The real UX culture that can boost your business
The User Experience culture is the responsible approach that is followed by employees (designers and non-designers) to support the company in providing the most innovative and appropriate best practices for users, and solving design problems along with the competent design team.
Today I will only talk about the culture of digital UX design on the basis that the reader has a background in defining UX as a concept.
During the past years, we noticed rapid developments in the world of UX Design, and this happened for numerous reasons, the most important of which is the increased demand in using technology in people’s lives and depending on it in most of their daily transactions, which affected the development of user behavior and this also coincided with the development of tools, professional specialties, and various studies.
Accordingly, this enhanced the role the User Experience plays in supporting businesses by providing a better user experience, and thus the increase in user engagement rates and increase in conversion rates were significant.
All of this has created the need for creating a UX culture within businesses that provide services to users through various technology tools. Which, in turn, achieves the most benefit for achieving the business goals and increasing profits.
Therefore, creating a special User Experience culture within your company or project has become an urgent matter that you must understand for you to achieve the greatest level of customer satisfaction you need and at the lowest possible cost. But the important question is how to build the right culture to effectively support your business goals.
Let’s go back to the basics and then go into detail in this article.
Focus is one of the main reasons why startups succeed. That is because it supports the way to reach a specific goal. Flexibility is how you rearrange your priorities based on expected and unexpected variables. As for planning, it is the roadmap that is created based on business goals and strategies, and it is also the basis for the previous points.
Thereafter, we shall remind you about the balance that you must take into your consideration, which is important for directing work streams promptly towards achieving the best results and to maintain the continuity of properly building the product.
Today, I had to generally mention some of these basics because they are important to build a true UX culture that meets business interests and is responsible alongside the business team.
Simply thinking about providing best practices and design methods to users is not sufficient. We should rather always think about the business among its strategies and what currently suits them.
From here, we go back to the most important and first rule in User Experience strategy, which is how to link business goals with the user needs. And here, I want to add “at the appropriate time, with the lowest possible cost, and in a manner that meets the business needs.”
How to build a UX culture in your business environment?
1. Everyone has to understand what is the true interest of the product today, and this comes through repeated explanation and constant reminders of the business goals; what are the changes and challenges that are faced today, and where the problems occur. For example, if you have an e-commerce website and one of the problems is that you offer expensive prices, everyone has to know and think about not only reducing the price but also about what features can convince users of this price.
2. UX is not restricted to designers or product managers, but everyone should think and initiate solutions that may lead to increased user satisfaction or increased conversion rates. A lot of non-design personnel can initiate, verbally or through simple wireframe drawings, suggestions that can be tested. This is happening in many of the largest technology companies all around the world.
3. Explain the concept of user experience
Do not mix concepts. Urge your employees to read books and articles that explain the concept of User Experience in our life and in business and how it can be used in the right and appropriate way for users and companies.
4. Explain how the design process and its elements work
If you want someone to participate in a topic, they must be familiar with the basics of such a topic. Therefore, you must support this aspect by explaining how User Experience works during projects, what are the steps that are being worked on, and what are the priorities.
Also, you need to explain the different roles or disciplines that designers work in. For example, what is the difference between UI and UX, what is usability testing, where should we start applying it, and what are its benefits.
5. Everything is driven by a number
To apply this principle, you have to get product managers and designers to explain how they achieve their results and how they work on the conversion rate equation. Here, everyone can understand that measuring the improvement of User Experience is not by providing visual design or better flows, but through User Engagement rates and moving forward in determining user acceptance rates to products.
6. Hackathon Events
When you do this event from time to time, you allow everyone to share their ideas. This supports their design thinking process, and from here come questions, through which, ideas emerge. Some of these ideas could be interesting and experiment-worthy. For example, invite everyone to a competition within different teams to design the best search results page to increase the users’ conversion rates.
7. Everyone should try
It would be great if you have a product through which employees can live the experience as if they were active users. This will generate a greater understanding of what the users need, and then they can have ideas to share with the design team and the whole team.
8. Let employees be your partners
Most companies that adopt this approach try to partner with their employees by offering them annual stock shares as compensation. Similar appropriate compensation helps with employee retention and increases the employees’ sense of responsibility and the formation of work teams that know what should be done.
User Experience Culture Responsibilities
1. Everyone is responsible
When the developer works on a feature, testing and validating its functionality in all possible scenarios is a responsibility to build a successful User Experience, as well as when the development team provides a fast digital product that does not cause the user any delay in using the product.
The same applies to data analysts because accurate numbers greatly help understand user behavior and provide appropriate best practices to them.
2. Solve problems first
When we have features or products that are live, the priority for solving all problems comes on top of building any new feature, and we must make sure that the basis is working well because building a robust User Experience is nothing but consecutive steps that users take during their journey.
3. Putting costs in the right place
The real User Experience culture sense comes through a real understanding of the concept of User Experience, which was referred to at the beginning, so there must be a balance between the user needs and the business goals whose goals are within the definition of the concept. From here, care must be taken to provide what is just right without any extras or omissions, and of course within the business strategy, so that we have covered the needs of the user and achieved the business goals.
For example, there is no need to exhaust developers by requesting many aesthetic additions to the design if we are in the launch phase or we are in a stage where we want to try a new feature because all of this consumes the developer’s time and thus are additional costs that we can invest in other places.
4. Innovation is not restricted to anyone
Creative ideas do not come by chance but are the results of continuous and thorough thinking to solve a problem or satisfy urgent needs that must be taken care of. So the circle of thinking must be expanded and shared with everyone so that there is more exchange of information. Thus, challenges are generated, which in turn, produce more ideas.
5. Real opportunities with priority
If the user’s behavior and needs are fully understood, many details will emerge that can greatly affect the conversion rates. And then, the attention will be directed towards taking advantage of these details. However, the real opportunity comes from studying these details and prioritizing them in proportion to the interest of the business. For example, it is a good idea to categorize these details according to the timeframe in which they can be executed and the percentage expected to improve the User Experience benchmarks.
6. Think as a business
When employees share a common understanding of their business team responsibilities, they gain new knowledge that can be a reason for developing the scope of their specialization to be more effective in better serving the business goals. So it is great for you to work on planting this approach in employees.
Conclusion
The UX culture you build within your company has to be a mixture of business sense and design based on providing the best User Experience that your customers can have and fits with your changing strategies based on changes in markets, technology, and accumulations of experience in user behavior.
So employees should have the flexibility and a true understanding of all of that. This is the culture that greatly supports the business.
