Introduction

User-centered design doesn't occur in a void. It is part of the product development life cycle. User experience professionals contribute to that environment by identifying key questions and the appropriate methods to answer them. UX research needs to be timely, believable, actionable, and surprising to be successful. Design needs to be efficient, legible, and learnable.

We must fit into the same schedules and time frames as our other colleagues. Our findings need to understand the context in which customers use our products, and we need to find appropriate research methods to understand those. Our design work must also provide direction and answers to the product teams' crucial questions and decisions. Great user research is surprising because it uncovers insights that no team member was aware of or had access to before our work. Meaningful design finds elegant ways to solve complex problems.

The Four Stages of the Product Life Cycle

The product life cycle is a multi-stage process in which the product is moving into greater and greater realization. We can divide the product life cycle into four stages: concept, design, development, and release. We tailor our work as User Experience professionals to meet the needs of each step.

• Concept stage: Developing UX goals and objectives, creating profiles and personas, executing research activities such as interviews.
• Design stage: User walkthroughs of low fidelity prototypes, heuristic evaluations, focus groups, card sorts.
• Development stage: Heuristic evaluations of early product releases and usability testing.
• Release stage: Usability testing, product surveys, and field studies to understand how real people use the product in the real world.

User-centered Design and Design Thinking

Design thinking is an approach to innovation that draws upon many of the same principles as user-centered design. It's often more common among businesspeople, designers, or product development teams that follow the user-centered design process. Common principles include a bias towards action, a humanistic viewpoint, and constant experimentation. Collecting user requirements is also central to both.

Discussing design thinking with team members can be an excellent opportunity to advocate for user-centered design work. It provides a common framework for understanding why a user-centric approach is critical to producing great products and services.

Your Role within the Larger Team

Fortunately, user experience is better understood these days and the value that it has to bring to the product development process. In industry discussions, you may hear people say, "UX has a seat at the table." At the beginning of my career, this was not the case, and even today, the full scope of our profession is not recognized. Companies have only incorporated a portion of the complete UCD process.

The most well-accepted UCD process tends to be usability testing; however, usability testing is only a small part of user experience research. The full suite of user research capabilities allows us to gather user requirements—the features and attributes that a user expects in the products and services.

Chances are that each of us has a different set of backgrounds. From my experience, a variety of different skills lead to the user experience (UX) profession, including design, computer science, psychology, marketing, business, anthropology, library science, and undoubtedly an array of others. My background includes both fine arts and design, which I've been practicing for the past 25 years. My introduction to this field began after I received my graduate degree from Art Center in design. Since then I have been a practicing designer and researcher.

Definitions

The User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) suggests the following:

I often tell people that I'm the person who makes technology more natural for others to use. Our profession is an empathetic one—we know what it's like to struggle to make things work, so we consider this perspective when doing our work.

The word usability is more specific, dealing with detailed interactions within an interface. User experience tends to be broader and more general. User-centered design speaks to the process of creating a good UX by focusing on user requirements—a set of features that a user needs for a particular project.

Titles

There are a variety of roles and job titles for people who perform UX work.

Individual contributor level:

• User experience designer
• User experience researcher
• Information architect
• Interaction designer
• Human factors engineer
• Business analyst
• Consultant
• Creative director
• Interaction architect
• Usability specialist

Executive level:

• Chief customer officer
• Chief client officer
• Chief experience officer
• VP of user experience

What is user-centered design (UCD)? It's a philosophy and an approach that places the user or customer at the center of the process. In contrast, an older approach to business and design tries to force the customer to adapt to the product. UCD is a fundamentally different way of doing business and reflects contemporary moods and beliefs. It is simply how we do business today.

The Three Steps of the UCD Process

1. An Early Focus on Users and Tasks. Successful product teams make sure to consider their user's experiences. It is at the heart of our profession and what motivates us to do research. Users are consulted throughout all stages in the product development life cycle, especially at the beginning—when there is the most significant opportunity to influence the design because team members have made fewer assumptions. When we involve our users from the beginning, less repair work needs to occur to undo earlier mistakes.

2. Empirical Measurement of Product Usage. The goal is the creation of highly usable products that are easy to use and error-free. Usability tests are one means to accomplish this. Participants are given a series of tasks to complete using a prototype. Common success measurements include the number of errors encountered, task completion rates, and time to complete a task. The purpose is to identify usability issues and correct them before the product is shipped.

3. Iterative Design. The best user experiences are ones designers and their colleagues continually work on. After we design a product, we modify and test the designs repeatedly. UX is a process of ongoing change and improvement. In practice, this might entail beginning with a paper prototype and making improvements several times before moving on to an interactive prototype. A certain amount of humility is required to accept one's mistakes and strive for perfection.

All software products have requirements that guide its direction. They are the goals of the project and how it is defined. There are often different sets of requirements, which is sometimes a source of tension. User requirements—those the UX team defines—are but one of many different sources of product requirements. Others come from various stakeholders, marketing, product development, business, etc. Ideally, our teams evaluate each different set of requirements equally. In reality, some sources have higher priority than others. As a UX professional, it's your job to ensure the team takes the user requirements into equal consideration.

Marketing and Sales

Requirements from the marketing and sales department typically have to do with selling the product. These may include feature requests that they believe customers want or that the competition currently lacks. On the customer end, these requests come from decision-makers and not end-users, meaning these requirements are directly related to the needs of one customer and not necessarily all customers. Even though the sales and marketing team may speak to users, since it's not their primary motivation to understand users, the data they collect tends to differ from true user requirements.

The Importance of User Requirements

Ignoring user requirements has many negative consequences, including increased training and support, increased development time, decreased user productivity, and overall user dissatisfaction. Unhappy users lead to a poor reputation, slow sales, and other adverse outcomes.

To truly get user requirements, one must directly speak to this audience and not rely on second-hand knowledge. Relying on decision-makers and sales/marketing teams often results in getting those wrong. Directly speaking to customers translates into positive outcomes: increased sales and market share, more effective and less expensive software development, and decreased training and support costs.

An essential skill for any user researcher is to be able to explain the value of the services they provide. Not all colleagues fully understand this. Benefits of good user experience include:

• Increase productivity
• Increased user satisfaction
• Decrease errors
• Decreased training cost
• Savings on redesign cost
• Increased audience/traffic
• Better online reviews and reputation

Counter Arguments against UX Research

"There isn't enough time to do a research study."

• It doesn't take a lot of time to do research
• We can customize our study to meet available time—as little as one day
• If it takes more time, the insights will be valuable for later use
• User research saves time in the development process

"There isn't money to do user research."

• It's possible to research with very little money—many cost-effective techniques exist
• The return on investment pays for itself
• The competition spends money on user research
• Good UX catches problems when they are least expensive to fix. For every dollar spent during product design, we spend $10 during development and $100 after product release
• The vast majority of software costs occur during the maintenance phase where unmet or unforeseen user requirements present

"It's not our fault if our users are stupid."

• You are not your users
• Different people have different needs
• You're biased due to your extensive background with technology

"Users don't know what they want."

• Users aren't required to articulate what they need
• That's why we have UX researchers who know how to study human behavior and ascertain needs
• User researchers find relevant information and translate those into action items
• User research is a skill and profession, just like any other on our team

"User research risks pointing out flaws, which can make customers unhappy and impact our sales."

• Quite the opposite—good UX increases customer satisfaction
• User research improves business development because it shows we care about our customers

"The sales team is responsible for our customers, not UX."

• The UX team has different goals from the sales team
• The UX team's work supports the sales team
• The UX team doesn't need the support of the sales team—we can accomplish our goals on our own

"Don't make promises we can't keep."

• We don't promise anything during research
• We only listen and collect data
• Afterward, we share data with the team who makes the decisions

"UX research shares confidential information."

• All participants sign an NDA
• Our moderators follow an approved script that the team has already approved

"There's nothing new to discover or learn."

• Whatever information we have will be augmented with new information we collect
• Our methods and goals for collecting new information differ from those that obtained the previous data

"We're introducing a different process. There's no need to study the current process."

• It's essential to understand how people currently do things, so we know what challenges they may face when changing
• We need to understand how people currently work so we can leverage the good and avoid the bad

"Our product is entirely new. There's nothing to observe or learn."

• There must be new users; otherwise, who's going to buy the product?
• There's always something we can learn to inform the work

"Everyone does it differently, so there's no point in studying a few users."

• Individual differences are smaller than one thinks
• A small sample size of 5 users can reveal 80% of the most common critical issues

"We're changing just one part of the system. We don't need to study more than that."

• Systems are more interrelated than most people think
• It's important to understand the context this change fits into
• Users don't work in isolation

"Our team is the only one using the product. It's an internal tool. Speaking to our employees isn't billable."

• If our systems are challenging to use, our employees will be less productive, and support staff will have to help them
• Creating good systems for our employees is an investment that pays off in the future

Getting Buy-in

Your success as a UX professional requires getting your product team and stakeholders involved in your work. It's vital for them to feel ownership of the activities you perform. When they agree with the contribution your work produces, they will be less likely to resist your recommendations and green-light your research activities. Involvement in all stages from A-Z of the user experience life cycle will increase their buy-in.

Key strategies:

• Be seen as a part of the product team—even if your organization doesn't officially recognize it
• Be as knowledgeable about the product and your team's process as everyone else
• Work towards developing solutions and not just identifying problems
• Increase your technical expertise when needed
• Attend team meetings, including morning stand-ups
• Follow the same processes and adopt the same standards as everyone else
• The earlier this happens, the better—the deeper you build your professional relationships and product knowledge, the more you will succeed