UX Triangle becomes Bermuda Triangle
The UX triangle is supposed to focus a project on the relationships involved in a project and how everything is centred upon the users.
The UX triangle shows the key relationships and participants in a user experience project. The outer participants are the Business (strategic and corporate), IT services (design, delivery and infrastructure) and Marketing (driving relationships, market knowledge and acquisition). Centred on User Experience (UX) and focused on the User.
User Experience Triangle Failure
It’s almost as if User Experience needs to start from the beginning again, because the essential component is missing in so many critical projects because there is ‘No Budget’.
If you don’t have the budget to do;
- user requirements gathering
- user concept testing
- user prototype testing
- usability testing
then your not working on a User Experience project.
How to Hire a Director of User Experience
Like my last post How to Hire a Head of User Experience this post is not intended to supersede the experience of a really good HR or employment agency person but to bring clarity around the differences in the roles.
A Director of User Experience is not really the next level on the business ladder for a Head of UX or a lead user experience or senior user experience person.
The reason is that it's a business role with little or no actual practical activity in the UX domain. A Director of UX is someone with an extra level of expertise related to management, finance and corporate control. Not for the faint hearted, or someone with their own start-up looking to add a title, they simply won't last, because they don’t know how to deliver. Nor in fact is it for an MBA because they just don’t get UX, they tend to think it’s an IT or design thing and that is the sort of incomplete view that makes UX fail to deliver.
If Director of UX is not about UX what is it about?
A Director of UX is a public speaker, advocate, able to compromise to see the business succeed, set the standards, deal with the flack and drive the business into a higher level of intimacy with their customers. A lot of these things are unpalatable for a fervent practitioner, but are daily life for a Director.
How to Hire a Head of User Experience
Head of anything is evocative of responsibility, power and knowledge, but what does Head of User Experience (UX) really mean and how do you know if your getting one?
User experience in its value and effectiveness is geographical and sector based, that is to say it means different things to different people by country, by business and by route to the role (in-house HR or agency service). With this many variants how can anyone be sure that they have hired a Head of User Experience?
One of my colleagues in a recent contract described User Experience as turning the turd (poo) into a piece of glitter covered turd. If this is the expectation it's not really surprising if the wrong people get senior roles, then the incompetent lead.
What I want to show is some basic indicators about hiring a Head of User Experience;
Please don't be offended if it's what you do for a living (recruitment or employment agent), glean what you can and discard anything you don't need. 
Who, What, When, Where, Why.
Who do they know and how do they deal with them?
They must know users; understand user drivers and perspective for every project just as they must know the client stakeholders and leaders with the environment that they are working in. The level of knowledge will vary, as much of the information is second hand from Lead and Senior designers or researchers. But the Head of UX will have both their own knowledgebase and be able to elicit extra business and strategic information not visible to other ux practitioners.
Can they let their team work or do they micro-manage? It’s really important when working with a new (to the Head of UX) team that the teams strengths are encouraged and supported. UX is one of those skill sets where diversity of experience is critical in evolving multiple parallel project solutions within a team of peers. Giving the team rights over the group output is critical to maintain quality and to challenge narrow thinking. How they manage, mentor and train people is key to the future of the team? How will they deal with internal applicants for the job they have just got? Conflict is a given in any location where people are, what are their stratagies for conflict? Watch out for people with an 'I problem' if it's all about them they cannot see other people. Get references from colleagues as well as employers, you can find them as connections on Linkedin.
What do they do for a living, how do they describe themselves, their ux work and their colleagues?
How do they describe what they do for a living, a couple of years ago recruitment agencies where told by someone that ux people only focus on the user and that should be their response when ask who they focus their efforts on. Wrong, ux is a service that is based on creating a meeting point between people, organisations/businesses > providers and products/services > content. Any Head of User Experience who does not know this is not a Head of User Experience, it’s a business. It’s a great business that gives an audience access to the content they are looking for, makes it easy to interact with and enables communication with the content provider, but it’s still a business. Watch out for divas they upset clients and stakeholders alike a Head of UX is a savvy business person and knows which things to fight for and which things to mitigate as a risk.
Do they have a process? Can they describe the process and where it came from, how it has evolved through their experiences and which projects made the most change or option routes for it.
When did they acquire their skills?
People involved in user experience who have the kind of experience to be a Head of User Experience come from diverse backgrounds. A colleague of mine started in the US DoD (in the 1980’s) designing graphic manuals for troop training and another NATO information systems. Find out what else they have done and how they evaluate their experiences, because their experience underwrites their other skills and gives them a breadth of understanding about various sectors that may not be on their CV’s. For instance I have had lots of experience setting up business banking accounts, some really lousy (maybe for another post), some grossly inefficient (some excuses of epic proportions) and others utterly fabulous. Ask them to describe an experience, evaluate it and provide a solution to any problem they have encountered. For people like us it’s easy, for example I’ve had a fix for the supermarket self checkout bottleneck for years, it’s obvious.
User Experience in its current form is a fairly recent naming when I meet practitioners with experience before 2005 described as user experience, I know there is something wrong depending on where in the world they say they got their experience.
Where and with whom do they associate?
Confirming the professional level of a person is now quite easy with Linkedin, connect with them and have a look at their connections, if they don't know any senior people outside of ux they are not senior themselves. It's a cultural thing we tend to mix with people at or above our own level when thinking professionally, occasionally people come on the radar where they a worth following to see where their career goes. Yes, Linkedin again, if you don't use it, you won't know what your missing.
Why do they think they fit?
Based upon their research, they should know enough about the role, the people, the ethos and the clients or stakeholders to be able to pitch a reason why they fit in.
Don’t ask a Head of User Experience;
Don't ask for a portfolio asks for a presentation. Presentation ability is required when working the board of directors, client stakeholders and when conducting pitches with new business or internal advocacy. Look for the narrative, a really good ux presentation has a story that it's telling 'What is UX?', 'How can UX help my business?', 'Project name UX concepts', 'Project name user stories' etc. Also look for substance over style, the presentation must be meaningful and hint at critical thinking and creative talent, really flashy presentations make me concerned when they lack any real information, interpretation of data or concepts that have a provable pathway from researched insights.
Finally get references
I mean get real references, as if your job depended upon it, because it and your future reputation do. User Experience is still a small field, when someone with little or no experience gets a Head of User Experience role the first question we all ask is what was the agency that did this? When I am really unsure of an applicant (due diligence is critical in client services) I use a private detective, just give them the CV and ask for verification.
Banking Change Management through User Centred Design (UCD)
There has been massive change management taking place across all sectors of British banking over the last three years. Much of this is driven by buy outs and mergers, some by efficiencies and a little more recently through questioning the nature and controls around risk management.
However simply changing the owner has caused major problems in these banks as their competitive advantage and therefore their value has been an amalgam of very different skilled people, internal processes and market penetration from the bank or group buying them. These internal processes have often evolved in a highly organic method through acquisition and proven delivery often driven by individual people. However once this people based relationship is broken and these processes are exposed to a wider audience they pose serious questions in relation to risk management, value and the continuance of revenue flow.
The standard process applied has been to pass these processes over at division level to change program managers, at department level to business analysts to define the scope of the current structure. After definition many of these process based activities are passed over to information technology to resolve. I remember being taught at University (Napier, Edinburgh) that technology should never be used as a substitute to sound business process; however this technology determinant does not seem to have been passed on to banking business people. While not the best starting point, people who work in technology do tend to ask the right questions, to define epic requirements, even when it’s unpopular with the business.
Information technology analysts take these epic requirements and define an A to Z system 'what it does'. However to get the B to Y user requirements (or stories), a user centred design analyst, ux research and designer spends time with the users to define 'how it works'. This may seem obvious to digital practitioners outside banking, but it’s a revelation to those inside banking and banking technology, that users who normally find ways around poor software are able to define the requirements that turn a useful application into a killer application.
This is not really the end, more a beginning, if other sectors can learn from banking, that users (not stakeholders, usually no longer active users) can determine the overall success of software. And that user centred design (UCD) can assure and amplify competitive advantage if underwritten by skilled practitioners, then the possibility of success is significantly raised in all software and change programs.
Year end retrospective 2011
This is my year end retrospective, including the things I have learned, experienced, shocked by, surprised and encouraged by (I'll add more as I think of them).
For me it’s been quite an odd year going back to December 2010 and I have seen some major changes in how user experience and user centred design is being understood, used and changed by market forces.
I have seen user experience and user centred design so dissipated by people who don’t understand the underlying concepts that the pretty graphics created are meaningless. I have also seen a client base who are so limited in their thinking it’s embarrassing to talk to them. For some unknown reason user experience and user centred design is being subjugated into a part of the process rather than the process itself. Where UX and UCD used to question the requirements it is being told that’s not its role by clients who just want graphics. What’s the point! They deserve to be ripped off.
I was told this year that user experience and user centred design takes the piece of shit and rolls it in glitter, not an encouraging perspective when spending tax payer’s money. I was also witness to a major global company employing a person with fourteen months experience in user experience as the Head of User Experience with responsibility for interfaces involved in billions of pounds of transactions. Quite shocking really, I think it’s the smugness that really concerns me and of course the lack of due diligence.
Now the good stuff, Microsoft has taken up the challenge and is moving towards user behaviours rather than forcing interaction. Windows 8 is a game changer for many reasons but the most important one is that it’s changing how Microsoft service users, by user devices, user information and user interactions.