Put a UX Vision Before Your UX Process

Without a compelling vision, people will push back on your process.

“They won’t follow the process I’ve laid out.”

I had just asked a UX leader what her biggest frustrations were. She didn’t have to think hard about her answer — she already knew. 

She’d spent her first months at her new job defining her new UX process. They’d hired her to increase the organization’s UX maturity, so she did that. She put order to the chaos with a shiny new process. Yet now that she’s told them what they need to do, they’re not doing it.

That’s when I asked, “If you convinced everyone to follow your process perfectly, what would be different, say, three years from now?”

“Um, well, the UX, development, and product teams would work effectively together,” she responded.

“Ok, but what would be better about your company’s product and services?”

“I assume the UX would be better because our teams would work together more efficiently.”

I tried a few more times. Yet, none of my follow-up prompts could get her to focus on how her products and services would improve the lives of her company’s customers and users. She was only interested in talking about her new process and the resistance she received.

Encountering stakeholder resistance to UX processes.

In her new position, she started with the process. She could see that having no process was holding her organization’s UX maturity back. 

They weren’t doing the right things. They were skipping essential steps. They were squeezing other necessary steps into the end of their delivery projects when doing them earlier would’ve been more effective.

This UX leader did what many do when they discover their organization has low UX maturity: She focused on the UX process and described a better way for UX to work with the product and development teams, complete with the right steps happening at the right times.

When she started her new job, every stakeholder told her they were excited about an improved UX process. When she presented her process, these same stakeholders endorsed it. Yet, now that it’s time to do the work, nobody wants to do it.

If this is why they hired her, why weren’t they adopting the process? They’ve told her it’s what they wanted. She couldn’t figure out why they weren’t just following it.

The missing ‘why.’

The stakeholders’ resistance to the new UX process was because they didn’t understand why. The UX leader had told them how the processes needed to change but not why in a way that was meaningful to them. Her stakeholders weren’t motivated to change.

Imagine you have two paths to follow. One path requires substantial effort to get over a big hill, while the second path is easy and flat. 

Why would you choose the more difficult path? Because there’s something you want on the hill’s far side that you can’t get with the easy path.

The stakeholders had nothing they desired on the other side of the improved process. So, why would they take that path?

Adding a new UX process will always be challenging. The stakeholders need a compelling reason to take on that extra work.

The UX leader’s company provides software to solve significant challenges in daily law practice. Its customers are law offices and courts, and its users are paralegals, secretaries, law clerks, lawyers, and judges.

The company promises to make the work behind running a legal practice easy. However, the software has become more complex and challenging to use over the years. 

The software’s current version has evolved, making many basic legal tasks more difficult. The company’s sales and marketing departments promise everything is easy, but that’s the daily reality for the users. 

It’s gotten bad enough that the software’s reputation is now hurting its sales. The software frustrates users and does not meet their needs, which is why the executives and senior stakeholders hired the UX leader.

However, they’re having trouble connecting the UX leader’s new UX process to improving their product’s reputation with a better UX. They only see more work with no additional benefit.

Providing a compelling UX Vision.

The stakeholders needed a clear understanding of what that improved user experience would look like. They needed to see the benefit of all of that work.

The UX leader needed a UX Vision. The UX Vision is a shared understanding of the users’ experiences once the team has improved the product.

Think of the UX Vision as a story that compares the current experience of today’s customers and users against what it will be like after the organization delivers its best work. With a well-told UX Vision story, everyone in the company can see the improvements their hard work will provide.

In the case of this legal software company, the stakeholders needed a UX vision that showed what it would be like to exceed the users’ expectations and anticipate the customers’ needs. They required the why first.

They had to see how much easier it would be for paralegals and law clerks to conduct their daily tasks. They had to envision how fixing the inefficiencies of today’s designs would make the users more efficient and save the law firms and courts massive time. And they needed to see how this would serve the public better.

The UX Vision must come before the UX Process.

Many UX leaders make the mistake of starting with what has to change in their UX process instead of sharing the vision of what those changes will deliver. And that’s why they meet resistance.

When UX leaders start with the UX Vision — sharing what will come from everyone’s hard work and getting everyone bought into those better outcomes — they encounter far less resistance to their suggested process changes. The stakeholders and senior executives buy into the results, so they champion the work it will take to bring those results to life.

Taking a vision-first approach requires looking beyond the day-to-day work of UX. UX leaders need to think strategically about why the organization has landed where it is today and what it will look like when it reaches its goals.

For this UX leader, that meant putting her new UX process aside until she could show how they could improve the lives of their users—the paralegals, law clerks, legal secretaries, lawyers, and judges. She told the story of why today’s software was so difficult to use and showed what a better user experience could be like for those users.

She got the buy-in to implement the significant process changes by presenting a clear UX vision to her stakeholders and executives. The organization immediately started seeing improvements that repaired the software’s reputation and brought in new sales.

Are you trying to convince people to follow your UX process before showing them a clear vision of what it can deliver? Put your UX Vision ahead of your UX process.