Ensuring the Staying Power of User Experience in Your Organization

Volunteering to Conduct Market Research and Competitive Analysis

At Rockwell, we’re fortunate to have teams that are focused on understanding our competitors and the overall trends in the marketplace. Maybe you also have resources in your company that have this focus; maybe you don’t. Regardless, these types of teams or individuals can’t be everywhere. Plus, they don’t always have user-level exposure or the deep knowledge that comes from qualitative and quantitative UX research methods—which is in your wheelhouse.

Therefore, if you hear a product leader inquire about how [insert company] handles [insert capability], offer to find out. Along the way, reach out to anyone in the company who might have some inside knowledge or the ability to connect you with the competitor’s solution. Simply getting access to competitors’ solutions within the industrial-automation domain can be an extraordinary feat. It often comes down to who you know. At Rockwell, we have many roles beyond product professionals and competitive and market analysts, including customer-success professionals, solution consultants, proposal specialists, sales representatives, and commercial engineers. Professionals whose work is proximate to selling your company’s solutions are often most knowledgeable about what the competition is selling and how their solutions work.

Once you find your market or competitive-insights champion—and ideally, get your hands on the competitive solution—you should let your UX research skills shine brightly. Better yet, bring your new allies along, whether you conduct a cognitive walkthrough, heuristic evaluation, or usability study. And who says you should limit interviews or conducting contextual inquiries to your users? Why not leverage these valuable skills and methods with people who use competitive products? You would create a multi-win scenario, not only satisfying the needs and requests of those with product decision-making authority but also cultivating allies in the business who are close to customers. This can be a gift that keeps on giving—if you bring them along with your processes and inject UX best practices along the way, improving overall UX maturity. You might even inspire the people using a competitor’s software. Is the competitor engaging with these users similarly to your company, allowing them to shape the future of the product or solution? Perhaps you’ve helped influence new sales.

Facilitating Workshops Focusing on Features and Requirements

Most product leaders wouldn’t think of generating their product backlogs without input from various architectural and engineering leads. If you’re fortunate, they’ll assume that the same level of involvement of your UX team should occur without much hassle. However, the reality looks different across various companies, company types, and industries. Even the best-intentioned product leader typically focuses on what they should build and whether it’s feasible—which is typically an engineering issue. In organizations with low UX maturity, people who design and research what’s best for users get brought in by product leaders only once they’ve captured requirements for solutions and even formalized them in a product backlog. This, of course, is a major miss and blown opportunity for building the right thing for the right user personas.

So, if you catch wind of an upcoming discussion or workshop regarding what a team is planning to build, approach the product leader with curiosity. When meeting with the product leader, communicate that your curiosity about their product stems from a desire to help and open access to the various skills that you and your team possess—because, after all, this product leader might not have this awareness. I find it’s best to assume that any product leader has had limited exposure to UX best practices, methods, and even what it’s like to work with such talent. If they do have this knowledge, all the better. Once you’ve met with the product leader and conveyed your desire to help, paint a distinct picture of what you can offer to make the benefits to the engagement feel real. This is similar to a trial use of a product—once they get a sense of the benefits, it becomes more difficult to reject. You could accomplish this sneak preview in the following ways:

• Sharing how you and your team helped [insert another product name]—Give a concrete example of how you have helped another team define various epics and stories for the launch of their product and show examples of what you produced.
• Communicating that your skills and those of your team are well-suited to facilitating discussions—Requirements gathering and formalization often involve multiple roles and internal personas. Your facilitation could take pressure off other leads, allowing them to focus only on their participation. Be prepared to show any Miro board, Jira backlog, or other output from prior engagements.
• Conveying your user-centered approach and experience supporting similar solutions such as [insert solutions, if appropriate]—However, take caution when using this approach, especially if you become aware that the product leader feels that her own knowledge of customers—not necessarily users—is an asset to the project. I’ve seen things devolve when a UX professional didn’t tactfully handle this approach.
• Shamelessly name-dropping other product leaders who have benefited from the services you and your team offer—Suggest that this new internal, prospective customer solicit the other product leaders’ feedback if they’re still unsure about proceeding. Peer pressure and testimonials are both powerful forces!

Driving Innovation Discussions

At Rockwell, our centralized UX Design Team in our Software & Control business unit has made a concerted effort to place ourselves right in the thick of any innovation activity that involves software. All is fair game, whether that software could feature artificial-intelligence innovations, novel workflows, or solutions we’d like to protect as intellectual property for the company. Our being a cross-functional team that operates as a shared service puts us in a unique position to observe and act upon innovations, expanding our team’s brand beyond what most people would consider simply UX design. Through the following means, we’ve become a hub of innovation:

• Earning a spot on our Patent Review Committee—Right now, I serve as one of the committee members, reviewing innovations that various employees across the business have put forward for consideration. Being a committee member has provided many benefits, giving me a front-row seat for observing what’s truly innovative in our space, learning what our competition is doing, and letting me mentor and consult with other UX professionals regarding what to consider when putting forth their own ideas. Finally, it will eventually let me guide a successor into this role, keeping the UX presence alive and well on this small committee, which has historically been heavily weighted toward engineering leadership.
• Asking our Intellectual Property (IP) attorneys for their guidance—On multiple occasions, our IP attorneys have attended our team meetings as guest speakers to present what they look for regarding innovation and how their process works. This exposure has allowed our team members to ask questions and further ignited their curiosity and provided inspiration for submitting innovation ideas without fear of failure or rejection. Often, the biggest hurdle is self-confidence, and the encouragement of our IP counsel has furthered our goal of creating a culture of healthy risk-taking.
• Participating in Innovation Challenges—Rockwell’s culture of innovation doesn’t begin and end with filing patents or protecting trade secrets. We have internal teams who host innovation competitions and provide platforms for submitting ideas that, depending on their merit, could eventually become funded projects. Maybe your company has similar programs. At the very least, it’s crucial that UX professionals feel licensed to participate in such opportunities because it helps bolster our reputation. Finally, they serve as novel outlets for our innate skills involving design, research, and user-centered methods.
• Creating annual team goals around innovation—We’ve found this tactic to be the most impactful because creating a specific, measurable objective for each of our team members has driven the biggest collective increase in our innovation. While we don’t prioritize this objective as highly as goals that ensure we meet the needs of our product teams, we recognize this as a barometer of performance. Plus, this provides another way of celebrating high achievement during our annual performance-review cycle and has fostered more inventors within our ranks!

Maybe your company doesn’t have an in-house counsel or methods of officially capturing innovation. Perhaps you don’t have centers of excellence oriented toward innovation either. However, you can still be an innovation thought leader. Consider your annual goals—for example, a developmental goal focusing on up-leveling innovation, starting within your UX team. Think about asking someone you know within the realm of intellectual property to guest-star as a speaker at one of your team meetings. With buy-in from senior leadership, perhaps even start your own center of innovation excellence to host challenges and competitions and consider ideas as potential funded activities. Becoming a hub of innovation only grows the staying power of User Experience within your organization.

Supporting Internal, Product-Telemetry Strategy and Analysis

If you work within a large enterprise, you probably support multiple software products and might even have a means of measuring their use. If you have a mature telemetry strategy that has captured the hearts and minds of product leaders, then bravo—that is a wonderful accomplishment, especially if you can leverage it to make data-driven decisions regarding your product portfolio. However, large enterprises such as Rockwell often acquire smaller companies, and it can be challenging to align newly acquired products and the telemetry strategies that underpin them—if they exist at all. As UX professionals, we understand the importance of making data-driven decisions, but the challenges with telemetry go beyond mixed adoption to getting buy-in to do the work, often involving engineering resources and prioritization. Plus, telemetry work tends to be an out-of-sight, out-of-mind activity because it isn’t user facing and lacks the panache of the tangible features that users employ. Telemetry isn’t something that a product leader can eagerly demonstrate—at least not at first.

As a UX professional, you are uniquely positioned and qualified to become involved with product telemetry and analytics—and even drive the strategy—because these activities are user-oriented and the decisions regarding product direction should factor into this perspective. So, assuming you either have an immature, end-to-end strategy that shows how users traverse your multi-product portfolio—or don’t have one at all—how can you help make this a reality? Consider the following sequential actions you might take:

1. Identify and inventory the various tools and platforms your company uses for capturing user telemetry in your software applications and Web sites. You might be surprised to find that not every product uses the same tool or shares the same approach. Some may use Gainsight, Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics, or some other solution and leverage different implementations. Some might not track telemetry at all.
2. Once you understand the who and what behind your telemetry-tool adoption and strategy, learn whether gaps exist, and if they do, why there are gaps. Put on your UX researcher hat and interview product leaders who are either slow to adopt product telemetry or have rejected it. This does happen. As I mentioned earlier, approach them with curiosity and a desire to help.
3. Once you understand why there’s been resistance, choose one product you feel could be your easiest inroad and offer to lead that work. I recommend a product whose product leader seems open to improving their strategy, but simply hasn’t gotten to it yet, or for whom its priority has slipped, because these are usually the most likely cases.
4. Once you’ve gotten their go-ahead to lead the work—and, of course, your manager’s, too—partner with the product’s engineering leads. Get together with them and discuss how and where to code the user interface to tie it into the telemetry tool. I won’t get into technical details here because every tool is different and strategies for marking up the code vary. However, it’s likely that engineering teammates would have to juggle their day-to-day responsibilities to do this work. Ensure their success by coming to them with a plan. Know which buttons to tag and workflows to measure and ensure that they understand the user goals and tasks you want to track. They might even have their own ideas, and you could forge more allies.
5. As you implement telemetry and see user data trickling in, become the telemetry evangelist, especially if stories begin to reveal themselves. Present these findings to your product team—and better yet, several product teams—to show the value of telemetry and even stir fear of missing out in other product leaders. Most product leaders adopt a show-me-first attitude when budgets are tight and roadmaps are really dialed in. This could be your chance to show them and cultivate more adopters. Over time, you can begin to connect user journeys across various products, assuming the use cases, scenarios, and workflows are valid and realistic.

Conclusion

As a UX professional, your skills don’t begin and end with creating wireframes and mockups or gathering research findings. You can bolster the longevity of User Experience within your organization—and your career—by demonstrating a willingness to take on responsibilities that seem to be adjacent to the UX function, but are important to your company’s success. If it’s important to the business, it should be important to you. Consider the ideas that I’ve presented in this column. They represent just a few of the activities you could lead. Are there others you’ve seen work? Better yet, have they led to further trust in you and your UX team, leading to more opportunities to up-level User Experience within your organization? If so, please share them in the comments!