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When UX meets the real world with Sarah Prag

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Regardless if you are working in house or for an agency, most of you can likely identify with having been part of a project team and being the only expert on hand for your area of expertise. You might be the best at what you do, but sharing your viewpoint and then convincing everyone else to go with what you’re proposing can be a challenge, and for some, quite daunting. 

Within UX, as a UX champion, you often work as part of a team, including developers, product people and sponsors, to name just a few. We got the chance to chat about this topic with Sarah Prag, service design & digital transformation consultant and coach who has spent 16 years doing things with digital.

ADLIB: In your experience, what are the 3 most common challenges that a “lone UX champion” faces?

Sarah Prag:

Other people’s opinions – A big challenge is that everyone you work with uses online products and services in their own lives, so they’ll all have an opinion about how yours should look and behave! We’ve probably all experienced a boss who is convinced that all the buttons should be a certain colour, or a colleague who is very keen to explain how their bank does a certain kind of feature and that you should do the same. I don’t think other digital specialists like software developers or information architects face this to the same extent. The work they do is more mysterious to the rest of the team. However, everyone has an opinion about user experience!

Getting enough time & money – Another challenge is that the people making the decisions about the allocation of money and time might not understand the value of doing user research, or what it takes to develop and test a really great user experience. You may come up against scepticism and have to fight hard to get the resources you need.

No support for iteration – I’m a big believer in continuous improvement – the ongoing testing and iteration of experiences. I don’t think a product or service is ever “done”, you have to keep learning about how people are using it, and making improvements. A common challenge is that others in the team, or the bosses, might not share this belief. Or, perhaps worse, they say it’s something they support but once the minimum viable product or first iteration is live they think it’s good enough and don’t want to invest in further work.

ADLIB: Can you give one piece of advice for dealing with each of the above?

SP: On combating personal opinions – make sure that you explain your approach and practices to the rest of the team, so that they appreciate that there is a lot of skill and science involved and it’s not just about what you think looks good! Taking them along to any user research or testing sessions can also be really powerful. At the end of the day it should be the views of the users which matter most and shape the experience, rather than anybody else’s!

On getting buy in for research & testing – think about what you can do quickly and on a low or no budget, and get the results of that in front of the decision makers. In my experience there is nothing more compelling than seeing real people talk about their needs or giving feedback on a product. This could simply mean doing some guerilla testing and recording it on your phone. If you then share that with colleagues and explain what you’re going to change as a result of it you’ve got a better chance of persuading them than if you filled in a hundred business case documents!

On continuous improvement – this is a tough one, but a good approach might be to identify things you can test and change under the radar, and then demonstrate an improvement. If you can’t make changes to the live product then perhaps do some A/B testing with mock-ups or even paper prototypes that show the product as it is, and some possible improvements. As with all of the above I think the key is to get evidence from users in front of the decision makers, as in my experience that’s hard to argue with.

Thank you Sarah!

 

This piece previously appeared on the ADLIB Blog.

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