Reframe user experience challenges as motivations: Advice from IBM

User experience design practitioners face many challenges in seeing the value of their work through to implementation. It can be an overwhelming endeavor to effect the changes in organizational process necessary to overcome these challenges. Recently, we ran a workshop called Advancing UX in Your Organization at Fluxible 2013 in Kitchener, Ontario to start participants on a journey of identifying areas for potential change in their own work environments and consider ways to make that change happen.

Partnering to present the workshop, we drew from our unique experiences as a UXD practitioner and a software engineer at IBM to communicate the ways in which we have changed our practices for the better and started our own journey to improve the outcomes for the products we work on. The heart of our challenges was the need for more cross-functional collaboration, for example, making collaborative design sessions a part of our team’s weekly cadence in order to share goals, vision and outcomes. The focus of the workshop, however, was not about what we have done, but rather what the participants of the workshop could do to improve their own situations and see more success in getting their designs through. Our experiences served as a template to demonstrate how others can think about their context and frame the challenges they face in a way that inspires cultural change.

Related: Full coverage of Fluxible 2013

We started the journey of discovery by having participants consider what might motivate them to take action. By reframing their challenges as motivations, the focus moves from a list of obstacles to something more compelling and constructive – something that might drive them enough to take ownership or responsibility for improving in their environment. An example of a motivation often experienced by designers in engineering organizations is wasted time on design that does not see the light of day. If this is a chronic problem, the designers might be significantly motivated to find ways to improve the process of what gets created and how it gets into development. Bret Victor’s talk on Inventing on Principle is a wonderful inspiration for thinking of problems as motivations – indeed, he goes even farther to suggest these might lead to “finding a guiding principle for your work, something that is important and necessary and right, and using that to guide what you do.”

Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

After considering motivations, the participants had the opportunity to explore their work context, and how they individually operate within it, as a kind of map for identifying where and with whom the motivating obstacles lie.

Finally, participants explored some possible solutions to experiment with in addressing the challenges they encounter in their respective work contexts.

After taking the participants through our experiences and helping them reflect on their own motivations, contexts and potential solutions, we left them with a few parting thoughts to keep in mind as they work to drive improvements into their organizations:

1) Change takes time – a lot of time. It is not a matter of identifying problems and solving them overnight, but rather evolving processes and practices – reflecting and adjusting over time.

2) Relationships matter – both bottom-up and top-down. In order to get broad change in an organization, you need others to get on board. Buy-in from peers can help show the value of a new or revised approach, but support from leadership is how to increase the possibility of significant, even viral, change.

3) Small changes keep you motivated. Or as said by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson in their book Rework, “To keep your momentum and motivation up, get in the habit of accomplishing small victories along the way.” It’s worth taking pause regularly to consider those small victories.

If you would like to see the slides for the workshop, they are available on slideshare. They include summaries of the hands-on activities we covered, as well as highlights of our own motivations, context and solutions.