Results by Design: UX Insights for Business Leaders

Description: In the latest episode of our series, Michael Woo is joined by one of his team members, Cristie Shrader, Product Designer, to talk about the advantage of having an external perspective in UX design.

Let’s unpack the insights and experiences of a seasoned design consultant, exploring how they tackle dilemmas, overcome challenges, and foster productive client relationships.

Join us as we explore innovative approaches to enhance your products and services, optimize customer interactions, and ultimately drive success for your organization.

Interview Participants:

• Michael Woo, Director of UX @ UpTop
• Cristie Schrader, Product Designer @ UpTop

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Results by Design UX Insights for business leaders, the podcast that dives deep into the world of UX design, strategy and insights. Tune in, take action and design your way to success.

Michael Woo:
Hello everyone. I’m Michael, your host for today’s episode of the Results by Design podcast and I’m flying solo today without Greg, since I’ll be having a conversation with a member of my UX team. I’m super excited about today’s topic, which is the advantage of an external perspective. So without further ado, I like to introduce Christie Schrader. Hi Christie. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

Cristie Schrader:
I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Michael Woo:
I am good. Are you ready to do this?

Cristie Schrader:
I am

Michael Woo:
Yeah. Okay. Well why don’t we start by telling the listeners a little bit about yourself. What were you doing just a few years ago up until now?

Cristie Schrader:
Okay, well, let’s see. So before moving into the UX world, I worked as an apparel and accessories designer for about 20 years. I’ve worked for both large and small corporation, a wide range of products from outdoor clothing to children’s clothing, and it was kind of fun. I even got to design bags and clothes for dogs.

Michael Woo:
How do you feel those unique skills have translated into what you do today?

Cristie Schrader:
So when I started getting into the UX world, it became apparent that the process of creating apparel is very similar to the methodologies used in UX design. You have a problem to solve for, you create a prototype, you test the prototype against the problem, iterate and repeat is necessary. So the fundamentals of apparel design of the apparel design process and UX processes are, they’re extremely similar. And having years of design under my belt, it made my transition a lot easier to ux.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, I did notice that for sure. And that’s great. Can you describe a little bit about the type of work that you’ve been doing since you joined UpTop?

Cristie Schrader:
The majority of my work has been on a long form project with the same client for about two years. The work is based around several interconnected work streams. So it’s been multiple segmented projects over a longer period of time, and what we’re doing is working to improve a small but dense part of a customer flow for a global e-commerce company. Some of the solutions we’re trying to solve are integrating business needs that don’t completely align with what makes the process easiest for the customer. So it’s the age old question of how can we improve the customer experience but also incorporate business priorities.

Michael Woo:
So let’s dive deeper into that for a minute. Balancing business goals with user goals. This is something we are almost always faced with. We’re working on our project, but what happens when you’re faced with a dilemma of in order to achieve a specific business goal, you must knowingly design a lesser user experience. How do you generally approach this and is there an example maybe that you can share?

Cristie Schrader:
Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s definitely a give and take. Being an outside consultant, I only have so much influence and sometimes the business goals are on a trajectory that kind of feels like they can’t be stopped. So no matter how much you try to suggest or nudge for a better user experience, it can be tricky. So one great thing about UX is the opportunity to validate with research, and our client on this project really believes in validating with data. So when in doubt we’ll run a test, usability studies have been really valuable. It’s been a valuable way to keep the user experience on at the forefront. In situations like this

Michael Woo:
From balancing business goals and user needs, what other challenges do you typically face or see and how has your diverse experience as an outside consultant help you navigate these challenges?

Cristie Schrader:
So designing on a global scale is tricky. More often than not when you think you found a solution, localization always throws you for a loop. There isn’t a one size fits all solution for a lot of reasons. Processes are different in other countries, so that increases the use cases, and you also have to think about edge cases. Localizing the language can affect the design tremendously. Sometimes we have a great design for the US market, but it doesn’t work with Germany, for example, due to longer words, and we don’t want to truncate and have the customer miss something that is important to their task. But we also don’t want to customize the design to every market. This could be a really big lift for developers. So that’s where it’s really tricky. Another challenge I face as a design consultant and not being in-house is kind of my knowledge around the process flow can feel really fragmented.

I’m not always privy to the structure of the entire process because I don’t need to be part of it on a day-to-day basis. To a certain extent, my knowledge around this whole process is at the mercy of my client partner and what they communicate to me. And when, and because I’m not usually involved in leadership reviews, I have to work a little harder to tease out timelines, which affects understanding the priority of certain work streams. Sometimes things are a surprise and I just have less control over these aspects as a consultant than I would if I was in house.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, I know what you mean. But I can tell you this, having worked on both sides of the fence, even when you are in-house, you still may not be privy to that kind of information as much as you may think a lot of those conversations are happening a few levels up, especially those that ship priorities and ultimately timelines. In what ways can an external perspective bring fresh insights to the client’s organization?

Cristie Schrader:
Well, I think simply the fact that I’m not an employee, I’m not bogged down by company culture and infrastructure, it kind of allows me more freedom of exploration. That might sound abstract, but I think when you’re at a company for a long time doing the same thing, you can get a little jaded. I don’t really have any preconceived notions coming into this. My skin in the game is simply different than what an employee’s would be. Also, because I’m not limited to the silos of work that an in-house designer might get trapped in, I don’t really experience disenchantment. The variety of work keeps things interesting and it can help spark new ideas that I can bring to our clients.

Michael Woo:
I know as an organization it can be a difficult decision on whether to hire within or hire externally. Often what we hear is it can be too expensive to build up an internal design team because it requires a lot of work to do. So I want to touch on some additional things that an outside perspective brings. There’s a saying that Craig uses all the time, which is you can’t read the label from inside the jar, which basically means you can’t identify or solve your own problems because you’re just way too close to them. We’ve heard this a lot from clients, which is that their in-house designers are good at what they do, but they are only good at working incrementally and when you need to reimagine an experience, they don’t have those capabilities along those same lines. Using an agency to reimagine an experience allows them to draw upon their cross-industry exposure and learnings.

We’ve also heard that some in-house teams are unable to think strategically or just look at the overall big picture. Consultants, on the other hand, are trained to ask those tough questions and to really dig deeper. And as Christie, you alluded to earlier, you’re not bound by culture or politics. So it’s a whole lot easier to ask these tough questions without feeling you’ll be reprimanded for doing it. Lastly, some companies only have an army of one and contrast this with a consultant who typically has a really strong T shape, meaning they are generalists with a specific strength, but also they have a supporting cast at an arm’s length away that can add various levels of experience or assistance when needed. So in all organizations who have the capability of building a design team, I think it’s great to have, but there’s definitely benefits to and advantages to looking outside if you need to. In what ways, just to pivot really quick, in what ways does our consultancy work allow you to stay updated on the latest design trends and technologies?

Cristie Schrader:
So the client that I’ve been working with is very much on the forefront of technology, and in some ways they’re even breaking barriers in their space. So I get to learn vicariously through them about technologies that the company is working on or even just planning on implementing. Soon I get to see into their future visions, and even if I’m not working directly on that project or with that technology, the awareness of what’s going on or what’s in the horizon and how they are being used, it serves as an inspiration and even a brainstorm mechanism for the work that I’m doing. Sometimes just knowing about the future solutions, it allows me to kind of think bigger and outside the box.

Michael Woo:
I agree. We learned so much from our various client work because they span across industries and applications, and heck, it’s always evolving. I’ve been doing consultancy work for more than 10 years now, and no day has been the same, and also no day has been boring. I don’t know what you think. Do you agree with that statement?

Cristie Schrader:
I do, actually. I would definitely say that, yeah.

Michael Woo:
How can the organization benefit from accessing specialized skills that you bring from working with various clients?

Cristie Schrader:
Well, I think having a diverse roster of clients means that I can tap into past experiences and leverage other scenarios to be more strategic. I’m not working in a vacuum on one type of scenario.

Michael Woo:
Absolutely agree with this point. Can you describe an occasion where you might have brought an idea to the table that was cross-pollinated from another project that either you or someone else at the agency had worked on?

Cristie Schrader:
I would say that research is definitely something that has been cross-pollinated. Later today actually, I am sharing a research study from a past work stream with another designer who is working on a different but related project. Last May, we did a study around some of the design components and the findings are still relevant and the findings can help validate some of the visuals that my colleague has been working on. So it does feel good to be able to help in that way. And as you know, internally, we have a regular cadence of design team meetings and we all share what we’re doing, and if we need more eyes on something, we can leverage our colleagues experience to help solve an issue or at the very least, it’s a good way to get some brainstorming out of it.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, that’s great. Going back to some of the challenges that we touched on earlier, the conversation, how do you handle sudden changes in project requirements or shifts in design priorities?

Cristie Schrader:
This is a very timely question. This week, in fact, I was on one trajectory prepping for a usability study, planning my script, creating prototypes around a certain design, but due to internal reviews that the objectives and focus have to shift. So in cases like this, I think it’s about working with your client partner, figuring out priorities when a shift happens, and remembering that ultimately you are working for them. I need to make sure that I understand the impacts of the shift, I understand the reprioritization that needs to happen, and that they also understand the impact of the shift. From a workload perspective, I would say communication is very important when there are big changes in a project. I like to keep expectations realistic. That’s really important in a long form project like this because the pacing of work is important, even just for my mental health and managing their expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time.

Michael Woo:
Yes, I agree. Communication is very important and it is very important as well to set expectations upfront. How do you build and maintain strong relationships with clients as a design consultant?

Cristie Schrader:
Well, I think I want them to feel that their needs are being met, that they’re being heard and that they are receiving quality work. Since I’m not privy to their schedules, as I mentioned earlier, I also don’t want to apply too much pressure about weekly meetings. I know things come up for them and that they have other things going on that I don’t know about. But on the flip side, establishing a regular cadence of communication is really important to make sure the project is pacing properly and in the right direction. So we haven’t established day and time for a weekly call, so there’s security on that. Knowing that communication is almost guaranteed once a week. We’ve actually had some trial and error figuring out the best way to communicate feedback and the best way to track tasks, but it seems like we have a solid system now, but it did take a little bit of time to get there. I think willingness to be flexible is important. Rigidity in this case doesn’t help anyone, but there is something to be said about boundaries as well. There’s a fine balance there, but I think that balance ultimately helps keep the relationship respectful and productive.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, flexibility is an important to have for an agency and an agency partner. Relationship with boundaries breeds respect and productivity. Definitely agree with that. Well, this was a good peek into your world, Christie, and I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you did as well. Maybe you could come back next time. We’ll do this again. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is it for today’s show. Join us again next time as we explore innovative approaches to enhance your products, services, optimize customer interactions, and ultimately drive success for your organization. Tune in, take action and design your way to success.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to Results by Design. If you liked this episode, be sure to share and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are also playing on all your favorite audio streaming podcast platforms, so stay connected and join us for the next one. Results by Design is brought to you by UpTop. Our mission is to equip business leaders like you with the knowledge and tools needed to leverage UX methods and strategies to achieve tangible business outcomes and create lasting value. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or just starting to explore the world of ux, results by Design is your go-to resource for unlocking the potential of user experience to achieve remarkable results. Tune in, take action, and design your way to success.