Ryan Weber: Welcome to 10-Minute Tech Comm. This is Ryan Weber at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and I’m very excited to welcome today’s guest.
Joe Natoli: I’m Joe Natoli. I’m a UX consultant. For the last 30 years of my life, I’ve been working with enterprise organizations of all shapes and sizes, government agencies, and I’ve been fortunate enough to teach online courses to train students and practitioners to the tune of 344,000 students at the UX 365 Academy and my most recent book with Leah Buley is called The User Experience Team of One and I could not be prouder to be here.
Ryan: Natoli joins Leah Buley as a co-author for the second edition of the classic book, The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. This book is designed for individuals who have to take on the entirety of UX work at their organization. To help them understand what sorts of research and design and advocacy strategies that they can use to make UX more effective in their organization.
I really enjoy talking with Joe about how UX teams of one can evangelize their work, get buy-in for what they’re doing, and grow their careers. Thank you for listening.
Begin Interview
Ryan: Thank you so much, Joe. We are very excited to have you and I’m really excited about the new book and congratulations on that. I guess to start out with, tell us what is a user experience team of one? And then what are some of the challenges that come with that role?
Joe: Well, I think to be honest with you, I think there are more UX teams of one than people realize. I mean, a lot of folks, in mid-level organizations in particular, and by mid-level, I mean fairly large, several hundred employees, where there’s one person responsible for UX. There’s one person responsible for product design.
And even in situations where there are more than one person on the team, on a UX team, they’re spread so thin across projects that you are pretty much on your own. So there are certainly situations where you have a team. You have a dozen people all working on UX. That’s a very different animal. And that is what gets most of the airtime on social media, in courses, in books, in bootcamps, whatever. And the truth is that that is a rarer situation than most people realize, right? Most folks are kind of left to their own devices.
And if you’re new to this profession, that kind of means that you’re thrown into the deep end, into a corporate environment where there are lots of competing agendas, and you’re sort of left to sink or swim. And you cannot, in that environment, you can’t use all these perfect-world detailed processes that take weeks, upon weeks, upon weeks, upon weeks. There’s no time. Everybody’s saying like, we got to launch, right? We got five days to make this happen.
So the genesis of this book, when Leah first did it way back, a decade plus ago, was to give people a more realistic lay of the land and say, here’s how you navigate this difficulty. Your back’s up against the wall, chill out, we got you.
Ryan: Yeah, so you’ve got a situation where, most UX advice probably assumes that we have a team, resources, everything we need to kind of run things in an ideal state. And all too often, that’s not the case people are working in at all.
Joe: No, in my experience, it’s almost never been that way. And in most environments I’ve been in, okay, and a lot of my clients are Fortune 500, 100, large enterprise works. The ratio, for example, of UX folks to developers is like one to a hundred.
I mean, you are, even in the best of circumstances, even when you have a small team, you’re still kind of grossly outnumbered. And I think it’s difficult in that environment, like I said, to sort of find ways to move forward quickly, especially when you’ve got other people on other teams, stakeholders who don’t necessarily have the time or in some cases the interest to be involved, right? They’re just like, make it happen.
Ryan: Yeah, so we’ve got a situation where there’s a lot of challenges. You’ve covered a lot of these in your book. One of the things you talk about is sort of people issues, right? Because you’re this UX team of one. What kinds of people issues might the UX team of one encounter and what are some ways to deal with those?
Joe: I mean, I think it can be several things, right? Like I said, the issue with corporations of any kind, is that companies are basically set up for a diametric opposition across every department. They’re just built that way in the org chart. Everyone’s got an agenda and it’s a good agenda. It’s a sound agenda. It’s what they’re on the hook for accomplishing, for their part of the business.
So you get pushback from stakeholders often. You get pushback from developers often. Now, sometimes, we all like to complain. Sometimes that is the case where someone doesn’t understand the amount of work that’s necessary to do good design work, to do good product designer UX work. But oftentimes it’s more competing agenda. It’s more that this person has to get something done. They’re responsible for a metric. They’re responsible for pushing something out into the world and they’ve got this much time to do it. They’re getting pressure all down the chain.
So you get opposition. You say, I need two weeks for research. No, you don’t have two weeks. You have a day. You have two days. We need two weeks to iterate on this particular piece of interaction, right? This key user path, customer path. No, you got three days. End of the sprint is in five days. I know you were on this other project three days ago, but now you’re here.
So to me, there’s constant people issues of different kinds. There’s always, I don’t want to paint it as war. It’s not. But there are lots of battles to be fought in. And it forces you to have to think on your feet, to say, okay, how do I get this person what they need? Number one, how do I figure out what they need in the first place, right? So that I can tailor what I’m doing in a way that addresses that and also give them some confidence that the work I’m doing connects to the things that they already want. And I think that’s the biggest people issue of all, right? Communicating to people that look, I’m not asking for this stuff because I want to make it perfect or because I want a gold plated. I’m asking for this stuff because you’re telling me you need A, B, and C. I’m telling you that in my experiences, this is the best way to get there. It’s those kinds of issues we talk about people issues.
Ryan: So really framing your work in a way that’s beneficial and complimentary to the work that others are doing?
Joe: Yes. Yeah.
Ryan: Well, because it sounds like what you’re saying is, in an organization, everyone is squeezed thin and then UX might be squeezed the thinnest.
Joe: Yeah, possibly. Possibly. Yeah.
Ryan: All right. So one of the other things you point out is kind of this need to evangelize for UX, right? To explain what UX is, to get people on board. What are some good ways to do that?
Joe: Yeah. And that was, again, when I first read this book, when Leah first published it, I was a fan of this book before I got involved in the second edition. That was one of the things that I loved about the book is in that it was evangelism, but not from a standpoint of we are UX, we’re the center of the universe, you need to listen to what we tell you. It was never like that. It was an acknowledgement of, look, the people around you don’t necessarily understand what it is that you do or what its value is or how it helps them. So it is your job—this is what I loved about this book—it is your job to communicate that in some way.
So evangelizing isn’t, we’re the experts, you need to listen to us. Like we talk about in the book, it’s more about, again, here’s how the work I’m doing connects to what you’re doing. Here’s how it makes your job easier, faster, better. Like developers, for example. When you involve developers early on in the UX process, your relationship with them changes dramatically. You have a lot less of this, you have a lot less wasted work as well. Same thing with stakeholders. If you have a conversation with people early and often and say, tell me what your goals are in two weeks, what has to happen for you to feel like the work we did in this time period was worth doing, right? Was successful?
So a lot of things we talk about in terms of evangelism is meeting people where they are and making sure that you speak to this in a way that is their language and not yours. And that’s a big thing with me. When I’m with clients, for example, I always, I say this all the time, I take off my UX badge. I don’t use that word, I don’t use those terms. I don’t use any of the language that we talk about in our profession on purpose because I need to be understood. They don’t have the time or the interest to learn my vocabulary. So it is on me to make sure that I communicate whatever it is that I wanna do in a language that they understand.
Ryan: So you’re not gonna say, let’s do a heuristic evaluation and then a time on task metrics.
Joe: Never.
Ryan: Okay, yeah. So you’re speaking in a language they can understand, explaining why it’s useful to the other people in the organization.
Joe: Yeah, and again, that’s why you have to find out upfront what it is that they want in the first place. And we talk about this, right? You have to know where people are coming from, not just from a departmental goal kind of thing, from a personal kind of thing. That person is feeling pressured, they’re feeling stressed. They’re on the hook for something and they’re worried in most cases, that they’re not gonna get it.
You have to know what that is. If you know what that is, you can keep pointing your work back to it, right? So when you say, “Okay, I know we don’t have much time, but I need at least, I need to carve out eight hours somewhere to talk to users. Okay, this is gonna be quick. We’re gonna get five or six users in. We’re gonna do this quick and dirty. But the reason I feel like I need to do it is because you told me that there’s an issue with A, B and C and I feel like we could take some guesses at that, but we’re probably gonna be back here in another two weeks trying to figure it out again. So I would rather cut to the chase and maybe eliminate some unnecessary work if we back up, spend some time talking to people and then let’s go forward with one of two plans.” It’s a different conversation, right? Than saying open-ended, I need two weeks to talk to users.
Ryan: It seems like your methods are gonna be a little different as a UX team of one in terms of kind of what you can do and how you can engage users. What kind of methods do you recommend that a team of one take on for testing, user engagement, everything like that?
Joe: We detail a lot of them, okay, inside the book. At the end of each section, for example, and this is Leah’s thing, not mine, I can’t take credit for it. She does this thing where if you only do one thing, okay, do this. Like we talk about heuristic evaluations, for example. In some cases, that’s all you have time for. Or the only thing you have time for is to talk to subject matter experts, right? If the mandate comes down, you can’t talk to users. We don’t have access to users, like we don’t have time. Whatever the answer is, fine, don’t waste time arguing about that. Find people inside the organization who understand this material. Talk to sales, talk to customer service, talk to support. Talk to people who are hearing on the front lines every day what people are upset about, at the very least. That is always better than nothing.
I think there’s a belief in this industry that if you can’t do things the quote-unquote right way, you know, I see posts every day that are like, it’s not real UX if, whatever, okay? You have to do something. Whoever you can talk to, whoever you can wrangle and say, look, here’s what I’m thinking.
Or even if you’re making improvements to an interface, for example. There’s nothing wrong with pulling five people in your organization, any five people, who have time for you, to have them walk through it, step through it, and watch what they do. Basic tenets of human cognition and behavior are always gonna apply in the interface. You’re always gonna see things at a very generic level that can be better, right? And all improvement is worth doing.
Ryan: Great, and that’s helpful, sort of like do what you can. You know, it may not be the perfect UX method, but it’s going to yield insights that can lead to improvements.
Joe: Right, for example, one of the things that people will see over and over in this book is in several instances we say, look, if no one else is willing to play with you with this exercise, with this meeting, this method, this process, that’s fine. Do it for yourself, okay? It still gets you a little bit further down the road in understanding what the lay of the land is and what needs to happen, okay? So just because people are like, I don’t have time for that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
Ryan: And now another thing I could see is, and I think you talk about this in the book a lot, is if I’m a UX team of one, my career might kind of stagnate, because there’s really nowhere to go, right? So what is a good way for somebody in this role to kind of grow and nurture and develop their career?
Joe: It’s a tall order because it depends on where you are. What I say to people all the time is that if you’re taking on a role where you are the only UX person, okay? Or if you’re already in a role where you are the only UX person, while you’re in this job, even if you’re looking at leaving, okay? Even if you’re looking at feeling like, okay, the ceiling is probably here and I’m always gonna be doing this work. Broaden your horizons a little bit and look for opportunities to step outside that work you’re doing.
Start talking to people in other departments. Find out what they’re doing. Find out how they’re doing it. Volunteer to help them with it. Find ways to expand your skillset while you’re doing what you’re doing, okay? In that situation, you are better off trying your hardest to be a generalist. Reason being is that there are gonna be more future job opportunities open to you if you can do a variety of things.
Now, eventually, can you specialize? Of course. But it is exceedingly difficult to start out as specialists and then try to change your area of expertise. So if you’re a UX team of one and you’re stuck and you’re the only person, man, take on everything you can possibly take on, even if it doesn’t directly have to do with core UX activities. Learn, stretch, diversify, poke your nose into things.
Ryan: Well, it seems like you’re gonna have to wear a lot of hats anyway, so you might as well kind of embrace that.
Joe: Correct, correct, correct. I mean, I’ll tell you right now, my career, in a lot of ways, would not be possible were it not for lots of situations early on where I was thrown into situations where I was it, and it was kind of sink or swim. So I felt like, okay, nobody knows how to do this. Everyone’s saying it needs to be done. All right, fine, I’m gonna raise my hand and I’m gonna figure this out. And that helped me greatly because as my career went on before I made the jump to work myself, I could pivot. I could pivot just about any direction anyone asked me to pivot in. Now, was I better at some of those things than others? Of course.
But that flexibility is critical, especially now, because in a strange way, this is a topic that’ll take us all day if we get into it, but I do think as a profession, I think we are sort of headed back toward more generalism. It’s just a gut feeling. It’s a lot of what I see and hear, but it seems like that’s kind of what’s going on, so.
Ryan: Okay, so kind of prepare for generalism, that it’s better to kind of be able to do a lot of things and then narrow as the job dictates rather than coming in saying, “I’m just a researcher, I’m just a graphic designer,” because you’re not, you can’t thrive as a UX team of one in that way, you have to be the whole team.
Joe: I agree. And again, there’s 290 pages of whatever it is of generalism. I mean, we’re tackling every single area of what you would call user experience on a broad scale. For that reason, you’re going to have to touch all these things or some of these things at some point, and you’re not going to know necessarily when is which.
So again, we’re trying to give people simple methods to say, look, I know this feels like a big stretch from where you are. What we’re trying to say is it’s not, okay? These are simple methods. Anyone can do this. If you already have the head for this kind of stuff already, you can absolutely elevate your game. It doesn’t have to be this stressful, panicked experience.
Ryan: Well, thank you, Joe. This has been great. I’ve had a lot of fun talking with you, and congratulations to you and Leah on the new book.
Joe: Thank you.
Ryan: That’s very exciting. Where can we get it?
Joe: You could go to Rosenfeldmedia.com, and you will see all their books, all of which are excellent. This company, I will give them a little plug right now, and not just because they’re my publisher. They are literally an amazing group of people, starting with Lou Rosenfeld. Integrity, character, genuine, genuine care about whether or not the things they put out into the world actually help people or not. And I’m telling you, 30 years on in my career, I think that is exceedingly rare. So I was honored, honored to do this. Plus, I was honored to work with Leah on a book that I already was in love with, so.
Ryan: Terrific. Well, thank you so much, Joe.
Joe: Thank you, sir.