Column: Management Matters

As leaders of UX organizations, we want our teams of designers and researchers to design products that change the world—to engage in strategic design. Often, though, UX designers and researchers get stuck with incrementalism—designing minor new features for which another functional group has provided the requirements, expecting UX to design them—regardless of whether the UX team agrees with the product direction. Perhaps we find ourselves immersed in organizations or work routines that do not provide space to think differently. This column reveals some tools that can help your team to innovate.

While the business community sometimes overuses the term, innovation is the single most important factor in business. It is what makes any company different from its competitors. An innovation is a novel idea that a company delivers to market with highly profitable results. As UX professionals, if we want our efforts to be relevant to the business, we have to think about more than just insights or great designs. Ideally, our role is to find the intersection of customer delight and financial opportunity. We need to find ways of introducing great ideas that make our companies money. Read More

In my last column, I talked about what it takes to be a successful first-time people manager—hopefully debunking some common myths. After reading that column, a number of people pointed out that they have a larger challenge: How can they make UX strategically relevant within their companies? I’ve been discussing this very topic with my peers in UX management for a number of years. One venue for discussion on this topic was a CHI 2007 panel “Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?” that Richard Anderson facilitated, in which I participated. [1] Since I’ve been talking with a colleague from Oracle about this topic over the last month, it seemed appropriate for us to collaborate on this installment of my Management Matters column. So, I’d like to introduce Laurie Pattison, Senior Director of UX at Oracle.

Although our UX management peers have shared many tactics with us that have made their groups more strategically relevant, we’re presenting just a few here. We’ll highlight what we feel are the most salient factors in getting you to the strategy table. If you’re not doing these things, try them out—or contact us if you want some help. Guidance from our mentors has been critical in helping us learn how to make our teams strategically relevant. Read More

I see a dichotomy in the thinking of UX professionals: On one hand, we believe strongly in user-centered design (UCD) practices—that it is critical to understand our users and their tasks. We want to design products and services that reflect these practices and delight our users. On the other hand, it seems a large number of UX professionals are unable to understand the motivations of their business partners—that is, Product Management or Business Analysis and Engineering—and assume they should simply agree with our perspectives. Of course, that would require them to understand our perspectives in the first place.

I’ve also observed that many UX professionals feel a bit frustrated that it is necessary for them to convince their business partners that user experience is valuable—and that our core practices should be a central part of standard business practices. I hear statements like: “Well, if they don’t understand the value of great design, maybe we should make them go back to using command line interfaces for email!” The bottom line is that we absolutely need the perspectives of those other disciplines to deliver successful products—just like they need ours—so it behooves us to understand them. Read More