Empower others to act - UX & change management (6/10)

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

Working in organizations, designers often meet resistance. Resistance is a natural reaction to change. It’s a challenge in itself to see resistance as a type of energy which can be mobilized positively. Because often behind resistance there’s a fear or a wish. You can start working towards a win-win solution by having conversations with people who resist and formulating their underlying wish, worry or interest.

Weerstand in kaart gebracht

I’ll address a few obstacles designers frequently encounter and their related possible win-win solutions.

An important obstacle towards a seamless customer experience are the silos of the organization. Although various departments perform their individual tasks, they are often aligned insufficiently. Customers are directed from desk to desk. Even the UX team of a large organization may experience this situation.

“Organizations were not designed to listen, adapt and respond. They were designed to create a ceaseless, one-way flow of material goods and information.” (From “Everything is a Service” by Dave Gray)

The role designers can play is to facilitate co-creation and collaboration. When different departments cooperate during workshops, they become unified towards a mutual goal and relations and shared knowledge emerge. Service design workshops creating deliverables like user journeys, service ecologies and personas are well-suited activities.

“Amongst all the service design-related activities that we carry out, workshops have proven to be the most successful tool in supporting the organizational change that the UWV is undergoing.” (From: “Overcoming the ‘Monkeysphere’ Challenge“, Mark Fonds and Jesse Grimes 2012)

Another quality of designers is their ability to create an universal language everybody understands. Various departments or disciplines within an organization often have a kind of “Venus versus Mars” confusion. Each uses a different language, writes down things differently, while meaning the same. Or they rely too much on written documents, like policy statements or lists of functional requirements, which are then interpreted differently by all. The success of a newly-designed service relies heavily on multidisciplinary teamwork. Collaboration emerges with the introduction of a visual language (e.g. sketches, visual designs, or prototypes), leading to a common understanding of the situation. With such a language, the UX team can build bridges between Business, Marketing, and Technology.

A familiar type of resistance for UX designers is: “We’re the designers, not you.” For example: A technology department creates functional designs and intends to continue this activity.

What’s the wish or fear behind this? “It must be done right.” Or, “It has to be done like we do it.” Or, “If I’m not careful, the UX department takes over my work, making me redundant.” The interests are clear: they want to do it appropriately and they want to do it themselves. A win-win solution could be providing the Technology department UX design tools which will bring their work to the next stage.

Imagine this scenario: Designers have created a new kind of e-service delivery, a vision for the next couple of years. It’s a self-service concept and the client participates in co-creation. Employees noticing the vision instinctively feel they will do less in the future. They fear they may lose their jobs. They can also do other things, but this is their primary reaction. Often, designers are the messengers of the vision and experience resistance, caused by the “shoot the messenger” reaction of employees.

Designers wonder if their designs were good enough…

When communicating the vision and strategy, it’s important to pay attention to organizational aspects and to provide security for the employees futures. Without going into the detail, employees can be prepared for a re-organization or re-training. Be as honest as possible, it’s all about credibility.

“Dear designer, you aren’t going to make a prototype, are you?” “Well, I was planning to do so. Why?” “It seems a little dangerous, though.” “What do you mean?” “Then people think, this how it’s going to be.” “Yes, so? That’s the intention, isn’t it?” “Yes, but then we have to make sure it also becomes a reality.”

Concreteness creates expectations with employees. Expectations which need to become reality. Concreteness means a client or policymaker needs to make decisions – decisions favorably being postponed as long as possible in order to make no mistakes.

What’s the underlying wish? A guarantee that what will be designed will be actually built. And flexibility, to repair possible mistakes or recall not-so-good decisions.

Through hifi-prototyping, well-balanced decisions can be made when things still can be modified. And if the hifi-prototype is based upon a strong relationship with the underlying technology architecture, then there is a stronger guarantee that what’s designed will be built.

Or, as Lund puts it: “The biggest barrier to design and deliver user experiences is when the design does not quite make it into what is being built. (…) Architecture is a powerful place for user experiences to be located.” (Lund, p. 76)

The table below show the various types of resistance and what you can do about it.

Weerstandstabel

Imagine employees want to subscribe to the vision, but they cannot do that immediately, then it is important to provide the employees with simple tools with which they can jump on the bandwagon with a feeling of shared ownership.

Semi-finished products and tools everybody can use successfully

Lund described how within Microsoft (his employer) research showed that the most appreciated and popular results made by the UX team were not their great designs, but documents like Common User Requirements and Human Interface Guidelines. The first being a set of requirements a project manager, developer and tester could use to scope, design and test. The latter being visual tools and design patterns for user inteface design.

“The goal is not just to focus on what the UX team does for projects , but rather provide a user-centered perspective that any team can use.” (From “User Experience Management” by Arnie Lund)

A mindshift: From product to employee

Creating tools for employees is a change of focus for the designer. Mostly, the designer focuses on designing tasks within the framework of the project with a focus on the artefact, a website or product. Their new focus is the colleague: the creation of a framework, a user-centred perspective, with which as many can work with and learn how to work in a user-centered fashion.

*“Rather than imposing rules on teams that don’t understand how they will help, customer experience professionals should lead a coordinated effort to gain consensus within the organization for a set of standards to which all digital channels should conform. These standards should encompass usability and compliance issues as well as how the brand is represented. Once there is a broad agreement on standards, customer experience teams should develop sets of templates and reusable assets that make it easy for stakeholders throughout the company to raise the quality of the digital channels for which they’re responsible while still having freedom to introduce content and functionality that supports their goals.” *(“Digital Customer Experience Improvement Requires a Systematic Approach”, Forrester Research 2012)

Training for all

Besides providing tools, delivering training facilities is important to allow people to follow the vision. Lund aims at developing the design skills of employees. This may be threatening for UX experts, because they may become redundant.

*“If non-UX people grow their skills, will they conclude that UX is no longer needed?” (From “User Experience Management” by Arnie Lund)

Lund concludes that when UX knowledge grows, the conviction grows that a compelling user experience can only be the work of specialists. In fact, by providing a training one makes the employee incompetent.

In cooperation with the educational department, Lund created a package containing an appropriate training for every employee. Inspired by his list of courses, I’ll provide a few examples of courses for different employees at different levels.

A cooperation between the UX team and the training department is not obvious, but it’s of vital importance to succeed with the mission of “raising the design IQ of an organization”.

Service design deliverables During a service design project for a governmental institution, we created personas. They were immediately printed by employees, put on the walls of their meeting room and frequently used during brainstorm sessions.

Besides the personas, we developed building blocks to be used by teams to ideate new services, such as

• Service essentials: key characteristics to be applied to all services
• Service ecology: A holistic overview of all possible services, connected to the customer needs

Masterclasses For a governmental institution, we developed a so-called Masterclass Workshop Kit, with which employees could design e-services with service design methods themselves.

Masterclass instructiekaart

Living personas for all employees At the MX 2010 Conference, Peter Merholz (then Adaptive Path) showed how he developed personas on paper for a bank. The bank brought these personas to life with real actors, which resulted in personas on film. These video clips could be used by anyone in the organization to learn to work in a more customer-focused manner. Visualization and emotion being key again!

Living requirements In the Total Customer Experience Program of Sato, a consultant made a video interview with the client on each and every requirement. These interviews were instrumental convincing employees, because they appealed to both the emotional as the rational aspect of people. “They proved a real breakthrough in facilitating change.” (Sato 2011, p.00)