UX for Business

Working with Different Stakeholders

Everybody Can’t Do UX

During the peak of UX fever, it became popular to say UX is just common sense. “Everybody can do UX!” It almost became taboo to suggest that UX designers know something other people don’t.

By now, this book has shown you that UX is a set of skills. Skills require practice. There are principles and methods behind UX. While anybody can learn to do UX, most haven’t. Everybody can’t do UX any more than everybody can ride a unicycle.

When you add more people to decision making, the decisions get worse unless there are very high standards for educating those people. If you do user research with the wrong users, you will get feedback that you can’t use. In a similar way, if you gather a bunch of colleagues together who are not good examples of your users, they cannot tell you what users think and feel.

And that does not make you superior to anyone! You can do UX. Your colleagues can also do things you can’t. Work together!

The Benefits and Conflicts of Working Together

There are pros and cons to every colleague you have. As people, they are all valuable and interesting, of course, and many will be your friends, but over the next few sections we will (very briefly) discuss what you can learn from them or how they can help you design better solutions, and also how they will get in your way and make you want to run away and join the circus.

It is true that diverse teams and many perspectives create better solutions. Not because ...