IA Failure Panel

User Experience: “Our” Role in Massive Organizational Failure Peter Jones, Ph.D. Principal Consultant, Redesign Research

Jumping to Conclusion:  As UX/IA we play several roles: 1. User Advocate based on > Understanding 2. Design Lead > Competency 3. Project Advisor > Interconnectedness

 At various stages in project lifecycle, our roles, properly played, can prevent tragedy You could save the company, the product, or … BTW: The answer is: Influential, recursive, dialogic 2

What are Organizational Failures?  Depends who’s defining “failure!”  Organizations will rarely recognize as such. “When significant initiatives critical to organizational strategy fail to meet most or all of their stated goals.”

Such as >>> Flagship product fails in market Merger failures Disastrous business mistakes 3

Type of Organizational Failures Products, Poor market understanding, features, or just bad timing: New Coke, Newton, Boo.com

Projects: Failures of coordination & decision making Processes: Adopting wrong practice for need, or poor execution of known process People: Someone has to take the blame, right?

Organizations need resilience, should not be dependent on individuals to succeed 4

A Case Study There’s a large automotive company …  Spent years developing best practices  Planned a next generation system for managing the dealerships  Product evolved over tech changes, from NT client-server, to Web-based rich client  Development team sequestered from the rest of the company to “innovate” undisturbed  Kept the project secret from much of the company until ready to release 5

Organization / Management / Employees Strategic / Exec Management Product Management

Project

Process

People

Case Study – Automotive Systems

Software Development

Project A: New Dealer Management Project B: Auto Parts Pipeline

Product

Ongoing – people change roles

Project C: Dealer Intranet

Product A Released

UX / UI IA

5-6 years 1-2 years 1 year

Product B Released

Product C Released

8-12 months 2-4 months

Marketing

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4-8 months

Timeline

Product or Organization? Bottom line was – the product failed.  2 years after release, did not acquire share  Dealerships kept their old systems  The implied “best practices” in the UI were not adopted or desired by most dealers  New executive shut the product down.  Auto company wrote-off > $50M, stock soared  New user-centered design was initiated

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What’s the UX Role? Remember the diagram?  UX located “under” Development  Current best-processes were employed:  Dedicated UI designer  UI architecture reviews  Usability testing was performed: Project/product managers restricted scope of tests Testing restricted to UI interaction only Evaluated usability of each transaction: - Isolated, no assessment to current work context - “Not a problem” idea was to change work practices Impossible to interpret a failure from UX POV

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UX is Influential Organizations are complex, intertwined  Failure in one process will affect others  Organizations need resilience, should not be dependent on individuals to succeed  Not all decisions or dependencies are equal (Some have real leverage …) (Sometimes redundancy propagates the errors!)

Product design Design right product?  How does UX play early warning role?  Which UX methods sensitive to detection? 9

UX is a recursive process You get more than one chance to fail.  Practices are repeated & improved, structures.  But: Orgs are competitive, avoid learning  Learning: Single-loop (Fixing things) vs. Double-loop (systematic reflection) What’s our recourse?  How should UX recurse?  Where do we challenge points of failure?  How does UX / user knowledge help learning? 10

UX should be dialogic In the sense of:  Surrounding product, org, or methods issues with perspectives  Inspiring exchanges & inquiry into root causes & prescriptive change  Motivating progressive learning What’s our dialogue?  What are key points of dialogue in processes?  Do WE listen? How does our listening impact? 11

Summary questions Product design Design right product?  How does UX play early warning role?  Which UX methods sensitive to detection? What’s our recourse?  How should UX provide feedback in the org?  Where do we challenge points of failure?  How does UX / user knowledge help learning?

What’s our dialogue?  What are key points of dialogue in processes?  Do WE listen? How does our listening impact?

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