Institutionalisation and UX debt

INSTITUTIONALISATION AND UX DEBT

Emma Chittenden

Hi, I’m Emma from Nomensa. This is my presentation ‘Institutionalisation and UX debt’

from Interact London 2014.

UX has become seen as the key to solving complex problems and increasing revenue for organisations. However, most organisations still use it because it's fashionable and don’t always understand when and

where to use it – often resulting in long-term UX debt. I will be talking about how understanding what UX debt is

at an institutional level can reduce cost and risk.

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If you build it, they will come.

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Yet if you build it inappropriately, no matter how beautiful it is, they will probably stay away.

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JESSE JAMES GARRETT

So in this, the age of technology, information and data, we have found a solution - User Experience

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User experience has become so popular, everyone is doing it. Designers have suddenly become UX designers and the skills appear

everywhere.

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There is nothing new with this, 10 years ago, IT support went through the same kind of revolution.

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Businesses went from seeing it as a necessary evil to identifying it as essential to their business as the utilities that serviced their buildings. It became the thing many

built.

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UX is something a little less tangible, yet businesses are seeing how important it is to their survival in a digital

age.

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It means businesses have the opportunity to go back to the old days, when the shop owner knew customers by name. A relationship was established and

customers were treated accordingly.

“WE NEED TO DO UX!”

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Business leaders hear about UX or hear the results that it can deliver and this is what they say.

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The concept of UX becomes as fashionable as buying the latest must have gadget and it is seen as the saviour to a lot of

problems.

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In fact, this is where the businesses start to create a lot of their problems.

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About 17 years ago, I started out my career in IT. I worked for ICL. At the time, they were one of the largest IT outsource providers in the UK.

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They held a lot of government IT contracts. One in particular was a private finance initiative called Pathway.

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Pathway was intended as a solution to replace department of work and pensions benefit cheques with a card that would give claimants

access to their money via the Post Office.

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It was a massive project, it consumed resources like a coal fired power station. Yet do we see the effect pathway had today?

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No. It was yet another costly IT infrastructure project that failed to see the light of day.

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But why did it fail? The problem to the government was the cost. But what about the problems the users faced? This is where the UX debt

started

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It took another 10 years for the debt to be repaid, with the help of banks and the introduction of non-status bank accounts.

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS UX DEBT?

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Why should it matter?

The failure to understand what problem you are trying to solve

and failing to leverage your users to solve it.

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The current thinking is leveraged from technical debt. Your design decisions are being made at the expense of the user.

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Or put more simply, everything gets pushed to the mythical ‘phase 2’. So let’s take a look at a couple of UX debt examples

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Morrison’s are never very far from the press in the supermarket wars. Only recently they started offering online shopping.

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But in an age when all their major competitors have been offering online shopping for around a

decade - is it too late for them?

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Faced with low budget supermarkets eating into their revenue, they have launched a loyalty card

to help them try and compete. Sadly it’s ended in public embarrassment. Had they taken the time to talk to their customers a lot of this could have

been avoided.

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Like financial debt however, UX debt of this kind can end up resulting in a very serious problem. The kind that could cause a company to fail.

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UX debt is always going to be there at some level throughout an organisation. Even the best don’t always get it right. When Apple launched iOS7, all anyone complained about where some of the little details weren’t quite

perfect.

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The fact that Apple had completely redesigned an operating system UI in around 12 months was overlooked. However, Apple are able to launch a product onto the market

that’s 95% there. When their competitors try it however, they aren’t so lucky.

Anyone else need instructions to use it? In their desire to design for tablet users, the forgot their fundamental user base - corporate desktop users.

A USER INTERFACE IS LIKE A JOKE. IF

YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN IT,

IT’S NOT THAT GOOD.

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Of course, this inevitably what happens.

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The missing ingredient was of course re-added in an update. this was a little bit more embarrassing than what

Apple faced. It hasn’t caused the company to fail, but it has put a dent in their reputation.

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So when they announced Windows 10 last week… they had to swallow their pride and put it back. They’re repaying the

UX debt.

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So we’ve seen what happens when you make design decisions that impact on the experience of a product. These happen every day and nobody real thinks much of them, until something bad happens .

HOW DO WE AVOID IT?

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So I’ve talked a bit about what UX debt is, but how can we repay it, or better yet, avoid it?

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100%1%

We, at Nomensa work with the concept of UX maturity. We have come to understand that those businesses that lack a degree of UX maturity will often create a problem

they need to solve.

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The problem may have its roots in pleasing shareholders by increasing revenue for the business.

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The problem may be about copying a competitor.

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…or it may be about wanting their company to be like their competitors.

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For the most part, they will lack the maturity to listen to their customers. To get to the root of what the actual problem is, and

how they can solve it.

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After all, listening to customers could identify flaws in infrastructure that could be costly to change, what happens if it fails? I’d like to counter that, what happens if it doesn’t

fail…

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What happens if it succeeds?

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Of course, changing infrastructure or even culture in a business is costly and filled with challenges, but there are ways to make it

work. Virgin recently hosted a Google hangout with Tim Brown from IDEO & Eric Reis, the author

of the lean startup.

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ERIC REIS

In it, Reis said ‘I think that if you look that the way modern companies need to be built, we need a new blueprint to what a business needs to look like.’ All businesses

follow the same structure even modern tech companies

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“LET’S DO AGILE”,

OR… “LET’S DO

UX.”

I mean we’ve all seen this right, the guy at the top telling us we need to do something.

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WHY HOLD ON TO THE PAST?

So why are we clinging on so rigidly to the old ways of doing things, just because millions have done it

before, doesn’t mean it’s the right way.

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MARKETINGSALES DIGITAL

OPSI.T.HR

Let’s embrace a new way of thinking. Let’s stop seeing teams or business units as

silo’s where they are responsible for their own area.

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Let’s think about the people that generate money for us, the end user. Investigating their needs, understanding their problems.

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PROFIT LOYALTY

HAPPY

MONEY

Happy customers mean loyal customers. Loyal customers mean spending customers. Spending customers mean better profits and

better profits mean happy shareholders. Switching the traditional focus from ‘what should we do to make the shareholders happy’ will ironically,

make them happy.

HOW DO WE PAY BACK THE DEBT?

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What I’m talking about requires change, to many seems big and scary. We work with the concept of micro and macro, but I’ll let my colleague

Simon describe those in more detail later.

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Instead, I want to look how a small change can make a big difference.

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ATUL GWANDE

A surgeon and professor from Harvard, Atul Gawande was approached by the World Health Organisation and asked if he could help cut the

mortality rates attributed to surgery.

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He quickly realised that they couldn’t solve the problem using traditional methods, so he looked how high risk industries reduce risk, like sky scraper

builders & aviation industry.

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He found the one thing that they had in common, was check lists.

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This is the end result - a single piece of paper.

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LONDON, UKIFAKARA, TANZANIA

They introduced this document at nine hospitals globally, the USA, Canada, the UK, Africa, India, UAE, Philippines and New Zealand. After these hospitals adopted it, the complication rate fell by 35%. The

death rates fell by 47%.

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Let’s just take a moment to consider that. This piece of paper resulted in 47% less deaths either during or following a surgical

procedure at the hospitals where it was trialed.

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I think Atul Gawande sums it up very well, and in a way that we can all appreciate as UX practitioners, ‘As individual as we want

to be, complexity requires group success’

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“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you

might miss it…”

Finally, I just want to add a thought from the late, great John Hughes (by way of Ferris Beuller), a mantra we can all appreciate,

in stopping to look around, we can see that small changes can make a big difference.

THANK YOU

Emma Chittenden