UXSG#6 Workshop

BUILDING A STRATEGIC
UX TEAM
Insights from effective UX teams
Sarah Bloomer
Principal
UX Singapore
27 June 2013
1SarahBloomer & Co | UX Singapore 2013

Our goals for today
Part 1- Team
• Your team
• Where to locate your team
Part 2 - Culture
• The impact of company culture
• Use the maturity model to plan
Part 3 – UX Strategy
• Align UX strategy with business goals

Who is Sarah?
SarahBloomer & Co | UX Singapore 2013 3
• Usability Engineering
• User Centered Design
• User Experience Designer
• UX Director
• Coach & Mentor
• Mom

Who are you?
Stand up if:
• You are a UX team manager
• You are a UX team of one
• Your team is brand new (less than a year old)
• Your team is more than a year old
• Your team is global and spread across different
countries

First let’s define organizations…
Software
Enterprise
Creative Agency
The software is the business
Software to support the business
Website or webapps to deliver services
Work with software companies and
enterprises to help them design user
experiences

What you’re creating
• Commercial software
• GUI
• Web app
• Internal software
• GUI
• Web apps
• Enterprise apps
• Websites
• eCommerce
• Marketing
• Informational
Single platform
Multi-platform

UX strategy drivers
7
What are you trying to achieve through your UX strategy?
Influence how
we do things
Change
the culture
Improve a
product or service
Improve development
efficiency
Get people to think
differently
Better product design
What are yours?
SarahBloomer & Co | UX Singapore 2013

What is a UX Strategy?
8
UX Team Acceptance
Product Vision
Integrated CX strategy
Business Goals Brand Strategy Market Share

What makes a UX team “Strategic”?
9
IMPACT
EFFORT

Implementing a strategy is change
10
Skepticism
Curiosity
Acceptance
Partnership
The better accepted your team is
the higher the UX capability
Ehrlich & Rohn, 1994
www.useit.com/alertbox/process_maturity.html

The Big Stumbling Blocks
• Wrong focus—no alignment to business goals
• Team lacks direction or cohesion
• Lack of communication
• No champion or support
• Being unaware of your corporate culture
11
UX teams and UX strategies fail when….

YOUR WORLD
How corporate culture impacts UX

Culture will impact your approach
Design centric
• Creative approach to design
• Tend to design for designers—visually oriented
Engineering centric
• Technology driven
• Have always owned the user interface
Sales & Marketing centric
• Believe they know their customers
• Feature driven, over usability or experience

How to learn about culture
Interview
• stakeholders
• the teams you’ll work with
• other teams about the teams you’ll work with
Identify the key decision makers
• Product managers? Lead engineers?
• Who owns the design?
• Where are potential allies?
Look for initiatives on which you can have an impact for
quick wins

Analyzing the culture
15
Engineering/ Development:
Process:
Design decisions:
Performance:
User Experience:
Formal or informal?
Requirements driven? Technology driven?
Deadline/budget driven?
Creates nice pictures? Critical to success?
Communication:
User research and feedback
UX Vision
Yes or no? Coordinated or fragmented?
Shared and understood or not?
Product Definition:
Ownership:
Design decisions:
Product managers? Marketing?
Engineering? User Experience Team?
Feature driven? Competitor driven?

Increase acceptance by meeting half way
• Engineers like:
• Rules, standards and patterns
• Deadlines
• Designers like:
• Wireframes with latitude to do their own thing
• Opportunities to be innovative
• Sales & Marketing like:
• Feature lists
• Research

Know your organizational culture
"the specific collection of values and norms that are shared
by people and groups in an organization and that control
the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders
outside the organization." Charles W. L. Hill, and Gareth R. Jones,
Strategic Management. Houghton Mifflin 2001.
• Myths
• Values
• Barriers
• Opportunities

Identify barriers and opportunities
A barrier may prevent or undermine the adoption of UX
• UX is new to the organization
• No skilled people
• Design research is under valued
An opportunity may help with acceptance of user
experience activities
• New senior manager with previous UX experience
• Initiative to reduce the calls to technical support
• Developers don’t have time to design and code

Identify myths and values
A myth is a belief held by your stakeholders
• UI design is subjective and cannot be measured or engineered
• If we design for ourselves, it’ll be fine
A value is a belief that defines the culture through actions
• Developers are rewarded for rescuing failing projects
• Pleasing senior management is good regardless of solution
• We’re a consensus driven organization—everyone gets a say in the
design

Discussion
Small groups:
• Pick one barrier and one opportunity at your company
from the list presented
• Tally the similar barriers and opportunities
• Discuss them with each other: why?
Together:
• What are the shared experiences?

Barriers
• UX is new to the organisation
• Not enough UX resources
• Difficult to hire skilled UX people
• Not enough time to do research or evaluation
• Product management “owns” the user interface design
• Big egos / lots of politics
• Limited access to users
• Lack of trust between Development and Product
Management
• Short sprints cause Development to change design to
meet deadlines
• Design research is under valued
• [your own]

Opportunities
• Well accepted user experience team
• Senior management willing to ‘champion’ usability
• Other staff are interested in user experience
(eg QA, tech writers)
• Starting a new product
• A company reorganization
• New funding for more resources
• A huge product failure
• Initiative to reduce the calls to technical support
• Developers don’t have time to design and code
• [ your own ]

BUSINESS GOALS AND UX
Base your strategy on business goals

What are business goals?
A goal should be
• Action oriented
• Completed within a target time frame
• Specific and well defined
• Achievable yet challenging.
24
Business goals reflect the strategy of an organisation,
how to accomplish the mission.

Corporate vision and goals

Mock company: Crabb e-Software
The company, Crabb e-Software, has one product: TrainingNOW.
Crabb e-Software were market leaders when they first introduced a
SaaS product into training management
TrainingNOW is an online web application. It is designed for training
management, admin and sales for commercial training.
Users can:
• Set up courses: assign instructors, set up location and scheduling
• Track enrolment: develop student/participant lists, log contact
• Generate leads: draw names from the student/customer database
• Track student participation: courses attended, grades (if relevant), goals

Crabb e-Software’s business goals
• Regain position as market leader in online training
management software
• Increase customer base by 15%
• Bring the product up to date
Experience Vision for TrainingNOW
TrainingNOW will be market leader by providing a seamless training
management experience. Our customers will feel confident that they have
a complete and current picture of their training plan and strategy.
The product will allow users to be highly productive by minimizing rework,
presenting easy to read overviews, and creating intuitive workflows. Users
will share data and keep each other current, from administrators to
executives. It will have a professional, up to date tone and style.

TrainingNOW’s experience vision
28
Brand Promise:
Seamless support of
all aspects of training
management
Customer Research:
Users are:
Admin
Managers
Marketers
Telesales
Office workers
Multi-tasking
Not web savvy
Frequent and
infrequent users
Experience Goals:
Customer is confident that
TN will streamline their
training management
TN is seen as up to date,
fast and reliable
Each user group feels
productive and effective
Business Goal: Increase customer base by 15%

Derive UX goals from business goals
29
Experience Goal Issues Business
Objectives
UX Goals Success
Metrics
Customer is confident
that TN will streamline
their training
management
• Users report that they
often enter the same
prospect multiple
times, so they are
called repeatedly.
• Sales isn’t aware
when a course is
close to full
• Courses
underperform when
registrants drop out
late
• Administrative staff
are often interrupted
and lose their work
• Enable sales to sell
the product based on
productivity gains
• Increase the number
of customer reference
sites
• Reduce customer
support calls
• Improve admin staff
efficiency
• Enable
information to be
viewed in different
ways in multiple
locations in the
organization
• Create reports for
management
which reflect
improvements
• Create a kick-ass
customer
database
• Customer contact
logs are shared by
all users
• 10% reduced
customer
support calls
• Increase time to
proficiency from
2 months to 2
weeks
• 20% increase in
customer
satisfaction
TrainingNOW

Align your UX team with goals
30
TrainingNOW: business goals
• Regain position as market leader in online training
management software
• Increase customer base by 15%
• Bring the product up to date
Your task:
• Pick 1 UX activity to address each goal
• Think about who to partner with at Crabb e-Software
Now add constraints:
• Release a major update in 4 months
• You have 1 UX practitioner, 1 tech writer and 3
product managers

Establish specific metrics
31
Measure Benchmark Timing Ownership
Productivity
improvement
Reduce task time
by 20%.
Track and time
current process
(usability and
end-users)
1.Usability test
during dev
2.6 months
after launch
Product
Owners
UX Team
Customer
satisfaction
Reduce customer
complaints by
10%
Capture current
survey results
Monthly for 6
months
Customer
Service
Sales Increase sales by
10%
Capture current
statistics for
past year
Every month
for a year
Sales
Some companies like metrics, some don’t. For those who do, choose
your metrics carefully.
Don’t be afraid to go for non-measurable goals:
our customers report that it’s fun.

YOUR UX TEAM
Fit your team into your culture

The UX Team ingredients
Goals
Company
33
Location
Approach
People

UX is unique in every organization
Business goals / drivers
Product(s)
& Team
Process
What How
Who When
and
and
Constraints
Company culture
Build a team that meets the needs within
given constraints

UX has evolved
35
Interaction design:
Navigation
Layout
Controls
Style and tone:
Visual treatment
Language
Interaction design
Information architecture
Development
Visual design
Writing/Editorial
Deep customer knowledge:
Ongoing research
and feedback
Evaluation
User research
Experience analysis
Usability testing
Analytics
Technology:
Opportunities/constraints
Trends
Technology
Social networking, mobile etc.

36
Modeling the user experience practice: a unified story
operational
model
capability
model
user research
interaction design
information architecture
usability engineering
visual design
content writing
front-end development
process
model
UX meta
model
user-
centered
taxonomies
/ ontology
knowledge
in-flows &
out-flows
capability interaction
touch points
attitude &
behavior
model
waterfall
agile
leadership
logistics
staffing
sponsorship
funding
personas
scenarios
rich pictures
storyboards
Jennifer Fabrizi, 2013

Make sure the team fits into the culture
Create roles your culture will accept right away
• Engineering: evaluation and needs analysis
• Design: information architecture and evaluation
• Sales & Marketing: research (by stealth) and evaluation
Recognize myths and values, change from within
Build allies and demonstrate complementary skills.
• Engineering: collaborate in UI design
• Design: clear hand-off from wireframes to visual design
• Sales & Marketing: share customer research; prioritize feature lists.
Invite to usability testing sessions

UX Practise Models
Center of
Excellence
Project
Project
Project
Project
Centralised All projects go through the same process

A strategy looks to the future
39
An experience strategy:
1. Anticipates and accounts for future form factors, technology
platforms, and user expectations
2. Promotes a perspective on the character of uniquely GE product
experiences
3. Uses values and principles as guides to design and development.
Case study:
GE wanted to drive revenue and growth through user
experience practices
• UX Framework
• UX Process
• UX Principles (tied to brand promise)
GE UX Center of Excellence
http://archive.mxconference.com/2012/videos/building-ux-and-design-
culture-at-ge/

UX Practise models
Decentralised
Project
Project Project
Project
Work individually
Sometimes research/evaluation is centralised
UX manager

UX Practise models
Project
Guild model
Project Project
UX manager
Project Project
QA
Engineer
Engineer
Product Owner
QA
Engineer
Engineer
Product Owner
QA
Engineer
Engineer
Product Owner
UX manager
QA
Engineer
Engineer
Product Owner
QA
Engineer
Engineer
Product Owner
Work individually
Meet together weekly for one full day

Focus your UX design efforts
42
Priority projects:
UX team works directly on
product team
2nd tier projects:
UX team facilitates the product
team’s work
Provide UI standards and
resources for self-serve
3rd tier projects:
Educate and facilitate:
Share the outcomes of priority
projects
Project
Project
Project
Project
Project

Where should your team live?
43
Pros Cons
IT group Same ‘team’ as
analyst/programmers
Not seen to be allied with users
Business Same ‘team’ as end users IT sees you as not in touch with
their issues
In-house
Pros Cons
Development Same ‘team’ as
analyst/programmers
Not seen to be allied with users
Marketing Closer to the goals of the
company
Fosters better relationship with
marketing
Engineers see you as not in
touch with their issues
Product team Same ‘team’ as product
owners
Not seen to be as familiar with
technical issues or product
positioning
Software
company
Locate yourself with the group who owns design decisions

UX MATURITY
Evolving UX acceptance

Capability Maturity
45
http://johnnyholland.org/2010/04/planning-your-ux-strategy/

A UX Strategy implements the vision
46
Business goals / drivers
Product(s)
& Team
Process
What How
Who When
and
and
Constraints
addresses both what and how

Five tactics for teams big and small
47
Communicate
Share, knowledge share, integrate
Educate
Enable others
Adapt
Change, try it out, improve
Leverage
Find allies and opportunities
Facilitate
Help others, integrate

Show and include
48
Users
Business Analysts
Product Owners
Stakeholders
Product Team
Users
End users
Developers (participatory)
Stakeholders (observers)
Definition workshop
Field research
User story mapping (Agile)
Process mapping
Brainstorming
Sketchboarding
Collaborative paper
prototyping
Design studio
Group collaborative
walkthroughs
Participatory paper
prototyping
Usability testing
5-9 participants 2-9 participants 1-2 participants
Group of 5-10
Discovery & Analysis Envision & Design Evaluate & Refine

Collaborate to communicate

Create “foundation teams”
50
Build relationships within your organization through Communities of Practice.
Promote cross-functional collaboration.
Cross-functional teams drive ongoing research, design and evaluation.
Customer research
Customer facing experience
Product Strategy
Branding
Marketing
UX Team
Product Strategy
Personas
Field studies
Analytics
Sales
Stores
Customer service
Tech support
Training
Personas
Stories
Customer feedback
Voice of the Customer
Sales
Marketing
UX Team
Tech Support
Product Development
Design research
Usability test results
Tech support issues
Release plans

Create UX Design Goals
51
Kronos
Innovative
Our products are modern and unique in both visual appearance and
behavior. We lead the industry in leveraging the latest advances in
technology.
Easy to learn
Like your favorite consumer products, minimal training is needed to get
started.
Fast & Responsive
Speed matters. We balance ease-of-use with powerful features that
optimize task completion with minimal time and clicks.
Engaging & Playful
Solve complex problems with enjoyable interactions that are an extension
of customers’ everyday experiences.
Smart & Powerful
Make better decisions. Our products harness the power of technology and
industry experience to deliver insights when and how a user needs them.

7 Evaluation Guidelines
52
User Objectives and Actions
Layout & Visual Treatment
Orientation
Language & Terminology
Feedback
Forgiveness
Navigation
At Kronos,we aligned UX goals with
design principles and taught product
management how to critique against
the goals.

Focus your message to the audience
53
Increase sales
Lowers support and training costs
Reduces IT development costs
Increases product quality
Increases user acceptance
Increases productivity; fewer errors
by end users
Decreases staff turnover
Fewer late design changes
Potential re-use
Shortens overall development cycle
Meet goals of a sprint
Increases product quality
Decreases maintenance cost and
effort
Greater satisfaction; less fatigue
Reduces training time and effort
Less time spent seeking support and
help
Less learning required
Fewer errors; faster error recovery
Fosters focus on the tasks instead of
the technology
Senior managers look at
the bottom line of any
investment or
development.
How UX improves my
costs?
IT managers are
measured on ability to
meet budgets and
deadlines
How UX helps me make
my deadline and stay
within budget?
Users want better and
more appropriate tools
& experiences
How will this help me do
my task better?
Return on investment Performance goals Satisfaction and use
Senior management IT management Users
In-house development

Show the UX vision
54
• User narratives, tell stories
• Conceptual prototypes
• Comics and Storyboards
• Kevin Cheng at kevnull.com
• Sun Web Experience Design
• Video
• Knowledge Navigator (1987)
• Mozilla Labs & Adaptive Path Aurora
• Microsoft Silverlight Productivity Future Vision
Knowledge Navigator: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0
Aurora: www.vimeo.com/1347289
Micros www.officelabs.com/Pages/Default.aspx

Talk it up all the time
55
Reduce your vision to 5 attributes
that fit on one hand
Modular for
quick updates
Supports multiple
roles
Easy to
learn UI
Enables
collaboration
Seamlessly
integrated with
other systems
Describe the attributes
during meetings and
elevator conversations

56
Group discussion:
What is the first thing you’ll do when you get
back to work?

Wrap up
People
Methods
Location
Vision
Your UX Team Your world
Culture
UX Maturity
Interaction
Communicate
Educate
Facilitate
Leverage
Adapt

Sample values
• We need to ‘innovate’ and make cool technology
• Pleasing senior management is good regardless of
solution
• The product managers are king
• Developers are rewarded for ‘rescuing’ failing projects
• Staff who don’t ‘rock the boat’ are safe in their jobs
• Clever code solutions are applauded
• Risk is dangerous

Sample myths
• UI standards can’t be implemented for all the diverse
needs of the user groups
• If I design for myself, it will work fine
• UX conflicts with Agile
• If developers are familiar with the interface guidelines and
principles, they’ll design good user interfaces
• UX specialists are not technical enough to grasp the
requirements of systems development
• Requirements are anti-agile
• Users don’t know what they want

SarahBloomer & Co 2013 P a g e | 1
References – Strategic UX Teams
Books
Cennydd Bowles and James Box. Undercover UX Design. New Riders. 2010.
Arnie Lund. User Experience Management Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams. Morgan
Kaufman 2011
Daniel Pink. Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books. 2011.
John P Kotter. Leading Change.
Paul Sherman. The User Experience Team Kit. ShermanUX.com/Files/UXKit/UX_Kit_Aug09.pdf
Presentations
Alcorn, Katrina. How to Manage a UX Team (without losing your mind!). March 2007/
iasummit.org/proceedings/2007/files/Katrina_alcorn-uxmanagers.pdf
Kreitzberg, Charlie, Cognetics “How Can Usability Departments Become More Influential and
Lead Organizational Change?” UPA 2005
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/conference/2005/im_kreitzberg.html
Greg Petroff. Building UX and Design Culture at GE. Adaptive Path MX 2012.
http://archive.mxconference.com/2012/videos/building-ux-and-design-culture-at-ge/
Jennifer Fabrizi and Sarah Bloomer. Changing the UX Mindset - Transforming your UX team through
Collaboration. February 2013. UXPA Boston.
Kim Goodwin. UX Leadership. Interview with Gerry Gaffney, October 2011.
http://infodesign.com.au/uxpod/uxleadership/
Kim Goodwin. Leading UX. http://www.slideshare.net/KimGoodwin/kim-goodwin-on-ux-leadership-
2011-04
Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe. Building and Managing a successful UX Team. Tutorial. UPA 2011
Sarah Bloomer. Upgrading your UX Team. Virtual Seminar. April 2009.
http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/upgrading/
Sarah Bloomer. Building Strategic & Effective UX Teams. Tutorial. UXPA Washington, DC. 2013
Joakim Sundén and Anders Ivarsson. Agile at Spotify. 2013.
http://www.slideshare.net/JoakimSunden/agile-at-spotify
Tim McCoy and Janice Fraser. Lean UX, Product Stewardship and Integrated Teams. 2011.
http://www.slideshare.net/seriouslynow/lean-ux-product-stewardship-integrated-teams
Articles
Pabini Gabriel-Petit. Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy? In UX Matters. 2009
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/02/specialists-versus-generalists-a-false-
dichotomy.php
Michael Hawley. 5 Ways to be Persuasive in Your UX Work. In UX Matters. 2012.
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/11/5-ways-to-be-persuasive-in-your-ux-work.php
Michael Hawley. Coaching Experience Designers. In UX Matters. March 20, 2012
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/03/coaching-experience-designers.php

SarahBloomer & Co 2013 P a g e | 2
Renato Feijó Planning your UX Strategy. In Johnny Holland. April 2011.
http://johnnyholland.org/2010/04/planning-your-ux-strategy/ This article defines UX strategy as the
whole customer experience.
Leonard L. Berry, Lewis P. Carbone and Stephan H. Haeckel. Managing the Total Customer
Experience. In MIT Sloane School of Management Magazine, 2002.
Daniel Szuc, Paul Sherman and John S Rhodes. Selling UX. In UX Matters. 2008.
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2008/10/selling-ux.php
Capability Maturity
CMMI Institute, Carnegie Mellon. www.cmmiinstitue.com. Downloadable resources including
CMMI models
Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/?location=secondary-
nav&source=652373
Nielsen, Jakob. Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4 Alertbox.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html 2006
Nielsen, Jakob. Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8 Alertbox.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/process_maturity.html 2006
Rich Buttiglieri’s presentation to UXPA Boston on UX Maturity Models
http://www.slideshare.net/UPABoston/ux-maturity-modelbuttiglieri. Rich includes other exemplars of
UXMMs.
Steve Psomas. The Five Competencies of UX Design. 2007.
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2007/11/the-five-competencies-of-user-experience-design.php
Other research
Sarah Bloomer & Susan Wolfe. Effective UX Teams. 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013. This survey has been
sent to UX team managers worldwide to track how internal UX teams are structured, issues faced
and solution.
Yury Vetrov. How to Calculate the ROI of UX Using Metrics. UX Matters. 9 July 2012.
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/07/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-ux-using-metrics.php
IDSA site. GE User Experience Strategy and Capacity Building http://idsa.org/ge-user-experience-
strategy-and-capacity-building
Blogs
Louis Rosenfeld. Blog: Oct 14, 2003: What Would MachIAvelli Do?
http://www.louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000211.html 2003
Cameron Moll. Nine Patterns among Virtuoso UX Teams. May 2013.
http://cameronmoll.tumblr.com/post/49513340428/nine-patterns-among-virtuoso-ux-teams
Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin. http://managinguxteams.com/ 2011 Discontinued blog
about managing UX teams in start ups.
Brandon Schauer. 7 (Video) Lessons for Managers of UX. 2012. http://adaptivepath.com/ideas/7-
video-lessons-for-managers-of-ux
Brandon Schauer. Just What is a UX Manager? 2012. http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/just-what-is-
a-ux-manager

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