How offering a helping hand can help create UX advocates
What you can do to improve the UX maturity of your organization
There’s no getting around it: sometimes life sucks as a UX Designer in a low UX maturity organization.
There may be frustrations as teams shoot down your ideas or even ignore UX, and it may seem like there’s nothing that you can do.
There are techniques to address this problem. Aim for small wins, create high-visibility UX case studies, and build UX champions and advocates.
However, sometimes these opportunities aren’t the projects that you’re assigned. It could be that you’ve heard about an effort going on where people are running into issues and could use some user feedback. Or there’s a specific bottleneck that you’ve encountered in many projects that could make your user’s life a lot easier if you addressed it. You may not realize it, but pursuing these opportunities not only improves your skills and portfolio. It can also improve the daily lives of every UX practitioner in the organization.
But how do you, in essence, squeeze your way into these types of projects? The idea of butting into another project, especially when UX is unfamiliar, and people don’t know what to think of you, might give you the sweats. It’s easier than you might think. To understand why this is, let’s first talk about UX maturity.
Understanding UX Maturity and advocates
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/
The UX maturity model is a term Jakob Nielsen coined to consider how mature your organization is from a user-centered perspective.
Organizations range in Maturity from companies where UX is ignored to companies where dedication to UX is present on all levels.
If you’ve ever worked for organizations on the lower stages of UX Maturity, you’ve no doubt dealt with frustrations in your UX Design process. Sometimes you have an excellent experience working with one team enthusiastic about UX. Then, you tear your hair out working with another team who believes Developers are God. Or you’ll feel like you have to teach your team the same design process, template, and more with each project because there’s no systematic knowledge of it.
One of the significant factors, especially at this stage, is the idea of consistency. Without a design system in place or a shared understanding of UX, it might feel like you’re reinventing the wheel with each project.
All this contributes to several frustrations that any designer in the organization will face. The age-old question then becomes: Do I fight, or do I flee?
Tomer Sharon, a Senior UX Researcher at Google, has suggested a maturity model in his book, It’s Our Research, indicating when to fight or flee.
https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/its-our-research/9780123851307/xhtml/CHP001.html
But regardless of where you are in the UX maturity model, there’s one surefire way of improving your organization’s UX maturity. Finding (or creating) as many UX Champions and Advocates as possible.
A single person advocating for UX Change is a big problem because if they leave, so does the momentum towards improving UX. But, if many people in leadership roles advocate for UX, they can help shape the organization’s culture and work process to enhance UX maturity. But to do that, you have to prioritize your efforts. Since you have limited resources, you should focus on UX projects that show stakeholders why they should care about UX. And unfortunately, you’re probably not assigned to those projects.
For example, imagine you work for an organization with a limited understanding of UX (Stage 2). In that case, you might be assigned to do graphics for a newsletter or put together an infographic instead of a high visibility UX case study.
What’s more, UX is often its separate department in the organization, which can be nestled in a specific department. As a result, many people may be reluctant to reach out to a completely different department for help. More importantly, if they’re not familiar with UX, they might not know that what they’re facing is a UX issue. So you’re probably going to have to be the person to reach out and seek out these opportunities. Hearing this is where my and many other introvert’s anxieties usually start to rise. I don’t like cold-calling random people, even if it’s to offer help. But the good news is, you don’t have to be: that type of work should be done through a 3rd party.
Find an ‘in’ through a 3rd party.
I’ve rarely gotten in trouble as a Designer, but one of the times I did was when I found myself entangled in the world of office politics.
I heard about an exciting project that needed help and was proactive in talking with the department head of that project. I also expressed interest (and perhaps my services as a UX Designer) in offering my services. My manager then got incredibly angry with me, as not only had I not sought her approval, but also I was conversing with another department. That experience taught me that I should always seek a third party in these types of negotiations.
There are numerous interpersonal, organizational, and office politics factors at work that you often aren’t aware of between departments. As a result, you usually don’t want to learn these types of things before reaching out.
Often your manager, mentor, branch head, or other people are those that can make that introduction for you. They probably also understand the organizational structure a whole lot better than you, so they can tell you whether or not even reaching out is a good idea.
Perhaps some explicit reasons (such as contractors being unable to work with particular employees) behind this. But for whatever reason, you shouldn’t have to make the dreaded cold-call of another department: instead, you should make the case to your manager, mentor, or anyone else that can convey these messages to the actual intended target. If they believe strongly enough, these are the people who can convince the other party to take this on.
So, in that case, what should you say to them?
Set up the UX case study
The mentality you should adopt to speak with your mentor or manager is a UX case study. You’re trying to figure out several different things from this process:
What’s the purpose of the study? How much do you understand about the project, and how much do you need to be informed? If you’ve heard about this issue from a colleague, try to understand more about the project and the help they need.
How can UX help? Do they need help understanding who the users are? Do they need help with conducting user testing? Personas? Etc.
What is the value to stakeholders? You should make sure of when deciding to offer your services if these projects are highly important to stakeholders. Can you imagine that someone might use it as an example when trying to showcase the value of UX within your organization at the end of this study?
What is a success/small-UX win for this project? How will you know if you’re successful? Frequently, this is best summed up as a design artifact (like personas, journey maps, etc.) or as a presentation/mini-usability report.
What sort of UX research methods are you using? Heuristic evaluation, usability testing, and moderated testing are some of the most common methods for this study, but you may want to use other methods if they’re more appropriate.
If you can sell your manager on this project and have outlined what you’re trying to accomplish, there’s just one more step: finding small wins when talking with the other team.
Aim for small wins when pitching your project
When it finally comes time to talk with the other team and pitch your UX help, keep it small and straightforward.
Never try to go beyond the scope: if you’re offering to help set up and run user testing, keep it to that.
Here’s a list of small wins that you can likely aim for with these projects:
Notetaking an existing lab study with users
Helping with Debriefing/Data Analysis/Breaking down user’s actions and needs after testing
Heuristic Evaluation/Usability Best practices to understand problems with an application
User Testing
Design artifacts (personas, journey maps)
Research planning
You only want to aim for small wins for the sake of your manager, their team, and yourself.
First and foremost, you don’t want your manager (or team) to feel like you’re abandoning your current work project (or at least giving it significantly less attention) to do something else: that’s a surefire way to get into trouble. As a result, you should only devote a small portion of your week to this and make sure it doesn’t distract you from the job responsibilities that you’re paid for.
This is also why you shouldn’t spend too much time: the other team has to accommodate you in specific ways. If you’re helping out, they need to catch you up to speed with what they’re doing and even sometimes share resources with you. So you don’t want to overburden yourself.
Lastly, though, you want to make sure you keep it small for yourself. This is often additional work that you’re taking on and not getting paid to do. So, why should you even do this? There are two reasons: high impact portfolio pieces and helping to make your daily life less frustrating.
High impact case studies
Sometimes, the projects we’re assigned as designers are honestly not exciting (or even portfolio-worthy). For example, working on an FAQ page, when you have to adhere to a strict style and brand guide, and you are provided all the copy for the questions and answers, can often feel like you’re not flexing your creative muscle at all.
So seeking out these opportunities may not only provide exciting case studies, they might be precious for your stakeholders, which make for excellent portfolio pieces. For example, suppose it sounds like your organization’s new VR project is trying to understand what motions will make users nauseous. In that case, there’s an opportunity to step in with user research. Doing so can not only improve a high-value target for stakeholders; it’s an incredible thing to talk about with your portfolio.
But choosing these projects also helps in another way: it helps spread the value of UX.
Finding UX champions and advocates
One of my favorite messages around UX advocacy is that we shouldn’t speak to executives about what UX could do but what UX should do.
For many people, seeing is believing: seeing how much easier UX methods make talking with users, uncovering new insights, or even just understanding your users is how you win them over. And while you can often work with your direct team more closely to turn them into UX advocates, sometimes you may hear about another project that needs UX. And that, by itself, is an opportunity to turn someone else into a UX advocate who might have helped improve the daily lives of all the designers and researchers in your organization.
So if you ever hear about a project in dire need of UX work, perhaps don’t be afraid to tell your manager to reach out. Lending a helping hand now may pay off in the future.
Kai Wong is a UX Specialist, Author, and Data Visualization advocate. His latest book, Data Persuasion, talks about learning Data Visualization from a Designer’s perspective and how UX can benefit Data Visualization.