With the commoditization of hardware and software, organizations
have started to look to user experience design as their key
differentiator. In a recent Forrester study, 93 percent of
organizations see customer experience as a key strategic
differentiator. So, you are sure to be asked to make more usable
and compelling applications. But what do you do?
While CIOs are well prepared to deliver efficient and reliable
technological solutions, they generally have very little knowledge
of the user experience field. So, it’s likely that you
won’t be very effective. And we see CIOs floundering
worldwide. It is a bit painful.
What does NOT work….
- Giving lectures about how everyone must consider the
customer.
- Hiring a few customer experience professionals
- Hiring a customer experience vendor that is really just a
graphics company
- Hiring a customer experience vendor
- Hiring a LOT of customer experience vendors (that is even worse
than one)
- Designing it yourself
- Asking for a iPhone application, personalization, responsive
design or other new technology
What DOES work…
Recognize that there is no magic blue pill that makes a
successful user experience design practice. You need to:
- Be or assign an executive champion and full time manager of
customer centricity
- Find a vendor who can help guide the process and has a suite of
IP so you don’t have to reinvent methods, training,
standards, etc.
- Develop a UX strategy roadmap
- Put in place the infrastructure (methods, standards, knowledge
management, etc)
- Setup the organizational structure and staffing (with training
and certification)
Once this practice is set up, pay attention to the issue of
governance. Because that is the area that is likely to be a problem
once you are on the path to a mature practice in customer centered
design.
But, But…Isn’t there a role for customer experience
vendors? Customer experience is too important to your organization
to be entrusted to a vendor. And if you entrusted it to
multiple vendors, without a strong framework, you will get a set
of inconsistent and disjointed deliveries and very little
ability to reuse past research and design thinking.
With a mature internal practice you can harness external vendors
for supplemental support and facilities. But, you must have an
internal practice that is mature and industrial strength. That is
the global best practice. And most organizations are headed in that
direction.
- Dr Eric Schaffer is the founder and CEO of Human Factors
International, Inc. (HFI). In the last three decades, Dr Eric
Schaffer has become known as the visionary who recognized that
usability would be the driving force in the "Third Wave of the
Information Age," following both hardware and software as the
previous key differentiators.