Article: Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team
July 11th, 2006
UIEtips 7/11/06: Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team
Producing a usable design takes time, money, and resources. It also requires the User Experience team’s dedication to focus on customer needs throughout the entire design process.
Knowing how to identify and communicate the value of a User Experience project will substantially help it get approved and supported by an organization. Most organizations we work with understand the need for UX efforts, yet they still struggle with how to best incorporate the team into the development process.
Christine Perfetti recently interviewed Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe, two premier User Experience experts, to discuss how organizations can make their UX practices a success. You can read the interview here.
It’s also no accident that we’ve asked Susan and Sarah to develop a new seminar for our User Interface 11 Conference to share the latest strategies for UX teams to add value to their organizations. You can read about Sarah and Susan’s session, along with the other great full-day seminars, here.
Are you challenged with building a UX team within your organization? Is your team struggling to get support and buy-in from your organization? How have you gotten your organization onboard? Join the discussion below.
July 11th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
I agree with many of the points raised by Susan and Sarah. I started a usability/UCD function at my company, and I too started with usability testing. That was the easiest way to dive in - by starting to prove the benefits using an existing project. Eventually, I started to work my way further and further back in the project lifecycle.
I also agree that tailoring the message of UX work to your specific audience is key. Helping each project team role understand the benefits that apply to them specifically goes a long way.
July 11th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Excellent article. I am interested in other suggestions and ideas that proved successful.
July 11th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Sarah and Susan mention a few techniques for promoting UX work within the organisation. I thought I’d add one of my favourites: design walls. I’ve had success on many projects by simply sticking up UX work artefacts (especially design ideas) in a high-traffic area of the organisation and soliciting feedback. Whether or not you get feedback, it’s a great way to get across the message that, yes, someone is taking responsibility for the UI!
July 11th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
It was interesting to read of the roles suggested for a successful UX team and the flexibility of how many people can fulfill these roles. We’ve had several internal discussions about how this team should be structured and what job titles we should use.
The User Experience team at my workplace is made of ‘producers’, who are responsible for interaction design, IA and usability initiatives, and a ‘web designer’, who leads the visual design effort.
The UX team is part of the Product Management department, so we have a very close relationship with the product managers and share business goals. This works well: they are as committed to user-centred design as we are, because they know the result is a more competitive, profitable and preferred web site.
The web designer role was originally in the IT department and we recently shifted it into the UX team. This has proven invaluable as the person can be closer to the strategy and goals of an initiative and we can prioritise their time to be much more involved in user-based evaluations, prototyping etc. instead of them just reacting to a brief and churning through design production.
The ‘producers’ all have different strengths and backgrounds: one person is strong on content, another on usability, two on interaction design, although we all perform tasks across the board.
Our UX team’s growth will focus on bringing in people with specific strengths to fill the gaps, and enabling us to separate design and evaluation, to reduce bias.
July 12th, 2006 at 3:47 am
What a timely article! UX teams seem to be a real flavour of the moment in the UK, where once it was the role of the lone ranger - literally - solely defending the usefulness of UCD.
July 12th, 2006 at 8:51 am
As long as we’re talking UX, may I point out that hyperlinking “here” (”You can read the interview here.”) is generaly considered sub-optimal? It would be much more useful to the user, for example, to drop that sentence, and instead hyperlink the verb “interviewed” earlier in the paragraph.
This would be especially helpful on this page, as the hyperlinked “here” construct is used twice, and in successive paragraphs — I can’t scan the page as readily, since I have to stop to suss out which “here” the link is leading me.
UX isn’t only visual/interaction design. Usability implicitly includes content as well.
July 20th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
I’m the lead designer at a university department. I’ve been really interested in starting to perform usability tests on our sites instead of just blindly producing work and hoping that our users are following our assumptions of who they are, what they want, and how they interact with our sites. I’ve had interest from my teammates about pursuing this, but my problem is that I’ve never performed usability testing. I’ve read about it, so I have some idea how it might go, but what I desparately want is to sit in on a usability test to see how it’s done first-hand. I feel this would make me feel much more confident to go out and start trying to implement a UX team where I work. Does anyone have any ideas of how I could sit in on usability testing? I’d love to find a local usability mentor.
July 22nd, 2006 at 1:34 am
Design Wall:
Hi Shane, we are doing that very thing at the moment on a project.
Where we have made a small cubicle called the *UX Design Studio* pinning up not only the process before builds, but wireframe sketches, design treatments and providing an opportunity for people to visibly see what is being produced. Its great!
We also have a number of people coming by to visit, look at the walls and we have worked out a system of moving current work (sketches) from one part of the wall to the right as it moves foward and then archives.
Very cool!
August 7th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
[...] At many large web companies (I’ve friends in several of these groups) there are entire teams devote to each one of these layers of user experience. At smaller companies, a small group of folks has to cover many of these. Learn more about UX teams from Jared Spool. [...]
October 14th, 2006 at 9:10 am
User Experience team are very usefull. Not just because of their celerity to contribute for different develomeninng aspect’s for the organisation, but the knowledge that is most important in this case to be escort to the other members of the group.