Summary
User-centric design and development mindset and maturity has been low in an enterprise context. UX departments struggle a lot to gain momentum and help organizations create better products in various different ways with RoI of their efforts being low. How might we increase the user-centric maturity and mindset of the enterprise in a more organic way and help as many product teams as possible while having insufficient UX specialists? Vasilieos will present a case study for top-down and bottom-up approach taken at LEGO with practical information, learnings and reflections so far.
Key Insights
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In 2015, LEGO's UX was minimally supported and mainly technology-driven with little end-user input.
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Rolling out LEGO-wide personas and training 300 IT colleagues helped raise UX awareness by 2018.
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Without a UX vision or strategy, individual projects lacked coordinated impact or metrics.
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The UX reboot involved treating the UX department like a business with clear responsibilities and expectations.
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By 2019, 7 UX designers served about 400 products, forcing focus only on highest ROI products.
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The User Experience Sandwich combines a top-down partnership with leadership and a bottom-up academy for organic mindset change.
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Top-down UX partners embed in streams, set visions, define KPIs like System Usability Scale scores, and influence vendor software selection.
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UX partners must rapidly develop domain knowledge, leadership skills, and resilience due to engagement with executives.
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The User Experience Academy trains non-designers (e.g., product owners, developers) using an affinity-mapped curriculum covering discovery to delivery phases.
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Embedding UX activities into teams increased products with UX design threefold, improved usability scores by 10+, and created internal UX ambassadors.
Notable Quotes
"User experience is not like the sauce you put on your steak to make it taste better; it's the actual protein within the steak."
"Instead of us begging to be involved, we set responsibilities and expectations for our involvement."
"With power comes a load of responsibility as a user experience partner embedded in a business stream."
"We push the System Usability Scale score as the KPI for all products within a stream."
"If vendor solutions are not usable from the start, we risk being stuck with unusable software for years."
"Designers need a thick skin because you often have to argue your case with senior VPs and directors."
"The User Experience Academy gives tools to non-designers so the change comes from within the product teams."
"We secured up to 20% of time for ambassadors to dedicate specifically to UX work."
"After interviews, the quieter I was, the more end users shared, which helped tremendously in designing new solutions."
"We tripled the number of products with some level of user experience design since launching the academy."
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