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"We all know the business case for doing user experience (UX) work: Investing upfront in making products easy to use really pays off. It reduces project risk, cost, and time while improving, efficiency, effectiveness, and end user satisfaction.\n(Don\u2019t know the business case? Read this or this. Or this.) But what if you\u2019re investing in UX and not getting results?\nThere can be many factors behind an under-performing user experience effort. First, rule out the obvious: Your UX folks are jerks, they don\u2019t communicate well, they don\u2019t understand business, they aren\u2019t team players, they have such terrible body odor people stay 10 feet away \u2026\nNext, look at your organization. The following list is based on observations accumulated over my years as a UX professional. These are some common organizational \u201Cbehavior\u201D patterns that can make even the best UX efforts ineffective.\n1. You Hired the Wrong People\nUser experience design is getting a lot of attention lately, and UX is a buzzword many want to add to their resumes. But the field has been around for several years (although under different names) and is fairly mature. Until a person has done full-time UX work\u2014not as an aspect of their job, but as their job\u2014for at least two or three years, they are generally not at a professional level.\nHow to spot a UX pro:\n\nHe displays a high level of empathy, excellent communication skills and lots of curiosity.\nShe doesn\u2019t design based on personal preference or opinion, and will try to make sure you don\u2019t either. She bases her design decisions on user research, heuristics, test data and UI design patterns.\nHe is not attached to his designs. In fact, he starts with sketches and wireframes and happily crumples up multiple iterations before progressing to a detailed level of design.\nShe starts with concept, structure, and information design before progressing to interaction and visual design. If the first thing she shows you looks like it could be the final product, she\u2019s probably not a UX pro.\nHe is very interested in measurable success metrics and uses them to drive design direction and test protocol. If he speaks of making something easy, but can\u2019t say how he\u2019ll measure how easy it is, he\u2019s not a UX pro.\n\n2. You\u2019re Not Letting the Right People Do Their Jobs\nYou\u2019ve kicked off a solid UX pro or team and an exciting project \u2014 that's great! But sometimes the very organization that values UX and hires us to do UX work is also the biggest impediment to a UX team\u2019s success. Here are some rules of engagement that will enable UX teams to do their best work.\n\nThey really do need to talk with and observe end-users before the design is finished. This is the underpinning of what UX does. Give them reasonable and timely access to end-users.\nDon\u2019t provide subject-matter experts in place of users. Your team will tell you they\u2019re not appropriate substitutes, and they will be right.\nGive designers the authority (within technical constraints) on design decisions and researchers authority on test protocol and data interpretation.\nNever design by committee. It\u2019s a quick way to degrade a design.\nYou\u2019ve hired your team to make a successful product. Be ready to make design changes\u2014sometimes big ones\u2014following user research and usability testing. The more usability recommendations are declined, the poorer quality the product\u2019s user experience will be.\nDon\u2019t nibble the design to death. Making a series of minor changes here and there, or picking and choosing which aspects of a design to keep or omit almost always creates new usability issues.\nClearly define roles and responsibilities for all team members at the beginning of project work.\n\n3. UX Work Is Done in a Silo\nUser experience work touches almost every aspect of an application or web project. Your UX resources will need regular check-ins with a multi-disciplinary team. At the very least, a development resource must be available to vet designs for technical feasibility and a business resource needs to make sure you\u2019re aligned with their goals.\nThe risk of not having a technical resource aware of the design direction from the beginning is that time gets wasted working on a design that the coders can\u2019t build. The risk of not having a business resource communicating with the UX team is that your design will not meet business needs, making it a waste of time and effort.\nSEE ALSO: Breaking Down Silos\n\nEven with a UX team ultimately responsible for designing your product, many other groups contribute to the final user experience. Establishing a shared vision across all the groups involved in a project encourages effective teamwork\u2014a coordinated effort is far more likely to lead to a great design.\n4. The UX Team Is Brought in Too Late\nTragically, many people view UX work as something that is done after coding to \u201Cmake it look good.\u201D They couldn\u2019t be more wrong. We not-so-secretly call this \u201Cputting lipstick on a pig.\"\nThe best time to bring in your UX team is at the initiation phase of the project lifecycle. The role of UX at this stage is to help define requirements and structural design based on user needs. This is where we have the biggest impact.\nBecause user experience pros follow a methodology called user-centered design, they need to stay consistently ahead of the development team. For product design to be user-centered, the design should be iterated and validated before it\u2019s coded.\nHave you observed other reasons UX teams might fall short? Please share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments below.\nPhoto courtesy of Flickr, juhansonin"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/01/28/user-experience-investment/>