How to Incorporate User Experience in Organizations

Last month Keikendo presented a model to identify the maturity level of user experience within an organization. We call it the Keikendo Maturity Model and is the result of over 10 years experience shared by Keikendo founders in organizations of different types, sizes and markets.

While each organization may have goals, processes, techniques and teams with special characteristics, in terms of user experience we have seen similar situations regardless of the type of organization.

Such situations can be described from the barriers to the adoption of user experience within an organization. The model describes 20 barriers clustered into 5 levels:

• Unintentional
• Self-referential
• Expert
• Centralized
• Distributed

It is highly feasable that the 20 barriers do not cover all situations in all organizations, but the most common. They are a sort of average of the most common situations, and each organization may add those applicable to it.

In this article I will describe only the most common barriers that occur at each level, along with the tools that I consider most powerful to overcome them.

1. Unintentional

• Level description: for organizations in this level user experience isn´t designed proactively but is a consequence of certain business goals and IT constraints. Generally speaking, there are no resources with knowledge of user experience or with the intention of incorporating its processes or technics.
• Common barriers: unknowledge and rejection.
• Tools: formal training (courses, events, etc.) or informal (internal presentations, lectures, etc.)

2. Self-referencial

• Level description: at this level organizations design products as if users were like them. Users are fictionally made up, often idealized, but they don´t really participate in the design process. UX can begin to be part of the organization´s public communications but in general it is no more than an slogan.
• Common barriers: budget, time and resources constraints. 
• Tools: user testing is the most powerful tool for overcoming resistances of this level. When observing real people using a product or interface, many preconceptions fall apart and it is possible to discover where and why they are failing. 

3. Expert

• Level description: at this level emerges one person or small team within the organization with concerns about user experience. It is possible that a new technique has been applied, at least once, which usually is user testing.
• Common barriers: formalization, expansion and deepening of the process. The UX technique that has been implemented can not be a consistent part of the design process. On the other hand, it is difficult to replicate it in other projects and even incorporate other complementary techniques.
• Tools: quantification of user testing to measure results and compare projects where UX techniques were applied to those who were not.

4. Centralized

• Level description: organizations that are at this level have a user experience team consisting of at least three roles: interaction design, information architecture and usability. Several UX techniques are applied and user testing is a consistent part of the design process.
• Common barriers: issues are related to UX team scalability. The value of UX has increased and different departments within the organization ask for more resources and better skills but it is difficult for the UX team to meet these demands. Generally this is because UX still is an internal service instead of a strategic area with its own budget.
• Tools: in this level is very important that UX metrics are linked to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and expose the impact that they have.

5. Distributed

• Level description: User Experience is an strategic area of the company at the same level of Marketing or Finance. UX is part of the organizational culture and participates in the phases of discovery, design and development for products and services. 
• Common barriers: barriers usually show up in the consolidation phase of UX as a strategic area of the organization. In general they are caused by generational issues and unknowledge of senior executives, including the CEO. 
• Tools: show how User Experience improves ROI (Return On Investment).

Maturity progreses one level at a time, organizations can not skip levels because each one of them requires the integration of knowledge, skills, specific profiles and changes at the internal processes that can last years.

To achieve higher levels of maturity (4 and 5) are two important changes have to occur within organizations:

• Organization goals
• Power balance

The first one involves incorporating new variables in the economic and financial business ecuation: focus on users. The product and service development cycle changed, the organization begins to think about the design of products with users in the center of the process, actively involving them from discovery and research phases, to design, development and support. The organization understands that users are the most important variable to achieve their business goals.

The second issue requires changes that affect all organization levels particularly middle management and directors including the CEO. It entails the participation of users into the decision-making process, which is a situation that could limit management control. In organizations with a personalistic management culture this can be difficult and requires gradual changes that would have to be always supported by positive results.

For each of the described levels there are tools that can overcome barriers. The contributions of the Keikendo Maturity Model are that it provides a map where each organization can be located throughout the identification of symptoms of distress, and to provide an action plan to incorporate user experience in order to improve business results.

5 things you need to have in mind when moderating a usability test.

Moderating a usability test may seem a simple task. When viewed from the outside, it appears that the moderator is simply talking to the user and taking notes, and that folks is something that anybody can do.

However, conducting a usability test requires special skills that must be combined and put into play concurrently during each session.

The five logging levels

We could say that there are five levels or channels on which the test moderator acts:

• Conversational level: it is an active mode and consists of what the moderator tells to the user.  Usually it is based on a predefined script with the scenarios and tasks for the users. Special attention should be paid to how the moderator says what it says, because his words could influence user behavior.
• Listening level: is an active-passive mode and is listening to what the user says and how he says it. In particular it is important to be aware of how the user named concepts or interface elements.
• Observational level: is a passive mode that consist of observing user behavior, what the user does on the interface and also his/her nonverbal communication: gestures, posture, facial expressions, movements, etc.
• Environmental level: the moderator is the highest authority in the room in which the tests are performed, and is also responsible for creating an environment where the user feel comfortable and can concentrate on the tasks requested. This includes from offering something to drink for the user, to assure that the other people present in the room (assistant, observer, etc.) do not disturb the user.
• Timing: This is the most difficult skill to obtain. It is knowing when to leave aside the script to investigate a particular aspect of what the user has done or said. What to inquire, in what way and to what extent are decisions to be taken by the moderator while the test runs. 

The more control is gained in each of these levels, the tests will have more depth and accurate results about what happens to users while using a product.

Finally, the only way to master all levels is training, which means making hundreds of usability tests and after each one wonder what could have been done better.

What Lean UX really means for UX professionals?

Lean UX is a concept that has been going around for a couple of years. Does it really means  something new to the field and professionals of UX or is just another way of naming what we are already doing?

Jeff Gothelf, one of the dominant voices in the movement, defined in an article Lean UX  as "the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.

Jeff is right when he suggests putting less emphasis on deliverables. Over the years, User Experience professionals have created a long list of documents with which often we torture our clients. In a quick mental review I could mention:

• Heuristic evaluations
• Personas
• Usability tests
• Iterative prototyping
• Mind maps
• Concept maps
• Sitemaps
• Wireframes
• Storyboards
• Scenarios
• Content inventories 

And so on. For many years it was necessary for us to create this corpus because our disciplines needed techniques, tools and deliverables that position themselves against others. But in the process we lost focus on our customers to whom we spoke an incomprehensible language or at best very distant to his, the business language.

Does Lean UX means that we should not create more deliverables?

No. Lean UX means to me a process for designing products and services that progressively, quickly and efficiently can refine the value proposal for users.

This definition does not include the deliverables as a core concept of what is or is not Lean UX, because often the generation of specific deliverables (although not directly linked to product design) is necessary to achieve the project objectives.

Let me explain this: in the context in which startups move, where Lean UX has its maximum applicability, one of the most important milestones is to raise capital. To do this, entrepreneurs need some kind of documentation (eg. usability testing reports) to investors to justify the need for more money to polish defective product areas or even rethink it completely .

The origins of Lean UX

Most of the concepts behind Lean UX arised with the Lean Startup movement, which was based in Lean methodologies, a particular type of agile processes. The Lean Startup movement was founded by Eric Ries and is based on five principles:

• There are entrepreneurs everywhere
• Entrepreneurship is administered
• Generate validated knowledge
• Innovation measurable
• Process Build-Measure-Learn (build - measure - learn)

Lean terminology, new names for old processes

Although the terminology used by Ries and the Lean Startup movement is different from the one we used as UX professionals, is closely related to processes or techniques we use frequently:

• Generate validated knowledge: is nothing else than doing user testings to obtain information with the purpose of validating the assumptions made during the design phase of a product.
• Measurable innovation: means taking metrics when testing with users, which perfectly could be typical usability metrics (effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction).
• Pivot: is one of the central concepts of Lean terminology. Describes the possibility of changing the course of product design based on knowledge obtained in usability tests.
• MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is what we call a testable prototype.
• Customer development: refers to leaving the cubicle and researching the way users use the product in a real context. It's what we call fieldwork either participant observation, contextual interviews or contextual surveys.

The Lean work process is iterative

The work process suggested by Eric Ries and called Build-Measure-Learn is an iterative process as commonly used in projects of User Centered Design:

What brings Lean UX?

Lean UX brings two changes that I consider interesting for the UX  field :

• A new way of communicate what we do: for many years UX professionals have spoken a foreign  and boring language for business people: "Usability Testing" "Heuristic Evaluation" "Personas" "Mental maps" are some of the strangest and abstract words ever invented. By contrast, the terminology proposed by Lean UX is much closer to the language used within an enterprise, and allows a better understanding and a connection with what we do and the results demanded by the business.
• A refocus of our work: Lean UX proposes to focus on the two most important partners of our iterations: business representatives and users. We must act as interpreters between two actors that at the begging may seem strangers but at the end must become best friends.

What means Lean UX for user experience professionals?

Working under Lean methodology requires some changes to the professionals capacity to deliver better results. Among them:

• Better understanding of the business: this is perhaps the greatest deficit of designers and developers who are well trained in the technical and operational aspects of their disciplines but often lacking and resist the business vision, and results orientation.
• Increased flexibility: the thoroughness that apply certain UX techniques can often make it more difficult to provide rapid and valuable inside to the business. Working with hybrid techniques is a possibility to avoid this.
• Higher speed: means to do all this faster.