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Leo Poll

Leo Poll

PhD – President Akendi UK

Everyone is Talking UX

And if they are not then they should! Why? Because the creation and/or delivery of a customer/user experience is teamwork. Just think of all the skills that are involved to develop an experience that fits your end-user as a glove. Just to name a few: business analysis, coding, user research, market analysis, graphic design, usability testing etc. The work of all of these team members with completely different backgrounds has to come together to deliver an experience to one person who is at the receiving end. Not a light feat and certainly not easily achievable.

Hire In-House UX

Some companies think they have the solution, ‘we require an internal UX capability’ and thus the conclusion is to hire a UX person who will give them just that. Good thinking if we are talking about a personal assistant, an SEO specialist, market analyst, etc but unfortunately not for experience development. To design and deliver an experience all the skills listed above are required and you will not find that in a single person. A single person can kick-start the process of embedding UX into an organization. However, as an organization, you are taking a significant risk here by putting the responsibility for introducing a common UX language as well as embed the multi-disciplinary steps needed into your development and delivery processes into one person. This usually doesn’t end well.

UX as a Culture

“So, if hiring a UX person is not the solution then what is it?” Stop seeing UX as a capability that can be embodied in a single person or team and inserted at will but instead start seeing UX as a way of thinking that needs to be engrained into an organization. Begin by raising awareness through training courses that deliver a common language to the team and, importantly, make people realize that UX is more than just delivering ‘pretty pictures’. Once an organization is aware, the next step is acceptance. Training to equip the team with more specialist UX skills helps but also example successes from UX projects that demonstrate what UX can deliver. Only then, when an organization is on board, can you start to consider full integration into an organization’s processes for both development and delivery.

How to Get Started

Sounds like a lot of work? Sure, but few realize that there is more to be gained from an ISO9241 based approach to UX development than just a smooth and optimal experience for your customers and users. Putting user/customers at the centre of UX development through early involvement (research & testing) greatly reduces the risk of getting things horribly wrong at launch. And we all know what that is like, the team has been working overtime and on launch get all the negative feedback because it is not what was needed. That is bad for morale, staff retention and the company revenues. The solution? Stop seeing UX as a capability that needs to be added in but instead as a culture that needs to be adopted. Akendi’s training courses can help there.

Leo Poll

Leo Poll

PhD – President Akendi UK

Since 1996, Leo has been helping organizations provide an intentional customer experience while matching technical innovations to market needs. He uses the Akendi blog to share his thoughts about the challenges of addressing business problems from an end-user perspective and finding solutions that work for real people.


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About Akendi

Akendi is a human experience design firm, leveraging equal parts experience research and creative design excellence. We provide strategic insights and analysis about customer and user behaviour and combine this knowledge with inspired design. The results enable organizations to improve effectiveness, engage users and provide remarkable customer experiences to their audiences.