In the second of In this month’s Thought Leader article we hear from Susan Wolfe, a pioneer in the Australian usability industry. She has spent 25 years evangelising the value of usability and user-centred design, and has extensive experience making it work in the real world. She has built and managed a number of highly successful teams, and has collaborated with a vast array of commercial, large corporate and government clients across industries and around the globe to introduce and reap the rewards of user-centred design practices.

So, you’ve decided your organisation needs a User Experience (UX) team.  It seems straight forward enough - there are lots of projects going on that would benefit from some attention to UX, and you’ve already identified a few staff who you could help deliver UX-related services.

While the need for a UX team might be obvious to you, setting up and running such a team is not as simple as you might think, and how to make it successful is anything but obvious.  There are a lot of considerations, such as:

• Figuring out where to start in the organisation
• Deciding where in the organisation your UX team should live
• Determining the best structure for your team
• Determining what services to offer
• Hiring the right people (whether that’s training people from within or going externally)
• Training the new team
• Maintaining your team and ensuring their ongoing skill development

These are just some of the many decisions that you will face.

But before you tackle this list, you need to recognise that there are lots of potential pitfalls to avoid.  Some of the more common ones include:

• Assuming that everyone in the organisation values a good user experience as much as you do
• ‘Stepping on the toes’ of other groups and not being sensitive to their priorities
• Introducing a new methodology on top of an existing methodology
• Transforming internal staff into user experience specialists without training
• Bringing in a consulting company without knowledge transfer

The list goes on and on.  Sadly, ‘build it and they will come’ simply doesn’t apply to UX teams!

However, this doesn’t mean that all UX teams are doomed to failure. It’s simply a matter of doing your homework - and approaching the development of a UX team as you would other business propositions.

One way to begin is to consider your organisation’s real business goals, which are generally tied to profit. Most activities can be related back to profit; such as how to earn more, cut costs, improve stock value, and expand market share. Your homework involves understanding and articulating exactly how UX activities can have an impact on profit, using real numbers from your organisation, not stats taken out of a book on Return on Investment. This is a good starting point.

However, understanding these business goals is not enough to ensure success. You also need to understand the organisational barriers and opportunities to introducing usability, user-centred design and broader UX activities, as well as the cultural myths and values held within your organisation. By understanding these, your team will better understand how to work within the context of organisation, and also with others on your team.

Barriers and opportunities

A barrier has the potential to prevent or undermine the adoption of your UX design activities. Think of it as an existing or planned circumstance that may get in the way of your ability to carry out UX activities. Some of these could include:

• Inadequate communication between developers and users
• Clients not understanding usability or UX and therefore not wanting to pay for it
• Different groups within your organisation "owning" the user experience
• Not enough skills in usability and UX design
• Most of the projects are too small to incorporate explicit UX design
• Overloading the UX specialist(s) with too many projects to support>
• Having projects which are located across the organisation and are hard for the specialists to reach
• The departments within your organisation consider themselves unique from each other, making standardisation feel difficult to sell

An opportunity, on the other hand, offers a vehicle for pushing UX design initiatives through, Think of it as an existing or planned initiative which may be leveraged to help carry out UX activities, such as:

• New systems development or redevelopment
• A well accepted systems development methodology
• A training department that is targeting cost reduction
• A quality assurance initiative that is well received
• A new business process re-engineering activity
• A management team that supports continuous improvement
• An impending reorganisation
• A senior manager who is willing to "champion" UX
• A set of clear and widely accepted corporate objectives
• Existing staff who can become UX specialists

Myths and values

Myths and values are not actual circumstances, but perceptions that can form potential barriers. A myth is a belief about usability and UX held by stakeholders, such as:

• Usability is subjective and can’t be measured or engineered
• Users don’t need better interfaces, just better training
• Standards and guidelines will take the creativity out of design
• As long as designers are familiar with interface guidelines and principles, they will design the right UX
• UX design shouldn’t be considered until the detailed design phase of a software project
• UX specialists aren’t technical enough to understand the requirements of systems development
• Users cannot affect or impact user interface design

Furthermore, a value is a belief that defines the culture of your organisation. These can either be helpful or unhelpful, and may include such things as:

• Developers are rewarded for "rescuing" a failing project
• Clever code solutions are applauded
• Innovation is highly valued
• Staff who don’t "rock the boat" are safe in their jobs
• Risk is dangerous

It is not until you understand your organisation at this level that you can start to craft a UX team that will really work. Though you are unlikely to immediately dispel a myth or change your organisation’s values, it is essential to recognise what they are so you can determine how best to introduce and foster a user-centred culture and a UX team. In future articles, we will show you how to effectively use this information to identify your allies and target your approach.