Even organizations that have had UX practitioners for some time may find themselves in the situation of needing to defend their practice or processes. While generally speaking, everyone agrees that “we must listen to the users”, the ferocity in which UX approaches this can be off-putting to other disciplines. Folks in Marketing for example might feel that they can achieve necessary results without input from UX.
“Evangelizing UX is a never-ending process and requires perseverance. Knowing what’s good for UX is good for your organization provides a great incentive for driving the UX message home every opportunity you get.”
UX can be a constant act in persuasion of stakeholders. But luckily, persuasion is convincing someone through reason, and it can be easy to align UX with business goals. If you can prove to stakeholders, on their terms, that usability improvements will help them meet their revenue or conversion goals, those improvements have a high chance of being implemented.
So how you get the word out is important. One way is soliciting involvement of folks across the organization. Reviewing a wireframe and asking for feedback can be done by anyone in the organization, as can usability testing. Asking stakeholders to actively get into the mindset of the user through these activities can be a valuable exercise to reframe their needs and benefits. There are other hands-on ways to involve others and evangelize detailed in this video by the Interaction Design Foundation. The most important part is making user experience an accessible and understandable concept by the entire business, and then continually using UX principles and gains to move the needle on improving both the user-focused product and the bottom line.
STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask the team to read or skim “Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization” from UXMatters and/or watch the above video from the Interaction Design Foundation. Start a discussion with how can we continue to or ramp up our current efforts with evangelizing UX within the broader organization. What are some tangible ways we can advocate for our practice area or get our message out to a wider audience? How can we better distribute our findings? Who should we be specifically targeting with this message / who should we be talking to that we aren’t?