97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 14. Create a Truly Visible UX Team

Sonia V. Weaver

Despite the UX discipline existing for decades (under one name or another), companies still employ folks who are completely unaware of the UX team or the role it plays within their business. Sometimes, developers even get praised for UX’s work. Don’t get me wrong—we love our engineering colleagues—but they don’t deliver all those intuitive user experiences by themselves. So ask yourself: are people in your organization aware of the UX team’s existence and its impact on customer loyalty, user satisfaction, and the company’s own bottom line?

If the answer is no, try the following techniques to help market your initiatives and successes. Since employing each of these over the past two years at my 1,500-person company, our UX team’s visibility has gone from near zero to eleven (scale à la Spinal Tap). We sparked a company-wide discourse around usability and now receive extra focus and resources to meet our goals.

Suggested tactical techniques:

• Create real-time conversation channels: If your company uses Slack, Microsoft Teams, or some other tool that supports discussion channels by topic, create one or two channels dedicated to UX design and research. Advertise them using other channels, emails, company newsletters, and intranet posts. Don’t just share information; use polls and questions to engage members.

• Add content to ...