Igniting User-Centered Design at DOE: Challenges and Lessons Learned
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How to create a new culture of User Centered Design from User Focus 2014 in Washington DC
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Igniting User-Centered Design at DOE: Challenges and Lessons Learned
- 1. Igniting User-Centered Design Thinking at DOE: Challenges and Lessons Learned Wendy Littman UX Consultant, TecEd User Focus 2014
- 2. The wild, wild west…
- 3. Roping them in… Credit: Wikipedia
- 4. Usability at EERE is born
- 5. Show of hands Interested in institutionalizing UCD? Helped your organization embrace UCD? Helped an organization as a UX consultant?
- 6. Tip 1: Know your organization To decide if an organization is a good fit for institutionalizing UCD, ask yourself: How stable is the organization? Is it motivated to fix problems? How open is it to embracing change? How is Web funding allocated?
- 7. Tip 2: Find a champion Shows value of UCD in a persuasive way. Understands how UCD fits current development process. Can identify and address pockets of resistance. Can direct resources. Can keep the initiative moving long term.
- 8. Tip 3: Find the right wake-up call Examples of useful wake-up calls: Capitalizing on a product launch that bombs. Sharing case studies from other groups going through UCD. Having an expert review conducted. Showing user click patterns. Conducting a pilot usability study.
- 9. Tip 4: Partner with a UX consultant UX consultants can help: Decide on a strategy. Invoke “outside authority.” Train staff on UX processes. Provide examples, templates, and standards. Assist with overflow UX work. Look for consultants who: Are leaders in their field. Are a good cultural fit. Enjoy mentoring. Are easy to work with. Are experienced helping organizations with UCD.
- 10. Tip 4: Partner with a UX consultant No budget? Look for: Training/mentoring through groups like UXPA. Free testing programs like First Fridays. UX materials available online, such as through usability.gov.
- 11. Tip 5: Grow top-down AND bottom-up “Usability should not reside within a single group or team. In order to succeed, usability must permeate the entire organization and become part of the system.” - Eric Schaffer, Institutionalization of Usability
- 12. Tip 6: Awareness first – then rules Credit: Alan@flickr
- 13. Tip 7: Put an infrastructure in place Consider providing: Knowledge and skills training Rules, standards, and processes Templates and examples Analysis and design tools Testing facilities http://www.eere.energy.gov/communica tionstandards/analysis_usability.html
- 15. Wendy Littman TecEd, Inc. 571-246-1588 Email: wendy@teced.com linkedin.com/in/wendylittman/
Notas del editor
- Thanks X, I appreciate the introduction. I’m excited to be here talking about this topic – the process of bringing user-centered design to an organization is one that is near and dear to my heart. So this year, I thought I’d share a little bit about our experience introducing UCD to an Office at the Department of Energy. Before we start, let me give you a little bit of background about how our UCD experiment began, and my role in the process. Although now I’m a user experience consultant with TecEd, up until December, I worked for 13 years as a contractor for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. My primary role there was to help their Web Enterprise Manager put processes and governance in place to manage EERE’s Web presence, which is by far the biggest at DOE. Originally it consisted of over 100 program sites that were managed by about 25 different site owners.
- You can see that at the beginning, it was like the wild west – every site had its own look, feel, and architecture.
- Over the course of several years, we started bringing everyone into the fold. We established design guidelines, templates, and standards, and we started a monthly meeting to share information and provide training to program Web Coordinators.
- Once we got everyone singing off the same sheet of music, Sarah Kirchen (the Web Enterprise Manager at EERE) invited me to attend usability training with her. She knew I’d been looking for an opportunity to pursue my interest in user experience work, and that training really lit a fire under me. So with Sarah’s support, after the training, I hatched a plan to more formally introduce user-centered design to EERE, and I became their first “usability evangelist.” So based on our experience at DOE, today I’m going to talk through what I consider to be some of the key ingredients for success when introducing UCD to an organization. And I’ll tell you up front, our experience was a mixed bag – we’re going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly today, because while you can learn a lot from hearing what worked well, sometimes you learn even more from hearing what didn’t go so well…
- Before we start – I’d like to see a show of hands. (CLICK) How many of you have introduced or would like to be introducing user-centered design more formally to your organization? (CLICK) For those of you with your hands up, how many of you would say you’ve successfully managed to get your organization to embrace UCD? (CLICK) Last question - how many of you work for a user experience company that has been called upon to help other organizations institutionalize UCD? Ok, let’s go ahead and jump into some tips for introducing user-centered design to an organization.
- So when you’re trying to decide if an organization is a good fit for introducing UCD, my first tip is to really understand the organization. You’ll want to think about things like: (CLICK) How stable is the organization, especially the leadership? Institutionalizing UCD is a long-term process, and requires a solid financial and philosophical commitment from leadership. In our case, we had very stable leadership until our long-time Web Enterprise Manager retired. After that, there was interim leadership for several years, and that caused some challenges. (CLICK) How willing is the organization to recognize problems and fix them? This can come down to personality or culture, but some organizations, especially for-profit groups, are very interested in learning what’s not working for their customers and fixing it. We didn’t have a profit motivator at EERE, being part of the government, but we did have a Web Enterprise Manager who was deeply committed to improving the EERE site to better serve the American public. However, after she retired, we had trouble convincing some of the interim managers of the need for UCD. We found, for example, that some managers only wanted to hear good news about the site, so that was a challenge. (CLICK) How open is the organization to embracing change? Adopting UCD means really rethinking how you approach your online presence – so being flexible and open to change is key. (CLICK) How is funding allocated for Web-related activities? Is the website centrally funded, or is funding distributed among smaller groups and departments? If it is centrally funded and managed, it can be easier to start a long-term and systemic change like this. If the funding is distributed, you may have more of a challenge, because you’ll need to get each group’s decision-maker on board, and you’ll need to think about how to fund UX positions, tools, and processes meant for everyone. In the case of EERE, we had some funding that was centralized, but each program funded its own Web presence. So we had to take both a top-down and bottom-up approach – we’ll talk more about that later.
- My second tip is to find an executive champion – or better yet, several champions so you have some continuity in case your primary champion leaves. The champion is basically the face of the project, so ideally you want to find a champion who: (CLICK) Can help the organization understand the value of UCD in a way that would be persuasive to them. The champion needs to be able to effectively influence key people in the power structure, which means they really need to understand the company’s culture and motivators. (CLICK) Understands the current development process and how UCD could fit in. This way the champion can better help the organization understand how they will move from point A to point B as processes change. (CLICK) Can identify pockets of resistance and bring them on board. This is critical, because nothing will derail your initiative faster than those who want to see it fail. (CLICK) Has the authority to direct human and financial resources. As I mentioned, it takes a financial commitment to introduce UCD, so you need to find a champion who has the ability to direct resources or to persuade others to direct resources. (CLICK) Can keep the initiative moving over the long term. Again, an effort like this takes a long time, and you need someone who can carry it forward over the long haul. As I mentioned, we had stable leadership for years, which is what allowed us to bring all the program sites into the same look and feel, and eventually to begin our UCD effort. But when Sarah retired, our progress became much, much slower because each time an interim leader took over, we had to get them up to speed on what we were doing and why. Some of the interim leaders became champions, but others never really bought into it, so during those times we had to find other ways to keep the project going. We’ll talk more about that in a few minutes.
- Once you have determined that your organization is a good fit for UCD, and you’ve identified one or more champions, you’ll need to find a way to wake up the rest of the organization to the need for user-centered design. Wake-up calls can take many forms; the ones you choose will depend on your organization. Wake-up calls can include things like: (CLICK) Capitalizing on a new product that launches and bombs. (CLICK) Sharing case studies from other organizations as they go through a user-centered design process. (CLICK) Having your site reviewed by an external usability consultant. (CLICK) Using inexpensive click tracking tools like Crazy Egg to show customer click patterns. (CLICK) Conducting a small pilot usability study of your own site – sometimes seeing people struggle with your site is sobering. While a full benchmark usability test can be expensive, you could also consider lower-budget options such as Steve Krug’s discount usability testing or products like User Testing. If you are a government organization, you can take advantage of GSA’s First Fridays testing program, which is free and run by Jon Rubin – and, I can say from personal experience, is awesome. In our case, we used a combination of wake-up calls at different times, and for different parts of the organization, which proved to be effective for us. We started by doing a pilot usability study, and we reported on it regularly in Web Coordinator meetings so all the programs could see the low task success rates and the changes we were making as a result. In addition, for site owners who were skeptical of usability, we put Crazy Egg on a few pages so they could see what their users were clicking on – and see what they weren’t clicking on. Then for one program, we did a small usability study with First Fridays – and that program was motivated enough by the experience to plan additional studies on their own, which is what we wanted. So how you wake up an organization will really depend on the nature of the organization. YOUR TURN: Now I’d like to pause briefly and turn it over to you. What wake-up calls have you or your organization used? What was successful for you? What wasn’t?
- My fourth tip is to hire an external user experience consultant. At the beginning of our process, we hired a wonderful consultancy called Anthro-Tech to mentor us through our first pilot usability study. Then we kept them on board to provide strategic guidance and templates as we worked through the process of introducing user-centered design. In addition, there were several times that we asked them to lead studies when we didn’t have the bandwidth to do the work, or we asked them to mentor new staff through studies when I was maxed out with other tasks. For us, hiring Anthro-Tech was a game changer, because they helped us move down the right road much more quickly than we would have on our own. It also proved to be lucrative for Anthro-Tech, in large part due to the overflow work we sent their way as the demand for UX grew. (CLICK) I think it’s absolutely critical when hiring a UX consultant that you find the “love connection.” While of course the consultant should be a leader in their field, they should also: be good fit for your organization’s culture should enjoy the process of teaching and mentoring should be easy to work with have experience introducing UCD to other organizations. Those were some of the things that made our relationship with Anthro-Tech so rewarding at the time, and some of the things I hope to bring to the work I do with organizations in my current job at TecEd.
- If you don’t have the budget to hire a consultant, look for some free resources. For example: look at training and mentoring available through UXPA, programs like First Fridays, and free templates and other resources available on sites like usability.gov.
- My fifth tip is to grow UCD from the top down as well as from the bottom up. For UCD to really take root and grow, it needs to be embraced by people at all levels of the organization – from the strategic decision-makers to the designers and writers. As I mentioned, we had great success at EERE growing UCD at the top levels when we had stable leadership in place. But we had mixed success once that stable leadership wasn’t there. However, because we had been raising awareness at the program level at the same time, we found that some of the program staff ended up becoming strong advocates for the change we wanted to see. And interestingly, they started to apply pressure to the leadership level, which really helped our cause. (YOUR TURN – ONLY IF AT SUB-20 minutes): Now it’s your turn again. If anyone’s willing to share, I’d love to know how you approached introducing UCD to an organization – what worked, and what didn’t? RESUME TALKING AT 20 MINUTES
- My sixth tip is to raise awareness about user-centered design first – then introduce the rules once people see the value of the approach – in other words, use the carrot first, THEN the stick. The fact is, change is hard, and because of that, some people are going to resist it. So when we began our effort, the goal for the first year was simply to raise people’s awareness. To do this, we: did talks about what UCD was and why it was valuable, we did tool demos of Crazy Egg and Treejack to spark curiosity, and we did several talks about our pilot project at different stages of the process so people could see how we were doing it and what we were learning. After we had some support for UCD, we started introducing governance processes to help us standardize how we practiced UCD as a group. For example, we introduced a usability plan review for all programs who wanted to create a new site or make a major change to an existing site. This approach of raising awareness first and then introducing the rules worked well for us.
- Time for my final tip. So once you have people excited about user-centered design, it’s time to build an infrastructure to ensure lasting success. If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that UCD can’t be driven by only one person, because otherwise the whole initiative will dissolve when that person leaves. It really needs to be engrained into the fiber of the organization. A good UX consultant can help you put your infrastructure in place. Some things you’ll want to plan for are: (CLICK) Knowledge and skills training – There’s always turnover in an organization, so there’s an ongoing need to educate new people about UCD and to provide continuing training for those already practicing UCD. (CLICK) Rules, standards, and processes – These, of course, help ensure that you’ll have more consistency in what you do and how you do it. At EERE, we created an online guidebook to help educate people about our standards and processes. (CLICK) Templates and examples – Again, this helps ensure consistency, but more than that, templates and examples help keep people from reinventing the wheel, which saves a lot of time. (CLICK) Analysis and design tools – We also offered a set of online tools to help people with their UX work. This proved to be especially important for us as a government agency because of all the rules governing tool purchase and use. Working at the top level, we were able to work through all the security and legal hoops once, and then provide the tools for all the programs to use, instead of each program having to go through these hoops themselves, which would have been prohibitive. (CLICK) Testing facilities – Then, of course, you need access to testing facilities and equipment. If you don’t have funds to set up your own facilities, there are labs for rent or groups like Health and Human Services that provide testing facilities that any government group can use. Of course, you can also do remote testing, which doesn’t require testing facilities. If you want to see the guidebook, templates, and tools we provided to EERE, you can check them out at this URL.
- If you want to learn more about introducing user-centered design to an organization, you might check out these two resources: Institutionalization of UX is a whole book on this topic Handbook of Usability Testing has a chapter on how to spread UX through an organization
- You are also more than welcome to contact me at any time; I’m happy to share more about my experience. Here’s my contact information. You should also have a card from TecEd in your registration packet, so that’s another way you can get in touch with us. So at this point, I’d love to take any questions you might have. OR IF SKIPPED SECOND YOUR TURN: And for those of you who have been involved with efforts to introduce UCD to an organization, I’d also love it if you could share a little about your experience – what approaches did you take, what worked well, and what didn’t…