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Below is the sample chapter I wrote for my book proposal. I encourage you to offer suggestions and provide feedback. If you have your own examples or anecdotes on this topic, let me know. You might end up in the book. Go ahead and drop you comments.

What’s the book about? Hint: I’m going to help you get UX into your organization.

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The time to strike is when the opportunity presents itself.
~ 6th Code of Isshinryu Karate

To me, Judo is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers knock each other down.
~ Jack Handy

Chapter Summary

All projects are headed in some direction. You want to understand the vector of activity and inject UX along the way. Catch that rising star. If the project is faltering, you can prevent the fall with the right mix of UX interventions. Businesses worry about failure and you can provide risk mitigation and project insurance. Always look ahead, always be prepared. Have answers to questions the project team didn’t even know it had. UX is a project success catalyst and also a failure prevention mechanism for businesses.

The Nature of Opportunity

Opportunity doesn’t really knock. There isn’t a person walking from cube to cube or office to office banging on doors offering it up. Opportunity is something that you have to recognize. It has many colors, shapes, and sizes.

A failing project is just as good for you as a project on the way to complete victory. The key is to understand the swing and flow of the project. The greater the changes, the more opportunities you will have. Ups and downs are good things for you.

So, here’s your first tip in this chapter. You have to find your own opportunities. You have the make your own magic. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. Evaluate your own projects and the other activities around you. Look for changes. Look for issues. Find strengths and weaknesses and prepare to strike.

I’m going to suggest something that I’ve done for years. You should literally keep a log of projects and opportunities, along with key contacts and UX issues you see along the way. Given my background, I tend to focus on usability issues and information architecture problems but you can focus on other types of UX issues. The trick is documentation and keeping your mind focused on the value you can provide at just the right time.

Actions

Let’s get specific. If the project is on the upswing, here’s what you do. Find one or two leaders and offer some of your time. All projects need help but often the most successful projects need the most help. This is ironic and counterintuitive but if you think about it, you’ll recognize the truth behind it. See the issue, review your documentation, then strike. Offer your help and do what it takes to get your foot in the door.

Once you are on the team, my best advice is to go after the least desirable but highest impact jobs. I’ve found that assisting with help text and training documentation are good places to hunt. There are many ways to inject UX at this point. For example, you can offer suggestions on language or you can write the text yourself, with just the right nuances.

If you are writing something for the project, you can also start asking a lot of good questions. How many customers have tried this? What were their biggest pain points? How can this be written to help people? All of these kinds of questions can be based on your experience and knowledge of UX.

Here’s another key insight. Even if you cannot influence the current project, you will get people thinking that you are a great resource for high impact, undesirable jobs. That builds mojo and goodwill. It also positions you for the next project. You’ll be able to inject UX sooner rather than later.

The previous comments apply to both projects on the upswing and downswing. MY advice is to find projects that are in flux. You’ll be less effective if the project is stagnating. You can’t make an impact if the project is sitting still. Move on and find other opportunities. You’ll see that there are plenty if you dig around a little.

Positioning and Posturing

As you build goodwill and relationships you will create another opportunity for yourself. You will be able to explain the value of UX in terms that make good sense to project leaders. In particular, you can explain how UX offers protection. That is sweet music to an executive.

On one of my projects for a manufacturing company several years ago I explained that I could increase the chances of project success by 200 or even 300%. Due to my UX knowledge, I said this with self assured confidence. I went on to explain that many projects fail because customers can’t figure out how to use products and that training costs often overwhelm help desks. It was simple to provide supporting evidence.

In the UX world, we think about our tools. For example, we talk about usability testing and card sorting. At most we describe what we do and some basic outcomes. The key insight in my little case study above is that I explained the value of UX in extremely simple business terms. I offered the project leader a guarantee. I provided a reasonable measure of risk mitigation and project insurance.

I’m not suggesting that you play on fear and doubt, but business leaders do have concerns about success. You can further augment your position by explaining how you can improve the chances for success, which in turn leads to their personal success.

In all of this activity and in all of these conversations, you need to look ahead several steps. You have the skills to do this. You’re a trained thinker. Translate those skills.

Consider for a moment that projects have personalities. They also live, grow and die. Your job is to use what you know. Understand the project and everything that drives it. If you know the project vector and the project personality, you can predict where it is going. That means you can stay ahead of other people. Your UX answers to problems will fall into the right hands at the right time, like magic.

Summary of tips:

• Keep a notebook of UX issues on projects and stay prepared
• Offer to write help text and documentation, then slip in UX
• Ask questions that make people think about UX topics
• Explain how UX offers project insurance and safety

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 11:04 am and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.