Leading an organisation from this role is also a major challenge. It’s hard work implementing a UX focus in a company where none exists. There will be battles against corporate biases, conflicting business needs, and results-driven culture.

In such a difficult position, how can a UXer go about creating a culture of great user experience?

It’s imperative to establish a baseline process, socialise the benefits of great UX, and prepare for the long road ahead.

Above all else, establish a process

When starting a culture of user experience focus, the first step is to establish a clear UX process. 

“UX process is a cornerstone of UX design, it’s a make-it-or-break-it aspect of UX design,” writes veteran UX professional Nick Babich in his blog for Adobe.

“Without a solid UX design process, a designer could be completely moving in the dark. A clear and concise UX process, on the other hand, makes it possible to craft amazing experiences for users.”

Every UX professional should have a favoured baseline process. In fact, you’d expect this to be the first question in any UX interview. Part of any quality answer to this question should be to acknowledge the importance of context. No two companies or products are the same. Processes should differ depending on organisational needs, technology stacks, and delivery speed.

No process is bound to be the perfect fit. An initial process’s existence is more important than its perfection. Install a process to address the largest problems and work to resolve the kinks later.

Whatever process you choose, tailor it to your organisation’s needs. This will help you with the second facet of gaining UX buy-in: socialising UX benefits among stakeholders.

Socialise the benefits of UX among stakeholders

In his Forbes piece Good UX is Good Business, Andrew Kucheriavy, founder and CEO Intechnic, lays out the argument for the business benefits of an improved focus on user experience.

“Good user experience is clearly good for business,” he writes. “ Studies show that companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support cost, increased customer retention and increased market share.”

While the benefits are clear, you must be able to explain why the UX process is beneficial to your stakeholders. 

UX success hinges on the cooperation and participation of the business as a whole. While you are the engine propelling the car, the whole machine must move forward together. It’s often difficult for internal stakeholders to see the progress and impact of UX focus. By clearly explaining the benefits, you’ll bring your company one step closer to fully embracing a culture of great user experience.

I’ve written previously on how big of a part UX professionals play in facilitating internal communication. We sit at the epicentre of our business. We speak with our business partners to understand project requirements. We work with our technical teams to understand what’s viable, and to support development efforts. We talk with customers to understand their wants, needs, and expectations. An established process allows UX pros to speak about the project pipeline and its direct impact to any stakeholder.

If we are successful as UX professionals, the benefits we add to our organisations should be clear. Our business partners should have a better understanding of our customers’ needs through UX testing. Our technical teams will receive projects that are both practical and well-defined through iteration and revision with our business partners. And, most importantly, our customers receive a product that exceeds their expectations.

Be aggressive in explaining your expected benefits. Take advantage of your team’s rituals and culture to discuss your roll and how your process will benefit specific projects and initiatives. This gives UX pros excellent opportunities to speak on how and why our process benefits the company as a whole, and gain allies in promoting usability throughout the company.

Cindy McCracken, a UX professional with more than 10 years of experience working for the likes of Fidelity Investments, agrees.

“The more you work with co-workers such as support, sales and development and show them the value of UX, the more support you will have within the organisation,” she writes in her article Proven Strategies to Win Over Stakeholders for Your UX Project. “These in-the-trenches supporters will see the value of your work and the successes with customers first hand, and that will go a long way toward impacting workplace culture and filtering up to senior level support of UX.”

There are a few ways UX professionals can quickly integrate themselves into the rhythms of the business.

Attend development standups. Listen for blockers and speak about how your UX process will ease these issues in the future. Pay attention for upcoming work, and ask for inclusion where practical. 

“In planning meetings, be alert for extensive development work planned to go work with interfaces that clearly need to be redesigned,” writes McCracken. “Rather than just let them proceed, bring potential design problems and ideas for improvements to the team.”

Set meetings with your business partners. Work to understand their underlying problems. Explain UX’s role in fixing those issues. Find the low hanging fruit to get some quick wins on the board. 

Take part in retrospectives. Retrospectives are a great platform to show the type of value you can provide for your new team. 

Listen for issues on previous releases. Present your UX process after discussing these issues. Prepare to speak on your process, and how that will affect any issues raised. After your first couple of releases, plan on asking for feedback to adjust your basic process.

Get in front of your customers. Some would argue that it’s not UX unless you’re getting in touch with your users. This is where great UX starts and ends. Working with your clients shows your engaged in their needs. It allows you to talk about projects that are in development. And it allows you to understand wants, needs, and pain points. We take all this back to our business partners to help create a better product.

According to McCracken, a great way to do this early in the game is to test early iterations of projects with your clients.

“[Use] an online first-click test to see if participants go where you expect when asked to perform tasks,” She writes. “You can even ask what people notice first on a page. Better yet, run one study with an image of your current design, and one with an image of the new design to see how user performance compares. If you have a clear winner, it should be easy to get buy-in to improve conversions, which would be a great return on investment.

Prepare for the long road ahead

The road to establishing UX as a team of one can be difficult and lonely at times. Larger teams, for starters, can divide and conquer work.

A team of one, however, does not have that luxury.

As solo teams, it’s important to take some steps to avoid over-extension. With no one to pick up the slack, whiffing on an objective or project can have major consequences. What’s more, the stress of working alone can be intimidating. 

So how can you make life as a solo UXer easier on yourself?

Work with your higher-ups to set reasonable goals and benchmarks. Talk about when you’d like to have processes installed and how you’d like to go about its implementation. Make sure that everyone is clear on mutual expectations and goals. Review your progress and blockers regularly. 

Engage with the larger UX community. One mind rarely surprises itself. In larger teams, UXers have comrades to give feedback. In solo teams, isolation can inhibit creative solutions and stunt professional development. Go to UX meetups. Follow industry leaders on Twitter. Start a blog. Ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow. Join an online UX group like the wonderful UXMastery Community. Whatever you do, get involved with the UX world as a whole in some way. Your conscious and career will thank you.

Conclusion

Working as the solitary UX professional in your organisation is not an easy job, but it can be tremendously rewarding.

In Leah Buley’s The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Survival Guide, she makes the best case I’ve yet seen for the allure of working as a UX team of one. The team of one’s work is as close as one can get to the fundamental values of the UX community as a whole.

“UX is a force for good,” she writes. “[As a team of one,] you help spread the growth of a new and exciting field, one person, team, and company at a time.”

What do you think are the greatest challenges for the solo UXer? Share your thoughts in the comments, or join the conversation in our friendly forums.

The post How to Survive as Your Company’s Solo UXer appeared first on UX Mastery.

The colour of the stapler is no coincidence, as my first encounter with a red Swingline was the cult classic Office Space. In the movie, Milton Waddams defends his prized piece of office equipment from theft and destruction at the hands of unscrupulous coworkers.

For Milton and millions of office workers worldwide, the red Swingline has become a symbol of those pieces of our work life for which we would, if ignored, set the world on fire.

My stapler’s daily use is as a reminder that everyone has red-stapler issues in their work life, and that a failure to communicate on those issues could have dire, unforeseen consequences. 

It’s an important reminder, to be sure. Our placement in our company’s organisation and workflow means that communicating as a UX professional is both imperative and, at times, extremely difficult.

Here are a few important lessons to learn to help avoid those red-stapler situations.

Learn and translate new languages

My wife and I do not speak the same language.  

My wife is an Archivist, and I’m a User Experience Engineer. Unsurprisingly, there is very little crossover between the world of antiquities and modern technology and design. Any dinner table conversation that begins with the inane question of “How was your day?” can lead to a whole meal spent translating different professional terms and concepts into language the other can understand.

This simply goes to illustrate this point: no one speaks the same language. Our individual collections of idioms, slang, and jargon is unique to each of us. What’s more, our own language changes and evolves depending on the group of people we’re interacting with at the moment.

Nowhere is the difference in languages used within an organisation more apparent than in the world of the user experience professional. We have exposure to nearly every element of our business, from C-Level management all the way on down to individual clients.  

To be successful in what we do, it’s imperative that we learn to speak and communicate in the various languages of our business partners and clients.

Additionally, because of our involvement across the business, a large part of our job is facilitating communication of difficult concepts between different groups. We are professional translators, addressing a wide audience that speaks a relatively small common language.

To make matters more difficult, UX has its own unique vocabulary that many in the organisation simply won’t understand. This is especially true in organisations that are new to UX. The temptation to slide a word of our own native language into the conversation is overwhelming.

Whether it’s a presentation or an email, we must take a moment before we begin communicating to put ourselves in our audience’s shoes. Potentially confusing jargon, acronyms, and unfamiliar concepts all need to be addressed to effectively communicate to our chosen audience. Identifying these potential issues ahead of time will help you avoid any problems and keep the conversation moving forward smoothly.

Admit your knowledge gaps

Your words mean nothing without the trust of your audience. The quickest route to being known as the office weasel—and quite quickly “the weasel that used to work here”—is to… ahem… massage the truth.

The temptation is real, especially when put on the spot. Unlike developers or QA analysts, UX professionals are often teams of one in many organisations, which means that we often have no one else to call on for help. Additionally, our familiarity with a project from multiple perspectives often forces us to believe we should know more than we actually do.

When our expertise is called upon and the answer evades us, that answer at the bottom of the trash can begins to look really attractive.

It’s a tough lesson that many learn the hard way: audiences can spot a heap of cow caca a mile away. Give that truth a rub down in front of a group more than a couple of times in your career and you will be called out. It will be painful.

At the same time, most people understand that even experts don’t have all of the answers. Additionally, most people don’t care where an answer comes from, so long as it is accurate and timely.

If you’re put on the spot to answer a question outside of your knowledge, simply admitting that you don’t know the right answer holds a lot of power. It projects honesty, humility, and self-awareness, all rare and valued personality traits in designers.

Equally important to admitting “I don’t know” is following it up with the phrase “but I’ll find out.”

The ability to navigate multiple different teams and business partners is a huge part of what we do, and we’re well-placed to find answers or connect individuals across internal boundaries. Always follow up with the requested information or an introduction to the party who can actually help out.

Always take the high road

It’s a guarantee that, eventually conflict will creep into your professional world. Every office is full of conflict, taking a number of different forms. There are egos to manage. There’s office politics in play, at some level, in virtually every decision of importance. There are personality conflicts and disparate goals amongst different arms of the organisation.

Add to that the all-around pressure to perform well, and it means that you will, inevitably, receive some sort of communication that is less than pleasant.

Whether the slights are subtle or overt, in-person or written, when someone lobs a putdown our way, our blood boils and our brain clouds up. Responding in anger is a natural reaction, but it’s not one that will help you accomplish your goals or further your career.

In office environments, anger and resentment are often the result of poor communication. When confronted with an angry or mean communication, take a step back, breathe, and even take a few minutes to calm down before asking yourself “What is this person really mad about, and how can I help resolve their problem?”

The chances are this person is not angry just for the sake of being angry. There is an issue to be resolved, and you have been given an opportunity to help solve the problem.

With our exposure to different business partners and perspectives, UX professionals can often be the key to quick resolution. We have the ability and insight to identify issues and connect key individuals to work towards a clear consensus on difficult issues.

What’s your best communication tip? Leave a comment here, or chat with us in the forums.

The post Why UX Professionals Must be Good Communicators appeared first on UX Mastery.

It’s no surprise then that Smashing Magazine chose one of the city’s most beautiful and noted locales, the Palace of Fine Arts, to hold one of its conferences this year. 

Smashing Conference San Francisco 2017 was full of amazing speakers and concepts that could benefit all UX designers. Here are five of the key trends from the conference.

Accessibility is key

It’s easy to think about web accessibility in terms of the blind, deaf, or quadriplegic, and to write them off as representing a small minority of web users. After all, the industry as a whole has done so for years, arguing that designing to their needs was not a reasonable use of valuable development time.

But what about those who are recovering from eye surgery? Or the construction workers who can’t hear audio over the noise of the job site? What about the new mother using an app with one hand and holding a baby in the other?

The reality is that virtually all web users have experienced some sort of accessibility issue, regardless of whether or not their impairment was temporary or permanent.

The conference covered a wide range of topics, and accessibility was a topic of discussion for all. It’s clear that many of the industry’s top professionals have a renewed focus on developing sites, apps, and experiences that meet the needs and capabilities of all individuals, regardless of their limitations.  

For many UX professionals, learning to design with an eye for accessibility will be a new skill that can no longer be ignored.

Design systems and pattern libraries are getting easier and more common

Even in the world of user experience, not everyone has had the chance to work on a true design system or pattern library. The reason? They require a significant amount of effort, maintenance and documentation to setup. As many UX designers have experienced, it’s often hard to quantify the value of a design project based on the project’s expected return on investment. The nature of setting up a design system only makes the task of quantifying its value more difficult.   

But where there is differentiation based on using design systems, there’s often a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. Larger companies such as Google and AirBnB (to name a few of the front-runners) now use them as a matter of course, and see them as a strategic advantage over competitors.  

The rest of the web is catching on. Tools like Fractal and Astrum have sprouted up to allow even the smallest projects to adopt and efficiently use a pattern library or design system. UX professionals will be tasked with deciding both if a design system would be useful for a particular project, and then implementing that system if the benefits are there.

CSS Grid will make executing layouts easier

I’m convinced that some of the more experienced web designers still wake up some nights in a cold sweat, desperately gasping for breath as the old demons of their first table-based or float-based layouts mock them from dreamland.

Fortunately, Flexbox changed the game when it came to designing a more grid-based layout, and now CSS Grid looks to change things once again. CSS Grid allows designers to create layouts in rows in columns without having a content structure, which means that designs that once brought tears to developers’ eyes won’t be nearly as difficult to implement.  

CSS Grid has gained support from all modern browsers except for Microsoft Edge, though Edge has announced that they will be supporting it soon. With widespread support, look for CSS Grid-based designs to quickly become the norm.

Part of being a great UX designer is understanding the relative difficulty of implementing our designs. CSS Grid means a greater ease in implementation for developers, greater freedom for designers, and less time the two groups spend negotiating layouts.

That’s a win for everyone.

Optimistic Design is on the rise

In everyday life, we expect most of the tools we use to interact with our world will be successful the vast majority of the time. When we flip a light switch, we expect it will turn on. When we turn the knob to the sink, we expect water will start running. We only need to know about the very rare failures when they occur; we don’t need to expect the possibility of failure every time.

So why should the web be any different?

Optimistic Design is the concept that we can plan for our site to be successful in its “everyday” tasks. Errors are handled on the server rather than on the page, allowing us to move the user through the UI faster. Errors only return if they present themselves. The perceived upgrade in speed and responsiveness is a huge win for both users looking for speedy services and businesses looking to increase conversions.

Learning to implement Optimistic Design and defining best practices is a discipline that more designers will begin to tinker with over the course of the coming year.

There’s no excuse to stop learning

The one thing that Smashing 2017 San Francisco was absolutely full of was amazing speakers who had dedicated their lives to mastering a craft. Speakers focused on data visualisations, interactive emails, typography design, and so much more, all with the aim of making the web a better place for everyone.

All of these brilliant designers and developers clearly have one thing in common: they never stop learning.

The web is full of opportunities to make a name for ourselves in our own niche. The very nature of the internet is progressive and fluid. We’re all learning as we go, and nobody ever knows everything.  

Keep learning, keep improving, and keep making the web a better place.

For more insights from Smashing Conference, head to the forums to see Doug’s live coverage.

The post 5 UX Design Trends from Smashing Conference San Francisco appeared first on UX Mastery.