Who’s responsible for the experience?
by Brandon SchauerLast summer Adaptive Path conducted a brief survey regarding the user experience practices within organizations. [Clarification: these were voluntary surveys of individuals about their organizations' practice around user experience.] From the data we collected, we found a few interesting tidbits. First of all, the term “user experience” or “customer experience” or similar derivatives have almost a 90% usage rate across various types of companies:
No surprise there, but this next data set piqued my curiosity because of the inverse relationships that emerged. Among our respondents, the for-profit public organizations were much more likely to have a group responsible for the user experience, but yet less likely to have an executive accountable for the experience. Now these for-profit public organizations are very large (70% of the respondents have over a thousand employees), and so the delegation and localization of UX responsibilities to a specific group of people may be due to the diverse range of products, services, and activities that the organization must coordinate.
While the for-profit privately-held organizations broke about even on both of these data points, the non-profits look about the opposite of the for-profit public organizations. I could read into these patterns and say they suggest: when an organization has an executive responsible for experience, the experience becomes the responsibility of the whole organization.
However, I think another hypothesis is more likely. The non-profits and privately-held firms tend to be much smaller in size. They’re more likely to have a single product/service, or a small handful of products/services. Therefore, the creation of a successful experience is much more crucially felt within these organizations. Someone at the top has their eye on the experience, and the role can’t be delegated to separate functional group in the organization.
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February 20th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Really interesting. Especially the non-profit data. Just out of curiosity, what did the sample look like? Was this a group representing a broad cross-section of businesses or was the survey limited to Adaptive Path’s brilliant, but design-savvy blog readership?
February 20th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Good question Joe. I like your style of questioning the sources of the data. It’s always good to kick the tires.
What I realize now is not so clear in this post that I need to correct (and will do so now) is that the respondents are individuals within organizations, not the organizations themselves. They voluntarily opted in for the survey; this was not a randomized selection of businesses representing the business landscape.
Still, we were quite concerned about getting all the data from a predisposed group, so we went far beyond the normal Adaptive Path channels for recruiting the individual research participants. We posted the survey announcement to multiple blogs, email distributions lists, and other sites.
While we didn’t track which of these sources respondents came from, we track that less than a quarter of them had been any kind of prior consumer of Adaptive Path reports, services, events, etc. However, given where we posted the survey announcement most of the respondents were likely to be (at the very least) individually accepting of the value of UX, design, usability, etc.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Thanks for the clarification. These questions are central to design/ux professionals within non-profits and it’s nice to look under the hood of your research
…now you’ve got me using automotive metaphors.
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:32 pm
[...] adaptive path » blog » blog archive » Who’s responsible for the experience? Been thinking about the prospect of a new boss and this Adaptive Path research got me thinking. I love the idea of a UX executive helping everyone in the organization become responsible for student/user experience. Good stuff! (tags: ux theoffice) [...]
September 13th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
[...] Who’s Responsible for the Experience – Adaptive Path – interesting. [...]