The Company of the Future: UX-driven?

At Caplin, we’ve taken a feather out of Google’s hat with our weekly Tech Talks. At Tech Talks one of our developers shares informative or inspirational videos, talks or gives a presentation on something tech-related. It’s a great platform for livening up the atmosphere in the development team as well as sparking discussion.

When I was offered a slot for my own UX Tech Talk the other day, I leapt at it. Working in a company where UX is outnumbered with a ratio of approximately 1 UXer:10 Developers, I wanted the opportunity to shake things up at work and throw some more UX-thinking into the mix. And I accomplished just that…

I managed to rope together around 25 people in my company, from Developers to UXers to Sales people and Marketing, even to the CEO. And the response to the video was surprisingly positive. Everyone agreed that we need to constantly grow as a company as shift our thinking to encompass more of what is the user’s perspective in the product. We are looking to continue expanding our user testing and research programme which is a huge win in my eyes. Working in financial UX can be quite challenging given the confidentiality of our clients and their customers, and the more access we can get to bankers, traders and stock brokers, the better. We are also going to be looking at ways we can make UX more of an Agile-friendly process, interlinking with the development of the products through various stages, rather than being a one-off design output at the initiation of projects.

Summary of the Video’s Key Points

Five Critical Moves to Making a Company More UX-focused

  1. No  quick wins  — Visual design and contextual help don’t necessarily equate to good UX. You need to change your organisation to be more UX-focused.
  2. Everyone plays – Everybody should have an opportunity to share every good idea they have regarding our products. Group brainstorming.
  3. Tools to think with – Represent our customers (research, interviews, personas)  so they are the focus in decision making (guide design decisions)
  4. Encourage fishing — Train your entire organisation to have a UX-mindset; listen to our customers passively and actively
  5. You still need pros on board – We need to work together to make UX part of our everyday culture, at every stage of development and release.

Steps to Making a More UX-focused Company

  • List all the known needs.
  • Identify the ones we must meet.
  • Gather every single good idea.
  • Everyone together can prioritise.
  • Everyone’s work is important.
  • Differentiate and clarify the competitive landscape.
  • Represent customer so they are the focus in decision-making.
  • Make principles that put customers first.
  • Change your company’s thinking.
  • Keep listening to your customers.

Overall I was very impressed with this video and its ability to speak to people of all levels in a company to the point that they are willing to welcome change into their environment. I highly recommend that you watch it and sharing it with your colleagues and perhaps you might get a similar response!

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