Are corporations failing their customers? Why does there seem to be a resistance to change even though organisations are continuing to hire User Experience Professionals. User experience design IS change. If user experience is to be defined as gathering all the strands then those strands need to be knitted together in a way that creates organisation amid potential chaos; to knit them together means changing their alignment to each other to create a vision.
Perhaps there is a conflict of interest that goes right to the heart of the issue when it comes to getting UX to work in corporations.
With some (not all) established commercial operations there is a layer of management who’s job it is to maintain a balance; of status quo, protecting revenue, protecting spend. This is because it exists to reduce or minimise risk and continue to generate business and money; the beating heart of any commercial enterprise.
in this context, change must therefore be viewed as bad or a requirement to proceed with absolute caution. After all individuals are not going to rock the boat (and neither should they) if there is a risk that they are going to look as though they are non-conformists (not to mention putting any bonuses at risk). So does that mean that middle managers are the antipathy of good UX?
Yes, and no.
How do you go about breaking this mind-set? How do you, as a UX professional, therefore incentivise innovation and improvements for customers? The answer to that is much more about the company’s appetite to be competitive and to resonate with your customers more effectively. Something that all organisations would want to do. The question becomes at what cost? It is also about finding the right ear; about building a case for change, rather than just saying that change is needed.
Therefore the answer has to be to expand an ability to research, in terms of budget allocation and a platform from which to share its findings. Without it there is no user experience; design becomes a consumable resource reacting to the demands of an opinion. Without direction, any road will do.
In return, managers need more education about what UX means for their organisation. Change and control over the rate of change doesn’t have to be something to be feared, but embracing it is much more difficult for some, but fortunately not all.
Here are some ideas of how this can be resolved
| Issues | Potential resolutions |
| • Resistance to change | • Increase capacity for user testing and research for insights |
| • Lack of opportunity to iterate | • Acceptance and analysis of initial failure, and an ability to roll-back |
| • Acceptance of the cost of iteration | • Emphasis on extending and creating long term conversations |
| • Less dependency on a direct route to sales attribution | • Better understand of the sales wider funnel from initial interactions to post-confirmation |
| • Less short term thinking | • More design-thinking and issue identification |
Opening up the conversations and inviting key individuals within an organisation will help to find colleagues who could become advocates. Inviting individuals to convey what issues they face will help to set the context of the issue. If you are willing to help show they where the problems really lie it will give you more buy-in to help remove those barriers to a better end-user experience. Forget about the processes and the tools, look to remove the barriers and uncover these opportunities for growth will ultimately mean that you can deliver a better experience overall.
Frazer Cooper 