The new breed of tech business leaders have repeatedly shown us that user experience should be used as a holistic and strategic approach to business leadership, and not just a sub-set of product or interface design. Putting user experience at the centre of management decisions creates efficiency, role clarity, common purpose, focus and has a depoliticising effect, reducing unnecessary drag on the organisation. By being obsessed with every detail of UX they have also proven that leadership is not a human trait but rather an emergent property of system. i.e. Leadership emerges when a system regularly renders compelling customer experiences. Leaders should then be assessed on the trail of customer experiences they leave behind and not on intrinsic characteristics that may never affect the experience of the customer. Historically, user experience may have been viewed as a soft metric but these businesses have also proven that the affect on hard business metrics, like revenue and profitability can be immense. Amazon, Google, Pinterest, Zappos, Dropbox, Tumblr and Square put user experience first and have returned billions of dollars to shareholders whilst doing away with cost centres, such as large advertising budgets and media spend.

1. THE 7 TRAITS
OF UX LED
BUSINESSES

2. 1. They clearly define and communicate the higher level
purpose of the company.
‘We wanted to create joy for our people and our customers’
- Chip Conley, ex-CEO of Joie de Vivre Hotels

3. Chip Conley, Founder of Joie De Vivre Hotels & fest300.com

4. 2. They identify, challenge and constantly revisit the
PURCHASE DRIVERS in their industry/product category.
e.g. freshness in bakeries, wait times in banking

5. 3. They clearly define, articulate, physically draw, digitise, share
and constantly revisit a map of the ideal customer experience.

6. 4. They have a leadership team that understands the vision for the
experience and are willing to put the the customer’s experience ahead
of other need sets*
*generally these red herrings are short term commercial pressures or organisational efficiency issues

7. 5. They build systems that support the defined experience
and it’s composite experiential ‘slices’.

8. 6. They have team members who are clear about which part of the
experience they own, and who consciously put this above politics,
personalities and power struggles.

9. 7. They keep iterating the slices towards a better experience.

10. When people that work in any position of leadership in a company :
Are aware of their roles as experience designers;
Are able to weave a specific ethos into these experiences…
The result is deep
competitive
advantage.

11. uxfoundry.co.za