How to discuss experience design and not sound like an arrogant arse
UX Methodologies are now Experience Practices
Restructuring our speech to be more inclusive and less technical, complicated and filled with jargon can go a long way. In this next series of articles, I’d like to explore how we could approach changing our talk from methodologies to more human terms with our teams.
The point of this article is not to teach you how to do each of these practices, but to change how we talk about them and to whom we talk about them with. In a previous article, I talked about how to reduce the rejection and stress levels in your life by changing your approach to UX design to a more Human design (HX). This included changing from “UX” and “Design” language to “Human” and “Experience” language.
This focus makes us more approachable and inclusive in our design work. We can still talk about the methodologies to each other as we push the maturity of our industry into the future, but we need to start translating or employing a conversion or connector when talking with our teams. Talking in highly technical terms confuses, alienates and excludes the teams that we are striving to be part of.
So again, the purpose here is to make a switch in our brains as to how we talk about various UX methodologies or Experience Practices. We can drop the ketchup bottles and courtyard paths when we try to explain to everyone what UX is- and leave the “methodologies” to rocket scientists. We’re just going to work on the “experiences” we’re creating for our customers and “practice” how we do them to get better as a team.
Before we start, these words and phrases are not magical, canonical or holy. In fact take them, and change them, as the immortal Paula Abdul was so fond of saying, “Make them your own!” The point I’m trying to get across is that many times our approach as UX professionals is not compatible with the engineering efforts going on in many companies. If you are the exception, wonderful. I’d love to hear how you did it. In the mean-time, this is my effort to make sense of it to myself and to those I work with. Hopefully it may bring a new approach to how you’re helping your team design experiences.
For most people, however, the analogy that I’ve heard that makes so much sense is that we (UX and the rest of the org) tend to come at things like two male plugs that don’t quite connect. We need someone to act as a connector, translator or conversion device. You know, like one of those Swiss Army knife contraptions you use when you travel abroad that pops out the multi-shaped prongs for different electrical standards. Imagine if we had some type of converter that translated our thinking and speech from a male plug to a male plug when doing experience design. You can be the translation device, — the piece in the middle of the teams that brings everything together to make it work harmoniously.
Trigger Words
Something that may be helpful is to listen to yourself for trigger words. In the past you may say, “user”, “UX design” or “UX” a lot to refer to the people or teams doing design. As part of the translation you can start to think about substituting these words. Customer instead of User, Experience Design instead of UX Design and team instead of UX. These are just a few of the words you can use in your mind and conversation to start changing how design is done in your organization. This will help you reduce your feelings of rejection and stress levels.
Consumer Journey Map Becomes Customer Experience Map
A consumer or customer Journey Map is a diagram that explores multiple steps taken by customers as they interact with the various channels and services of your organization. It allows you to have empathy with a customer’s motivations and needs along each step of their interaction (experience) and design experiences that are needed for each step.
This is simply the process a customer goes through when they initially are introduced to your organization and all the places where they can interact with another human being, computer or other technology. This can be your website, mobile apps, customer service, brick and mortar stores, product shipping, returns, IoT, etc.
These are usually associated with a persona which we’ll call a role. It can be very useful as it allows you to see what the current experience is, test to set priority of areas to change and then focus on areas to improve the experience.
A great example of the value of a map is when a designer asked our team last week, if everyone could help him understand how the features they’re working on would interact with our notification process. I pulled out our journey maps, walked the process though of all the spots where a notification may have triggered interaction with a customer.
The main point is that we change consumer to customer as who know’s what a consumer is and that journey changes to experience because it better describes what is happening. Our customers are interacting with our customer success agents and having experiences. They are interacting with our websites and mobile apps and having experiences. You wouldn’t hear a customer in a store or online say, “I’m about to start a journey to interact with the company called Nike.” It’s much more common for people to talk about their good or bad “experiences” with someone in a call center or with ordering on line. This is our natural language and we all understand what these terms mean.
Your Challenge
Whether you’re involved in creating a Customer/Consumer Journey Map right now, or validating them or using them to explore a new/existing feature. Have this conversation with your team, both your UX team and your feature teams. Talk about how you could change the wording and approach of exercise or findings to be more inclusive in gathering the data and understanding it. How can you reframe the conversation so that everyone understands what the goal is (to get a better understanding of the customers experiences) and how you will use that information going forward (prioritizing experiences that need attention or walking through the maps to provide insight into existing/new features that you’re designing).
Next Up: Personas
Personas are Now Called Roles
I’ve heard personas described as, “A relatable snapshot of the target audience that highlights demographics, behaviors, needs and motivations through the creation of a fictional character. Personas make it easier for designers to create empathy with consumers throughout the design process.”
This is from a foundational work originally appearing in Medium from the UX Collective on UX Design Methods & Deliverables. My intent is not to disparage anything they provided as it’s vital that we have an understanding of the work described here. My goal is to build on this and provide the translational layer for discussion around how to communicate these methodologies or activities/practices to a larger, more inclusive group.
I think it’s important that we’re able to speak both languages, the technical terms to advance the rigor around the science of experience design as well as the more approachable common terminology to communicate effectively to the larger group we work with.
A good analogy might be a medical doctor. When choosing someone to perform a double bi-pass heart surgery for your loved one you want someone who can both speak intelligently with the correct technical terms to the medical staff, as well as someone who can explain just what is going to happen during the surgery. You expect or at least hope that the doctor is mature enough to be the translator and communicate effectively with both groups.
Articles in this series
This series seeks to reexamine the approach and vocabulary of UX design methodologies and translate them into experience practices (minus the UX and design terms) that help us to be more inclusive, align with our teams better and interact with the full spectrum of humans as we design experiences.
How to discuss experience design and not sound like an arrogant arse
Sometimes we struggle connecting with our teams and it may just be our approach and interaction.
Personas are now called “Experience Roles”
Personas really look at the hats or roles that people play and the things they do that make them different from others.
Taxonomies are now “Experience Organizations”
In life, it’s important to learn how to organize things. Let’s look at how we can do this with our teams.
Is HX simply about doing UX right, or is it more?
Human experience design is a more holistic approach to experience design.
How co-designing can reduce your rejection and stress levels
You’re not a magician, cowboy, ninja or superhero; stop trying to be one.
