Business | Elisabeth Hubert

Guest Post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

It’s been 6 Mondays since I landed at O’hare and came directly to the famed Merchandise Mart ready to begin a new chapter. After spending 3 years placing designers and putting my own creative needs on the back-burner, I was here to start again and begin my journey towards becoming a UX designer. So, exhausted from my last 4 days in New York, I walked into the 1871 space at the Merchandise Mart, luggage in tow and duly impressed by what I saw.

After several years of going to IxDA events and flirting with the idea of UX as a career, I decided that it was time. In making my transition I had spoken to a good number of people in the industry and received some valuable advice. I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to the practice and also that I didn’t want to pay too much money. The ship and build philosophy, the location, and the very reasonable price made Starter League, my current focus, a very attractive option.

For those who don’t know, the Starter League is a 1.5 year old “school” that teaches different aspects of web design and development. The Starter League was founded by Neal Sales-Griffin and Mike McGee, two friends who had faced the challenge of learning the skills needed to build their own digital products. Realizing that there weren’t that many opportunities and resources available that truly help the uninitiated, they began the Starter League. The root of their drive and methodology is to help people learn the skills needed to create and ship viable products fast.

They offer classes in Beginner and Advanced HTML/CSS, Web Development using Ruby on Rails, Visual Design, and User Experience, the class I’m taking. All courses last 3 months and attendees are encouraged to take more than one course to round out their education. The UX class is taught by Carolyn Chandler, co-author of “A Project Guide to UX Design” assisted by Veronika Goldberg, a visual designer turned UX designer and alumnus of The Starter League.

A typical class starts with the review of the homework, Carolyn asks us about any insights and pain points and then we delve into the lesson for the next 3 hours with a ten minute break at the half-way point. We’ve already learned about visual design, heuristics, personas, user stories, surveys and research, as well as, have begun to do some initial wireframing and site maps. All work is project based and done in groups that were formed in the second week. Groups… which leads me to one of the over riding tenets of the course. Collaboration!

Collaboration forms the spine of the learning. In the programming classes, students work in pairs during class, but for the design classes, students work in groups on one “real – life project”. They work together, as practitioners, looking to develop and launch an idea. The high point of all this collaboration is Starter Night at the end of term when teams from all the classes will join together to build an app and then present their app and their process to the rest of the League. Think of it like a 6 week Hack-a-thon without the begging for money at the end. One of the taglines displayed heavily on the Starter League homepage reads: Start Careers. Launch Products. Build Companies. But after 6 weeks here I can definitely say the emphasis, besides being on collaboration, is more heavily on the last 2 tenets.

With such an emphasis, in the UX classes especially, the process can sometimes feel a little lacking on feedback. With 3 months to cover everything there is a speed that is obvious but not overwhelming. However, our homework assignments are mere discussion points and serve ultimately as a roadmap to the construction of an app. Topics and processes are well covered, but we seem to touch on them only once or twice and don’t come back to them as we move on in the class. More than one of my colleagues and I have raised this point, and Carolyn and Veronika have responded admirably. Homework review is taking up a little more of the opening minutes in class while some information that can be consumed as reading material is placed in an extra file. The emphasis on in-class activity and familiarity with the UX process has gone up, and that is great. But enough about Starter League, the question for me remains:

As one of the many here focused on making a career change, and on making UX my livelihood: How do I KEEP IT REAL and become a UX professional while I’m here?

I was trying to keep it real even before I started the program. On deciding to come to this program I have not only left my job but have also made a not so insignificant financial investment. I wanted to make sure I would use the time wisely and be efficient. So, the first thing I did when I was accepted was to prepare myself mentally for the challenge.

Inspired by a Steve Martin quote, “So Good they Can’t Ignore You” is a book by Cal Newport, a Georgetown Computer science professor who’s been writing since high school on different tips for academic success. This latest book looks the idea of Follow your Passion dead in the eye and forces it to blink. To summarize, his claim is that a successful career isn’t about “Following your Passion”, instead your passion arises from using deliberate practice to build career capital, build valuable skills in your industry, gain more control over what you work on and then couple that with a mission statement that drives success and that elusive Passion. Skills are the foundation and that foundation takes work! This has become the backbone of my practice.

But deliberate practice isn’t just about work it’s about receiving critical feedback on that work and then working to make it right. So when my friends in the NYC IxDA community alerted me to this internship I jumped at it. I had known Lis from going to IxDA events and knew she was a well respected straight shooter who would definitely help me refine my craft. Along with this internship I was pleasantly surprised that the Starter League had also put some thought into mentoring and would provide anyone who wanted it with a professional in the city as a mentor for the duration of the course. I was lucky to have been assigned Patrick DiMichale, a colleague of Caroyln’s at Manifest Digital.

The most important thing I’ve done is immerse myself in the work. The Starter League is full of people working to put their ideas to market. Regardless of their experience they are developing projects that require good User Experience design. I’ve aligned myself with 3 of these projects (including my own), and have been using the things I learn in class to look at the projects from a user perspective as well as a business perspective. I’ve given both my mentors a lot to chew on in the past weeks and it’s been invaluable to have their input.

As I look at the next 6 weeks the end seems both far away and right around the corner. I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be ready to start a UX career by the end of my time here, but I do know I’ll be on the right path and will have built a solid foundation from which to move forward. No matter what the challenge, being mindful about the skills that are important, as well as coveted, and working on those will be the guiding principal in my practice. I urge you to read Cal Newport’s book and look at his 4 principals to a happy career. No matter what the environment Keeping it Real starts with knowing your stuff!

Building Business models is one of the most creative things we can do ~ Lou Rosenfeld, WIAD NYC 2013

It’s no surprise that I’m writing more about business and its intersections with UX. I see the many crossovers each and every day; from attending an event like World IA Day in NYC, to working on client projects. The theme even infiltrated the membership meeting at this years IA Summit. We are starting to see, more clearly, the rift that is being created by our field and it’s ignoring the need to understand better how businesses work. When I heard Mr. Rosenfeld say the above quote this year, it started to make me think that among the many misconceptions we have about business that help to cause this rift, the fact that we think it is not creative is probably one of the biggest.

Business? Creative? Is she serious? Yes, indeed! We as IAs and UXers tend to look at “the business” as the opposite of our field. Business is calculated and structured. We are adaptive and free flowing. They care only about profit. We care about and advocate for our users!

The reality is, our outlook is simply not true. Business is very much rooted in creativity. Especially when you think about the overall concept for how to structure businesses. Things like which roles should be involved, and how are we going to make money, these are, in essence, problems for information architects to solve.

However, we never get invited to help solve these problems, do we? We don’t even have the knowledge to go out on our own and start creating UX and IA led businesses, and this is why we all need to change our minds.

The reasons why we aren’t invited to the right conversations, or we aren’t using our creativity to create businesses are simple. We not only don’t know business, but we see it as the exact opposite of what we should know. This does not go unnoticed by our business partners who then decide that:

They don’t trust us to have their best interests as a priority.
They don’t think we “get it” so they don’t give us responsibilities outside of our little design sandbox.

No wonder you aren’t getting invited to the cool conversations to help make businesses better! Would you invite a person that not only didn’t understand UX, but saw it as “the enemy” to your UX party aimed at defining how UX should be structured? I didn’t think so.

But worse, if we don’t switch our frame of mind to seeing business as a partner, then we’ll never take the step to learn more about business. Further if we don’t know business, then we can’t start businesses. “No big deal”, you may be thinking, “I don’t want to start a business anyway”. The thing is, we NEED IA and UX first businesses to see our profession earn the respect we think it deserves. (Read more of my thoughts on this in my piece The Only Way).

What are we to do then? First we need realize that UX, as well as business, has a calculated side as well as a creative side. We have processes we stick to, and mantras (User First!) that we shout from the rooftops. Just like business has processes and mantra (Where’s the ROI??). Our professions are not so very different after all.

This mind shift, this realization, is really the only key. Because once we realize that business can be creative, and that it is not so different than us, several paths can unfold.

First, UX will see and take advantage of more opportunities to partner with our businesses to help make them better, instead of colliding with them. This will not go unnoticed by our business partners who will then be able to see our real value, instead of our omnigraffle skills. They will see that we can help them with their creative thinking around business and its necessary structures. Our sandbox will, in effect, grow.

With the walls down, many of us may also start to learn more about business. This can only set our profession up for more success as we move into an age where IA lead businesses will rule the day.

Thus, do we continue down this path of alternate reality where we see business as the opposite of us, uncreative, uncaring, inflexible OR do we start to see businesses and their ultimate potential? The choice is yours, but I caution you to choose wisely. The wiser of the two choices is the one that puts us in a place where we can help set our businesses up to be more geared towards our users, and how do you expect to do that, when you don’t understand how the business is run in the first place?

“The only way we are going to get recognized for what we do is to make money doing it” ~ Lou Rosenfeld, World IA Day NYC, February 9, 2013

When I heard Mr. Rosenfeld speak these words, I thought to myself “Yes, that’s it! That is the only way that this UX thing can work.”. It’s no secret that information architects and designers are sick and tired of being seen as ‘just the interface people’ churning out deliverables to make our project teams feel productive (whether those deliverables are paper or electronic). We all know that our skillsets are more than just ‘Yes people’, and we are waiting patiently for the day when some one or some thing emancipates us from this stronghold. And up until this moment I, along with many of you, had been racking my brain to couple this complex problem with a simply stated solution. I think that Mr. Rosenfeld brings us just that (Thanks Lou!).

Associating IA, UX and Design with business, and making money doing the things, all the things, that we say we can do and should be doing (instead saying that we should be doing one thing, and only creating the interface) is the way, the ONLY way, for information architects and designers to get recognized for our true expertise. The problem is… none of us really wants to get into the money side of things.

The Current State of UX and Business

It is no surprise that our industry currently sees business and business people as immoral, evil, greedy and only motivated by profit and gain. Businesses and advertisements that profit and gain by taking advantage of consumers are exposed daily in the news. Further, not only do we see this immoral business behavior in the news, but many of us see it within our own companies and project teams as well. Thus, it’s no wonder that when I put out a short, informal, non-statistically based and some would say biased poll (I think I covered all the rants here), that the responses I got were fairly skewed.

In this poll, I asked respondents to finish this sentence: “Most business people are motivated by”. Of the 30 respondents, 24 replied “profit” and only 1 answered “the best interests of the user.”. Other answers I received include “client deadlines and money”, “their own beliefs regarding what is best”, “winning”, “their personal interests”, and “the two are not mutually exclusive”. (A big thank you to all that responded!).

As you can see profit and gain as the motivator for business people was far and away the winner, and I agree with this notion. I also most definitely agree with the idea that user interests and profit and gain are not mutually exclusive options, and that is part of the point of today’s post. As architects and designers, hell as people, we tend to view profit and gain as greedy and evil, as the opposite of helping our users. But, who said that profit and gain is wrong? In fact, profit and gain can be quite good! For instance, we all love Apple products. They are not only beautiful but they make our lives easier, better and more delightful. You can bet your bottom dollar (pun intended) that Apple profits and gains from our consumption, and yet we still love them for it! But that same emotion is not garnered for a rival company… let’s say Microsoft. Microsoft makes similar products to Apple, but the love for them is not nearly as strong. In fact that company is construed as ‘only in it for profit and gain’, and that makes them… evil.

We should ask ourselves, what makes Apple a good business in our eyes and Microsoft a bad business if both are motivated by profit and gain? We can say that we support Apple because in return for the profit and gain they get, they provide us actual value. Apple has, in essence, earned their profit, whereas, in most cases, Microsoft has not. With this example, we can see that being motivated by profit and gain in and of itself isn’t morally bad, it is when you are motivated by profit and gain without giving value in return you are acting immoral. More, because we usually only hear about profit and gain in these evil business scenarios, we start to associate being motivating by profit and gain as evil. Lastly, because we see profit and gain as evil, and because businesses and business people are motivated by it, we then associate business and business people as evil too.

Whew, ok, let’s get to the point here. The 24 people who said that business people are motivated by profit were right. And we, as a community must not see this motivation as wrong, or our business partners as evil, because that is holding us back in a big way.

The Problems with Viewing Business as Evil

Perhaps the biggest problem that we face when we view business and its hunt for profit as evil, is that we as designers and architects separate ourselves from our businesses and business teams. We see ourselves in opposition to them instead of thinking of ourselves as their advisors and partners. They want profit and gain (bad for our users), we want delightful experiences (good for our users), and this must mean that we aren’t like them. Thinking this way means that we don’t see our businesses for what they are, the organizations and systems that we are hired to help and support because they are the ones providing a good or service that will make our users lives better.

This separation and opposition holds architects and designers back because it 1) prevents us from seeing ourselves as business people which 2) means that we can’t get better at being business people which means 3) we have to continue to work for the bad companies in order to ensure an income because we are scared to leave these jobs or to start our own awesome businesses.

If only we were armed with business knowledge we’d understand the economics behind this and then we could strike out on our own or to better places with real experience work. But, alas, we’d rather keep up the UX and Business divide. We’d rather push back on the idea that we, too, are business and as such should learn more about business to be better. But, let’s face it, you are a business person too!

A businessperson (also business person, businessman, business man, businesswoman, or business woman) is someone involved in a particular undertaking of activities, commercial or industrial, for the purpose of generating revenue from a combination of human, financial, and physical capital. ~ Wikipedia

You may not rack up numbers, create product goals, attend board meetings, or wear suits to work, but work designing and architecting for good user experiences… i.e. Experiences that generate more company revenue, is what you do.

Shunning this fact prevents us from learning more about and understanding business. And business, is what drives our economy, feeds us and our families, and provides us homes. When we don’t understand business, we have to become more dependent on the “business people” (both good and bad) to make money for us and to pay us (and our bills). This setup, one in which only the “real” business people know how to be fiscally successful, makes it even harder for those of us working for the bad business people to leave to find morally good work that is UX based.

And finally, if we don’t associate ourselves with and better understand business, we can’t negotiate better work or start our own companies that do great work. Meaning, we will never, ever really make money doing what we say we should be doing (facilitating experiences that are delightful, doing real ethnographic research, creating useful research based personas, need I go on?)… and therefore we will never be recognized for that really fun, awesome, valuable stuff that we should be doing.. aka we’ll still be only involved in the interface.

Solutions

It may be obvious to you at this point, but the first steps that we should take to combat our separation from business is to 1. See that each and every one of us is “in business” and 2. Realize that the occupation of business is moral, noble and worthy. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin writes in his book Thou Shall Prosper – Ten Commandments for Making Money, most people believe that business is inherently bad, but as we saw above, this is not the case. In fact, it is time to start seeing business for what it really is: The way that we create and exchange valuable goods and services that people want and need. And, doing this in a way that upholds morals and virtues, while still making a profit, is not only morally good, but it is the entire point of not only a successful business, but of architecting and designing for delightful user experiences! Therefore, not only are we business people, but we aim to be great business people who stay moral, nobel, and worthy by advocating for our users, while matching their needs with business needs.

Outcomes

The outcomes of us realizing we are business people, and seeing that business and profit can be good (if done through moral means) are us not only closing the gap between UX and business, but making it almost invisible. This enables us to be not only user advocates for good businesses, because we know more about business and don’t fear losing or changing jobs as much, but can even help us decide to start our own morally good businesses with IA, and great UX as the output of great IA, at the forefront! In either case, knowing more about business helps us to do what we say we should be doing, what we want to be doing to really provide value. It helps us to not only do the work, but to make money doing it, so that we can be recognized for our true value and not for our software manipulation skills only.

I’ll leave you with this…

The only way we are going to get recognized for what we do, for the value we know we provide, is to make money actually doing the things we say we should be doing. The only way to get to do those things is to learn more about, and get closer to business. It is your choice which path you go down, but I recommend the business path… otherwise plan on keeping that Omnigraffle file open.

This is perhaps the least “sexy” piece I have ever sat down to write. In fact, I am surprised that you have made it to this second sentence. But, today, as I looked through my list of posts I’ve been meaning to write, this one stuck out to me, and thus I felt it was its time to shine.

For the past several months, I have been noticing a puzzling trend happening in the world of software development. Perhaps this has only been happening in my own bubble, but since it has been happening so often, I assume it has been seen elsewhere. That trend? That of the business team not wanting to take ownership of their requirements for a project or product. Not only do I see them not wanting to take ownership of the requirements, but they don’t even do, think about or have goals in mind for a project. To make things even more puzzling, the business teams have been looking to me, as the UX person, to define and maintain the requirements for the system.
Why does this seem so puzzling? Because instead of taking the opportunity to define what a product needs to have to solve their business problem, business team are basically saying to me “I have no idea the purpose of my product. I just think something that does something really cool like Pinterest would be great.” Then they want me, the person designing the solution, to come up with the problem.

If you are a UXer facing this situation you may be thinking a few different things. First, you maybe thinking “Lis who cares?? They are letting us define things, and we know best anyway!” OR you maybe thinking “Lis… right on!” OR you may be thinking “How weird is that?!”.

For those of you that are saying “right on!”… thanks. For those of you saying “this is weird”… you’re right! For those of you saying “Lis who cares??” my answer is you should. Why?

Because even though it is our role as UX designers to help facilitate the process of understanding what should be done on a project or with a product, when we get to the point of the business team handing UX the responsibility of defining the entire product without understanding their input, we have a big problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of large requirements documents just for the sake of having something written down, nor do I think that requirements have to be formal enough to catalog in the Library of Congress. I do, however, think that the intention of the product should be recorded and upheld, because if it is not… how will we know that we solved the problem correctly for the business as well as the user?

Requirements are the “what”. They define what the product should do. The outputs of our solutions are the “what” extended with the “how”. Think of it like a test. The “what” are the questions on the test, the “how” are the answers. If you have the person taking the test writing the questions to that test, they are always going to “do well” on it, and no real progress and learning is ever done. Thus, businesses, if you have the people taking the test (I.e. The UX and design teams) writing the questions for the test (I.e. The requirements) you’re going to get a “successful solution” no matter what, and probably no real value added to boot.

Put more frankly, someone needs to be responsible for defining and maintaing the business purpose behind the project, and that someone should be from… the business!

If you are facing this same trend and agree that it is a problem, you may want some quick tips on how to combat it. Well there are a few that I have been using that have helped.

First, I really try to utilize my facilitation skills to help my business teams figure out requirements. When they turn to me and ask me to write requirements, I tell them I can’t, because it is their job to tell me what they need. I then use my UX know how to get them there.

Which brings us to tip number 2, putting the requirements back on the business. Encourage and enable your business partners to take ownership of what they need and not of the solution. The solution is yours UXers! Take ownership of that, and keep asking the what from the business.

The last tip I have is when a business person asks you to, for example, make something like Pinterest, always ask “how will we test that our solution meets requirements?” or “how will we know we were successful?”. “Will that be a design test, color palette, functionality?” And then ask “why does this need to be like Pinterest? How does that help the business?”.

The outcomes of implementing these tips are a more engaged and responsible business team. The business team, however annoying, is necessary for balance within our companies. They help to make our company more successful from a different angle, and we need to partner with them in order to create a holistic product that means user AND business needs. By helping them to be more engaged you are helping yourself get the requirements and business insight you need in order to do great work that is for both the user and the business. That is one way UX adds real value.

Some time ago, a good friend and fellow UX colleague recommended I read the book “Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money” by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. This friend (who is Chris Pallé over at Wisdom & Craft. Check him out, he’s awesome) knew that I had been increasingly curious about the intersections of UX and Business (especially after he saw my Learn the Business Behind the IA Business talk). It is my duty to say that I’m glad he made this recommendation. It is a book that I highly recommend for any professional out there; from those working in Corporate America to those working for themselves!

The other night, as I was reading more of the book I started to think about the UX community and our reactions towards the Business community. I found myself making many assumptions based off of my own personal views, but realized that I should probably verify those assumptions. That is what this blog post aims to do.

I have included below a question that I’d greatly appreciate your response to. For being generous with your opinion, expect a follow up post with additional insight (hopefully good insight ).

More thoughts to come when the results are in!

“Ads are the way that many companies can afford to maintain websites. If you don’t like them in your designs, then you need to design a better solution that makes your company money. Until then, ads are it.” I heard the amazing Karen McGrane speak these (paraphrased) words back in 2009 (they are from her 2009 IA Summit talk entitled “Designing For, With, and Around Advertising”). To this day, those words still ring in my ears. I couldn’t agree more with what Karen was saying. And, thankfully, on November 13, 2012, somebody finally did design a better solution. That solution, a more complete user experience.

I was introduced to Ann Montgomery in the Fall of 2010. Her startup, Nabewise, was one of Hubert Experience Design’s very first clients (in fact, my second client… to be exact). At the time, Nabewise was still in the very early stages, so my time with Ann was usually spent in a coffee shop, somewhere in NYC, commenting on and discussing her ideas for how the product should work (a product which I loved from the get go!). Although I wasn’t able to remain a “certified” Nabewise employee for the duration of their growth, I was able watch the product develop from the sidelines. As I did, it was easy (and awesome!) to see that the product decisions that we hammered out in those coffee shops had a great impact on the trajectory it took. I am thrilled to say that yesterday marked the announcement of Nabewise’s acquisition by Airbnb, a tremendous feat indeed. In only two years Nabewise had built a tremendously successful product. Kudos to Ann and the rest of the Nabewise team… you guys are truly amazing and successful to boot!

But what, pre-tell, does this have to do with ads and a better solution? As I was digging through all of the coverage of Neighborhoods, the new Airbnb product from their Nabewise partnership, I found this article from CNNMoney. Here is the relevant quote:

“Unlike the glossy travel magazines and travel review sites it mirrors, Neighborhoods offers no advertising opportunities; Airbnb’s primary revenue stream continues to be the fees that it collects when users book listings on the site. The beautiful images and stories will likely keep potential travelers on the site longer and lead to more bookings. What’s more, Neighborhoods expands Airbnb’s position in travel beyond home-share opportunities alone, making it a go-to platform for dreaming up ideas—and putting it more firmly into competition with sites from TripAdvisor to Frommers, which Google (GOOG) has agreed to acquire. It begins to open up the opportunities for Airbnb to expand into other travel-related services. (Local tour guide, anyone?) And it creates new opportunities for the 21st century travel journalists, a couple dozen of which are still hanging around Airbnb’s offices this week.”

That’s right, Neighborhoods will be ad free. And, the way that Airbnb can afford to do this? They know that the product will not only keep potential travelers on the site longer and lead to more bookings, but it also expands Airbnb’s position in travel and opens up more opportunities for them.

You see, Neighborhoods creates a more holistic user experience for Airbnb users. The product fulfills the user’s mental model of wanting to know about a neighborhood before actually staying there. By closing this gap for the user, right there on the Airbnb site, users don’t have to leave Airbnb to get more information on a neighbordhood before booking. By users not having to leave to find information, it means that they are more likely to book right there on Airbnb. Badda bing… Badda boom!

This is a sure-fire example of a more holistic user experience creating more revenue, and thus more success for a company. When you hear me mention this in any of my talks, posts, meetings, wherever you hear me or others mention it, know it’s true! Once again congrats to Nabewise and Airbnb for getting this right. And thank you both for providing a clear example of how a good UX = a more successful business!

Wrong – [rawng, rong] adjective – deviating from truth or fact; erroneous: a wrong answer. out of order; awry; amiss: Something is wrong with the machine.

When something is wrong, it deviates from truth or fact. And I can say, with more confidence than ever, that traditional Agile software development methodologies (i.e. Scrum) are wrong for UX. In order to prove my case, I want to take you back to the inception of Agile (as I have read and experienced it) and its related software development methodologies. Along the way, we’ll point out the reasons these methodologies are incompatible with the field of User Experience Design.

The birth of Agile

Agile principles and related methodologies were created for several reasons. Perhaps one of the bigger reasons was in response to the problems of the waterfall software development methodology (the most popular methodology in use up until this point). The waterfall methodology involves defining all system requirements and designs before beginning to build the software. Once these requirements and designs are defined and signed off on, the development team begins to build the software to spec. However, because of its rigid, separate phases, this system proves ill-equipped to handle the changes that can come about as new ideas arise and requirements evolve. This inability to handle change throws off build time and costs in a big way. Thus, the problems of waterfall include high costs in development resources with low return in quality code. Simple put, waterfall proves bad for business.

From this, Agile principles were born. These principles include: 1) a focus on adaptive methodologies, 2) a focus on people and 3) a focus on self-adaptive processes. Different methodologies utilized these principles in order to create working software more rapidly and iteratively to decrease costs and increase quality. And, that is something that Agile methodologies do very well. They enable businesses to make software cheaper and faster, and they also help to incorporate more user feedback in the process. So, why am I saying the methodologies born out of these principles are wrong for UX?

The argument

The second principle of Agile is a focus on people. This must mean that there is a focus on user experience design, right? Wrong. At least, this is wrong for many of the adaptive methodologies that we are putting into practice when we say we are “doing Agile”. Agile methodologies do focus on feedback from users to help create a higher quality and more usable product. However, what you’ll note is that nowhere in the above story of Agile’s birth was any other participant in the software development lifecycle mentioned except for the development team. The focus in creating these agile methodologies was simply on making the development process more efficient. UX was not even an after-thought (It really wasn’t. We had to butt our heads in and keep reminding them that we existed. Nod your head if you agree… Ok, you can stop nodding.) Thus, Agile principles are great, but the adaptive methodologies that employ these principles do not take into consideration anyone else but developers (and stakeholders… someone’s gotta pay for the work, afterall). Furthermore, there is an important reason why these methodologies don’t take anyone else into consideration. Put simply it is because Agile adaptive methodologies are software development methodologies, not product development methodologies. Thus, Agile methodologies were not designed for, nor intended for UX practitioner participation.

To make matters worse, our businesses have latched on to Agile methodologies as a way to decrease costs and increase production. Because of the appeal of saving money, decreasing time and increasing quality, the business hasn’t stopped to really think about how Agile methodologies should be employed, and the effects of employing them incorrectly. The result is that they have confused software development with product development. They are trying to substitute software development methodologies (Agile’s adaptive methodologies) for product development processes in hopes to speed up the entire product development lifecycle. Therefore, the business cuts out any thought of upfront product validation and research, as well as, any product strategy work because these processes are not “part of Agile”. Ultimately, by the business trying to replace product development processes (where UX contributes the most value) with Agile methodologies (which weren’t designed to include UX in the first place), we see UX processes and procedures get pushed out of product development all together (are you pissed off yet?).

Please let us play

In the fury of switching to Agile methodologies, UX does not want to get left behind. Therefore, we keep trying to fit ourselves inside of Agile methodologies (Note: Some companies and startups have found a way to do this very well, but most are still lacking). Most of the time, UX is looking for ways to ensure we are involved, and are thus constantly compromising our processes and beliefs in order to stay relevant. In the process, we lose more and more of the value that we bring and make ourselves more and more irrelevant. We decide that research doesn’t need to be as extensive as we think (and yes, sometimes this is true), and so we cut down on it. We decide that design thinking can be sped up and so we skip through that. Basically we are doing everything to ensure we don’t get kicked off the playground and sent home.

Side note: I do agree that our processes can and should be more lean, and I do see a huge benefit to the appropriate use of Lean UX methodologies. Lean UX is not Agile it’s just good UX applied to appropriate situations, something we as UX designers should be doing anyway.

The solution

Obviously, Agile isn’t going away (for good reason), and UX can’t just stop trying to bring our knowledge to projects. So, how do we solve the issue mentioned above? I think the first step is truly internalizing the issue, that of businesses using Agile methodologies for product development. We need to realize that Agile methodologies are great for software development, but are not great product development.

Second, we need to become educated about the difference between using Agile methodologies for product development versus for software development so that we can educate our businesses to this fact. And, how do we educate our clients and businesses about this? Easy; we tell them how they are wasting their money trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Businesses have employed agile methodologies to decrease costs (see Learn the Business Behind Our Business for more thoughts on this), but using them incorrectly will only increase costs in the long run. By applying Agile methodologies to product development, something they were not designed for, businesses are dumping money into an investment which will yield a small return. Because they are disregarding upfront research and strategy, they have no idea how their product will sit with users and this is a huge risk (for more info see How to Know When Your Product is Going to Fail). They are also using the wrong resources for the wrong responsibilities at the wrong time, and this is even more costly than returning to waterfall!

Third, we need to design a solution that works, for everyone, and then sell this to our businesses. This might mean a methodology that includes Agile principles in its build methodology (see The Secret Step to Agile: Discovery for initial thoughts. Slides also available), or it might include an entirely different thought all-together. But, we have to have a solution to product development that is cost effective, user effective and tech effective in order to push out Agile as the reigning product development solution. Agile is meant for software, not products…. we have to spread this message.

The aftermath

Once we educate our businesses and help them to see the error in their ways, some important outcomes occur. We get a change in the system of how products are developed that allows UX to exert its value, Tech to exert its value, and Business to be successful. Agile methodologies don’t reign as product development methodologies, but continue to evolve along with their related software development methodologies. This helps to create software cheaper and faster, but also software that is relevant, delightful and useful. But, UX can only get there if we cause a shift in the times, and that shift is the outcome of us changing our ways from people just trying to get invited to the party, to the people who are throwing it. The choice, is ours.

I’m about to expose a deep, dark secret about experience strategy, and it ain’t going to be pretty. Some of you may already be aware of it, some of you may not, but either way today is the day that I am going to get the truth out there. I hope you are ready to hear it.

You see I wasn’t always completely aware of this truth either. It just so happens that some time ago I came across this post/presentation from Zachary Paradis (PS I highly recommend that you listen to the entire presentation.). In it, he dispels 3 myths of customer experience, however, those myths are not the secret that I want to expose today. The secret that I want to expose happens around minute 10 of the presentation, and boy what a minute it is.

It’s at this point in the presentation that Zachary breaks down for us what Experience Strategy really is. He defines it as Business Strategy combined with Experience Modeling, and I think this is a great way to define the term. But the secret is this (queue suspenseful music): Experience Strategy comes directly from Business Strategy. Oh the horror! Yes, what we do is modeled directly after what those pesky business strategists do. The thing that sets experience strategy apart from business strategy is, of course, our ability to model user experiences in cooperation with knowing and attempting to couple them with the business strategy.

But wait… what does this all mean? Lis, what do you mean that experience strategy is based off of the business? How can that be? Isn’t what we do really based off of our empathy for our users as well as our ability to be the opposite of the “business-only” focused people in the room? Isn’t that where our creative and empathetic value comes into play? Well, that is only partly correct. What this means is that not only is this stuff we call experience strategy not new, and therefore we are not the first ones doing it, but it also means that in order for an experience strategy to be successful it has to include and help to progress the business needs and goals. This means that at the heart of what we do lies a business strategy that drives us forward, and that it is our job as experience strategists and designers to be very familiar with that business strategy.

Thus, in order for us to truly add value with our experience strategy work and thereby attain more of it (as opposed to the wireframing we are so well known for), we have to learn about our business’s strategies, as well as continue to learn about our user needs and goals. It is then that we apply experience modeling to those strategies and needs in order to create holistic and valuable solutions. By doing so, we create a competitive advantage for our products like few others ever seen; one based off both business need and user goals. The products and services that we wish we were designing have this competitive advantage, and it’s what makes them so attractive to both us and to our users. So I implore you UX, learn the business, model the experiences from it, and then, I promise you, you will create some of the best experiences of your career. And, how can that not make the world a better place?

UX designers have split personalities… well, at least most of us do. We are this rare mix of designers, psychologists, developers, writers, artists, and more. Lately I find myself leaning into the psychology realm. Learning about people from this stand point is really starting to cultivate my interests. I have begun to think somewhat whacky things due to this new found passion, and often find myself in heated debates with friends and colleagues around the topics that I have been diving into. It is with this frame of mind, that I settled in to hear Luke Williams speak at Interaction 12 about The Disruptive Age. The talk centers around, what Luke defines as the first of the step of disruption; that of crafting a disruptive hypothesis. During the talk, I couldn’t help but think about Luke’s ideas in relation to who we are as people as defined by psychology, and it was at this point that I realized that disruption, by its sheer definition, cannot be the norm.

Let me explain. You see disruption is defined as “an act of delaying or interrupting the continuity”. This means that when disrupting you are taking something from a state of plateau, certainty, and order and pushing it into another state that is no longer a comfortable one. We designers are trained to disrupt. We see it as our jobs to look beyond the plateau into the future of what could be if only we could break our businesses out of their normal routines. However what we don’t realize is that people do NOT like to be disrupted. Think about it… disruption is against our need to feel safe and consistent. Back in the day (I’m talking way back in the day… think cave man, saber tooth tiger days), comfortable was good because it meant there was no danger. That comfort could only be disrupted by one thing… danger! There is a huge piece of us that is stilled wired this way… to stay comfortable. Thus, the disruption that we seek to create is not really wanted, even when a business says they want it. More often than not, the first time they get an uncomfortable feeling (or that feeling of danger) they are going to want to stop the disruption.

Of course, this creates a huge problem for us designers. First being a disruptor becomes very difficult, close to impossible in some organizations, because it makes everyone feel so damn uncomfortable. We tend to look at the businesses that we are trying to make better as not “getting it” or not “valuing the user”, but in many cases they are just down right scared because they have that uncomfortable feeling in their stomach. Second, because all of this makes being a disruptor hard, we disrupt much less than we would like. This can make us pretty unsatisfied in our work. We begin to get disgruntled and unconfident, which leads to a lack of passion for what we do and a feeling of wanting to stop playing with the mean kids, and take our ball and go home.

But do not fear, there is a solution to what ails us. I think the first thing that we all need to come to grips with is the realization that mass disruption all at once, will probably not happen in 99% of situations. Disruptions like Luke points out in his talk (i.e. Apple and Google being in the cell phone business) are not everyday occurances. And most disruption will not be widespread. Second, we need to realize that, that fact is OK, in fact it is natural. Of course that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to distrupt, but it just means that we should be accepting of the fact that we probably won’t create large organizational changes (so if you really, really hate where you work you may want to look elsewhere). Third, in order to disrupt anything at all in the places we work, we need to make ourselves a part of our business partners comfort zone. Which means we need to make UX Design part of their plateau state, because it is only when they are comfortable with us in this state, that they’ll trust our ideas to disrupt (even a little).

Let me break it down even further. We humans like to have a constant, something to lead us to safety in all scenarios. Ever see Inception? Remember that spinny thimble thing Leonardo kept bringing out, that was his constant. The cup of coffee that you have every day, your constant. Picking up the mail after work every day… constant. Without these constants we start to anticipate things being “off” and thus we assume, you guessed it, danger! The businesses that you work in are the same way. They want a constant. That waterfall process they are holding onto… a constant. The huge requirements document they “need”… another constant. These constants make them feel comfortable, and slow their ability to be disrupted. Now you come in, and you show them how UX can help the business. You Learn the Business side of things and cement your value. You, UX in general, become a new constant. So when you start to try to disrupt something in the business with your amazing design ideas, what becomes the one thing that is present before, during, and after the disruption… that’s right… you!

Thus, once we shift our thinking around disruption and thus our businesses hesitation to be disrupted, we can start to think about how we can disrupt things more easily. We can see that once we become the new constant in the business’ world, that disruption becomes a lot less uncomfortable because there is always something constant… UX! They trust us to take them to the next level of creating experiences and become much more open to letting us help lead the process. We also become more successful at disrupting and thus have a lot more confidence in ourselves. At the same time we change the focus of measuring our success just on disruption to that of measuring our success on solving problems and making things better. By looking at disruption differently, we can successfully move our business partners away from their fear of disruption danger, and into the realization that disruption is needed in order to create a better business for all… and yes this includes increasing the value to our users.

Today I want to invite you on a journey in which we UX designers take a step outside of ourselves and look closely at our world. In doing so, we can see that our kind is a splice of two different personalities. We are a cross of those that want to lead the world in designing a better place for everyone, and those that want to be directed as to which problems to solve and when to solve them. Being natural perceivers we operate on our own wavelength and thus find it annoying when people screw with our genius. On the flip side, we are generally not always great at staying grounded because our creativity takes us to new heights and allows us to go places with our ideas that others could only dream! The impressive amount of imagination, creativity, and innovative thinking that we posses contributes to the fact that we expect people to recognize the power of our work and the immense value we bring. At the same time, we are unable to reign in our own genius to the biggest design constraint of all, that of our reality.

Of course, in order to put our untapped creativity and genius to use, we have to look outside of reality. I mean, that is the whole point of what makes UX Design so powerful, is the ability to look beyond the now to the how it should be. However, there is a time and a place for everything, and I would argue that there is a time and place for us to come to the realization of the world in which we work. The problems that we see due to our natural personality types coming into combat with our economical way of producing success are many, however, there is a specific problem that I think we should discuss today, and one that was brought up in Cameron Koczon’s post on A List Apart, An Important Time for Design. The simple fact is that design thinking, although it is the latest word on every company’s lips, is still only seen as important for executing the idea, and is not seen as integral to coming up with the ideas in the first place. Cameron does an amazing job of illustrating this through his narrative on how startups view design. He also points out to us that another group was in our same position not so long ago. Who was that group? Developers (seriously, read the article before you continue this post. Here it is again.)

As you just read, there are several solutions to the problem of UX Design being seen as useful only during execution of an idea, however the big one is that we need to see the forest through the trees. We absolutely need to admit to ourselves that we work within the world of business, and thus we need to recognize that world as the biggest constraint in which we do our work (for more thoughts see UX… It’s Time to Start Keeping It Real). This means that we need to stop playing by our own rules without considering the rules of business. We need to stop designing solely for design’s sake or only for the user’s benefit, and start realizing the environment in which our solutions are developed. We need to stop waiting for the day when someone else realizes the genius of what IA and UX really is, and figure out how to sell that genius to others. In short… UX it’s time we wake up, rise up, and take our place next to our development and business partners instead of hiding behind our processes and methodologies… instead of hiding behind our users. This means that we take responsibility for our fate, and we aim to change that fate by coming out of our community’s shell and integrate UX into the world of business. How do we do that?

First and foremost, we need to take responsibility for the cultivation of the UX industry. We need to push ourselves to stop talking only about how to do UX, and start talking about how the constraints around the UX world (i.e. business, startups, etc), work. We then need to figure out how we can fit UX into those constraints. Lastly, we need to admit that we do this work, not only because we love it, but because we love doing something we love in order to provide for ourselves and our families. We need then, to start keeping it real and bring that fantasy part of our personalities out of the clouds for a moment or two, and start realizing that we aren’t in our own little bubble anymore, in fact that we never were in that bubble in the first place.

By taking responsibility for improving UX over and by admitting that we work within businesses and that is our biggest constraint, we begin to create a profession of people that can work within the business structures around us. This doesn’t mean that we sell out and become a part of the machine, but that we study and learn the machine so that we can change it from the inside out. Right now we are only on the perifery… only there to execute… not there to think. But in order to be the thinkers we need to know more than just UX, so that we can navigate UX through anything that comes at us. Cameron was right in his article… it is an important time for design. My only question for us is will we answer to our call of duty or hide behind what we know to stay safe. The choice, is up to you.

Elisabeth Hubert

Experience Design Consulting

Category Archives: Business

Keeping it Real: Learning UX in a Lean Environment

Guest Post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

Yes UX… Business IS Creative

The Only Way

The Current State of UX and Business

The Problems with Viewing Business as Evil

Solutions

Outcomes

I’ll leave you with this…

Whatever Happened to Requirements?

Poll: UX and Business – How different are we?

Finally! Real Proof that Good UX Equals Business Success

Agile is Wrong for UX

The birth of Agile

The argument

Please let us play

The solution

The aftermath

Experience Strategy: Exposing the Truth

Disruptive UX: The Dirty Truth

The Awakening of UX Design