Process: Ideation

“Speed.” This was the unflinching response Sandy Cutler, former Eaton CEO who is now retired, gave at a public meeting in Manhattan roughly ten years when a Wall Street analyst asked what worried him the most. Taking his answer further, Cutler said he was concerned that, as the company swelled through both acquisition and organic growth—already to nearly 100,000 employees globally—it would slow down. To be competitive, the company needed to be as fast as its smallest competitor.

People working in virtually every industry I’ve dealt with, in organizations from a few hundred to a hundred thousand, often say the same thing: “We’re too slow.” The fact is that, as you grow—even from a one-person show to a two-person partnership—your decision-making process becomes more complex and you begin to plant the seeds of bureaucracy. Left unchecked, bureaucracy seems to scale geometrically—the larger the organization, the more overhead bureaucracy requires. Workers need supervisors, those supervisors need managers, managers require directors, and on it goes. Read More

In Part 1 of this two-parter within my larger series on applied UX strategy, I wrote about the composition and structure of UX design teams. Now, in Part 2, I’ll cover two other areas of focus that are essential in making UX design an integral part of the development process and achieving success in a highly competitive marketplace:

• leaders
• culture

Leaders

When thinking about UX leaders, many people might imagine somebody like Jony Ive. But having a lone regent of design is usually neither possible nor necessary. As an organization grows, a single UX leader is rarely able to deal with the massive number and broad variety of projects and tasks. A UX leader must be deeply engaged in ongoing projects to make smart decisions. This is hard to do when a company makes many products. Plus, someone outside a product team would have limited influence on that team. When a UX leader is spread thin, day-to-day project tasks often take higher priority over long-term strategy. Read More

This time, we’ll discuss two topics in Ask UXmatters:

• generating ideas
• using first person (my) or second person (your) in user interfaces

Ask UXmatters answers our readers’ questions about user experience matters. If you want to read our experts’ responses to your question in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to: [email protected]. Read More