This is part of a series of posts on the 7 barriers to better user experience. For context, you might want to start with the introductory post, 7 Organizational Barriers to Designing Better Experiences.

Two true stories:

For three years in a row, the executive team of a smart software as a service company identified user experience as one of the organization’s top three strategic goals. When the CEO gave company-wide presentations, he showed the slide with that year’s top three strategic goals, and user experience was right there at number three. The company even used its NPS score as the top-level metric to measure year-over-year progress. Even though improving UX was one of the company’s top-three goals, it always lost the focus game. The company didn’t bump user experience for items lower on the strategic totem pole, but the strategic priorities in slots one and two ate all of the focus and resources, leaving nothing for the user experience.

Across the country, a national telecommunications company was developing a new consumer service. The product and executive teams relied on user experience to drive consumer conversion and retention. Even though key aspects of the experience interfered with conversion and retention, UX never made it into the bi-weekly sprints. The user experience was never as important as that week’s sexy, new features. The user experience stories were always at the top of the backlog, the very next thing to work on, but they never made it into an actual sprint.

Both of these companies have conquered that first barrier. They understand the value and importance of user experience, but they can’t keep focused. Other activities keep pushing user experience aside. Now that your organization understands how design can be integrated into the product development process, you start to compete with other project activities. Once UX has a seat at the table, it has to compete with everyone else to be heard.

There are three strategies for making sure you can keep your eye on the UX ball:

1. Conquer the world

In theory, if you can better communicate the value of user experience, it will compete more fairly against other priorities. And if user experience is important, you’ll always end up at the top of the pile. Of course, that means you have to find ways to compare user experience and totally different activities side-by-side. How do you weight user experience versus software development? Or user experience versus marketing?

2. Protect your milkshake

If your organization understands user experience is important, but can’t spare the necessary attention, then you won’t have the resources you need. You have a milkshake, but other people keep drinking it. But what if no one can take your milkshake? If you can schedule inviolable blocks of time or gain total control of someone’s tasks, then you won’t have to worry about that time or resource being used on anything other than the user experience. No one else will drink your milkshake because their straw can’t reach it.

(And to continue the theme of extended metaphors…)

3. Lay your eggs in someone else’s nest

Cow birds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. The nest owner returns and cares for the cow bird’s eggs as if they were their own. Whose nest can you lay eggs in? If you can merge or sneak user experience activities into other work streams, then you won’t have to worry about always being the next thing on the list. This means pushing user surveys into marketing, usability testing into QA, and scenarios and wireframing into your development teams. If you can get more important birds to hatch your eggs, you leverage their clout to protect the activities.

Where there’s a will…

Understanding user experience and pursuing it are two pre-requisites to improving the experiences your organization can produce. Once your organization has the mustered the will to create better experiences, then—and only then—can you begin to examine and improve the way you design. We’ll examine barrier to your organization’s design process in our next post.

This is part of a series of posts on the 7 barriers to better user experience. For context, you might want to start with the introductory post, 7 Organizational Barriers to Designing Better Experiences.

It can be easy to think that your organization doesn’t value user experience design. Projects start and you’re not called in until it’s time to paint the wireframes with pretty colors. Or worse, you’re not called in at all! It can be easy to think that your organization doesn’t believe in the value of a better user experience.

But this isn’t true. Pundits continue to tie Apple’s success to its focus on design, and the business press discusses the power of design in regards to innovation on an almost daily basis. Developers are reading books on user experience and product managers devour material about the constant iteration and continuous validation from the lean startup movement. Everyone in your organization understands the power in creating a better user experience.

So if they understand the value of design, why don’t they call upon their user experience practitioners the second they launch a new project?

CEOs and managers and product managers aren’t stupid. They’re smart, capable people. When stuck in the rapid-fire, day-to-day shepherding of projects, they have no problem calling in developers and graphic designers and QA engineers. Each of these necessary skill-sets are finite defined entities that they have experience with. They know how to plan for them, how to manage them, and what kind of outcome they’ll have once the project is done.

The problem isn’t that organizations don’t value design. It’s that they don’t understand how to leverage design in a concrete way. Staring at a looming deadline, your colleagues will always choose concrete, known tactics where they can estimate the outcome.

If it seems like your organization doesn’t value design, it’s more likely they don’t understand how to precisely leverage user experience activities to enhance a project’s success.

There are 2 keys to overcoming this barrier:

First, you can communicate what user experience success will look like: concrete outcomes your stakeholders can measure next to the concrete outcomes they already understand from their existing processes.

Second, you can communicate the concrete, easily planned tactics your organization can take to capture the power of design.

Without knowing one of these two things — the concrete outcome or the concrete tactic — you’re asking your stakeholders to employ user experience design methods on faith.

And it’s the rare organization that can stick numbers on faith and plot them with Excel graphs.

During these last six years, I’ve discovered 3 principles:

1. Designers don’t design anything. Organizations design everything.
2. Organizations face 7 barriers to designing better experiences.
3. Instead of changing what you do, change how you do it.

The key to knowing what to change, though, is in understanding these 7 barriers.

7 Organizational Barriers to Designing Better Experiences

I won’t say there are only 7, but these are the ones I’ve identified. They represent areas of the corporate culture at different structural levels within the organization. Meaning, any time you’re trying to change your organization’s culture, you have the opportunity (and perhaps the necessity) to influence that change at specific places in the org chart. That’s handy to know!

But first, the 7 barriers:

The organization:

…doesn’t VALUE design.

…can’t FOCUS on the design activities it needs to focus on.

…doesn’t have TIME to design everything it needs designed.

…has no MEMORY about its design decisions.

…has a low QUALITY of design done by non-designers.

…has no UNDERSTANDING about what it takes to do UX.

…can’t validate IMPROVEMENT in the user experience.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll look at each of the 7 barriers to understand why and how they exist. Understanding these barriers is an important first step to helping your organization design better experiences.