Business: Culture Change

Should UX designers be able to facilitate teamwork and engage in organizational design? A few years ago, the most likely answer would have been: No. We have process consultants, Human Resources (HR) consultants, and all sorts of coaches to help organizations organize their people and processes. But today’s businesses are confronting some significant changes that impact the role of User Experience, as follows:

1. Design challenges have become more complex. Some prominent. independent design firms have decided to join bigger collectives to address such issues. Recently, IDEO joined the kyu collective, Adaptive Path was acquired by CapitalOne, and there have been many other instances of this trend.
2. The role of the UX designer is shifting from merely imagining and executing on solutions to fostering collective creativity and engaging all sorts of professionals in a co-creation process.
3. Just as the impact of the design discipline has gradually expanded from products to services, over the last few decades, it continues to expand to process and organizational design. Branding agencies like Wolff Olins and transformation consultancies like SYPartners are leveraging the power of design to help companies re-imagine the way they work and organize themselves.

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In the 21st century, work is busy and often distracted. This reality can deprive us of moments to stop, pause, and take the time necessary for reflection and consider the implications and importance of mentoring in leading meaningful cultures.

This situation has been complicated even further by the global pandemic, with the spaces between work and home becoming blurred. People working at home encounter more distractions that can interfere with their ability to focus. Plus, they often lack the time necessary to step away from their work periodically and give their mind and body the rest and recuperation they need.

As UX leaders, we must provide explicit opportunities for mentoring people and prompting conversations that can help people to see, plan, and move forward. We need to help people to share their stories, spot practices, and conduct exercises that enable them to learn how to connect and contextualize their learnings to insert meaning into what they do. We need to provide spaces such as our Sparkle Studio—a learning platform for developing 21st century, transferable soft skills. Read More

UX designers tend to be perfectionists—purpose-driven idealists, who are intent on creating experiences that users love. Many designers believe that Business and Engineering don’t care about the user experience at the same level they do. Sometimes, this is the reality. As a result, UX experts often take the full burden of creating great experiences on their own shoulders. After all, shouldn’t the user experience be left to the professionals? While a UX designer’s first instinct might be to command sole ownership over the user experience, the problem is that no isolated UX team can create a product without collaborating with other disciplines—particularly Product Management and Engineering.

The truth is that the best products result from product teams participating in integrative thinking—working together to solve problems than none could solve as well alone. As Roger Martin points out, “Integrative thinkers consider the problem as a whole rather than breaking it down and farming out the parts.” UX professionals must realize that we actually need the help of our Business and Engineering partners to create the best experiences.

In this article, I’ll consider the paradox of control. What are the implications when UX professionals seek control of the user experience? And, alternatively, what happens if User Experience relinquishes control? Read More