In the last 16 years of working with businesses digitally, I witnessed the ‘User Experience’ industry develop and learnt a thing or two about the building of digital products. A large part of this is because I have been lucky enough to work with a selection of hugely successful brands, superlative product owners, excellent digital designers, exceptional business analysts and extremely talented development teams plus I’ve also had the fortune to learn from the highly educated stakeholders, passionate business owners and highly driven C-Suites. Over the years I have learnt many UX techniques and methodologies either from my own research, courses, and investigations or from working with other outstanding UX practitioners and consultants from across the globe. Although there are a plethora of techniques and approaches to UX, the most important, particularly at the start of a project, for me, is to ‘listen’. It’s really as simple as that.
Listening, clearly, is extremely important in many facets of our lives with our partners, our children, our parents, our friends and even strangers. How quick we all are to bring to the table a solution. In the domain of digital products, it’s very easy to ‘solutionise’, and it’s completely understandable. We may think we can see the solution immediately, as we’ve been in a similar position to this before but forget quickly in haste that perhaps we haven’t attained the full picture yet. I see it happen in the building of digital products constantly, and at times are guilty of it myself. Certain environments may need a quick solution when projects are over budget, deadlines brought forward or something unforeseen enters the picture, but we must still try to take the time to listen.
I have worked on highly complex projects where for the first month I did nothing but listen to different stakeholders and employees in the company, just asking questions and shadowing, learning, and taking notes to understand the full picture. Everyone had something to offer, some little nugget that added to the overall discovery period which contributed to the development and understanding of the user and business goals of the project.
It may seem obvious to say one should listen, but you would be surprised that before the requirements, needs and goals have been discussed and established teams are already solutionising. In a sense, as I said before, I think it’s quite natural. Personally, I like to go out of my way to meet everyone I can and hear their thoughts. It’s quite often you will find an employee who has been in the company for years, 10, 15 maybe 20 and has built up an extensive wealth of knowledge and will be able provide answers for a multitude of questions related to the business, why the business or marketing decision were made in the past and what the outcome was. Find these people, they will make improve your chances of creating a better product and save you from repeating ideas or mistakes made before you were hired.
But it’s not just on the business side that we need to listen, we also need to listen to the users, essentially the most important voices for the products we are building. From simple interviews to A/B tests to intensive workshops the users will deliver the gold. We just need to listen and put forth the correct questions to encourage and hear the customers/users speak.
Another example of the need to listen I have witnessed is when teams particularly in huge businesses find themselves working in silo. This in nothing uncommon but it can have a deleterious effect to goals on a road map or to one another particularly when teams all have requirements that conflict, and someone in UX is trying to please all parties which clearly is going to be impossible. I have been in this situation many times unfortunately which has led me to arranging meetings, inviting all parties and asking each participant to stand up and elucidate on what they were currently building while everybody ‘listens’. It’s surprising at how well it is received once a broader understanding is achieved.
I think, as a UX consultant/practitioner you can learn all the UX techniques and methodologies available but if you don’t listen and think you know what the answer is beforehand you are heading for trouble, will inherit technical debt and products that don’t serve user or business needs.
Just ask your partner, closest friend, or a work colleague what they think… And listen!