How Do I Convince My Team We Need to Focus On the User Experience?
It can be really frustrating to be the only person on your team who cares about the user experience (UX). So, what do you do? You put your user experience researcher hat on and figure out how to best communicate with your client, boss, or other stakeholders. How can you leverage what they care about, what they are worried about, or what their bonus is dependent on? How can you make the case for investing in UX that aligns with their goals? As you think about that, consider the following:
1. Make sure stakeholders understand the difference between UX and UI.
In many cases, they don’t. So, when you try make the case to invest in UX, stakeholders are thinking you mean investing in choosing bedroom paint colors when you actually mean you’re figuring out why you’re building the house the in first place. It’s going to be an uphill battle if no one knows what you’re referring to. It’s your job, then, to educate stakeholders on the difference. The UX strategy informs the user interface—what user ultimately interacts with. While both are important, it’s nearly impossible to create a successful UI without a UX strategy with a foundation on user research. An attractive UI with a poor user experience is like building a celebrity-designed igloo in the desert—the finishes are gorgeous but the dwelling fails to fulfill the needs of anyone who wants to live there.
2. Make a case for minimizing risk.
Once your team understands the difference between UX and UI, make the case for minimizing risk. Most stakeholders don’t like wasting time or money, yet so many website and software projects are failed investments. For example, your team developed features that no one actually ended up using or the new workflow that was supposed to reduce the time it took to perform the task actually made it take longer, with more errors that had to be fixed after-the-fact. Most of the time, no one has actually taken the time to quantify these UX issues—issues that could have been prevented if someone had taken the time to conduct UX research in the first place. That’s where you come in.
Gather data to back up your assumption that no one—or very few people—use a product or feature. If possible, recruit actual users and share video clips of them having difficulty using the product. Once you’ve done that, estimate the cost it took to build the product or feature. Include contractor costs, as well as the staff hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours (including project management). Then add in an estimate of how much money is spent to maintain the product: updates, server costs, etc.
Maybe you know you’ve gotten increased customer service calls after a recent update. What’s the customer service representative’s hourly rate multiplied by the average (or estimated) handle time multiplied by the number of calls or emails related to the website or a specific feature?
Now there’s the time spent to diagnose and fix user experience issues. That’s the cost of a UX specialist, developer(s), and people who will need to oversee the changes.
These are just a few examples. And, while you probably won’t have access to all the information to get an exact number, you can make an educated guess. Since this is the first time anyone has taken the time to quantify the waste associated with neglecting the user experience, chances are the calculations will make stakeholders take notice.
3. Make a case for maximizing opportunity.
While stakeholders will sit up and take notice about wasting money, the added benefit of user research is that is maximizes opportunity. UX research doesn’t just tell you what you shouldn’t be building. It tells you what you should be focusing your efforts on for the maximum return on investment.
With any digital product, there are a lot of unknowns. But investing in UX helps us to:
Validate assumptions.
Uncover user insights that would be impossible to discover any other way.
Think about the last time your team had an assumption about why users were doing or not doing certain things. Let’s say you work at an airline and, while many people search for tickets on your website, you’re not generating the amount of successful online bookings you would like to. You could make a bunch of changes to the page design, user flow, where buttons are placed and what they say. You may even decide that price is the deciding factor. But, before making changes—and potentially making the situation worse—wouldn’t you prefer to validate your assumptions and only then make informed decisions about what you’ll change, and then test the results?
An investment in UX will not only help you validate your assumptions—the very same research and experimentation will enable you discover what you users value and how they behave. For example, during the research you conduct to understand why users are dropping off after they search for flights, you may discover important information about how users search for flights, compare options, and add-ons they perceive as valuable as they are planning their trip.
Further, UX research will provide you with insights on what aspects of the user experience you should be measuring: UX key performance indicators (KPIs). UX KPIs are an action or series of actions a user takes, how efficiently a user can complete those actions moving towards a goal, and how the user felt—either overall or completing a certain goal. You should be using UX KPIs to demonstrate a UX ROI throughout the lifetime of your product.
To summarize, if you feel like you’re the only person on your team—or your organization—who is concerned about the user experience, put yourself in the shoes of your team and stakeholders. What’s important to them? Next, make sure they understand that when you are making the case for UX, you’re not just taking about changes to the UI. Finally, make a case for the UX ROI. Investing in UX minimizes risk and maximizes opportunity.
Need to get a UX strategy in place? Our in-house UX workshops help your entire team develop UX KPIs specific to your digital products in order to demonstrate a UX ROI.