“I think a successful company is one where everybody owns the same mission. Out of necessity, we divide ourselves up into discipline groups. But the goal when you are actually doing the work is to somehow forget what discipline group you are in and come together. So in that sense, nobody should own user experience; everybody should own it.” – Don Norman
Read more from an interview with Don Norman on where user experience should be positioned within a company in this article.
“My definition of a ‘customer centric’ culture is where people are asking the right questions to the right people, who are able and willing to collaborate to provide their insights. In such a culture, over time, individuals ask the right questions more often and get the right answers more often. This is a reinforcing feedback loop. As this culture takes hold, more and more of the solutions coming out of the group would yield positive customer experiences.” – Secil Watson
Read more from Secil in Richard Anderson’s Riander Blog entry “Breaking Silos.” Secil describes why collaboration and integrated work practices are critical to the success of any team.
“Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the ‘things’ that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.” – Bill Buxton’s “personal mantra”
Bill Buxton’s personal mantra is cited on his website. Visit his site to learn more about his recent work or his upcoming talks and events. Read more from Bill in his book Sketching User Experiences.
“User experience is something that cuts right across the organization. It is the tangible manifestation of the organization’s reason for being, translating the brand values into a series of identifiable and actionable experience characteristics. To execute a UX strategy requires the coordinated efforts of the entire organization, and, as such, should sit close to the centre of the organization’s overall strategy.” – Steve Baty
Read an interview with Steve Baty “UX Strategy: defining and executing strategies for your UX projects and UX teams” for more thoughts on the importance of UX strategy within an organization.
“Good design is design that not only achieves a desired effect, but shapes our expectation of what the experience can be.” – Astrida Valigorsky
Astrida’s quote was quoted in Richard Buchanan’s article “Good design in the digital age” (PDF).
“For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts, not just one time but over and over, they’ll need to do more than hire designers. They’ll need to be designers. They’ll need to think like designers, feel like designers, work like designers. The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today’s wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.” – Marty Neumeier
Read Marty’s article “Designing the Future of Business” for his thoughts on how design can turn a company into a “powerhouse of nonstop innovation.”
Catriona Cornett