Adaptive Path Blog

I’m interested in hard problems. When it comes to design, the hardest problems aren’t around methods, or execution, or the shape or form a particular solution should take. Any competent designer can come up with a good solution. The challenge is how to get that solution out into the world. And that is primarily an organizational problem.

When I was asked to present at the UI13 Conference, I decided to focus on this hard problem, and gave a talk titled “16 (Mostly) Difficult Steps to Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Organization”. The 16 steps are culled from a variety of sources — our 2004 report on business value, our book Subject to Change, my experience working with clients, and what I’ve heard and learned from others who have been successful.

After the talk, the topic people most wanted to discuss with me was the very last step I shared, “Do not become a department.” Even though it’s actually a non-step, I felt the need to call it out explicitly, because it seems that, for many, their criterion of success is if they’ve established enough organizational critical mass to warrant their own department, with a VP or director, and a staff to make it go. (I believe the only important criterion is whether the organizational is delivering better experiences, and deriving value from that.)

This seems short-sighted and potentially foolish. I believe that user experience is not best thought of as an activity or function, but as a mindset. To varying degrees, every customer-facing person in an organization has an impact on, and, thus, responsibility for the user experience. However, if UX becomes the province of a department, others can ignore this responsibility, assuming that somebody else is caring for it. So then, the folks in the UX Department have to be explicitly vocal about what’s right for the customer, because no one else is focusing on it. But then the UX Department become something of the “customer police,” and other departments, in their desire to get things down, may try to simply route around the UX Department. (I tend to think that most organizations have departments so they can contain functions that the rest of the organization wants to route around.)

Jared Spool has spoken in the past about his research that shows that the size of a companies usability or UX department has a slight inverse correlation to the quality of their experiences — the larger the groups, the worse the experiences the company delivers. This makes sense to me, because it’s typical for a thoughtless company to fix a problem by throwing resources at it — and if the problem persists, to throw even more. When in fact, most problems are fixed by reframing them and approaching them differently, with the resources you currently have.

Now, I recognize there are nuances here. Bruce Temkin, who is speaking at MX 2009, blogged about this very topic back in September, Corporate Customer Experience Groups; To Do Or Not To Do?. He argues for an appreciation of organizational context and maturity when figuring out whether or not a department is helpful.

And I guess that, fundamentally, is what I’m asking for. Too many organizations have outdated modes of structure, wherein they bolt on new functions as they arise, and their org charts resemble the Winchester Mystery House. Reconsider such default behaviors, and instead think about how your organization can best make satisfied customers who contribute to your business’ value. When you begin with first principles, I bet “establish a department,” does not leap out as The Solution.

What are helpful steps, then? Well, those are the other 15 things I covered in that talk. And which I’ll be sharing on this blog as I have time to.

I’d love to hear about non-standard organizational practices toward delivering great user experience. Please share them in the comments!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Experience Strategy, 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.