Getting Buy-In to UX: Action plan for success

Note: In this article, UX includes all disciplines that belong to user-centered product development, among them UX research and UX design.

No matter if you are a product manager, UX researcher or not even directly working on the product or service your company is selling: If you are blocked by a lack of buy-in for increasing the UX maturity in your organization, this article might be for you.

One reason why you may struggle to get UX to take off to make use of its full potential is that you are lacking the buy-in from relevant decision-makers to invest in more user-centered product development.

Believe me, I have been there.

The hours, no years, I have spent trying to convince people outside of the product development team to invest in user research taught me four things that today make my life much easier:

• Start with your audience: Understand who you are trying to get on board first and learn where they stand. Focus on what they care about.

• Pitch using your audience's language: Any success needs to be measurable in business KPIs. Translate UX benefits into measurable outcomes that are relevant to your goals and organization.

• Seeing is believing: Educate about the benefits of UX by showing immediate proof of application and the advantages.

• Patience is key: Adopting a UX mindset is a cultural change that won’t happen overnight. Start small, get allies on board, trust that these small victories will produce a snowball effect, with each minor success leading to more interest from other teams.

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Start with your audience

If you are struggling with getting the buy-in to invest in UX, it’s likely that you’re talking to people that have no idea what UX is and/or do not see the immediate leverage of UX for the company.

These people might care about the success of the product just as much as you do but their plan on how to become successful is different from yours.

People that have had no touchpoints with UX might not have a clear understanding of what it is. Bot dissimilar to your lack of understanding of legal texts and paragraphs, or depreciation and amortization. Everyone has their area of expertise. Most people with limited knowledge of UX might mistake it for UI and visual appeal.

The term UX is fairly new. It originates in Apple’s cognitive science approach. Companies in the digital revolution weren’t designing and developing their ideas from a user-first perspective but instead moved quickly to implement any solution for innovation. And, let’s be honest, they weren’t unsuccessful with it.

We as UX enthusiasts, however, know that there is a better way than getting first-time input from users after launch. We know that testing idea as soon as possible, getting early input from our customers, and iterating quickly has several positive effects on product development.

But while you are talking about user satisfaction and happiness, better processes, and clearer outcomes, your audience might be pursuing very different solutions to drive success, for example, higher spending on development resources, or launching bolder ideas (that usually turn out too complex for the limited knowledge available).

Get to know the people you are trying to get on board with and understand their backgrounds. It’s important to get a view of where they stand right now. The communication and depth of information you provide will change depending on who you're trying to win over.

If you are lost on who your most important stakeholders are, start by analyzing the processes of your overall organization and understand where you currently stand in terms of UX maturity.

Some questions you might want to consider:

Pitch using your audience’s language

If you want to start from where the people are, you need to be aware of the above-mentioned challenges and find ways to resolve them by starting to speak the same language. While educating your stakeholders about UX is an important strategy, which I will get to a bit further down, the first step towards speaking a common language is translating the benefits of UX-focused product development into KPIs that speak to decision-makers.

Many people that try to implement or grow user research in their organization take a lot of time to elaborate on the 'how' of increasing user research but often neglect to communicate the ‘why’. What's in it for the product, department or organization? What does success look like?

In other words, you need to show the return on investment (ROI). You have to build the case around inputs and outputs: For what we put in, what do we as a company get out?

In the beginning, you might struggle with finding a valid KPI that describes the ROI for UX. Quantifying the value of UX is more difficult than defining the costs of technology.

This is because:

• The effect of UX is more long term: Only a minority of UX insights lead to immediate short-term returns and can be celebrated in a shorter time frame.

• The effect of UX is less direct: There are a lot of indirect successes but it is often not so easy to quantify the direct effect of user research. This is because user research is not just a tool. It can trigger a shift in mindset that can revolutionize a company but can't be easily measured or isolated. This however makes it hard to isolate the effect of user research on returns.

The challenge is therefore often to measurable KPIs that are tied to increased UX and are measurable.

Most importantly, start with a goal in mind that is not only relevant to you but to the company as a whole: What is it that you think UX can do for your organization?

Some questions that might guide your direction:

The value of UX is highly dependent on the type of industry you are in. Think about KPIs that are relevant to your industry, e.g. in B2C e-commerce companies think about increasing conversion rates or increasing the average order value as good metrics of value for an improved UX.

Based on your assessment, choose the goals you want to achieve for your organization:

1. Improving leadership position and competitive advantage. For example, it has been found that design-centric companies have a continuous stock market advantage, outperforming the S&P index by 228% (DMI) Use it when you're working

• with stakeholders who are more growth and market-oriented

• on a product in a highly innovative environment:

2. Improve relevant KPIs such as conversion rate, overall revenue, or cost of customer acquisition. Investing in UX leads to an uplift of up to 83% in conversion (Nielsen norman group) and 32 percentage points higher revenue growth for design-driven companies (McKinsey)

Use it when your working

• with stakeholders that are strongly revenue-oriented:

• in a B2C product for example e-commerce

3. Improved internal processes e.g. to reduce development costs or increased employee satisfaction. The time, that developers spend on rework that is avoidable is up to 50% which correlates with the development cost. Furthermore, the cost of rework of code is at 4x to 100x of the investment upfront, depending on the size of the project, and increases later in the product development process. (DZONE)

Use it when you're working

• with stakeholders who are more efficiency-oriented

• on a product that is focused on internal systems

To find and communicate the right KPIs, a starting point can be to find evidence from the market and communicate those as a prospect. Find arguments that are relevant to your industry, organization, and stakeholders and apply them to your case.

Seeing is believing

If it’s your goal to establish UX in your organization, whatever your professional relationship to the field it is your task to make sure people understand what UX is. People do not believe in something they don’t understand.

At the same time, it is not important that everyone gets every detail of processes and methods in user research. Your focus should instead be on helping people understand what it can do for the organization. Some starting points can be:

• Increase the visibility of the customer/user in your organization: If there is no user data available at the moment, find places in the organization where the user voice already matters. Maybe you have customer support or sales that has some insights about the users. It’s time to make use of this and share this insight with the company.

• Report on outputs of user behavior: For example, we can see a behavioral trend, especially since the pandemic, of people using more digital products and therefore having higher expectations of those products. Could this be applicable to your organization as well? Find other evidence, either within your customer/user base or from desk research showing how listening to customers matters and share that with your organization.

• Show videos or smaller reports: The smaller and more digestible the information you share is, the better. This can be snippets of user interviews or usability tests, quotes picked up from support, or pictures of heat maps, and explain how they influenced the output positively.

• Make use of what is there: Use at first forums that your organization already has, maybe a stand-up or a demo. Introduce newsletters about your research and design work or simply start with slack notifications. Over time, you can increase the visibility of UX.

Patience is key

Most of the changes won’t happen overnight. UX is not a tool, it is a culture you are trying to create. This means that having patience and trust, as well as handling setbacks, is key.

To begin with, find some allies. The more people you have on board, the easier it is going to be to stay committed and believe in the process. Once you have one or two teams on board to support your endeavor, it will become easier and you will see your first successes.

Key takeaways

When you want to increase the UX maturity in your company, you need the buy-in from your key decision makers; you cannot do it alone (except of course if you are the key decision maker).

To get this buy-in, follow these steps:

• Assess your current situation and UX maturity to understand where you can find the biggest challenges and blockers. Establish then who your key audience is within the current level.

• Think about what you are trying to achieve by growing the UX maturity and translating it into meaningful KPIs for your key stakeholders. Define the return on investment (ROI).

• Show first results and practical implications for the organization. Make your stakeholders see the value of UX on every level possible.

• Be patient with any changes you might want to see. It might require a cultural shift and those take time.