How I build up an UX team within a company with low UX maturity

Ramona Ziemann at UXDX Community: Building UX Teams. Video: https://youtu.be/Cj3f7iNm9is

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and background

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, good evening, nice to meet you. Welcome to my living room, and thank you for having me. I'm very excited to share with you my own experience and journey in how I'm building, and actually keeping, a UX team within a company that does not have a strong focus on UX and does not fully understand yet the value of having UX designers on board. Meaning, working in a company that has a low UX maturity level.

[00:00:34] Today I would like to guide you through the challenges which my team and I are facing, what I'm doing to overcome those challenges, and how I actually identified Endava's maturity stage. At the same time, I would like to use the chance to present myself: who I am, what I'm currently doing and what makes me qualified to speak on the given topic. Building a UX team within an organization with limited interest in and understanding of UX is definitely a challenging task. It can feel very frustrating to make changes in large organizations, and data shows high resistance. For that reason I want to share some of my strategies or tactics that have worked so far for me, and I would like to encourage people to find their opportunities to grow through some examples which I'm going to share.

[00:01:36] Before I jump into the gossip mode, let me present myself. My name is Ramona Ziemann. I'm currently head of creative services at Endava. I'm located in Chișinău, in the Republic of Moldova. For those who don't know where or what Moldova is, Moldova is a very small country placed in between Romania and Ukraine. I'm originally from Germany and have been working and living in Moldova for seven years. Moldova is now my new home country. If you want to know what Moldova is famous for, Moldova is known for its high-quality wines and is one of the largest wine-producing countries in the world.

[00:02:24] I'm currently managing a team of 12 UX and UI designers at various levels. I'm an award-winning UX designer and a Tech Woman ambassador with over 14 years of work experience in international IT companies. I've started various UX mentorship programs to help people create usable and accessible products by following a more data-driven, iterative process. Outside of my job, I'm a mom and I love to spend time with my family, and I perform weightlifting three times per week, so I'm now into sports. And of course, living in a wine country, I love to explore new flavors of wine.

[00:03:24] Those who might know me know me from working at Crunchyroll. I'm a former lead product designer, and I had the pleasure of spending the last six years being part of the mobile team and pushing, together with my team, the subscriber numbers to more than a million users within less than a year by running several growth-related initiatives.

Endava and its young design discipline

[00:03:49] Speaking about Endava: Endava is a global technology company that provides mostly software development and consultancy services to businesses in over 60 locations worldwide. Historically, Endava has a strong background in software engineering and works with clients across a range of industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, telecommunications and media. Endava has been on the market for more than 20 years and grew to more than 20K employees worldwide. The reason I'm mentioning those numbers is to let you understand that the creative services discipline which I'm part of is very young. Endava hired one of their first dedicated designers seven years ago, and before that, design work was mostly done by front-end engineers, or not at all, because there was no demand or request for it. The global design team is now growing, which is good, which is an indicator of growth and interest, not just internally but also externally, since clients are demanding and requesting design work.

[00:05:09] Even if the majority of my speech today will be in a kind of finger-pointing mood, I want to emphasize that we have more than 200 designers across 14 locations who are supporting our clients in designing, building and shipping products to create value. We are able to follow human-centered design principles, integrating the needs of people, and create services that are simple, nice and easy to use. But there is not yet a consistent approach to and understanding of our design capabilities. That being said, I joined Endava a year ago with the mission to bring more UX awareness and try to establish a UX culture. Me coming from a product-oriented company like Crunchyroll, where UX is an integrated mindset respected across teams, switching to Endava comes along with a lot of challenges and obstacles. So you will hear a kind of status quo in the roadmap of my journey.

Defining and assessing UX maturity

[00:06:22] Before we dive into the challenges, let's define what is meant by UX maturity. UX maturity is a measure of how well a company understands and implements user-centered design principles. Companies with a high UX maturity have a strong focus on user needs and invest especially in UX research, in design and in testing, while a company with low UX maturity may not even have a dedicated UX team or UX processes in place, and may not fully understand the value of UX. In the context of Endava, it also refers to how well Endava understands and values the role of user experience in its product development processes.

[00:07:17] If we take a look at the UX maturity model which I'm sharing right now, provided by the Nielsen Norman Group, I would categorize Endava as being on a roller coaster between stage one and stage three. In the context of today, UX at Endava is mostly seen as a directional point, so it happens mostly on demand. The maturity stage also depends on multiple factors. It's about the culture, it's about seeing UX as a strategic or non-strategic arm, it's about how UX is integrated within the existing process, and whether we are measuring UX outcomes, understanding that UX is not just about solving user challenges but also about achieving business goals. All these factors contribute to the success of UX awareness.

[00:08:22] I took that maturity model from the Nielsen Norman Group as an example since it is the best known among designers. It describes a six-stage model and provides a framework to assess an organization's UX-related strengths and weaknesses. In order to evaluate Endava's UX maturity and the existing design team's maturity, I used the Nielsen Norman self-assessment tool to identify the potential areas for improvement. That was my starting point: first, to see where Endava might be, and second, to look at the team's operations and how they affect the organizational UX maturity.

[00:09:17] Keep in mind, for those who want to build a UX team: before you start building a team, it's essential to understand your company's needs. In my experience, the UX audits which I did helped me to identify areas where Endava was falling short on UX, and also helped me to prioritize the areas that needed the most attention. The outcome of the research brought me to the top four challenges which my team and I are facing, so let's dive into that and analyze what they are.

Lack of awareness and understanding of UX

[00:10:03] One of the biggest challenges is a lack of awareness and understanding of what user experience design is. The majority of our colleagues, from project managers and salespeople to engineers and testers, do not understand the value of UX design. As a result, we designers are struggling to convince people of the importance of our work, and we lack support, with a total misunderstanding of the value that UX work brings to the product. For me as a design manager, it's also challenging to retain the talent and keep the team motivated, being surrounded by this non-existent UX culture.

[00:10:58] So what am I doing about it? One of my highest priorities is to educate our stakeholders and our colleagues about the value of UX and how it can actually improve the product and the overall business. What is highly requested are case studies and best practices. Project managers and especially salespeople, who are selling our capabilities to our clients, need and want to understand the benefits of UX. So I'm initiating several trainings, workshop sessions and meetups to share case studies, meaning projects where we applied UX, or best practices, and educate them on the benefits of UX, such as improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue.

Limited collaboration and influence

[00:11:53] Lack of awareness also comes along with limited collaboration or limited influence. At Endava, my team rarely has the opportunity to collaborate effectively with other teams such as product, project managers and the engineering team. Lack of interest also limits collaboration. Design is currently treated as a nice-to-have asset and is rarely integrated, for example, in discovery workshops, or prioritized in the product development cycle. In that sense, it can be difficult for designers to understand the goals and priorities and get a place at the decision makers' table.

[00:12:45] In order to break this isolation, be part of a team and improve the collaboration, I'm starting to be more vocal and create a community of UX champions who are involved in different departments and bring awareness of UX research, especially during discovery phases, or even during design work, being constantly in a collaborative exchange mode and sharing design work in progress. It's important that we integrate people at an early stage and make them part of our process. If we want to share design work in progress, it might be valuable to add engineers into calls and show them what we plan to do, how we think certain things should work and what's best for our users.

[00:13:48] Speaking about business cases for UX, I've many times had trouble allocating designers on projects. One strategy has been to revisit existing projects, do a UX audit and provide, not just to the client but also to the project managers who are leading certain projects, a comprehensive plan for how you would improve the product. That was one option to gain influence and also be part of a collaboration.

Resistance to change

[00:14:29] Implementing UX also requires a shift in the company culture and mindset, and some people may be resistant to change. So one of our challenges is resistance to change. If we speak about change, people are the most significant impediment to organizational change. Changing an organization which has been running in the same way for decades is extremely hard, and that won't happen overnight. One of the most crucial components of my work as a design manager is to help people overcome the natural tendency to constantly maintain the status quo and not make an effort to change and adapt to something new. People mostly show anxiety and resistance to change, especially if they need to get out of their comfort zone.

[00:15:38] Working through that visible resistance is a delicate subject and needs to be treated very cautiously. I can't force people to do whatever I think might be best. During my research time I also needed to understand why there is such resistance, so I had to talk with those resistors. I experienced an excellent collaboration between designers and engineers during my time working at Crunchyroll, so the ambition was also to share the best practices which I gained with designers and engineers at Endava. The scope is also to share, on certain points, success stories from other companies and help them understand that collaboration, let's take engineers as an example, is possible. So take those best practices and show people how you can do it better.

Limited UX expertise and budget

[00:16:50] When we speak about limited UX expertise, usually companies with low UX maturity may not have enough UX expertise on staff. Not feeling the support can result in designers feeling isolated and struggling to get the feedback and support they need to create effective designs. What I've experienced so far is that not having enough expertise is also connected with limited budget. We don't have a dedicated budget for UX design, which limits the tools and resources available to us. And if we have a budget, then it's a very bureaucratic effort to allocate money for trainings and workshops. You have to provide so many arguments for why it's needed and what it's needed for, and that creates a lot of frustration. That escalates to the fact that you as a designer don't feel valuable and needed within your organization.

[00:18:01] What I also observed is that a lot of designers in my team struggle to combine UX theory with putting it into practice. Since we struggle to have mature projects, people might not know how to deal with certain UX challenges. What I'm doing about it is always encouraging my team to invest in themselves by learning new skills and methodologies. This will help them become more valuable to any organization, not just to Endava, and it will also give them the confidence to become stronger advocates for their work. Attending workshops, webinars and conferences, and networking with other professionals in their field, is a valuable aspect which I encourage in each designer. I've introduced, for example, recap sessions where on a weekly basis people share their know-how from trainings, readings or events. So I'm offering a space where we share best practices and analyze the gaps which need to be filled.

Conclusion

[00:19:23] In conclusion, building a UX team in a company with low UX maturity requires a combination of education, resources, collaboration, advocacy and adaptability. At the same time, it also presents an opportunity for our team to lead the way in building a culture of user-centered design and demonstrating the value of UX design to our stakeholders and colleagues. For those who are going through a similar experience, one of the most important pieces of advice I can give is: don't give up. Don't expect changes to happen overnight, today or tomorrow. It can take months or years, and it implies a lot of work. For those people who enjoy the process of change, be aware that you have to invest a lot of soul and patience to make things happen. I hope that my experience was valuable and helpful for some of you. Thank you for listening, I hope you found this presentation helpful, and I will remain here for any questions.

Q&A

[00:20:58] Host: This is excellent, thank you very much, Ramona. I recognized a lot of that from experience. As Ramona said, if you have any questions, please just post them on whichever platform you're watching on, and we'll put those questions through to Ramona. But I'm going to lead off the questions, because one of the things I was thinking as you were going through was: let's do an audit, let's get people involved, and all these things take time, and you touched on that, it can take years. Often people say, particularly when you have that low maturity where stakeholders might not see the value in it, you want to get your quick wins. So what are the things that people can do? Where should they start, to try to get the ball rolling a little bit so that they can buy themselves a bit more time to get those changes through?

[00:22:04] Ramona: Yeah, I think what immediately came to my mind is the way designers present their work. I do believe if we switch the mindset a bit, taking the design hat aside and not speaking just about a visual outcome, but speaking a bit of the business language as well, it makes a huge difference for people like project managers or clients who want to understand what the business outcome is of involving designers on a specific project, for example. Speaking just the visual language and explaining the surface of the design won't buy in the stakeholders. So you have to change the language a bit: the way you speak, the way you present.

[00:23:05] Host: Great. My follow-up question on that, because I think that's really good advice: one thing I've seen is that people don't know the business. They're coming from the background of, "Okay, I know my design background, so I can explain things." How do they get those insights about the business and the business language, to be able to speak in that way?

[00:23:32] Ramona: Yeah, I don't advise jumping right into what kind of business outcome they want to achieve. But if you are a newcomer, if you're a new designer, talk with your project manager, for example, because they understand the business behind the project, and understand what they actually want to achieve from a business perspective, what is important for them. Do a kind of research on your project managers or product managers. Or even if you have a good collaboration with a client, you can also do research on the person themselves and understand what they actually want to achieve. Gather the information there and try to shift the mindset a bit in that way.

[00:24:43] Host: Okay, I think that's obviously one thing I always think of: we spend so much time researching our users; we should be treating our stakeholders almost the same way, researching their needs.

[00:24:54] Ramona: Exactly. Because they are mostly the ones who are pushing back on stuff. If you work in a client-oriented company, the stakeholders are usually the middlemen who think they know what is best for the end users, which sometimes might not be the right thing.

[00:25:23] Host: One of the other things you touched on is the maturity of the people as well, with upskilling. One of the things I'm seeing a lot more is the concept of pairing. Is that something that you have, almost like an apprenticeship, where you'd have a junior and a senior working closely together, really learning by doing?

[00:25:46] Ramona: To an extent, yes. I'm doing it as a test to see how it works. But it depends on how willing people are. Usually, if we do this pairing thing, senior designers are allocated on projects and don't have the amount of time to take care of other team members. But I'm trying to allocate this time for doing this practice of pairing. I'm running a test right now, and so far it works, so let's see.

[00:26:41] Host: Well, I think that's all we have time for with questions, but I just want to say thank you once again. I really enjoyed that talk, and I hope everybody out there did as well. Thank you very much.