Create short-term wins - UX & change management (7/10)

This is the seventh article in a series on UX design and change management.

It may sound obvious, but success starts with the creation of a great design.

“When great design is delivered it raises the visibility of design thinking across the organization.” (From “User Experience Management” by Arnie Lund)

It’s a skill in itself to choose those projects which can deliver great designs. See also “Choosing projects strategically” in this post.

The following design instruments can be used successfully rather quickly:

Personas

Although already mentioned in previous posts, personas are a visual and relatively easy way to stimulate user-centered thinking and doing in an organization.

Sketches and wireframes

The creation of sketches and wireframes is an effective way to make a design visible. It introduces a visual language understandable by everybody. In this way, you can apply co-creation and create support.

Lo-Fi prototyping

A sketch or wireframe made interactive (“clickable”) speaks more to the imagination. Performing simple user tests with positive results delivers higher credibility to a design team. In this phase, prototyping tools must be easy to use and provide results quickly. Obvious examples of these are Axure, Balsamic and Omnigraffle.

Customer journeys

As mentioned in the previous step, the creation of customer journeys has several short-term advantages.

• Visible result: A poster depicting a customer journey provides an overview of the “journey” customers make through the service.
• Awareness: With a service design workshop, an employee gets familiar with designing outside-in. During the design of services and processes in the backstage, the customer process is the starting point.
• Improvements: During the workshop, required improvements are identified, including so-called “quick wins” which can be implemented in the short term.
• Enthusiasm: Journeys are often created in workshops in conjunction with representatives from the client. Awareness, cooperation and enthusiasm about such a new way of working are generated, which is then communicated to others as well.
• Networking: During service design workshops, employees get acquainted with each other and exchange their contact details.

“Identify those projects that are strategically important and where the user experience is in the critical path to succes.” (From “User Experience Management” by Arnie Lund)

Be in the position to select your own projects, then pick those in which you can be successful and those which are important and visible. Consider the following in the project selection:

1. Strategic value and impact: How important is the project for the organization? And what’s the importance of design in the project, so the designer can make a difference?
2. Low/High risk: How complex is the project? Are there many/few uncertainties and stress factors involved? Is there a real chance that the designer will be blamed when things go wrong? Or is there a chance that the designer gets all the credits because design appears to be the success factor.
3. Beginning or end in the design process: When you are involved? At the beginning of the process, you will have more influence than at the end of the process when you can only do a usability test, for example. And of course, hoping there are enough resources available to fix major flaws.
4. Showcase for a large audience: How many are going to see or use the end result? Does the project focus on a primary channel or a secondary channel of the organization?
5. Small things for stakeholders: It can be strategically important to get involved in a low-impact project to get an important stakeholder on board. See for example the end of this post.
6. Quickly-visible results: In cases when the final results take quite some time, how can you get intermediary results and make them visible? Advice: When you’re dependent on a release process, select short releases with quickly-visible results.

A basic principle of change is to avoid doing many things in parallel. This applies to both the change agent and the people involved in the change. It implies finding short term successes, looking for “low hanging fruit”, “quick wins” and “quick fixes”. But definitely those which are relevant for the customer/employee.

Persona-based prioritising In their article, Sato and Paton describe a tool to identify relevant improvements. It’s a matrix, plotting functions or projects against customer relevance (Y-axis) and business relevance (X-axis). All items positioned above the threshold (the dotted line) are promising enough to take on board.

Pruitt and Grudin introduce a similar approach in their paper “Personas: Practice and Theory.

Achieving short term successes implies you celebrate them as successes and celebration brings exposure within the organization. In general, designers are not easily satisfied and rather modest. They might even forget to claim and celebrate their successes. Claim your fame! Two examples:

Timesheet system In his book, Arnie Lund describes the example of the UX design of a timesheet system. Because everybody uses this system weekly to administer their working hours, this is an ideal showcase with a large reach.

Important small things Kotter provides an example of a small but important thing to create support. An important stakeholder wasn’t immediately in favor of user-centered design, but just complained about the fact that many of his staff spent hours and hours completing all kinds of forms. The change management team allowed him to redesign the forms. In this way, the stakeholder and his staff became strong proponents of the UCD approach.