A significantly large number of companies and organizations share three specific traits when it comes to #UX improvement and #ProductDesign in general:
1 - They don’t really know what their users or customers actually want.
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2 - They’re under the mistaken assumption that surveys or their NPS scores tell them what the value of their product/service is to those users.
3 - They’re not willing to allow you to talk to those users to find out what they actually need or hope to accomplish.
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I get enough emails and DMs every day to tell me that this is reality for most of you. And the question folks ask me is always the same:
What the hell do I DO?
My answer tends to ruffle some feathers, but here it is.
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If your client or the company you work for is one of many #UX immature organizations who has no research — and won’t pay for any either — you have to take a different approach.
Which often means looking internally instead of externally.
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Since you can’t talk to users, you interview specific groups of people inside the business. You focus on those people and roles that have direct contact with users and customers.
No, they're not users. But all of these people will have useful stories to tell you.
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I can say from experience that you will absolutely hear the same common refrains over and over in terms of what people wish for or are struggling with.
Those common refrains are your clues — they tell you where to look.
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They tell you what the root causes of customer or user problems may be.
And while we all know that what people say they want or do is not always what they actually say or do, for purposes of an audit, this information is enough to point you in the right direction.
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These clues can guide you in identifying the product’s UX and #UI flaws. And the representative samples, in these cases, are usually very high.
Take the volume of people a call center phone or chat operator speaks to in a single day, for example.
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That can often be more than enough to account for those folks who only calling in or chatting because they have a problem (and they like to complain ;-)
If you found that helpful, I have an invitation for you.
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I invite you to check out "The Simple Way to Conduct a UX Audit," part of my UX 365 Academy. Across two hours, I’ll show you exactly how I’ve done UX Audit work for the last two decades of my career. And there are two bonuses included as well.
You get a full-length deliverable video that shows you exactly what + how I present my findings to clients.
And the course also includes a downloadable UX Audit Workbook covering 170-plus individual elements + attributes you need to pay attention to during your audit.
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Everything I’ll cover with you is the heart and soul of good interaction and positive UX — an approach I’ve used successfully for 20+ years, to improve the products of some of the largest companies in the world.
Them: "We never have enough time to do proper user interviews."
Me: "How much time do you have?"
Them: "a week."
Me: "Let me tell you a story..."
And the story, #UX and #design friends, goes like this:
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I was consulting with an organization, whose team needed to do some research; interviews specifically. They said "well, we have 24 hours based on our schedule…but we have to get to this other work to make deadline and right now it's all hands on deck."
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So the team can't spare the manpower or the people and there were lots of reasons why that date couldn't move. In the end, we got eight hours.
Eight hours to talk to users and get some sense of what's going on here.
I will be 54 this year. I have helped product design and development teams and individuals in startups, mid sized orgs and global Fortune 100 orgs in 23 U.S. states and six countries in almost every industry you can think of for thirty (30) years.
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And across that span and across all those companies and industries, I have seen the same patterns and the same situations over and over and over again when it comes to the power, autonomy and authority far too many people assume #UX and #UI Designers have.
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The common thread over every experience across that time is that the majority of organizations still operate in command-and-control fashion when it comes to Design + UX.
The marginalization, devaluing + disempowering of UX and Design folks isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Ever wonder why executives and bosses are often so resistant to doing #UX work?
Why they seem to become personally offended at the very mention of user research or #IA or prototyping, in a way as if you were suggesting a diabolical plot to overthrow the government?
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From "we don’t have time for that," to "we know what our customers want," to "just make the #UI better looking," the wall of rejection is thrown up fast and furious.
Where does this come from, and more importantly, how do you deal with it?
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Let’s start here: most people in management or executive positions can’t truly see what’s broken, because they’re usually only looking at the side that’s working.
To me, EVERY meeting is a working meeting. So the very first time I speak to a room of stakeholders during a consulting gig, I am absolutely not doing the dog-and-pony show of presenting with slides.
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I am here to do one thing and one thing only: make an IMPACT.
Leave a firm, lasting impression that they will not ever meet another consultant cares as much about helping them succeed as I do.
Which means I’m here to talk about *them.*
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What they need. What they’re struggling with. What they think is wrong and what needs to be made right.
This also means that even if I don't have the gig yet, instead of sitting politely + taking turns, we’re going to dive in together + interact. Trade ideas.
#UX and #design friends, we need to talk about estimating. I'd like to share some advice that's come up 3 times this week, in hopes it's useful. And it's echoed, by the way, in the BUSINESS OF UX course @EliNatoli and I are teaching at my UX 365 Academy (link at the end).
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Avoiding wars with clients is a matter of how you structure your engagements, along with how you spell out what you're doing in your proposals/contracts. That starts with estimating.
The biggest 2 rules I follow are these:
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1. I do not EVER estimate a project in full from start-to-finish.
2. Once we're past initial Discovery (see below), I estimate in small chunks, e.g. "here's what will take us to the next iteration/review."
PSA: Three weeks ago I tested positive for #COVID19. Four days later, while on a video call with my doctor I found myself gasping for breath, my pulse oxygen levels diving, with her yelling at me to CALL 911 NOW.
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An ambulance took me to the ER where they scrambled to hook me up to Oxygen and IV tubes and heart monitors. I’m going to tell you straight: I thought I was going to suffocate on that gurney. This is the first time in my life I ever literally thought I was going to die.
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I had developed severe inflammation and pneumonia in my lungs in a matter of DAYS. So for 36 hours they pumped me non-stop full of various antibiotics and steroids. When one bag emptied, they hooked up another.