Foreword

At the end of the movie “Soylent Green,” Charlton Heston famously cries out, “It’s people!” when he discovers the primary ingredient in the food system. Every time someone sends a goodbye note on their final day at a job, they always say, “I’ll miss the people the most.”

At the center of a great user experience design effort is – you guessed it – people. In the case of the UX project, the people are our customers and we function as their main advocate in our agencies, companies, and teams. We study them. We observe them. We learn their motivations and their needs. We figure out how to help them and ensure that our solutions meet their needs. We know how to speak to them. More often than not, we also know how to speak to each other. Why then do we struggle as a profession to make compelling conversation happen with our colleagues in other disciplines, our leaders and executives, and our clients?

Technology shifts in the last decade have made conversation with our customers increasingly easier, faster, and richer with insight. Capturing this insight and translating it to our colleagues and clients is core to our goal of creating delightful and usable products. It’s also core to building successful collaborative teams. It is these highly engaged, cross-functional teams (made up of UX designers, visual designers, content strategists, software engineers, product managers, QA engineers, marketers, and others) that can properly respond, in a timely fashion, to this vast trove of insight now available to us. The more effective these teams are, the more responsive the organization can be to changing customer needs.

UXers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this new reality to bridge the gap between individuals and interactions while shedding the constraints of processes and tools.

This new opportunity is often seen through the lens of facilitation. UXers are the most qualified individuals on a team to take the lead in facilitating productive, meaningful team discussions. We know how to take input from various sources, synthesize it into something meaningful, and present it back to our customers for feedback. Yet we struggle to do this with our own teams and stakeholders.

It is the tactics covered in this book that will help you make, and continue to make, a bigger impact on your organizations. They will teach you to translate your work into language your audience cares about. You will learn how to take data and metrics, and use them to not only inform your design process, but to make a compelling case for the decisions you’ve made.

Martina and James have put together a treasure trove of tactics and insights to ensure that UX is at the center of these Agile, collaborative teams. And it is with this know-how that we, together with our colleagues in other disciplines, can continue to build amazing products moving forward.

August 2014, New York, NY