An Approach to Looking for Positive Signs

An Approach, Not Methods

To learn more about the business and the people with whom you’re meeting, it’s important to start projecting how you would conduct your work if the company had already commissioned you to do the work. We do this by keeping our presentation brief and quickly moving on to using paper and Sharpies or a whiteboard to tell our story and start sketching the organizational landscape. We camp around our sketch to support our conversation and make our critical points tangible.

Freeing the conversation from the confines of a presentation—which can feel like one-way communication—automatically brings other people into the conversation and encourages collaboration. Another benefit of sketching on paper is that the client can keep the drawings as a reference for future conversations.

The first meeting is less about trying to close a sales deal and more about encouraging a discussion of an approach to thinking, working, and design on which you can get some initial alignment. An important piece of this is sharing knowledge and connecting to a larger body of knowledge—beyond what you can offer. This often opens a door to helping a client plan a UX program. You may be inviting a potential client into a playground that they may not even have imagined.

To clarify, this conversation is not about selling services or methods, but setting the stage for what you could achieve through planning. Making the importance of the need for planning explicit is a core part of the conversation at this stage.

Setting the Stage

In theater, as all of the performers rehearse a piece, they mark lines on the floor and use simple props and furniture to get a sense of the space on the stage on which they’ll be performing. This also allows the performers to get a sense of how the story will play out and helps with their interactions as the characters in the story mature.

As a business explores its need for user experience, they’re setting the stage for great product design and moving toward understanding

• what skills their product teams require
• who is currently on the delivery team and what their strengths are
• in what kinds of physical spaces they’ll create products and services
• how effective product teams are organized
• what their overall understanding of user experience is
• whether the organization requires further alignment
• what previous research might provide customer insights

UX Mentoring and Coaching

As user experience matures in Asia, gaps in knowledge are surfacing. People are hungry for UX knowledge. They want to know everything quickly, but do not always know where to find information locally or how to build a foundation to better understand how all of the UX components fit together. This is true not only of user experience, but also of the way businesses and societies operate. There is a real opportunity for the more experienced UX professionals and leaders in Asia to mentor newer practitioners—helping them not only to identify gaps in their knowledge, but to provide a clear roadmap for their professional development.

Becoming Self-Aware

Being aware of your own approach and performance when meeting with clients is important. Before meeting with clients, we often briefly rehearse our approach and think about what we would like to learn during the first meeting. We also give some thought to what our demeanor should be—both before and during the meeting with the client. Some useful questions to consider include the following:

• Are you focused on the meeting?
• Are you feeling tired or energized?
• Are you genuinely interested in learning more about the business?
• Are you open to and flexible about helping to craft a UX Plan with the client?
• Are you relaxed, so you can help the client to relax and be receptive to knowledge they may not yet have?
• Are you smiling and projecting a positive outlook?
• Are you thinking about a path forward, working toward your next meeting with the client?
• Do you have a few questions prepared to help build a bridge to a larger conversation?
• Are you in sync with the beliefs and values that are the foundation of your own approach? Do they match up with your client’s outlook?

Ask yourself what skill sets and character traits are essential for UX professionals to do our best work and have the tactical and strategic impact we seek to have in business. How does this inform an overall skills framework for the activities we need to practice? Examples of skills and character traits include the following:

• listening
• empathy
• clear communications
• holistic thinking
• flexibility
• decision making
• persuasion
• negotiation
• selling

What else would you add to this list?

Caring About UX and Looking for Positive Signs

In a previous UXmatters article titled “Being Human,” we spoke about the importance of caring:

“Caring for other people assumes that you care enough to look out for their best interests. It suggests that you have thought about the points at which people may face roadblocks in their journey and how to help guide them gently around those obstacles. It also assumes that people should have the flexibility to handle situations you may not necessarily have considered when devising a design solution and that you empower people to handle those situations well. Doing all of this ensures that, when people are impacted negatively, they’ll remember turning a challenging situation into positive one. These moments are rare.”

Your overarching goal should be to look for positive signs that a client is someone you want to help and that the business will be receptive to your help. Are they open to the new research methods that are available to help uncover customer insights? Are they receptive to new approaches to design that may be contrary to the way they are currently working? Are they ready to become a human business again? 

Announcing UX Hong Kong 2013

UX Hong Kong 2013 is dedicated to bringing all product and service design disciplines together—from research, marketing, design, technology, and business. This event is for those who are interested in and passionate about designing great user experiences for people and designing businesses to create a better world for us all.