We’ve got a UX crisis on our hands.
It’s not like in the ’90s, when UX hadn’t been popularized yet and software came in boxes with 452-page manuals nobody wanted to read.
And it’s not like in the early 2000s when companies tried to fold in UX design after 8 years of ignoring their users, then realizing the meaning of the phrase “too little too late.”
Companies these days are well aware of the benefit of focusing on the user experience, and incorporating this focus early in their business, putting UX designers in the strategy meetings, and hopefully running regular user testing. This is good.
But companies don’t always understand the job they’re asking these people to do. The black box of design still prevails.
Nothing proves this to me more than the proliferation of the UX team of one.
It’s the idea that a company can hire one person with a broad range of design skills and check the “UX” box off their list. But they’re not that simple. UX is a whole lot of responsibility for one person to take on.
After all, being a user advocate means being in the middle of two groups of people: your business’s customers, and your business’s decision makers. Not the easiest balancing act for one person.
If you find yourself in this boat, I’ve got a few tactics you can try.
Befriend your customer support team
In your business, customer support folks know all the frustrations your company’s users confront, and how often. They know exactly what words your users use to talk about these problems. This can help you immensely.
You can also help them out quite a bit as well. It’s a match made in heaven.
1. See if you can join them and help answer phone calls or emails occasionally.
You get a chance to speak firsthand with customers who are in the crux of some kind of issue or problem. Your support team gets some added help. Everybody wins.
I know some companies require all new employees to help out in the customer support department as part of their employee training. Nothing makes you an expert at your company faster than speaking with customers in need.
2. Set up a regular weekly or bi-weekly meeting with your customer support team.
Pick one representative (usually the team lead) or meet with the whole team if they’re into it. In these meetings, you’ve got two things on the agenda:
First, you want to understand the problems that surfaced from the users since your last meeting.
As you meet over time, you may develop systems to track the quantity and frequency of problems. This can help you track your progress fixing problems as features are released — have we lowered mentions of that issue? Gone altogether? Great! Prioritize the issues and work on the ones that come up most often.
This is mutually beneficial — you get insight into issues customers are having as well as information about your impact. Your support team gets to play a more active role in helping solve customer problems.
Secondly, you’ll want to give the support team a heads up about any new features or changes that will soon be released.
This is also mutually beneficial — the support team is prepared in case new questions pop up. Nobody on a customer support team wants to be on a call with a customer, hearing about a new feature for the first time through a customer complaint.
For example, working in e-commerce, we were improving the way our system allowed customers to make returns. Since the customer support team had been dealing with customer returns manually for months, they knew all the common customer scenarios. My support team also knew the frequently asked questions, concerns, and risks. This was a huge help when designing the flows, the instructional copy, and the transactional emails.
I worked very closely with the support team throughout the entire design cycle for that feature, brainstorming, bouncing ideas around, roleplaying, paper prototyping — and they loved being part of the design process.
Find your ally for business strategy meetings
In order to do your job as the user advocate, you’ll need to navigate some company politics.
If you’re not invited to the meetings where decisions are made, you need to find a way to advocate for users through someone who is attending. This may be your supervisor, or someone even higher up.
If there is a regular recurring meeting, ask to set up a meeting with your ally to meet on a recurring basis before that strategy meeting usually takes place.
In that meeting, come prepared with clear statements, quotes, and problems you’ve observed in your work with users and the support team. Have data to back it up. Give your ally as clear a case as possible so she can represent these issues in the important strategy meetings.
Your customer’s experience depends on your ability to do this task with grace.
Be careful to help people understand you aren’t acting out of your own personal agenda. Remind them, they hired you to create a great user experience. Help them understand this is part of that job description.
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I was never great at facilitating usability tests. It took me years to get comfortable with it.
I’m an introvert, I stare at a screen all day. Talking to strangers is about as fun for me as going to the dentist. That’s not fun in case you’re a dental enthusiast.
Having someone to help me schedule tests, welcome and direct users, and take notes during sessions is always so much better (for me and for the user) than trying to handle all this on my own.
Turns out, tons of people in a company can excel at these tasks. Customer support folks, again, or the people at the reception desk, salespeople, and often marketers are really great at welcoming people and helping them feel at ease.
Photo credit: Barrel
And guess what — observing and being involved with these sessions helps those folks too — especially marketing and sales. Understanding users, getting into their heads, knowing how they think are all hugely valuable pieces of information for marketing and selling a product.
Personally, I think everyone should have UX training, not just designers, which is why I’ve created my Psychology of UX online class to help spread the knowledge and UX skill-set throughout the company.
Get ideas out into the open
Designing a user experience often means holding a lot of information in your head — new user states, repeat user states, how the application looks at different points, where someone goes once they sign in, on and on.
Get those ideas out onto paper and post it around the office.
Leah Buley suggests many collaborative techniques in her book UX Team of One. Facilitate brainstorm sessions, post sketches, and document the way your app looks, behaves, and responds for all to see.
One of my favorite tactics is to invest in a few large foam core boards from an arts supply store.
- Post on it print-outs of screens, sketches, personas, user quotes, data, print-outs of emails, and labels to tell the story of what your users experience, one board for each main area of your app.
- You can display the boards along a hallway, and carry them around to meetings for brainstorming and strategy discussions. UX can be very abstract and conceptual — making it visual and concrete helps facilitate empathy and internal communication.
Be open to introducing others to your mockups and sketches, too. Ask people for their input interpreting A/B test results and user feedback. Grab people coming back from lunch, ask questions, ask for opinions. You may find other people have different interpretations that help you come up with more creative hypotheses and lead to better experiments.
Collaboration is the engine that drives great design.
Don’t sweat the small stuff
We designers tend to obsess about the details.
When you are a UX team of one, though, you must pick your battles. Here’s the reality of the situation: focusing on the nitty gritty details and the high level experience will drive you into madness.
Choose the part with the greatest potential for impact — the overall user flow, the biggest pain points, the elements that improve the business’s bottom line. If you’re going to have to let something go, and you will, don’t let it be the big stuff.
Try automating the small details.
If you get a style just right, can it be reused? Create a style guide, a swipe file, a template for all your frequently used styles. Put your energy into automating and codifying the details so you can free your mind from their narrow focus.
Create a culture of UX
Even if you’re a UX team of one, you can and should always advocate for a thriving UX culture in your company.
Become a leader and an educator for UX in your company. Find the holes in people’s understanding and fill them in gracefully and joyfully.
Your company and your users will thank you.
