Category Archives: user experience

management, user experience

Elpha: “Leading an effective design organization”

Elpha invited me to write about leading an effective design organization. Here’s what I had to say:

Leading a large organization is a hell of a job.

Sometimes it’s fun and exciting, like when you get to invest in a big project to imagine a new future for healthcare that’s built around the real-world needs of people no matter their socioeconomic status, ethnoracial identity, gender identity, or the intersection of those.

Sometimes it’s empowering, such as when you get to address pay disparities by ethnoracial identity and gender identity within your company.

And sometimes it’s infuriating, like when a peer executive writes off your entire organization’s work as “futzing about with pixels”.

Throughout my career, I’ve established brand-new teams in user experience and design, scaled teams, and led large global organizations. I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned about how to effectively lead a design organization as an executive.

What does it mean for a design org to be effective? To me, it means three things:

  1. The design org has a shared purpose and vision where everyone is empowered to do their best work, there is a lot of support for growth, and high performers are rewarded for their contributions.
  2. Our cross-functional partners know the value that design brings to the products and services that we create and grow, help us ensure that we’ve got what we need to do our work, and hold us accountable for delivering high-quality business results.
  3. We understand both the needs of our users as well as our business objectives and bring them together in a unique way that creates new value.

Each of these three points needs careful tending by the leader of the organization. A shared purpose and vision can feel like it’s been thrown aside, especially during times of uncertainty like our current economic climate. A change in leadership can result in new cross-functional partners who no longer understand the value of design or ensure that design has sufficient resources to be effective. As user needs and business objectives evolve, we have to understand that change and evolve alongside so that we can continue to create new value and not be left in the dust.

Getting all of this right is especially important, and can be especially hard, because design is one of the organizations within a company that has a higher-than-average number of people from historically-excluded backgrounds. We have more people of color, more LGBTQIA+ folks, and more women than many other organizations in a tech company. The diversity of the design team is one of our greatest strengths as we work to build products and services to meet everyone’s needs. However, we’re more likely to have the value of our work questioned or to have our leader under-leveled compared to the leaders of our cross-functional partners. We have to fight not only to have our seat at the table. I’ve learned that getting a seat at the table is only the first step: everything that follows is about using that seat effectively to meet business objectives, meet user goals, and be an effective advocate and ally for historically-excluded groups.

As a design executive, I rely on three things to help me see my way through all of this:

  1. Empathy. In addition to empathy for our users which is one of the most common traits and the best part about being in user experience, I extend my empathy to my cross-functional partners and fellow executives. By better understanding their perspectives, their needs, and their constraints, I’m better able to bring everyone along to reach better decisions.
  2. Love of my craft. I’ve been in user experience for over 20 years. I still love everything about it, from doing the early discovery work before we have product-market fit to understand what needs we must meet, to delivering a product and continuing to iterate on it to make it better meet those needs and whatever new needs emerge. As a leader, I get to create opportunities and remove roadblocks so that the folks who report to me have the space to love their craft and deliver their best results.
  3. Business acumen. By developing a deep understanding of our business environment and objectives, I can align the design org to the most important and most impactful work, partner effectively across the entire company, mitigate risk, and unlock new opportunities for innovation.
user experience

the decisions from user research

The most recent episode of the Awkward Silences podcast from User Interviews has a brilliant interview with Holly Hester-Reilly about common mistakes that are made when planning, conducting, analyzing, and sharing user research.

When she discussed planning user research, she talked about needing to understand what decisions would be driven by the user research. This point is one that I see researchers and people conducting research miss frequently.

Knowing what decisions will be made helps you frame your research well and ensure that you’re asking the right research questions. You can always go back to the decisions that need to be made to help you evaluate whether you’re using the right research methodology or you’re applying that methodology well.

Defining the decisions that will be made as a result of the research can be a powerful tool when a team is using research for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen teams become so risk-adverse that they want to test every single thing. I’ve also seen teams become so beholden to a process that they don’t know when or even how to deviate from it. In those cases, defining the decision that will be driven and why that decision matters illuminates the more important problem that needs to be addressed within the team.

When you’ve completed the user research, you can measure its effectiveness by determining whether it actually drove the decision(s) that it needed to. This is especially helpful if you have to cut the proposed scope of a research project due to budget or timeline constraints. If your research successfully answered the question, you learned something about the benefits of a lean research plan. If it helped with some but not all of the decisions that you thought needed to be made, you can then decide what to do to address the remaining decisions to be made.

Another benefit of defining the decisions to be driven by user research is to prioritize research requests. We should invest more time in the research to support those decisions for which we have little data, or little agreement within our teams, or which have a high opportunity cost.

Knowing why you’re doing the research is at least as important as selecting the right methodology, doing a great job of collecting and analyzing the data, and sharing the results in the right ways with the right people. If you have a template that helps you plan your research studies, consider adding this section to improve the usefulness and business value of your user research.

user experience

making research more collaborative

Recently, I was talking to a new researcher who is struggling because they feel siloed off from the rest of their organization. “Is this really what research is like?” they asked me, after describing a research process conducted almost exclusively by themselves.

One of the things that I like the most about research is how collaborative it is. I shared several ideas for making research more collaborative, including the following:

  1. Make the planning process collaborative by involving others (other researchers, designers, PMs, anyone who is interested!) in the creation of your test plan. 
  2. Make the research phase collaborative by inviting others to your sessions, or asking others to take notes for you.
  3. In the days of working in-office, I used to bake cookies for my research days to incentive people to come and watch the sessions. While they were watching, I gave them a short questionnaire to fill out while watching the session. It was lightweight enough that it didn’t feel like the observers were being imposed on. Questions on it were:
    • What stood out to you the most?
    • What worked well?
    • What didn’t?
  4. Make the analysis phase collaborative through brainstorming sessions. Take the insights that you gathered during the session and run a workshop with colleagues where you identify themes and potential recommendations to address the issues identified.
  5. Make the outcomes phase more collaborative by scheduling watch parties, where you show some videos from your sessions. This could be one particular participant who had a lot of insight to share, or it could be a collection of clips that show a theme.
  6. If the designers who you work with have some kind of critique session set up, start attending them and sharing your research materials for critique there.
  7. If you have enough fellow researchers, create a critique session where you give and get feedback on your research plans, performance while interviewing participants, or final reports.
healthcare UX, user experience

the user experience of healthcare

I’ve worked for software companies for my professional life.  Coming to work in healthcare has been eye-opening for me.

The user experience is … well, let’s be generous.  Let’s call it “challenging”.  And it’s challenging for, as far as I can tell, everyone involved.

It’s challenging for the patients themselves.  Getting care is no simple matter.  There are decisions to be made, providers to find, waiting lists lurking.  There are healthcare and wellness apps which promise to help the patient in some way.

It’s challenging for healthcare providers.  We’ve seen an explosion in everything related to healthcare.  There is an ever-increasing amount of data.  Some of it is specific to a single visit with a patient, such as the results from blood work or an MRI.  All of this data, not to mention whatever notes are jotted down or diagnoses given or prescriptions filled, are aggregated into a patient’s healthcare record.  Any given patient likely has multiple of these health records, even if you only consider that a patient probably has a different health record with their primary care physician than they do with their dentist.  Keeping up with all of this data is difficult and time-consuming.

And that’s just the medical side of it.  We haven’t touched the administrative side of matters, which involves the patients, family members or other caregivers, the patient’s insurance company 1, administrators and office staff at the healthcare provider, and so much more.

All of this adds up to a bad user experience.  Some of the bad user experience is just annoying.  But, since we’re talking about healthcare, a bad user experience has risks far beyond annoyance.  A patient could choose to delay treatment because navigating the system just to get an appointment is too difficult and time-consuming.  A clinician could miss an important detail in the patient’s health record and prescribe the wrong treatment.  A data-entry clerk in the doctor’s office could make a typo that results in the patient’s insurance company rejecting the claim.

I’m sure you can imagine that I read “Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad” with much interest, and I agree with almost every word of it.  The only point that I disagree with is that it’s not enough for physicians to be unable to live without a given technology.  There are many technologies that physicians today can’t live without.  Whatever technology is part of getting the user experience of healthcare right has to make the whole process better for everyone, not just the physician.  If my doctor thinks the technology that gives her my health record is something that she can’t live without, that is almost useless to me if she refers me to another doctor who can’t access that health record.

There are too many moving parts in the system, too many stakeholders.  It’s not sufficient to get it right for just one of them.  We’ll probably get there in a piecemeal fashion, improving experiences for different sets of stakeholders at different points.  We can’t stop because we’ve gotten it right for the physician.  The user experience of healthcare goes far beyond the physician.

  1.  I’m being lazy here, there’s also public payers like Medicare or the Veterans’ Administration. ↩
Genentech, user experience

finding my people

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the US Digital Service.  I got a last-minute invitation to attend, I didn’t have any plans, I didn’t really know what the US Digital Service is but I rarely get email with the seal of the White House on it, so I figured I might as well attend.  It was so very much worth my time.  I learned that USDS are my people, which is something that I’ve been kind of lacking at Genentech.

My new role is pretty awesome.  I work on Genentech Access Solutions, which is a program where we help patients get access to the medicines that they need.  At first gloss, this doesn’t necessarily sound like it’s a good fit for someone with a UX background.  It’s actually a perfect fit.  We’ve got people who understand how to deliver great services to patients and their healthcare providers.  We’ve got people who understand how to run such services internally.  We’ve got an IT team to deliver the software that’s necessary for patients, their healthcare providers, and our internal team.  What they don’t have is an understanding of the overall user experience for each of the different types of people who use our system and services.

On the other hand, I don’t exactly fit in with my direct team, who are all very focused on business and operations.  I don’t exactly fit in with the IT team either, who are very focused on delivering a solution to my team.  I’m the one who’s tasked with understanding the experience of everyone who comes in contact with our system and services, and ensuring that we’re delivering the right user experience for each of those groups.  Patients have different needs than healthcare providers, and both have different needs to our various internal users.

From a UX perspective, this all makes perfect sense.  As a UX professional, it’s my job to understand not just what people do (or don’t do) with our software and services, but the context in which they do it.  I have to understand what they’re really trying to accomplish, and what else they’re using to accomplish it, what works and what doesn’t about their current method, and design a solution that meets their needs.

I’ve spent my time so far getting up-to-speed on Genentech and Access Solutions: what we do, how we do it, who interacts with us.  I’ve spent some time in the offices of healthcare providers, talking to everyone from doctors to nurses to office managers to front office staff to billing managers.  I’ve learned so much in the past few months.  It’s been amazing.  And I’ve shared what I’ve learnt with my team, to help them see our services through the lens of UX, and to consider ways we can better meet the needs of our patients.

I get to use my UX skills in a way that we often don’t get to.  It’s been fun, it’s been eye-opening, and I have high hopes for the future.  But I also don’t have a built-in UX community that I can turn to.

And then I got to meet the US Digital Service team and hear about projects that they’ve worked on, and suddenly I realized that I’d found my people.  They understood the challenges of doing UX in an organization that hasn’t exactly considered UX before.  They understood the challenges of doing UX in an organization that has deep ties to processes and technology that are often considered outdated elsewhere.  They understood the challenges of communicating about UX in an organization that knows they’re missing something but isn’t quite sure what it is. And they understood how deeply satisfying it is to improve the UX of something that is used by people not because they want to, but because they have a very different driver behind their usage.

There are other UX people out there who are trying to do the same thing that I’m doing.  It was a great feeling.  I’ve already had coffee with a couple of people that I met that night, and it was so exciting to have found my community again.  Thank you, US Digital Service.  You’re doing awesome work.  I can’t wait to share with you the results of what I’ve been doing.

user experience

Susan Kare on design

“What Every Young Designer Should Know, From Legendary Apple Designer Susan Kare”:

“People say graphic design is so different now, because you have so many more pixels and colors to work with,” Kare says. “But when you study art history, you see there’s just nothing new under the sun. Mosaics and needlework, it’s all analogous to pixel and bitmap art. And with it all, good design’s not about what medium you’re working in, it’s about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.”

Genentech, Nadyne, user experience

you say goodbye, I say hello

2 Comments

In saying goodbye to VMware, I decided to say hello to a new adventure.  As of last Monday, I started a new role at Genentech.

In some respects, Genentech and VMware have a lot in common.  Unless you directly work with one of the two companies, you might not have heard of them, but they’re doing important work behind the scenes.  VMware is the foundation of the datacenters and the clouds of many Fortune 500 companies.  Genentech scientists research treatments for diseases.  If you have been prescribed one of the treatments that we make, just like you might not know what software forms the cloud for your company or what is in your bank’s datacenter, you might not look up the name of the company that makes a medical treatment.

At Genentech, I’m working on Access Solutions, which offers coverage and reimbursement support services for patients and health care professionals.  I’m here to understand and improve the user experience of Access Solutions.  I’m a week and two days in to this new role, and I’m only beginning to understand the complexity of what I’ve undertaken.

Why am I here?  The answer is twofold.  First, this role scares me.  It’s very different in every way possible from working on software.  Taking a role like this that scares me is an excellent way to get out of my comfort zone, apply my skills in a new area, and stretch my abilities.  Second, as someone with degrees in computer science and math who has spent 15 years working on software, it’s not often that you get this kind of opportunity to make a material impact on the lives of people when they need all the support that they can get.  I couldn’t turn this chance down.  And so, here I am, sitting in Genentech’s US headquarters in South San Francisco.

I don’t know where this role will take me.  I can’t wait to find out.

Q&A, user experience

Q&A: moving from technical writing to user experience

I got the following question this week:

I am a technical writer with experience in usability. I do not have a professional degree in design to support my credentials as a UX professional. Is it feasible for someone who is from non-design background to even to get a portfolio considered by the prospective employers?

This is somewhat similar to a question that I answered earlier about moving from engineering to user experience.  In short, it boils down to how you discuss your work to highlight the user experience work that you have done as a part of your technical writing role.

It is certainly possible to get your portfolio reviewed. Your portfolio should show how you have applied your experience and expertise to the problem domain at hand. I recently wrote about what a UX portfolio should contain.  Technical writing can have overlap with UX. It depends on the writer and their experience. Some writers simply interview subject-matter experts and turn that into documentation. Others do much more. Your portfolio will have to explain how your work shows that you understand user experience and user-centred design.

The most important thing to do is to read the job description to determine whether it is one for which you think you would be a good fit.  Then, write a cover letter and resume/CV that explain to the hiring manager why you would be a good fit.  Focus on your UX achievements and accomplishments.  You don’t need to have a specific background to be great in UX.  You do need to be able to explain how your background will make you a great fit for the UX position you want.

Microsoft, user experience

BP and college students have something in common

When I was working at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to observe research that one of my colleagues conducted about how college students used Word.  During a focus group, while discussing writing papers, the students discussed methods that they used to get around a page-length requirement.  I’d heard of most of them: changing the font, changing the margins, changing the line spacing.1

I was amused to read that BP’s lawyers have resorted to the same methods.  This is quote from the judge’s ruling:

BP’s counsel filed a brief that, at first blush, appeared just within the 35-page limit. A closer study reveals that BP’s counsel abused the page limit by reducing the line spacing to slightly less than double-spaced. As a result, BP exceeded the (already enlarged) page limit by roughly six pages.

The Court should not have to waste its time policing such simple rules — particularly in a case as massive and complex as this. … Counsel’s tactic would not be appropriate for a college term paper. It certainly is not appropriate here.

It occurs to me that I hope that I haven’t given anyone any new ideas about how to get around page limits by writing this.

  1.  I recall one that was new to me: changing the font (or font size) of just the periods: professors who checked for correct fonts and font sizes usually wouldn’t bother checking to ensure that the correct font was used on every single character in the document, and the difference of a point or two of font size on a period wasn’t visually noticeable.  If you were close to, but not quite at, the minimum required page limit, increasing your period size could be enough to get you over the line. ↩
user experience

inspiration

I noticed that the official VMware tweets about their Q&A with me talk about “the inspiration behind my work”.  They got my inspiration to get started in computing, which isn’t the same as what inspires my day-to-day work.

I like solving hard problems.  The hardest problems aren’t necessarily in the code.  They’re the ones that keep people from getting to that code, or that keep that code from being something that people want to put to use.

My inspiration is seeing someone get frustrated because they can’t do something.  My inspiration is seeing someone spend hours searching online for help.  My inspiration is seeing someone trip over something, not even notice it because they always trip over it, and continuing on with that little bit of lingering annoyance that they can’t identify because they didn’t notice it when it happened.

My inspiration lies in coming up with ways that make people’s lives better.  It might be a little thing, like fixing that thing that trips them up every day but that they don’t notice.  It might be something bigger, like giving them the tools to do something that they never knew was possible but can make their days go so much smoother.  It might be in providing great APIs so that they can roll their own solution that perfectly meets their needs, and in them having the satisfaction of a job well done as they roll their own solution.

My work is invisible.  When it’s done well, you’ll never see it.  My inspiration is in keeping your life ticking along, making things easier for you, without you ever even knowing about it.