It is a survey about the impact of UX in companies during the year 2016 by letterpress.se

171 UX designers from 22 European countries answered this survey.

We could know the size of these companies, areas, and the UX influence on the company strategy.

It is interesting to discover which are the barriers that do not allow UX getting a more significant impact. According to the results are:

1. Lack of understanding
2. Silos and politics
3. Partial implementation of UX practices
4. Resource constraints
5. Lack of leadership
6. Organisational size
7. Others…

As conclusions, UX has a more significant impact and benefits when it is part of the company strategy and roadmap.

Include UX on the company strategy increase the UX impact and their benefits

It is evident that if you take UX into account from the beginning, you could apply it rigorously, and you will get the maximum benefits from the best user experience.

Solutions to avoid barriers applying UX

Personally, I have found several of these barriers that don’t allow you to apply UX to optimise the result of your projects.
These are my recommendations:

Lack of understanding

Many times they don’t apply UX techniques because they don’t know them, so that, they do not appreciate the value, the benefits and rentability that they could get.

• Explain the benefits clearly and directly to the company.
• Try to convey empathy towards users, showing different perspectives to learn that not everybody thought and behaviour in the same way.
• The best way to learn it is to go to the practices. If they observe this valuable information directly during user testing, they will be more open-minded and more receptive.

Be clear, direct and practical.

A picture is worth than a thousand words.

Silos and politics

The task could become more complex because of the restrictive company policies.

As you can see from the survey results, UX should become part of the company from the beginning, it is essential.

To reach this:

1. Firstly, know very well the company
2. Plan how the introduce UX progressively into the organisation
3. Finally, go from down to up until you meet the person who is able to accept and apply our proposal

Know the company and learn to communicate with it

Partial implementation of UX practices

If we apply UX partially, we are not going to get a real benefit that we could get.

It is useless to do user testing if we don’t optimise the product later. It can happen because they have not enough resources, time, money…

• We could avoid it by applying UX as soon as possible. Because it will be easy and cheaper apply improvements or solve errors with less cost and efforts than when the product is already developed
• Planning and timing well, we could take into account the time and resources that we have to don’t go out from the project scope

Plan and apply UX from the initial phases

Resource constraints

It is not a must to do deep and costly research to generate impact by UX.
It is recommendable to test with the real end-users, but they are not always reachable.

However, many other available persons allow us to test and learn about the product even if they are not real end-users.

It is named guerrilla testing. It is faster and cheaper because it is more informal and you can get some feedback from friends, family or colleagues that could also be useful to improve the product.

Guerrilla testing is a very accessible and cheaper resource

Lack of leadership

Occasionally, the lack of leadership will prevent to meet the person to propose our ideas to be applied.

We cannot stop in front of this barrier. Be active, take the initiative and propose to all your ideas. Always respecting the work of all of your colleagues.

Take the initiative, always respecting the company and colleagues

Organisational size

It will be easier to apply and include UX in the organisation when the company was smaller. However, the process is the same; we just need to be more patient and constant.

Be patient and constant to reach your goal