User Experience Design

CHAPTER 10GETTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE RIGHT: Aligning skills, roles, and personnel in a user‐centric organization

Inevitably the first action that every organization that understands the business value in being user experience–centric takes is to hire a designer or two and hope this will be the Holy Grail in their transformation. This unfortunately always turns out to be filled with angst both for the organization (wanting to see a transformation in the business) and the designer (wanting to be the change agent involved in strategic work), as they both end up not getting what they expected, at a huge opportunity cost of wasted time.

To understand what it takes, businesses need to understand two major people‐related variables that make user experience design function effectively. The first is all the people that make up the user experience design practice, and the second is all the collaborators that work with this team to ensure the intended outcome.

A good design practice should consist of competent people with the skills needed to deliver a great user experience, as well as leaders who can help orchestrate the business outcomes by leveraging the individual practitioners, methods, and tools.

The Team of Practitioners

First, recognize that UI design and UX design are two distinct disciplines, as we discussed in Chapter 5. To assemble an effective team of practitioners, you need to understand the various types of expertise needed across the team. Specifically, four skills are ...