Why a Serious User Experience Design Practice Needs an Executive Champion

Jan 7, 2014

📄 Contents

␡

The Value of Usability
Beyond Classic Usability
CEO Wants a Great Customer Experience: Now Don't Fall for UX Fads or Half-measures
Who Can Be a Champion?
The Role of the Executive Champion
Keep Moving on the Strategy, Keep Expanding and Innovating

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This chapter is from the book 

Institutionalization of UX: A Step-by-Step Guide to a User Experience Practice, 2nd Edition

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Keep Moving on the Strategy, Keep Expanding and Innovating

To be successful, executive champions cannot just avert problems and maintain the user experience design operation. Instead, they must find new methods, create new ways of working, and make new markets and business models. If they do not engage in innovation, they are caretakers, rather than executives.

Why Support from Senior Management Is Crucial

Harley Manning, Research Director, Forrester Research

The person at the top of the organization must believe that user experience is important and must require people to follow good practices. Unless that person is committed to this idea, good usability is not going to happen.

The companies that really get it tend to have C-level people who care deeply, like Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab himself, the guy who runs the company, uses the site every day. The woman who headed up the site design came to a workshop I ran a few years ago. She said that Schwab called down on a pretty much daily basis. Certainly, she didn’t go a week without hearing directly from him about some problem that he or his mother or his friend had with the site or about something he thought could be better. So this guy is very engaged, very demanding. And the site works as well as it does because, from the top down, it’s critically important that the site deliver a great user experience.

We come back to this time and again—the executives must understand the importance of the user experience to the business. Because no executives will put up their hands and say, “Let’s do something that’s bad for business” or “Let’s do something that hurts our customers”—they won’t do that on purpose. When they do those things, they do them out of ignorance.

You don’t get widespread attention to user experience unless its importance is understood at the top. That’s where the leverage is.

The executive helps to expand user experience design throughout the organization. Creating usable software can be essential to many different groups in the organization, or it may be the only way to keep up with the competition. Usability can save millions of dollars when there are large numbers of internal users. For example, the usability team at Sun Microsystems estimated that poor design of the company intranet cost the average employee 6 minutes per day, for a total of $10 million in lost time per year [Ward 2001]. A single second removed from the average call-handling time can be worth $50,000 per year or more in large call centers. With an application that has a large number of users, even benefits from small improvements can add up fast (Figures 1-3 and 1-4). It is no accident that the term “usability” is commonly discussed in executive suites now. Once the executive champion determines the specific value of usability to the organization, he or she must spread the word and keep people focused on the goal.

Figure 1-3: Chart showing increased lead generation from a mutual fund and an insurance site reworked by an HFI user experience design team.

Figure 1-4: Chart showing customers shifting from expensive human-intermediated channels to online self-service from an insurance site reworked by an HFI user experience design team.

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