How to build a UX mindset in your organization?

Do you feel that the level of design maturity in your organization is low? Would you like to change it, but you don’t know how? Changing the mindset of people in your team or organization seems to be a big challenge. Especially, when your colleagues are used to working in a certain way. It’s difficult to change it in one day, but you can do it step by step. What can help you?

Start with the research

The key to building a UX mindset and increasing the level of design maturity in your organization is to know all the voices. How to do it? Start with internal research. You’re lucky if you have UX Researchers in your team. You can ask them for help to plan and coordinate regular UX research to define employees’ needs. If conducting research in your organization is not a standard, you can try to do it on your own. Start with small experiments. You don’t have to prepare a detailed script with complicated questions to discover what users or employees want. Asking one question to five colleagues is definitely more valuable than not asking at all. This will give you the perspective of people from different departments and help you work together more efficiently. Sometimes you just need this little spark that can start the fire, so it’s always worth doing internal research. Show your colleagues the value of the results that you got and inspire them to do their own research. Broadening the awareness of one team will affect the next one. Building a UX mindset is based on a chain reaction, when one team starts working differently, it inspires the others.

Show the value of UX

Changing the mindset of people in your organization on your own can be difficult, so find your partners in crime. They don’t have to be people from your team, it could be anyone who also thinks the same way. Work together and take every single opportunity to show the value of UX. Convincing your stakeholders to research or anything else related to UX will be easier if you work with partners. One of the arguments that are always important for all those who are responsible for business results, is showing how they can make more profits. Do your stakeholders think that building a prototype will make the design process longer? Show them how much time and money they will save if they implement improvements in the prototype, not in the final product. Do your stakeholders know for sure which features in your product work properly and which should be improved? Show them how one user who has never had contact with your product uses it. Sometimes, simple solutions are enough. Combine your willingness to change with the willingness of your partners and show together how to do things differently.

Work as a team

UX is a team sport, where every player has an impact on the final result. The management team, security team, design team, marketing team and any other, all of them are trying to do their best. The key is to understand that every team has the same goal: satisfied users. So, if you’re working on something, invite other people to the process, and make sure, that all of you have the same goal in mind. If you want to do something differently, show that is not because you want it, but because your users want it. This is an argument that is hard to discuss with. Kaja Kalmus, Agile Coach at ING Hubs Poland who was one of the speakers at our webinar “How does UX change organizations?” explained how it looks in her organization: “From many different perspectives, whether we are talking about the Scrum Master perspective, Product Owner perspective, management perspective or customer experience perspective, we still have the same focus. So we keep that in mind, that we are talking about the actual people who will use the things that we deliver to them, whatever it is, a product or a service”. To get to know more about Kaja’s story, watch the whole webinar recording.

Build the same fundaments

A common fundament will enable the further development of a UX mindset in your organization. One of the things that could help you to build it is UX-PM Certification. Kaja Kalmus, who is also an alumni of the whole UX-PM Certification confirms this: “When I started attending UX-PM trainings I changed the way I was working with Product Owners and the way that I spoke to them. At that moment in my organization, we have basic knowledge about Agile, about Scrum, about working with the customers hand in hand, but we were still treating Product Owners as customers. We also didn’t understand the difference who’s our user, who’s our customer, who’s our stakeholder. So trying to go hand in hand with the idea that we need to combine all of the voices was really important and I think that was the biggest switch in my mindset that I gained because of UX-PM. Those tools that I got there, allow me to switch that perspective within the teams”. UX-PM Certification helped Kaja improve working with other teams and spread it further within the organization. If you want to start building a UX fundament, take your team to UX-PM training. This program was created by international experts. It empowers professionals to achieve business outcomes by adopting a human-centered design approach in their practice. There are three levels of UX-PM: Level 1 – Adopting UX, Level 2 – Executing UX, and Level 3 – Leading UX. UX-PM Certification will help you understand the fundamentals of UX and adopt them to your project. What is important, the certification includes both: theory and practice. During the training, participants get to know UX tools and learn how to use them in practice. You can attend the training on your own and then educate your colleagues. However, a better way is to join as a whole team or, if possible, as an organization. In this situation, everyone will get the same fundament on which you can build a UX mindset.