The Business Case for UX

I’ve been fortunate to have worked alongside mentors in the past that ran their own businesses after graduating from their respective majors in college. Yet, over the past 5 years, many mentees have come to me they too with Masters degrees in hand, with the fear of business. Part of it has to do with perceiving business as transactional, unethical, and parasitic. Perhaps due to an unfortunate event in their past. However, businesses that are too charitable rarely survive because they have to stay profitable to thrive.

Businesses on the other hand, can make a lot of headway just by focusing on engineering and accounting. Therefore, design is not exactly a huge priority on their mind. Sometimes designers come in and accidentally make things worse in the short-term for businesses. Then those businesses too give designers a bad reputation. They feel as thought the designer just does whatever they want, and doesn’t listen. Well, I’m here to say it doesn’t have to be this way.

During my 17 years as a design, I’ve spent the last 7 years running my own self-employed business Great2BNate LLC. As a result, I’ve had to make hard choices as a business owner. I’ve contracted designers in the past as well, and this gave me a test of my own medicine. My mentor Chris Do at The Futur has taught me a lot about overcoming objections, and redesigning my own design process. It all begins with sales.

Yet, many of the UX Designers I’ve mentored or taught over the past 5 years, have been shy when it comes to business. A recent survey I ran on my email newsletter, also showed that business is an area of them self-describing they know the least. Therefore, I thought I’d share a bit about the business of UX here on my blog at Great2BNate.com.

UX Design really started to take off in popularity coinciding with mobile phones. For me it was 2011. Yet, the actual practice dates back much further. Many enterprises in the late 80s and early 90s were already catching on to UX, they just called it something else. XeroX is a popular case study on the topic. Apple probably did more than any company to legitimize the business case for UX. Although, many companies look up to Apple, few have the stomach to make design decisions the way Apple does.

UX Design to me is this mix of psychology, human-computer interaction, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and more. Many of my mentees come purely thinking it’s just aesthetic visual design and that their graphic art background will easily migrate over. Well, perhaps in terms of hard skills yes, but the world of UX is very different.

There’s a similarity between UX and Business in terms of recruiting users manually to get a project or business off the ground and running. Many businesses don’t even need a website to begin. They just need to go door to door, or pick up the phone and perform cold outreach. This is just sales 101. UX Designers must recruit users and screen them so they test the right individuals. This ensures the quality of the data they collect is contextual and applicable to business needs. This is performing research through design. SO, you see the two have much in common, but there’s a language barrier between them.

UX values humanity above all else, even business. Where as, business sometimes values profit over everything else. Perhaps because of greed, but more often than not, business owners are keeping the business going for their own families. A seasoned senior UX Designer knows how to balance what can seem like two counter objectives.

Today, the majority of prospective customers interact with business via their mobile phones, yet existing customers migrate to a companies desktop/laptop interface because they see it as a staple of their day to day job or life.

When looking at reactive data from analytics platforms like Google, business owners feel comfortable because it resembles hard math much like Wall Street stock exchanges and accounting software. Yet, the UX brings a benefit. They can help build a more holistic view of the business and market by being proactive rather than reactive. They do this by recruiting prospective customers manually and testing them on early prototypes along the way. Guaging their satisfaction with survey questions like the Likert Scale in the SEQ (Single Ease Question.) Advanced UX Designers know they need to run statistics to help translate that into business language, but many UX Designers have not been exposed to statistics in this way and so fail to make the argument. When business are stuck in reactive state of the market, they make decisions based on old data. Yet, when they see both the qualitative proactive data and the quantitative reactive data they can make better holistic decisions for their business strategy.

“For every $1 you spend on UX is $100 ROI in the market.” — Is this Eric Ries Author of The Lean Startup? I think so…

Nevertheless, UX can help business get a jump start on collecting data and make waves in the market sooner rather than later via usability testing or research through design. Businesses can help UX Designers by treating design as another investment rather than expense. This is because hourly wage incentivizes the designer to take as long as possible on said project; where as, a project budget split into stage gate payments permits the best designers to do their work in record time. This is good for both business and designers. More on that topic in the book Value Based Fees by Andrew Weiss I believe the author’s name is.

In my experience I was surprised when conducting usability testing at a Starbucks between 2013-2016 as lead UX Designer at Apliiq, Inc based in downtown LA. When I came upon a user tester that was a coach. During the test, he tried to checkout in bulk and couldn’t. Our team then changed trajectory and objective to focus on bulk checkout. Doing so resulted in average orders increasing from $100 per order to $1000 per order! That’s a 900% increase! So, although aesthetics does help to increase the perception of a usable and premium business offering in which the business yes can charge their customers more, design is not just that alone. As Steve Jobs once said,

“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs

I tend to agree with this sentiment, especially when it comes to UX Design, because we often have to redesign a service or digital experience from the users point of view to add value to the business. It’s up to the designer in this case to use sales tactics, because I believe every design process truly starts during the sales process. Otherwise, the clients are set aback by the domino effect of agile or lean that comes thereafter.

When UX Design is about measuring the human reaction to a business/service/ product then business can reimagine design not as a veneer on the exterior of their product/service offering but design as the root underpinnings. This is where the UX Designer is best suited for utilizing a service model blueprint to both understand their clients business and communicate to them areas that need automation or digital reformation. By breaking big visionary projects down into little bite size chunks, businesses and UX Designers can work hand in glove to provide exquisite user experiences to their customers.


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *