At the 2008 IA Summit, Jess McMullin walked through several techniques for building business relationships & success utilizing user experience design methods.
- The User Experience profession has reached the point where the barriers to having more influence are about working with business not users
- Pivot Tools: use user experience techniques/approaches in business setting.
Identify your audience
- Business personas: ways to think of people in business organization
- Network diagram: define influence network of relationships
- Advocate: on my side
- Superior: the boss
- Peer: other people that can help with or need to buy in
- Frontline: people that implementation affects.
- Critics: pick apart ideas
- Validators: balance critics and provide support. Could be analysts, media, or other companies.
- Gatekeepers: need to sign off on something. Finance/lawyers
- What are relationships of these people? How do they interact?
Understand motivators
- Reward: what matters to stakeholders (up and to the right)
- Power –have influence in organization
- Vendorship: transactional relationship of selling deliverables
- Risk: what might happen
- Motivation map –who fits where against risk/reward/power –etc?
- Helps understand business
Understand Activities
- What are business stakeholders involved in and responsible for?
- Lead, Manage, Execute
- Consider activities people have –understand what they are trying to achieve and why
- Tools & principles are better than a set cookbook
- Understand, Solve, Evaluate toolkit – what in each of these can make a contribution to Leading, Managing, or Executing?
- Empathize with business leaders – what is it like to hit numbers, hit deadlines
- Hindsight from past experience can help predict future activities
- Through empathy can think about future scenarios –what would best for people?
Commit to action
- Need to go out into world, talk to people, and get them to do things.
- Build trust: credibility with projects. Care about if people succeed or not.
- Ask open ended questions to get to real motivations
- “Will you questions” get people to make commitments.