Good UX Is a Sign of Respect

I love work and working. I have a page on my website that lists every job I have ever had. It is a fact that I love reading job descriptions from CEO to store clerk.  As someone raised in the working class, my identity as a worker is very important to me. Work can be a source of nourishment and dignity (it often isn’t, but it can be).  Employment takes up a huge amount of time in our lives, and we willingly give it up at the extraordinary opportunity cost of other important human activities like making art, walking through the woods, rebuilding cars, woodworking, volunteering, or caretaking, to name a few.  It stands to reason that it matters that the time spent engaging in work goes as well as possible.  We all want a good experience.

My career, as I know it, started in advertising in 2005, which is not exactly tech, but it is tech. This is a fact because advertising as a discipline and an industry is always trying to find, leverage, and create new and increasingly engaging ways to communicate with people.  When I entered the advertising space, it was the dawn of Web 2.0, and everything was new.  In 2007, I became an interactive producer, so my role required the skills of curiosity, learning, and teaching.  Lucky for me, I was good at those things.  I do remember being exasperated at times by the speed of change the industry was experiencing, but I also found it thrilling.

I remember a time near the beginning of my stint as an interactive producer when I had a conversation with my Aunt, who had a long career in broadcast media sales.  She is a brilliant woman and enjoyed great success in her past media career. At the time, she shared a very similar attitude towards digital media with the more senior executives at my agency.  The new technology was cool, but she didn’t have the energy or interest to learn it.  I told her all about the metrics we could get and how they could make us smarter, more strategic, and more powerful communicators. She asked how, and I didn’t have a particularly satisfying answer yet, but I know now that the answer was related to user experience.

The discipline of user experience, or UX, emerged around the 1950s but was popularized in the 1980s. Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things, is most credited with popularizing the concept. In that text, Norman highlights the importance of recognizing the innate human behavior and instincts that surround using objects and systems to reduce errors and create better outcomes. I love this book and wish I had read it much sooner.

I had my first brush with UX when a creative director I was working with handed me a copy of Steven Krug's Don’t Make Me Think. In his book, Krug lays out the importance of clarity, usability, and user testing. Before the introduction of that text, it seemed like we, the producers of commercial websites, were operating on the information we had from years of print and broadcast work.  We didn’t have use of the massive knowledge base of best practices that we have now.  I suppose that is because we were building it.  Before UX was a true agency discipline, I made crude wireframes to help designers, copywriters, and developers understand the space and functionality they were designing, writing, and building for.  After introducing UX designers into our workflow, we produced high-fidelity wireframes that relied on research, conventions, and a deeper understanding of the user audience.

My career moved from interactive producer to project manager, which, to be honest, felt like a real tragedy at the time. However, it turned out that I loved the transition, which gave me a new way to employ UX.  As a project manager, I had a new population of users to consider; my new user base included my team, which had to work with systems, protocols, tools, and assignments.  I needed the team to intuitively, powerfully, and reliably navigate the agency so that I could manage throughput.  I am the kind of person who is rarely willing to accept the constraints entropy puts on workflow.  Entropy is the natural outcome of having layers of tools and systems that were not designed to work together or work for the people who use them. All organizations and industries are prone to experience a kind of uncomfortable chaos when technology expands quickly.  

There are reasons for that, which I will save for another day. However, living in a moment when technology and its capabilities rapidly expand requires wisdom, discernment, and practice of non-attachment. We have to make decisions about how we manage our work. We must decide when to invest money and time in new solutions and recognize when to divest.  We must also know what kind of experience we are trying to build and for whom. 

In the case of an agency, I considered our clients, creative workers, strategists, developers, account managers, media planners, project managers, and accounting teams.  There were also internal ops folks and IT to consider.  All of these people have specific needs to be effective at their jobs.  Good systems provide enough structure to support individual contributors without spending an outsized amount of time working with the system.  A great system will provide data on the back end that supplies leaders with solid organizational data about the work.   If internal systems do not deliver a good user experience to workers, they won’t use it, or they won’t use it correctly, which will result in poor data or no data at all.

My career later took me to creative operations and general operations in agencies. Again, I kept my knowledge of UX close at hand. My approach to thinking broadly about operations was rooted in learning from building commercial websites.  I would identify the users' needs and define the system's requirements for the primary front-end users, who were largely creative workers and back-end users in leadership, accounting, ops, and project management roles.  These systems had to provide information, structure, and resources on the front end. These systems must provide capacity, utilization, and burn metrics on the back end.  If the user experience was too unwieldy or unhelpful for the front-end workers, the quality of the work would suffer, as would the potential volume of work.  If the workers abandon the system, it impacts delivery for certain, but it also leaves leaders to make decisions without data.  So, it turns out the user experience of workers really matters when it comes to agency workflow.  

I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but in my experience, it is common to have gaps of understanding between the people who select software, implement software, use software, and design the protocols that integrate the software into a workflow.  Plenty of organizations do this well, but it takes a commitment to continuously invest resources into building, maintaining, and optimizing user experiences.  The ROI on this investment shows up in the quality of work, employee retention, collaboration, and strong operations.

I left conventional advertising to lead an employer brand agency. I had never thought too much about employer brand before I arrived at that agency, but I fell in love with it immediately. I loved working with companies that committed time and money to understanding, communicating, and improving their employees' experiences. At the core of that work sits a necessary UX discipline. 

The employer brand agency I worked for had a particular strength in capturing qualitative data and spinning it into story content that helped recruiters.  The agency also offered EVPs (employer value propositions) and a smattering of recruitment and branding tools.  Because I do come from a strong branding background, I had a lot of thoughts on what the agency was doing well and what the opportunities were to expand our offerings. The most immediately visible insight was that the power of the work they were doing came from the truthiness of it. The truth is important because it is what candidates require to make decisions.  Delivering anything other than the truth to candidates results in massive costs to companies through unproductive hiring efforts and turnover, which is particularly difficult for start-ups.

Guess what else is important to recruitment and hiring?  User Experience.  A company’s brand isn’t just color palettes and taglines; it’s the sum of its actions.  Brand is what you do. Our agency began to focus on what we called functional branding.  Functional branding is rooted in the experience of candidates and employees. We looked at qualitative metrics by finding trends in employee and candidate stories and how effectively an EVP is enabled.  We also looked at quantitative metrics that included communication touchpoints, engagement, the hiring funnel, and how applicant tracking systems were set up and used.

At the end of the day, UX will always tell people in a company’s ecosystem how well that company regards them.  User experience is how an organization respects its employees, consumers, constituents, and the quality of work.