- Show benefits of user experience work before it's actually "required" to unblock development
- Work within the team process: issues, bug trackers, trello, JIRA... you need to be where the work is.
## 3. Communicating UX
### Dollars, Dollars, Dollars
- Biggest mistake around research: presenting the _research findings_, rather than presenting _what those findings mean_
- "Start your sentence with a dollar figure to help more impact"
- Efficience, Effectiveness, Satisfaction: each of these measures has a dollar value attached to it
- Help frame user needs in business terms
- Tracking the impact of your design changes after release
### UX as a Brand
- What is your brand? What do people think when they hear the word "UX" from you?
- “I make computers easier to use”
- Find an expressive way to communicate the role and work your UX team does.
- Then, market the team to the org: identify your audience, your message, and the medium you plan on using.
- What is your pitch to: C-level team, Managers, ICs? What works for _your organization_?
### The danger: Too much work
- Having the members of a UX team with limited size is not sustainable
- How do you prioritize UX work that needs to be done, while delivering the required impact to the organization and not overworking designers?
- Are there any high-cost high-visibility projects that need to happen? Or a maintenance project that is used by a large volume of users?
- These might be good candidates for UX involvement. Realistically speaking though, the development team's willingness to work with UX should also be a factor. Also: are the teams early enough in the project that change is still viable? Does the team has a budget for your involvement?
- Last of all: what value does the project brings to _you_? A high visibility project with strong sponsorship might have more value to your team in terms of promotions, visibility, learning, and recognition. Take that into account.
- Split your projects and order them by priority. Then, calculate the effort required for each project or sub-project (UX weight) and fill up your team capacity.
- Draw a line on the maximum capacity of your team, with the non-priorities falling beneath it. Any project that wants to get within the priority line will either:
+ Push another project from the top under the line
+ Bring in more full-time resources to the team
- Take into account how many simultaneous projects your team members can handle: anything more than 4 likely means someone is getting overworked.
- This priority model is helpful to keep track of changing organization goals, and how they affect your team: any shift in goals can be reflected in your priorities, in a way that is respectful to your team members, while staying accountable to the organization.
- Having a priority model changes conversations from "you need to accomodate my needs" to "how do your needs fit the organization goals"
### Resources for teams you can't help
- What can you do instead of actual hands-on design work for low priority projects?
+ Lightweight design consulting
+ If they have budget: suggest external vendors, while helping structure the project or relationship with the vendor
+ Provide UX guidelines so they can run their own design processes
+ Styleguides and pattern libraries can be helpful to empower good design decisions for UI & Front-end
- A good library of design documentation can help other teams better understand design processes and terminology. They might not product good design on their own, but they will certainly be in a better position to collaborate with UX teams in the future.
## 4. Having a Voice and Something to Say
### First Say No
- It's only when you stop doing extra work that people will realize your value
- Until internal clients start complaining you're not available, your management won't know how overworked you truly are
- Saying no in an assertive way:
> “No, I won't be able to help with that”; or
> “No, I won't be able to help with that, our team is already committed to other projects”
- Don't add too much information, though: the requester may take in upon themselves to reach out to other stakeholders in your plate and try to free you up
- You may also take some time to answer, and tell the requester you will get back to them. That will give you more time to formulate an appropriate answer.
### Speak from data, not opinion
- You need to have readily accessible, easily digestible data
- Push it out into the world, rather than waiting until it's requested
- Make a repository of user data that can be used in meetings, presentations, etc
- White papers, industry research are other useful data sources
- Bring developers and other stakeholders into research sessions, and then conduct workshops with them to analyze this data and make sure the insights are applied to the product as it's designed and built.
- Each time you introduce real user data, you help overcome team member inertia or indiference to user needs: more exposure means more understanding
- Team metrics:
+ Usability issues ××× open, ××× fixed
+ UX feature revisions: ×××
+ Documented design decisions: ×××
+ Maybe even “Days of development prevented: ×××”
- Essentially, you're tracking the output and value of your combined efforts. Being able to quantify the impact of your UX work has on the development process is pretty good insurance for your future employment and career growth.
### Influencing without authority
- When we fail to influence a team, it might be a problem with our approach
- Figure out what the product team wants, and then show how you can provide it
- There's a big need for communication, since many times the team does not understand the skills and work a UX designer is able to carry: you need to listen more than you talk
- For example, when advocating for user research with developers, a designer could argue that
> “With user research, we can find show-stopped issues before you spend the time to code them and have to do re-work”
- Perhaps they are not engaged in the re-design effort you are working on — and that's on _you_ to make it clear.
- Relationships matter: UX people usually have a lot of contacts because they work with many people across the organization. Draw on those people to help you out.
> Note: Usually for me, that has been in the form of mentorship and advice, either on how to deal with tricky team dynamics or how to strategize for complex projects
- Because of our position, UX people are usually strategically aware of what's going on in the organization: making that visible to your immediate team can bring a lot of value
- Your authority comes from your knowledge and skills, not (necessarily) from your position in the org chart.
- Understand the team's goals and perspective, and then embed your UX goals within a shared proposal that focuses on both
## 5. Growing Up
### UX Maturity Model
- Level 1: Hostility towards usability
- Level 2: Developer-centered usability
- Level 3: Skunkworks usability
- Level 4: Dedicated usability budget
- Level 5: Managed usability
- Level 6: Systematic usability process
- Level 7: Integrated user-centered design
- Level 8: User-driven Corporation
### Cultivate Executive Champions
- Ask your executives what you can do for them:
+ What do they need?
+ What do I have to further their agenda?
+ How can I make them look good?
- Understand how you can slice your data to make it useful for them
- If they see you as a source of impartial, user-centric data, you become more important for the company's strategy
- To talk with business people, you need to talk in business terms: talk in terms of "customers" and "employees", rather than generically referring to "users"
- Don't talk process, talk outcomes (and how they impact the company bottom lines)
- Time to market, conversion, cost savings, dollars per year
- Before and after snapshots of system and metrics
### Justify your budget
Getting budget to expand your team:
- Communicate team support
- Capture your success metrics
- Obtain testimonials from other teams
-**Never, ever complain that you're lacking budget**
- Just show how you could use extra funds, and how this allocation would benefit the business
- How much do you need, and what will you be doing with it?
- Always good to have contingencies, in case your first choice cannot be met: Better tools? External vendors? Partial allocation from other parts of the org?
- Have the data that shows the best decision is to give you what you want
## 6. Conclusion
### Next steps
A handy summary and to-do list:
- Work out what it takes to sell UX to the correct people in the organization
- Figure out your team's work priorities and stick to them
- Create a priority model and update it frequently
**Plan Ahead**
- Executive leadership
- Visibility
**Goal: Become the group responsible for defining user experience**
