Thoughts By Thought Leaders bridges the digital divide between the web and business communities. Here you’ll find case studies, ideas and experiences that have helped organizations realize real business value in adopting or implementing advanced web practices in #UX, #IA, #CS and #WW.
AUTHORS
- Austin Govella
- Brad Nunnally
- Clinton Forry
- Jamie Gerrard
- Jeff Parks
- Jill Christ
- Kristina Mausser
- Laura Creekmore
- Laura Hampton
- Mario Bourque
- Michael Carvin
- Olga Howard
- Ricardo Fleck
- Roger Davis
- Sally Bagshaw
- Werner Puchert
CATEGORIES
7 Organizational Barriers to Designing Better Experiences
September 6/2011
Over the last 6 years, I’ve been fascinated by watching how teams work together to create experiences. Much of these 6 years was spent with agile teams. Slowly, my personal practice as a user experience designer has evolved. Instead of focusing on what I can do to improve the experience, I’ve come to focus on what I can do to improve the organization.
During these last six years, I’ve discovered 3 principles:
- Designers don’t design anything. Organizations design everything.
- Organizations face 7 barriers to designing better experiences.
- 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Austin Govella
As an independent user experience consultant, Austin helps non-profits, the Fortune 500, and tiny start-ups build better experiences. He co-wrote the 'Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web' with Christina Wodtke and has helped edit the Polar Bear book, Nathan Curtis's 'Modular Web Design' and scads of articles for Boxes and Arrows. He's currently focused on lean and agile UX and ways to measure user experience with tools like the UX Heath Check. He's discovered seven barriers your organization may face when designing better products and services, and collected approaches you can use to overcome them.
website: http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/
twitter: @austingovella
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[...] 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. [...]