5 Proven Tactics for Evangelizing UX

I'd like to share with you five Proven Tactics for Evangelizing UX Process. These are things that really work over the theory. These are based on practice and they're based on the practice of my daily work and the work of my team. So the first one here is fast and rapid deliverables. You know, Lean has got to be fast and rapid.

I've been practicing Agile in Lean UX for 17 years, since, well, since 2000, when the Agile Manifesto came out, I joined a company that was using Agile, and so I automatically went into Agile practices and I didn't even realize they were agile or Lean UX until the book started coming out, you know, a decade later. But basically paring down your deliverables. And this doesn't mean flimsy because there are some really flimsy

personas out there, and we'll look at some in just a bit. There's some very flimsy documentations and I'm you know, I'm a fan of breadth. You really need substance. You can see from these crazy notes here on this this slide here, this is from a clothing field study. You know, e-commerce for a for a clothing retailer, you know, bite sized insights. So having, you know, just summaries like bubble it up, executive summaries

or creating a a fast DAC, you know, so I've taken like a 80 slides PowerPoint deck and can condense it down to 12 slides or down to seven slides I think in one case down to three slides. For the more senior you go, the less time you have to present and the more summary you have to do. So that's really good practice to help you get, you know,

lean with your presentation, make sure that it's compelling and useful and usable. Right. That your deliverable, your test report or your field study findings make sure that they are that you have stories to tell, which you will. Because you know, when you visit a user site, you'll have the stories. And storytelling, by the way, is a key part of UX. So don't let anybody tell you it's not. The other one is listening posts.

So socializing and evangelizing findings. You know, this is an example from a client of ours. Set up a computer with a demo of the wireframe and then have the personas there. And so things like this customer kiosks or Levi's jeans from their field study, they built a closet, you know, Intel built a desk that they saw in China that everybody had for their PCs in their back room to get, because the measurement, the size of the desk was really important

because of the space that people had in their actual homes. And for the closet analysis, this was more around bringing that empathy artifact back in this in this is called empathy room or persona room. You may have heard that that a lot of the big brands will they'll come you know, you basically come back and create a you know, an actual physical space, an actual room

and bring those persona insights. Now, you could also just do live streaming as well. I think that listening posts are really powerful and really important. I've forgotten to do them and many companies I've worked in. There's a tendency with UX people to be insular because their work is not really understood, so they tend to just keep it to themselves, basically. And, and that's not not a good thing because it's so important to,

to evangelize. So it's, it's really important that you get really tangible with your deliverables. And one of the things I noticed years ago was that delivering persona presentations, for example, is really critical. Right? And we'll see in just a bit how that is driven from an eye perspective. But people would look at my personas and go near, you know, and dismiss them or sort of, you know, question or or, you know,

you know, basically find reasons to not use them as deliverables. And so then what we started doing was making them more tangible and making them more 3D. And I actually have an example of this 3D pop up persona here. And what it has is the user on the front. This is this is their slogan and it's it was wounded. Wendy, She's she her motto is get away from corporate banks and find a new bank.

She's a credit union persona. And she's she's been burned by the big banks. So on the back here, we have her ideal experience at a glance, kind of the things she does or motivations, tasks, likes, dislikes, problem areas, insights and considerations. And this is like a kind of 3D, you know, you can actually hold this. So, you know, once we started delivering our personas with this tangible artifact, the believability just went away.

I mean, the the way they're received was like it was like, wow, okay. It was like more like blown away instead of, you know, instead of like, hmm, what's this thing? So playing cards are also good comic books, full scale cutouts, you know, just making your deliverables tangible. This is a a journey poster. So I just grabbed this, literally grabbed this off the wall just to show you to print out your poster. So we have here a user journey.

It's from that same study of getting an account so we can all see where the user's going. They're discovering and researching, applying and dreaming their details and design recommendations. You can see the touch points, but these posters went up around the room and actually stayed in the room for many weeks after, you know, as we were building out the interaction design, the UI design. So the tangibility can be really helpful there.

The fourth proven you Lean UX practices, cross company communication, so clear communication of methodology and findings, right? So it's really important that you understand what you've done. You know, I think a lot of UX people will do user interviews and then not really realize what it is they're they've got in their hands, you know, in terms of what this is, you know, begin, describe the process, explain what it is, explain its its purpose, its goal.

And be clear with your design recommendations. You know, one thing that we found useful is to host brown bag lunches or to have like a UX university or digital college just constantly educating. It's not just about the deliverable, but it's a constant dialog to to, you know, evoke an outside in cultural or I should say seed or generate germinate an outside in design approach, you know, and, and as the UX team you've got to be able

to do that through your communication labs are also great with regular invites. It could just be online or in person. And the fifth technique is to use a scorecard. So scorecards I think are heavily underutilized. I think I'd like to see way more scorecard so you can measure things like social activity, different KPIs, your customer experience, score,

usability testing scorecard, or an emotion measurement scorecard. Very few people do that, but we developed one for HP and it totally catalyzed the way they were having internal sort of designer versus marketing battles and giving them an emotion scorecard on a on the branding of their icon with actual data test data and emotion data from users and in which feelings are the branding.

The new branding direction evoked totally helped them just firm use empirical data. They could see it on a scorecard. No more fighting. So that's that's a proven lean. You practice. That's the power of what that can do.