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Evangelizing UX in the Enterprise
July 30/2011
This article is meant for entry to mid-level practitioners.
I’ve spent nearly 15 years working in an enterprise environment and my clients have, for the most part, been internal stakeholders. Something that I have personal success with is evangelizing UX in the enterprise. Many UX practitioners fancy giving presentations at conferences and workshops to groups of people who already understand UX and its inherent value; however, we don’t do enough to teach others outside of our community who have yet to realize this. These are the people who need to be enlightened.
Evangelizing UX in the Enterprise not only helps those you work with understand what you are trying to accomplish, it also helps your colleagues communicate concepts to you in relatable terms you can understand.
I teach others across my organization how to create low to high fidelity wireframes, sitemaps and other UX practices that would usually fall under my domain. Reminiscent of the old proverb, in teaching others “how to fish” I free up some of my time for other projects that are more time sensitive.
In many cases, UX practitioners need to do more with less. Freeing up some time by transferring your knowledge benefits both you and those you collaborate with.
Start by giving UX presentations at your company. Don’t stop at your own team. As a subject matter expert, it is in your best interest to raise awareness by preaching the UX gospel throughout the organization. Start by teaching basic concepts so that others in the company can better communicate their ideas through visual thinking! Give Webinars to remote employees so they too can hear the message.
By empowering other people in your enterprise with this knowledge, you not only raise awareness for the practice of UX, you raise your own profile and that may lead to greater opportunities and even a promotion down your career path. This is something I encourage to those I mentor through the Information Architecture Institute. Presenting internally gives you a great environment to practice your presentation skills, which may lead you to eventually submitting a presentation at a future UX conference !
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mario Bourque
Mario is the Manager of Information Architecture and Content Management for a leading provider of specialized, mission-critical solutions to vertical markets around the world.
website: http://mariobourque.com
twitter: @mariobourque
3 Comments
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[...] ago, I was the Web Architect for a Canadian Crown corporation. I was asked by my team to create an Enterprise Portal strategy for all of their web services, which at the time involved an Internet, Intranet, and [...]
Great post, Mario. I’ve always felt nervous about the success of any project where I was the only one pushing UX and advocating for the user–it’s something that has to be ingrained and organization-wide. Making sure that those in the C-level suite understand our work and value is important, but I love the idea of empowering others across the enterprise as well.