4 Takeaways from UXDX 2023

On 11th and 12th October 2023 I attended UXDX 2023 in Dublin for the first time. I was very much looking forward to this conference having the chance to learn and hear from experts in the UX field as well as networking with other UX peers to see what paths people in the industry are in. These are just 4 of many amazing presentations at the event and 4 that I took strategies from to practice and implement within my processes.

Enhancing the Impact of User Research in Enterprise Software from Fahad Osmani, Senior Director of Design at Splunk.

In this presentation Fahad discussed the challenges when working at enterprise level and connecting with end users to gather user research. He shares some strategies that can be implemented to reach users for better research and design decisions.

Enterprise software is not meant for individual users, enterprise software has a very specific use case for sets of users. The goal of the organisation usually prompts the use of software for the entire organisation. Some of the challenges with enterprise software are:

• The Buyer is not the User
• Dealing with Expert Users
• Pricing structures might be one thing that comes first before user needs
• Starts with the technology rather than the use case

Fahad then discusses how to work with these challenges and how he learnt to stop worrying and start loving enterprise software.

1. Amplifying the culture of user research. Rather than focusing on the user, customer, buyer as individual personas. Invite multiple stakeholders into the process, developers, product managers, customers, users, and sales. Invite other opinions into the project but make sure there is an over arching expert to analyse the feedback in order to understand and analyse user goals.
2. Sellers and consultants are your best friends. Build relationships with other parts of the organisation that are connected to the users. Help sales and consultants with workshops around design thinking and polished demos so when they meet with the user they have the best tools to gather feedback for you. The once a relationship builds you will get invited to demos or site visits and in front of the users.
3. Keep re-iterating the voice of the user. Use customer quotes, recordings, pain points, seller stories, and demos at the beginning of every meeting, scrum, or executive meetings.
4. Create pride of ownership. From feedback and pain points create a tangible goal that the entire team can work towards. If the team is involved and can see visually on a chart e.g 8/10 users must be able to complete a task in 10minutes or less. Over time this turns into an event and entire teams want to see the line decrease and celebrate. This brings organisational teams together outside of design.
5. Ask Why? When the technology comes ahead of the user needs, persist with the question why, to discover the use case.

User research within enterprise software has its challenges, you will have to think not only from the users perspective but include buyers, customers, and expert users. Solving these challenges does open doors to a more collaborative organisation by getting other stakeholders involved, building your network, and sharing user insights and goals company wide.

Fostering a customer-centric culture at an enterprise from Marine Palamutyan, UX Research Manager, and Morgan Davis, Director at DocuSign.

The next presentation focused on learning how you can systematically share customer insights across your organisation to empower teams to make more informed and customer-centric decisions. A topic that continually came up in conversation throughout the two days on how to get everyone aligned, with the importance of keeping the customer at the forefront of every organisation. Some great insights and tools to use from this talk.

A guide to breaking silos and allowing the flow of user insights throughout an organisation:

• Establish Value

Teams need to see how your user research work and customer insights can compliment and add value to their work. In order to establish value of customer insights you need to 1) Raise Awareness: could be through news letters, workshops, or company presentations. 2) Deliver Valued Outputs: any insights shared have to be actionable and specific to the organisation level. High-level insights or goals for executives, to low-level granular data for developers. 3) Look for Partners: have to start looking for opportunities while sharing insights to start breaking into next area of forming alliances.

• Form Alliances

After gathering insights and sharing across the organisation you now have the content, brand, value, and data aligned that can be used as a deck with a slightly different focus. You want to start conversations that go above sharing insights but look at how different areas within the business work and how you might mutually benefit each other. User researchers are insights gatherers and can use their focus to bring other teams together, for example Sales and Operations will have different insights from different lenses that can all feed into customer insights. So as a user research team you can form the alliance between, sales, operations, and research.

After forming alliances you need to act on them in order to transform the culture. One way DocuSign do this is using OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). This is a mutually agreed objective and result that all alliances can work towards.

• Transform Culture

Silos are now starting to break down and you are working/having conversations within different teams of the organisation. All teams have actionable goals that they work towards centred around customer-centric insights.

• Deliver Outcomes

Leverage your alliances to deliver outcomes. For example ideas and insights from a sales team can be mapped to personas, and user stories, then planned within a product roadmap, making their way to features within a product. This allows any ideas coming from alliances to be fully considered against specific user needs. Then loop back to establishing value by sharing customer insights, feedback, and case studies on delivered products.

This strategy can be applied across large or small organisations and keep in mind to iterate and practice, progress over perfection, and just get started no matter how small the initial steps are.

Design Delivery Principles: Accelerating Product Delivery Outcomes in a Complex World from Russ Drury, Senior Director, Customer Success at Zeplin.

I was intrigued by this presentation and interested to hear the areas that are holding us back due to increased complexity and maybe without even realising it. Russ talks about how product delivery outcomes have become increasingly difficult to achieve in today’s complex world. Despite better tools and frameworks, the features delivered often fail to match user expectations.

The increased complexity problem can be seen in different areas:

• Too many great tools.
• Expectations and requirements. Customers are expecting more because of advancements in technology in other areas of life.
• Working practices have changed. From fully remote, to now remote, hybrid, or back to the office has changed working environments which means added pressure.

For organisations and teams there are things to consider to solve this problem:

• Uncover the hidden forces slowing you down. The Doherty Threshold says that productivity soars when people interact at a pace that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.

Once the Doherty Threshold is exceeded and productivity soars it is said that tasks can become addictive and more enjoyable. There are 3 hidden forces that could be slowing you down:

1. Understand design intent and requirements.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to design something the hidden time is taken when clarifying designs and communicating to other teams. One way to solve this is organising your designs in a standardised way so developers, customers, stakeholders know how they will receive designs, every time, for design reviews. Separate in progress design work from finalised ready to build designs.

2. Changes and approvals.

When a designer is done with a screen it is only the beginning. The design work is done but there will be reviews, feedback, changes and iterations. To reduce this time of clarifying changes, track changes to shared designs deliberately. Use version clarity and highlight the changes in each version, be very specific, so developers or stakeholders can see listed the latest changes to be implemented.

3. Measuring adoption in production.

“90% of designers report differences between the design and implementation”. To improve this process in production some areas to look at are, to measure component usage in production, make data-driven decisions, and demonstrate value.

A design system will increase designer productivity but the source of truth for design is the components and design elements within a production environment. By measuring this we can reduce time on unused components and reduce customised components.

These changes can be implemented immediately and create standardisation across organisation for quicker design, development, launch, and in turn more consistent end user experiences.

An Unexpected Approach to Design: Uncovering Hidden Parallels With Writing Story Tales from Rapha?l Vonthron, Lead User Experience Strategist at SLB.

In this talk, Raphael introduces an unconventional approach to crafting complex experiences, drawing inspiration from the art of storytelling. He describes when designing complex systems, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and feel uncertain about the best approach.

During Raphael’s experience of working with complex design, starting with design concepts and user experiences flows he hit a problem where stakeholders found it hard to reflect and understand wire-framing concepts. So he took a step back to look at the stakeholder personas. Focusing a lot on the peoples jobs that he was building applications for. Personas are high level and one persona can have many jobs and many goals that they want to achieve. By looking at jobs it unraveled hidden user needs, the small individual puzzle pieces that need to fit together to complete a job.

Archetypes:

• Define their needs
• Picture the initial situation
• Clarify their problems

The next step was building the elements of information to complete the jobs: user flows, storyboards, user journeys, but Raphael hit another problem…the team got stuck on knowing what information to prioritise, what was most important to the user. They could ask the user but often the user doesn’t know the most critical information they need until they see it.

This is when his team worked together on a backward approach. Starting at the end of the information architecture and then designing backwards. Taking all the low-level detail and data in one view, looking for data that stands out and then elevating this to a higher level. Doing this at every level of the architecture to aggregate information up to a dashboard view so the user has the most meaningful information from the top then can drill down to complete a job.

A great way to look a building complex systems and something I have implemented myself. Looking from a jobs-to-be-done perspective then a data up view. Bringing together low level data and aggregating it up so personas have the most valuable data and design views to complete tasks.

A very valuable 2 days at UXDX hope to be back.