Chapter 18: Creating a User-Centered Corporate Culture

Overview

Researching the users of your product is extremely important in making it more popular, more profitable, and more compelling. But companies make products, not user research teams. A company needs more than data about its users; it needs to be able to take that knowledge and act on it. Unless the benefits and techniques of user-centered design and research are ingrained in the processes, tools, and mind-set of the company, knowledge will do little to prevent problems.

A user-centered development process means making an overall shift in perspective from how products are made to how they are used. Development processes are focused on making a product, not satisfying needs. This is a major gap between how a company and their customers think about its products, a gap that's often revealed by user research. The difference between the capabilities of a product and the unsatisfied needs of the users reflects deficiencies in the development processes as much as in the product itself. This is where a solution that's based solely on research can fail. Merely knowing what the users need is often not enough to continue making products that people will want to use and that will serve the company's needs. For research to have a sustained impact on the customer experience, the whole organization needs to understand it, value it, and know how to act on it.

That's a hard sell. The benefits of a user-centered development process are seen as intangible and long term, as an abstract "nice to have" that can be written off when it's time to squeeze out a profitable quarter. But making a user-focused customer experience is not just a long-term strategy that may save a penny here or there; it is a vital short-term process that can create immediate value. Good user experience research takes both the user experience and the company's needs into account, creating a set of needs and constraints that make it more likely to produce a successful, and therefore profitable, product.

Unfortunately, this reticence is not unfounded. Creating an effective user-centered corporate culture is difficult. It's straightforward to have everyone agree in principle to make products "with the users' needs in mind," but it is undeniably difficult to create a development process that is steeped in an understanding of the user while still balancing the needs of the company. Creating a process by which the developers' perspectives are secondary to the users' at every point requires letting go of our innate preference for our own perspective. That's difficult and needs to be done carefully, introducing changes and justifying them at the same time.

Note

Karen Donoghue's book, Built for Use, covers the relationship between business goals, features, and the user experience, and many of her thoughts are directly related to the ideas in this chapter.