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Congrats! If you are reading this article, chances are you have woken up to the fact that UX is important in your organisation. Good for you. Now you can start making design decisions based on your user's behaviour, not your gut feeling or your boss' ideas.
I know that this realisation may be a painful one to arrive at. For years your organisation may have done the work a certain way, assuming they know what users need and want, and speaking in their name. It's a crucial step though, and the first one in a long journey that will take your company up to a higher UX maturity.
This article is not about this first step - admitting that UX needs to be fostered - but more about the second: now that I've realised UX is important, how do I set up my UX team / department in my organisation?
This journey means change. Let me start with the basics - the people. If you need UX, you need people to carry out the UX work. After that, I will tackle the mindset, which is as important as the people. For UX to thrive, your organisation needs to be prepared for it.
People make the company, they say. Therefore, if you need to establish UX in your organisation, you will need the right people. Here are two possible scenarios:
Let's take the first - if there is no-one on the team, your company will need to hire.
The challenge in hiring a team from scratch is that there is no team culture to support the first hires. Think of it as a lighthouse in a stormy night - when the new hires come in, they may struggle to adjust to the organisation and feel lost at that. UX is a large field and there are numerous approaches to collaborating, communicating and delivering the work. Settling down on one methodology that works in a certain company's environment is more important than knowing them all.
In order to overcome the lack of team culture, it’s useful to hire someone more senior, or outsource this person / this competency to help hire the rest of the team. The goal is that this person provides a sense of structure, guiding vision and support for the new hires to come.
Solo UX professionals carry significant weight on their shoulders, may face overwhelming opposition and eventually give in under pressure. They have to assert their position in the organisation in order to survive.
Unlike established teams, the new UX department will lack the communication flows, the interdepartmental relationships and the given time and place to voice their concerns. Solo UX professionals will have to create all the above for themselves. It will take patience, resilience and determination - it isn't likely that a brand new UX team is born in a company eager and ready to embrace it.
Early in my career I was a UX team of one. It took me about 2 years to shift mindsets and convince stakeholders to put me (UX) in the loop. People at first defy my recommendations, try to compromise my studies and intimidate me. I was fortunate to have a few people listening and encouraging me, long enough for it to spread. I witnessed that company shifting from non-believer to straight out advocate, and that was beautiful.
Not all UX profiles will be suitable for this role, because it takes a lot more than doing the UX work right. The ability to influence peers and superiors, to create healthy interdepartmental relationships and hold their ground when pressured are essential for success. Getting this first hire right will enable you to grow the team in a year or two to a sizable number. Hiring wrong is a big risk - instead of raising the UX credibility you may be burying it down.
Working with an existing team is easier, one might think. But it may not be. People who work a certain way for a long time are understandably reluctant to change. Nevertheless we have to add them in the equation. To hire new people and forget about the existing wouldn't make for a healthy environment. You need to create a bridge between them. That means training and coaching the existing people and preparing them for what's coming.
Being a business owner and a mother, I see my employees similarly to how I see my children. I’ve kept them under my roof and cared for them over the years, so that they accumulate love, knowledge and skills that will make me proud - it's an investment. When you hire someone, it is as if you start from square one with that person, investing time, sharing knowledge, and coaching them, to a point where they give back to you through their work, ethics and dedication. If you always hire someone new, without up-skilling existing staff, it is as if you reinvest all that "love", without ever getting much of it back.
It’s worth up-skilling your existing team, no matter how challenging it may be. Indeed it requires both professional training and coaching, but going down this route you'll show your appreciation for their loyalty and contribution during all those years. It will be more appealing for them to continue working with you and doing their best, because you give them a chance to evolve. Whereas new hires pose a higher risk - they don't have strong bonds with the company and may decide to leave before returning any "love".
People may not be willing to try something new. It's not to say that they can't see the benefits, they can, but it's hard for them. All at once they are not the experts anymore, despite their 10+ or 20+ years of experience. They need to give up their accomplished statuses and embrace the discomfort of being incompetent again. We can all agree that it is perfectly human.
Be sure to prepare for these responses, and to empathise, plan the transition in a way that is smooth and understanding:
After training, coaching or recruiting your people, you should tackle the mindset.
In order for your UX team to function well and deliver value, the other departments need to be familiar with the UX methodology and welcome along its processes. If not, the collaboration amongst departments will be scarce, knowledge sharing will be inhibited and recommendations won't be taken into account, no matter how good they are.
That is why mindset should be the next aspect to tackle.
For starters, you should identify the departments that will need to work closely with your UX team. Depending on the nature of your business, these departments may vary, but there could be Marketing, Engineering, Customer Support, Sales, R&D, to name a few. Those are all good places to start.
Talk to your Human Resources colleagues and see if you can work out a corporate training plan. The idea is that you can grab a reasonable amount of people from all these departments to join and become aware of UX and how it can benefit their areas of expertise. Plan them in a way that is specific and applicable to their day-to-day work.
Finally, once they are aware (at least a few of them will be, thanks to training), it's time to put it into practice. Identify a small project to test out the collaboration. Invite at least one element from each department for a kickoff and decide together how each one is going to contribute to the project. I call it a "work group", because it's a temporary team made of various disciplines, brought together to solve a problem. It's not about their own departments, or politics, or chain of command, it's about getting to a great solution, owned by all.
You may find resistance, though. People may struggle to let go of old habits and beliefs, prior experience of working together, or lack thereof. The idea is to assume that it is an experiment and be open about it, without promises of perfection. You want to focus on the learnings from that project to inform future collaborations, and not on the outcome per se.
From my experience, these new collaborations feel odd at first, but end up producing a refreshing effect on people. It is as if they come back from intelectual hibernation - I kid you not. What's important to include is a facilitator (from your UX team) who sets the pace and keeps track of planning. Then again, that person should be confident in that role, on one hand detecting what the group needs, on the other pushing it to deliver.
And there you have it. To successfully establish UX in your organisation, you need people and mindset to be aligned. Congrats on your decision to welcome UX in!
May this be the beginning of a new era, where the user is at the guiding wheel.
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