I’ve done a little bit of usability testing involving managers and directors at my work (a large corporation). It’s a double-edged sword. It can bring to light various usability problems in a hurry, illustrate a good UI, and make UX a very concrete entity. However, one has to avoid making people look or feel bad — the participant, the development team, etc. Also, a person in authority may start making design and functionality suggestions, which is typically not a good thing. Under some circumstances this tactic can be useful.

Even so, that is not a guarantee that the message will be heard or that the leadership even understands or genuinely cares about the goals they themselves have put forth. Who knows what really goes on in those smoke-filled-rooms.

Execs are similar : addicted or habituated with processes and reports they understand. A presentation can’t help a smoker or an exec. Quantifiable results that fit with current processes can work, but in many industries UX is hard to quantify. It’s easy in small changes in checkout processes to show an uptick in sales. Many companies however have a multi-channel on/offline operation with things that may slip to a competitor or perhaps just to another channel (usually the telephone sales team, who are often only too happy to gain volume in a general downward trend). In the first place you have to have decent analytics in place, and I don’t mean the tool but the exploitation of data, of which there is usually too much and it’s used with too much detail and not enough “high level” analysis.

UX is moving ahead though – posts like CXO, VP of Product (where the product is an online tool or service) etc didn’t exist when I first started on the web back in the last millenium.

The execs are usually savy political operators. If a key customer complains about something and they happen to utter a designers name, your UX phone will be ringing. They will match a problem with a solution.

But investing in UX means paradigm shift. It means to let intuitive designers do observational research to find the opportunities, and means to stop listening to the voice of the customer product management tracks in microsoft excel. It means to let people with design skill visualize a solution of what the product needs to do, and means to stop listening to the product manager careful analysis of ill conceived features. The executive is more in tune with the product manager, and more in tune with analysis. The idea of letting the intuitive oriented, talented person make the strategic decisions is a laugher. Why would they invest their money like that and sign up for a process like that?
It is like faith.

Unless there is an obvious problem to be solved (customer complains of ux, call ux), you will not be called and you will not be invested in. They don’t understand you or UX.

Challenge is in how we find tangible added value of usability to convince decision makers. Erick’s comment about Napoleon, or in general playing into greed and fear, is how business work. So what do we need to do? One approach is to find ways to present comparative usability results and position the ease of use of a design against that of competing products. E.g. if you can demonstrate quantifiably that a commonly used function in a HTC Android phone design is more difficult to use than that of a competitor, say Motorola Android product, connecting the dots to customer satisfaction, impact on revenue will become the next discussion. If the evidence is convincing, HTC management and marketing folks have a hard time ignoring it.

The next obvious question is how can we present such quantifiable evidence, say of the ease-of-use of a product, that management will be compelled to make the leap? Any thoughts?

Working in an environment where the management is more desperate for newer features than UX which usually make them to suffer.

On a related note, a friend of mine, Bogo Vatovec, says (and I paraphrase a rant on usability) there are three stages to this process: 1. Nobody talks about UX. 2. Everybody talks about UX. 3. Nobody talks about UX.

Our job is to start the second phase – and this is where our manipulation of the clueless, but self-absorbed executives comes into play.

The third phase seems odd, but in reality, it just means that everyone takes UX for granted as it has been built into the system. Just as today we take car safety for granted – which was not the case back when Ralph Nader wrote his seminal book.

I am convinced I will live to see the day when the third phase becomes the norm rather than the exception.

I’ve attended Agile Conference 2009 in Chicago and your keynote was the last one. It was totally amazing and changes everything. 2 years later we have refreshed company with 4 UX experts, usability tests, etc. We combined our agile development process and UX process. I’ve read about 30 books about UX, usability and design since then. I’m injecting UX into our culture.

So you can convince CEOs, since I’m a living example of a CEO who was convinced by just a single keynote.

This is a chicken and egg situation, but I often recommend a smal UX project is undertaken to use as an education tool to the holder of the purse strings. How can you argue with a customer struggling to complete an online purchase process on your website? Then explain that there is a wealth of UX tools that can help ensure an optimum user experience.

Fortunately, this is happening less frequently as more people are at least aware of the benefits of UX even if they haven’t been invovled in it yet!

The “find someplace else to work” recommendation is not very humane, but it may be the most humane one available. It rolls easily off the tongue for someone who already works for a great company. In an economic slump, with a family, with real expenses, and not much in assets, this is an oversimplification. If you’ve only ever done mediocre work because that was all that was ever asked of you and you didn’t have time to build something on your own because of other obligations (i.e. child care, house work, or even enjoying life), this suggestion may not reach the ears of those who it is intended for. “[F]ind someplace else to work,” really needs to be interpreted literally, especially if you’ve been miserable for years. Find someplace better. Even a little better will go a long way. Interview the interviewer. Figure out if your prospective employer will let you push the envelope, even if just a little.

In the book The Passionate Programmer (yes you should read this), the author talks about never being the most talented person in the room. I couldn’t agree more. He even talks about creating a room (contributing to open source) so that you can be around more talented people than yourself.

I know there is a stigma against “giving work away” or “doing spec work” in the design community, but I really wish more UX professionals would contribute to open source software. Rather than seeing it as “doing unpaid work” you could choose to see it as a teaching moment or a chance to make a difference (Code for America recruits UX professionals as well). You could retort that a lot of ivory tower coder geeks don’t see the value of UX (suggest you read article above). FLOSS geeks are a different breed. They don’t necessarily care if their open-source baby makes them any money (though it would be nice). What they care about is being useful (guilty). If they are shackled to a desk 8-5 where no one seems to listen to them or care what they are thinking, how useful do you think they really feel? So, if they don’t get UX, simply explain to them how a certain program modification would increase it’s usage. Case in point: the hotkeys for Inkscape really suck (function keys—talk about unnatural mapping). If you can get a FLOSS geek’s software to the wider world, you have made a friend for life; I guarantee it.

UX, for me at least, is akin to programming in that you can learn from online and offline resources, but you learn much more quickly and deeply when you can converse with and work alongside experienced professionals.