Kathy Harris

Innovation in user experience requires talent and skills in two arenas: 

1. Discovery and comprehension of user needs, both explicit and latent.  
2. Building extreme usability into processes, products or services. Usability implies satisfying or exceeding user expectations and providing a compelling experience. 

Your innovation challenge is to cultivate a team with this point of view and the skills to act on it. 

First, an observation. I believe — although I have no hard facts — that a very low percentage of “developers” (such as process designers, product or service developers, software programmers, and so on) actually use what they produce. I estimate not more than 10% do so. Most developers focus on ensuring their deliverables fulfill functional and technical requirements. But, because the developers are not users, most don’t have a frame of reference for discovering latent needs and satisfying high-usability requirements. 

Here’s a starting list of ideas to build up your discovery/usability frame of reference:

• “Walk a mile in their shoes” – whether the intended users of a product or service are employees, customers, partners or others, innovators should get into their space and experience what they experience. Focus on discovering what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Aim to hone your powers of observation and conceptualization while deepening your understanding of user needs. Here’s an article on how several companies have achieved this user point of view with customers.
• “Eat your own dog food” – this phrase suggests that you adopt what you’re building for others to your own use. It most often refers to technology. By using what you expect others to use, you can become sensitized to the positive and negative aspects of usability. Immerse yourself sufficiently to discover the complications, shortcomings and possibilities, plus any upstream and downstream effects. This phrase has an interesting history — it originated from an actual dog food company (Alpo). Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the concept.
• “Employees are customers” – when designing or developing for employees, treat them as you would any customer or partner. In the end, your aim is to provide the same high usability, productivity, respect and satisfying experience as you would for customers or partners. One of my past employers used this concept and benefited from two perspectives – employees got early access to new products or services and the organization received comprehensive, unbiased feedback and advice.
• “A day in the life”- if you’re not able to immerse your team directly into the users’ environment, develop your skills in simulating or role playing how, when and why users behave as they do. Once you’ve developed a single scenario, consider expanding it with multiple personas to simulate how different users will respond and drive different outcomes. See an excellent collection of scenarios from Gartner analysts on “a day in the life, 2028 to help technology planners envision the future.