Few weeks ago Mobi Lab organized one of their Design Friday casual meet-ups. They usually consist of 3-4 small presentations given by professionals involved in the design field. Among all these presentations, there was one that really caught my attention. Elina, one of the speakers, prepared a nice presentation about how everyone in an agency can impact the UX design of a product. And specially pointing the fact that there is usually a big unawareness about this fact in most companies.
Sometimes we tend to ignore the fact that UX design is more about the users rather than about the designers. We also believe that designers can do their magic and improve the usability by themselves. That’s their main focus, but in order to do that they need feedback and an external point of view.
It seems to me that there is an invisible barrier between the different departments in companies. This affects the perception of the roles and the awareness of the impact or everyone in the firm.
During her talk, Elina, who works as UX designer in a company offering test management services, pointed out that she made a research at the company she works for. One research that all of us could actually do. The main goal was to figure out if and how her colleagues felt they had any influence over the UX of the service. For that, she asked 2 main questions:
- Do you feel you contribute to UX with your work?
- Who is responsible for good UX?
Offering several options: design team, developers, product teams, QA analysts, sales team, whole company…Her conclusions were that 40% of people at her company didn’t understand how they affect UX with their own work, which is a quite big number. Definitely something to work on, since this unawareness means that some of them don’t show their whole potential. Companies or agencies should also think about how they can show recognition for that, so everyone is aware of their importance.
Results of her research
Among the 60% of her colleagues that considered that in fact their work had an influence in UX, Elina tried to figure out how they perceived what they contributed. The main answers she got were the following:
– Participating in product / service design workshops
– Suggesting improvements / giving feedback
– Taking part in usability testing
– Through front-end and back-end
-Highlighting usage patterns
To understand better how user experience is a result of many different factors that need smooth and constant interaction, it would be good to take a look at the CUBI User Experience Model. Corey Stern, UX designer with over 15 years of experience, found that most existing user experience models were confusing and unorganized, so he felt the need to come up with something more modern, updated and smooth. He named it CUBI User Experience Model.
