Download the UX Sales Deck: Sell Your Team on the Benefits of Great UX

Working somewhere that doesn’t put the needs of customers first can be frustrating. These 52 Cards from Paul Boag are designed to help you convince your team how important user experience truly is!

The truth is that many of our colleagues do care about the user’s experience, they just don’t know it yet! They want to increase revenue, cut costs, meet targets or any number of other things that efficient user experience design can help improve. We just need to get better at showing them the potential. We need to learn how to sell user experience.

That has become somewhat of an obsession for me. This deck can help you start shifting culture at your workplace so that others understand how important it is to be user centric. The techniques on these cards are the distillation of 20 years experience of working with companies to become more user-friendly. Born out of the research undertaken for the book User Experience Revolution, they include techniques used by organizations who have successfully realigned around user needs.

It is time to become a better salesperson

Being a UX professional can feel like an uphill battle sometimes. It can often feel like we are the only people in the world who care about the user. That can lead us to adopt a lone wolf mentality, fearlessly fighting the evil corporate machine on behalf of the user. But this attitude does more harm than good.

You see, no matter how much we would like to think otherwise, we cannot, single-handedly, craft an outstanding user experience. We need the help of colleagues, and not just other digital professionals. We need the help of everybody from the boardroom to the finance department. Even the actions of somebody in the HR department ultimately affects the customer experience to some extent, because the criteria by which HR assess staff affects how they behave with customers.

Of course, at some level, we know all of this. Unfortunately, our solution to this problem is to nag our colleagues into submission! We drone on about the user experience when, often, all our colleagues want to do is to meet their deadlines, get paid and not get fired. Instead of being the user champion, we come across as religious fanatics shouting on the street corner.

I believe that our ultimate goal as user experience professionals is to make ourselves redundant. That one day everybody will care as genuinely about creating a great user experience as we do, and on that day we will no longer be needed.

But to get to that point, we need to get better at convincing others. We need to take the skills we use to understand users and apply it to our stakeholders. To understand what motivates them so we can frame user experience in the right way.

We must stop bashing our colleagues around the head for failing to care as much as we do, but instead gently educate them about the fantastic benefits a great experience can provide, not only to users, but for them personally and the business as a whole.

About The Creator

Paul Boag is a leader in digital strategy and user experience design. He has been working with organisations such as The European Commission, Oxford University and Doctors Without Borders for over 20 years. Through consultancy and training he helps organisations make better use of digital technologies. He helps them meet the needs of today’s connected consumers.