 speaker, Ms. Malini Rao, director at User Experience United States and alumni of Industrial Design Center IIT, Pohai, Mumbai, with experience of over two decades in UX and design product experiences for diverse organizations like Simon's Medical Systems and Oracle, Red Hat and other nimble organizations like Acquia and Ipswich and also holds a UX patent for her work at Red Hat United States. She believes in the proposal that out-of-the-box creativity should not be limited to the design of efficient and delightful user experiences alone, but also to the methods of doing design itself. We are all very pleased to have Ms. Malini Rao here today with us to discuss enough with the vandalism, let's make a deal, please give her a warm welcome with loud applause. Thank you, Nehita. Hello everybody, first session after lunch, sorry to keep you guys waiting. I'm really, really excited to be here speaking to all of you, some of you, you know, you guys are the best, I think, in the design community in India and I know that the conference also has people attending from other parts of the world, so I'm really excited to be here. I've actually come a full circle. My career in design, the foundation was laid, as Nehita mentioned, at the Industrial Design Center, IIT, Poway and here I am, 20 plus years later, reconnecting with some old friends, you know, some of whom are big names right now in the design scene here and also connecting with all the vibrant talent in this country. So when I left to pursue a career in design and left to the United States, the design scene was very different. There was just really just two schools of design at that time where now there are what, I hear 600 plus schools that are offering different types of degrees and diplomas and every major employer is an employer for user experience as well. So suffice to say that design has come a long way and perhaps is in its prime right now in India and most definitely around the world as well. So we are definitely traversing the value trajectory. First we were brought into embellish, you know, products and services and then to evaluate usability and then it was around adding value and now we're aspiring to create value, right? So even as we acknowledge how far we've come as a profession, I think there's also another truth, right? Another reality. UX teams then and even now continue to struggle to influence the product decisions around delivery, right? It seems like an uphill battle for most teams and when we sort of push back, we're either considered rogue or we're considered idealistic, right? And so most practitioners then think about whether our work, does it even matter, right? But the best of us then become evangelists or we become activists and then we teach, we preach, we negotiate, we conduct workshops, we protest, right? We do all of that. But it doesn't seem to be working. No one seems to be listening, right? So why is that? Why is this evangelism not working? In order to understand that, instead of looking at a design tool, what I decided to do was to use the Eisenhower matrix. This is actually a very popular business decision making tool. It's called the urgent important matrix as well. So it has four quadrants and each quadrant has an action associated with it. Now let's say something is very important for the business and is also urgent, right? Then definitely do it right away. If something is not that urgent but is really important for the business, definitely plan for it, schedule for it, right? If something is not that important but urgent, those are the types of things you want to delegate. You want to delegate it to somebody else, not spend the time on it. And then if something is neither urgent nor important, then why bother do it, right? Makes sense? Why bother do such things? So now let's try to see where our UX work falls in the quadrant. Look at that. This is where our work is, right? On the quadrant. There are a couple important takeaways that I want to highlight here, right? First of all, here's the reason for the title of my talk, right? Why we need to stop evangelism. The business does not care about the value of design. They want to get the value from design, right? How important, how does somebody see design in the company is not something that's urgent or important to the business. But they want design to function well so that they can reap the benefits of it. That's why evangelism is not working. And that's why we need to think of other ways to get our job done, okay? The other thing I want to point out is the quadrant where we are not there. That's the most important quadrant. That's the thing that the business cares about, right? That's the one that's important to the business and is urgent, right? If we are there, we're not getting enough credit for it. So in order for us to live in these top two quadrants here, what is it that we need to do? We need to understand the mechanics of influence, okay? To do that, I'm going to introduce you to one more matrix. I promise you that's the last matrix for this talk, okay? So this is the Kilman-Coven Organizational Survey. In this survey, they talk about two types of organizational influence. One is the formal aspects of influence of the organization. These are things like the building, the personnel, the equipment, the org structure, things like that. These are hard to change. And especially you need somebody in the C suite or VP or higher. And in many organizations, UX may or may not have people at that level. So the other type of influence is the informal aspect of the organizational influence, right? And so these are really how the humans in the organization collaborate, how they behave, how they come to decisions, things like that. So these are actually some things that we can leverage, right? These are things that we can affect. These are, you know, more and more organizations are nimble now, collaborative. So people that are able to traverse through the organization, they are the ones with the power. So you don't need to have a specific organizational structure in order to have that influence. It is as long as you're able to traverse the organization, okay? So definitely that is on our side because anybody can do that. The other axis here is whether you're influencing within your work group or outside your work group. This is easy, right? If it's within your work group, the chances of your influence is greater. Outside your work group, as you move out, it's a little bit harder, right? But I think as a goal for us, we need to think about living in these two quadrants, informal inside and informal outside, right? How can we have our influence grow that way? But in order to be very effective, I think we need to understand some of the spheres of influence, right? There are certainly certain things that you can control for yourself and sometimes for others. These are your actions, your attitude and things like that. A lot of the things that I will talk about in the rest of my talk is in this realm, right? Because these are the things that we have absolute control on. If we don't do a good job with this, then everything else is hard, okay? Next, we should put our skills and our strategies in place to influence the perceptions and decisions that happen in the organization. We'll talk a little bit about that as well, okay? But most importantly, I think we will not succeed if we don't become aware of this outer circle. This is that sphere of acceptance, right? There are certain things that you cannot change, right? For instance, the constraints in your organization or the fact that change is the only constant, right? So you need to accept the set of things that you cannot change and then think about how you can expand your influence, right? Sometimes I feel as designers, we're idealistic, we are not aware of that outer circle and then we get frustrated, okay? So I think as a field, design is actually poised with a lot of strengths to influence. Think about research. We have the research that can drive decision making. We have design thinking. We have visual design on our side. We are able to create awesome prototypes and things like that very quickly in order to sort of craft a vision and have people rally behind that. So many things, right? And yet we struggle when it comes to influencing our organizations. Why? Right? The fundamental weakness that we guys have, I think in my opinion, is gaining trust. So that's where I want you to, I want to introduce this trust equation. This is something that Charles Green came up with in his book, The Trusted Advisor, okay? So he formulates trust as credibility, plus reliability, plus intimacy over self-orientation. So over the years, UX, I think, as a field, we have come leaps and bounds when it comes to credibility, gaining credibility, reliability, working closely with our partners, things like that. So those are all going well. So we have an issue with trust mainly because of this other variable, self-orientation, which has an inverse effect on trust. So what is self-orientation? Self-orientation is a focus on one's own agenda over others, okay? But wait a minute. If there is one discipline in the organization that does not self-advocate it's us, isn't it? We're talking about thinking about the users, we're thinking about the customers, never about ourselves. So how come self-advocacy is, you know, how come we're scoring high on self-orientation? It doesn't seem to add up, but really if you think about it, it's not that hard to understand some of the reasons. So design in most organizations is an afterthought. Design as a field is only about 20 to 50 years old. Like I said, from the time I left to the United States to now we have moved so far, right? It's a lot has happened in a short time. Organizational culture and processes have been around for a much longer time. They have deep roots. It's like that big tree and design is like that wine that's going around the tree. It's engulfing it in new thinking and unknown potential. And all of that can at best be seen as a distraction or as a threat, right? And that's why our self-orientation is high. Additionally, businesses want fast returns, right? So anything, any new thinking that's coming in and trying to change old habits, it seems like it's going to slow the momentum down. And that's scary for businesses, right? So businesses, as I said, want those fast returns and design is focused on creating value. That's much more nuanced, right? That is something that organizations are still wrapping their head around in terms of how do we actually create value and nurture value. So again, because we are sort of ahead of the curve there, we are seen as coming in in the opposite direction, okay? Last but not least, because organizations are so delivery focused, the teams that are actually delivering are the drivers, the engineering teams most likely, right? Especially in a country like India where there's been a lot of offshore development, engineers are worshiped. And that is true around the world as well, right? And it's not as if engineers do not want to create a quality product, but their lens is different. They are focused more on system efficiencies. And they have to deliver on time and quality product within certain, you know, resource constraints, things like that, right? And here we come in with our user advocacy halos and throwing wrenches in the mission, right? And obviously it seems like we are marching in a different direction. And again, our self-orientation seems to be perceived as high. And these are the reasons why I think we're not able to gain the trust of our partners in business, right? So is it possible, I think the slides are getting cut off a little bit, but as long as you guys are okay, it's fine, okay? So is it possible for us to stay authentic and gain the trust of both our users and our partners in business? It seems like it's opposite, but I think yes. And I think we can do that with our own skills, right? The skills that we have, all that we need is really some mental ships, and we'll talk about that. Designers are masters of influencing behavior, yes? We all do this. We have so many tools and techniques in our design toolbox, which really we use to make our users feel at home with our products and our services, and we help them accomplish their tasks successfully, right? So it's my proposal that we can use some of the same tools and techniques to influence behavior in the organization as well. To be able to have our partners in the business feel at home with us, and for us together to be successful, okay? So like I said, some mental ships are necessary in order to do that. And I'm going to outline a few of them. Here's the first one. Design for the users, measure for the business. You know, we want to straddle between these two worlds, right? So we are very, very good at this first part, designing for the users, right? Our most of us start with empathy in our design process. We start by trying to understand who's the user we're designing for? What are their goals? What can they do? What are their skills? What can they do? What are their constraints? What is their context? We spend a lot of time to understand that. But think about this. How much time do we spend about understanding the other side about the business? Why is the business building this product? What does the business want to get out of this, right? What are some constraints? What is the context of this project? We sometimes gloss over these things. And remember, a good product, a good design, is one that works for our users, but also makes sense for the business, right? Nobody is doing this just like that. So we need to make sure that we balance those two. Especially new designers coming to the field, I don't know. Many of you may be starting out, many of you may be doing this for a while. New designers especially need to really just check on themselves if they have the singular focus on the user. And then try to balance that out with the business drivers and the technology drivers, etc. Now more experienced users, designers may say that I do this all the time. I'm always trying to talk to the product manager, talking to the engineers to understand what's feasible, what's viable, things like that. But remember, most of us, I think if we come across a problem that is somewhat similar, it doesn't matter if you are in X organization, you are in another organization, we might approach it similarly. And that's where I think we are still missing that outer context, the organizational context, right? Again, go back to that sphere of acceptance, right? To understand what that organization is about, how is it different from another organization? And how does that reflect in the design, right? When I worked for a company called Ipswich, which is now progress software, we were looking at the buyer's journey from a time when somebody discovers the product to when they actually make a decision to buy. So we did a customer journey map, I know it's small but I'll sort of explain the point I want to make here. So we did a customer journey map and it's mostly a traditional customer journey map. Really, it sees the process from discovery until purchase from the perspective of a customer and plots along the way how the customer is feeling. But what's special about this customer journey map is this lower half, okay? So there's a mirror image. From here until here, it's all from the outside in. And from here until the middle is all looking from the inside out. At the very bottom, we have some principles and aspirations of the organization. And then we have a set of issues that we've identified through our research, right? And as we are looking at those issues at every stage of the journey, we are looking at how to come up with recommendations in the light of the principles that the organization operates on and the aspirations of the organization. So in this way without evangelizing, we're holding a mirror to the organizational leadership, right? To say here are the issues, here's how we operate. And then that, and here are our recommendations. Now if there is something that they truly believe they want to transform in the culture and the DNA of the organization, then that has to come from the top down. I think most of the times, some of the times we hit those brick walls because we're trying to make such transformation happen from the bottom up, right? And that's also because we're just considering the goal and not the organizational context. Yeah, so for instance, just to give you an example, this organization had decided that they would mostly do inside sales. So they would not have sales agents go out in the field. That was the way that this organization did sales. So we are saying, okay, if that's how we want to operate, then these are the issues and these are the recommendations. If we do not want to change how we are, right? Now we can decide then if the top management can decide, okay, no, I really have a problem in getting enough leads. And therefore I'm going to also start field sales, maybe. So that's something that needs to come from the top down, you understand? But to understand what the aspiration and also think about the principles and the aspiration do they match? So really I think what you're trying to do is, in one short, you're trying to tell them, here's how the customer's perceiving. Here's your aspiration, here's where we are. These are the issues and here are some recommendations. So it's a full slew where it tells you, looks from the outside and inside out and gives a full picture. All right, so the other part of this mind shift, right? This is measuring for the business. Again, this is not something new for us. We are constantly doing usability testing and validation, things like that. This is part of our DNA too, right? We're also very careful in choosing the right metrics when it comes to our usability tests so that they reflect our user goals. I don't think, again, we're doing enough to add any metrics that reflect the business goals. First, are we aware of the business goals? And two, how are we measuring for those business goals, right? I would like to sort of walk you through a very quick case study to give you an example of how we did this. So I worked for a company called Acvia and they had a product called Acvia Lift. It was a product for personalization for marketers, okay? And it was at a very critical stage of failure. I'm gonna give you like a two minute case study for a journey that was a year long. A product that transformed quite a bit in that period of time. So the product, like I said, was at a very critical stage of failure. There were severe adoption and retention issues, so much so that it had become a C level issue to be monitored. So on a quarterly basis, everything about the product, whether it was sales, whether it was customer success, customer service support, everything including user experience was being monitored. So from a user experience perspective, they were monitoring how we can eliminate the UX pain for somebody to adopt and use lift, okay? And because adoption and retention were the business problems here, we chose our metrics carefully. We said we would look at the number of assists that a user needs in order to get going or complete their tasks because that sort of maps to ease of use, adoption, right? If they need a lot of assists, it's going to be hard to adopt. And then task completion rate or time on task, these are looking at efficiency. And that's where retention comes. If it's not efficient, people are not going to continue to use it because there are other products that they can try, right? So after selecting these metrics, we sort of did usability test quarter on quarter, right? And we had to go and present these findings. And the goal here was to show positive trends in our own area every quarter, to show that lift is doing better than the last quarter. What this did, does anybody remember or know the Gestalt law of common fate? Yeah, so when you are all in a similar situation, suddenly it doesn't matter whether you have any differences, you become one, right? So that's exactly what happened here too. Each of us, whether it was sales or user experience or engineering, product management, whoever, or any side of the business, right? We were asked to stand in front of the C suite and answer those tough questions. Nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news, right? So every quarter. So now instead of looking at our own silos, we began to work together, right? And then we were able to show quarter over quarter positive trends, right? And so this was the few things here, right? First is to recognize the business goals, to have metrics, identify metrics that reflect those business goals, stick with it. Be consistent and repeat so that you can see trends. And then if it allows, try to create partnerships with your organization so that you are able to then work on those goals together, okay? So it's not your goal versus my goal, but it's a common business goal that we're working towards, okay? The next mental shift I want to talk to you guys about is focusing on the outcomes over the process. Now as designers, I think we all are very fond of our own process, right? But one thing is true, and we've all experienced the benefits of process. And also the pain of having either too little or too much process. So I think what's important though is in design, when we are designing, we all know one big mantra that is one size does not fit all. But when it comes to our process, we say, no, this is the design process. This is what I need to do. I need to do research, and then I need to do this, and then I need to do that. And that scares other people, right? Now they have their own process, how do we fit into it? Actually, curiously though, if you Google even, you'll get hundreds of these things about how the design process can fit into the agile, development process, things like that. There are definitely challenges, but one thing is true. The design process is a framework and you can collapse or expand it as needed, right? And so I think what I invite you guys to think about is, how can I be experimental with my process? How can I have that be flexible? Because remember, this is not academia. You are in a business corporate situation. Done is better than perfect, okay? So you do what it takes to get the job done, focusing on the outcomes. I want to refer back to the Acrealift example. Because of the level of sensitivities that were there, we were not even able to access our customers to do research at one point in time, right? So what we did was we brought all the stakeholders together for a two-day workshop, not even a design sprint, just a two-day workshop, right? And we very flexibly adapted a technique called reality mapping from our design toolbox, right? And there were different people who had different pieces of information. And we collected all of those things, we strung that together. We used this technique to understand where our ideas were, where our gaps in understanding were, which became our research queue. And then we also identified certain themes. For the first time, all the stakeholders shared an end-to-end vision, right? And then we also identified these themes so that the product manager then took that as themes for the roadmap. So in two days, everybody had their set of action items and we were aligned on the end-to-end vision. And we had taken so many liberties with the process itself, the technique. It was not textbook, but we mashed lots of things up. But in two days we had outcomes more than we had ever imagined, okay? So that's what I would invite you to do, be creative with your process. Next, next mental shift. Think about packaging your design artifacts for maximum influence. Most designers, they think their job is done once you have your UX spec done. We do a very good job in being comprehensive, in being detailed, in dotting our I's, crossing our T's, doing all of that. But really the design spec, that's only the end of one part of your design project, that's when your second project starts. You need to think about how to design that artifact and how to communicate that artifact or your findings or your recommendations for maximum effect. So I'll give you a few examples. But before that, I want to say so far I've been talking about how we can blend in to the rest of the organization. But remember as designers we do something, again, the law of contrast, right? When we want, we use that judiciously so that we can draw attention of the user so that they can do something, right? So similarly, I think what we should do in this case is make design visible. Most of the other functions in the organization, we may not have, they may not be able to show their artifacts as much, but we can. So at Red Hat, when I worked there, we were looking at, we did a deep dive into the eval process, the evaluation process of our virtualization product, okay? So when we started to unravel that, we started putting these stickies on this long corridor, office corridor. And as we started to learn and everyday people were walking down those corridors, they would consume those findings and slowly people started to write on that and say, or make a comment or something like that. Suddenly, we had people that were not in our everyday meetings, that were not on the project team contributing to the process. So we were breaking down walls only by making it visible, right? And then when it was time and when all of this was done, instead of actually creating a PowerPoint or a PDF and sending it to our executive leaders, what we did was we invited them and then we presented the competitor eval process on a single sheet of paper, okay? And then we had two people unravel a 17 foot scroll, right? That showed our process for Red Hat, right? There were audible groans in the room and the CTO's head was in his hands. And no surprises, there were lots of remedial actions that were put into place right away. I don't think we would have quite the same speed or effect if we had not used the power of the artifact there, right? So really, I think we need to think about also what is the best way to communicate our design findings and recommendations as well. Last but not least, put design at the service of everybody. As I said, we spend a lot of time getting our specs looking just perfect, right? But remember, the spec has a very short shelf life. It is a very, its purpose is transient. Once the product is built, nobody cares about the spec, right? So yes, we need to do a good job with that, but what is really important is to use our tools to enable the organization. Also remember, as designers, we are frequently in the position of telling people what's wrong with something or in telling them what to do, right? And that immediately puts us on the opposite side. And we are always prescribers. So in addition, if we can become enablers, I think it increases trust, it increases that, decreases that self-orientation. And so one example of what we did at Kronos recently, there was a PM offside, product management, right, offside. And a couple of us went there just to facilitate their prioritization exercise. They had lots of things to think about the roadmap. And we spent a couple of hours with them and ran a KJ analysis for anyone that's aware of that, you can look it up if you're not. So we ran a KJ analysis, and in two hours, we were able to help them come down to their top priorities, right? A few weeks ago, I was at another cross-functional offsite, and one of the product managers was using a version of that KJ to run a session in that other offsite. And it was wonderful because not just did we empower them to come up with the goals for that PM offsite, but now we have given them some tools that they can now use in other places as well. And that really is the value of design, right? So really, influence can be logical, emotional, and cooperative, right? Logical through research and data, we talked about that. Emotional, that's CTO with his head in his hands, right? That's the power of the artifacts. And then cooperative is when you are doing, using your design skills, not for your benefit, but for the benefit of others, right? So the chief takeaways, I think influence is possible no matter, no matter what the organizational structure is, right? You can do that. You have several frameworks I've given you, the trust equation being one of them to think about how you can strategize your actions and your game plan based off of that framework. And then remember, there is no secret source, there's no other thing that you need to learn. As designers, we have every tool that we need, we just need to add a little bit of that pragmatic aspect into our process, okay? And last but not least, this is what I'd like to leave you with. Influence has a domino effect, right? You just need to find the first piece. Build on your small successes one after the other. It's never an all or nothing. Most of the time the frustration comes because we always try to get all or nothing, okay? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.