Adaptive Path Blog

When we began Adaptive Path in 2001, user experience was not a widely appreciated concept. It was confused for “user interface” or “usability,” and companies typically had one or two people dedicated to it.

In the time since then, user experience has emerged as a recognized discipline within many enterprises, valued for its customer empathy as well as the rational approach it brings to design problems.

Here’s the problem with the recognition of user experience as a valuable contributor to the enterprise — such success encourages growth, with the idea that the more valuable something is, the more people should work on it. I know of companies that have literally dozens of user experience practitioners, and you know what? Those teams are typically too big.

How do you know when your user experience team is too big? When team members are working on the bulls*** projects in your organization. You’ve got all this staff, and you need to keep them busy, so it’s hard to say know when other parts of your organization ask for your team’s help, even when you know those projects aren’t truly worthwhile.

But it’s essential for user experience groups to be able to say, “No.” If we want to be considered for a seat at the strategy and planning table, if we want to be taken seriously as instrumental contributors to the companies we work for, we need to make sure that we only work on that which satisfies a true strategic direction of our organization. If we’re willing to work on any old thing, then we’re also easy targets for “headcount reduction” when times get tough.

You don’t need that many people to have a large impact. Excuse me for referencing Apple, but as this article explains, “Apple has always kept its design team small–somewhere between 12 and 20 people, Brunner estimates.” Those folks aren’t working on bulls*** projects.

And I can think immediately of two tangible benefits by keeping your user experience team smaller. The first I already addressed — you deliver only on projects fundamental to the business. The second is focus. One spur for writing this article was seeing UX managers with large teams whose efforts are scattered across numerous bulls*** projects. All of those projects suffer because the leadership can’t bring any focus.

As an advocate for user experience efforts, I feel its essential that we say “No” to bulls*** projects and keep ourselves focused on work that truly matters. To do this, I suspect that some organizations would need to shed quite a few employees. That’s okay — there are plenty of understaffed user experience groups out there who could use them.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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