Macadamian Blog

Exposing your team… to your users!

A great blog article was sent to me by a fellow researcher regarding a way to improve the designs teams produce. The solution… more exposure hours. It was found that by exposing all team members to the design’s end users helped improve the final product.

Exposing team members to end users means participating in field visits and listening in on interviews and usability tests that help uncover user’s goals and objectives.

For a project I recently worked on, I conducted field visits and interviews with a number of users and user groups. Reporting on the findings to stakeholders that had not participated in the research activity led to some conflicts and discussions at design and product development meetings since they weren’t as familiar with certain ways their product was being used. Not connecting with their end users has lead their design to become more complex by the addition of features and capabilities so it was great to see that this first step had been taken and an importance placed on user experience (UX).

Let’s compare that scenario to another project. For this project, a number of stakeholders actively participated in observing design concept walkthroughs and therefore, were much more educated in the subtleties and nuances of users’ interactions with the design. Seeing the problems users were running into led to insights behind their potential causes and gave everyone new ideas for a better solution. When everyone has a chance to come up with solutions, it helps the core design team become aware of other influences to the design, which may not have been considered or mentioned previously.

One way that we expose stakeholders to end users is to invite them to (silently) observe usability test sessions; whether in-house or remote. This allows them to become familiar with the users’ needs and wants so that conversations don’t become a battle in the meeting room later. If time zones or schedules don’t permit stakeholders to sit in live for the sessions, we record every one of them so that they can still expose their team members to the research activity at a time that’s more convenient.

Currently, we’ve also been involving our developers in projects that aren’t UX-only projects. Our developers have either been encouraged by our UX team members to become familiar with the design’s end users or often, the developers have put “more UX-exposure” onto their yearly review. When developers see how people are experiencing the design, they can think about the implications from a technology standpoint. It also gives them a chance to become more knowledgeable so that when something has been created and a roadblock occurs, they know of reasonable alternatives to use. This enables the whole team to work better together.

Involving these groups sends a clear message of the importance of UX and I’m excited to see how this leads to greater experiences for our end users!