Three Ways to Build Your In-House Ecommerce Team Structure by Emily Pfeiffer

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May 13, 2014 by Emily Pfeiffer - Add Comment

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There was a time when e-commerce and digital marketing tasks were so baffling to “regular” business management types, it was automatically lumped in with IT. Because it was somewhat technical it seemed only the most geeky could handle it (as my Grandma says, “you must understand this – you do computers”).

Not to insult my technically inclined brethren (no, really – I was once an IT Director!) but your average IT professional, however talented and truly indispensable, is probably not the ideal person to manage your digital marketing efforts. Would you put a developer at the helm of your trade show booth? Almost certainly not. It’s just not that role’s skillset. Similarly, your most visible marketing channel should only be owned by someone with a strong handle on customer experience, marketing, and brand positioning.

Maybe this is old news for you. You could be way ahead of the curve on these expectations. If so, good for you! But do you know what it is that makes this particular marketing channel so difficult to staff with just a few heads?

E-commerce is still the love child of Marketing and IT. So much of the work involved is technical. More than that, data and statistics become even more prominent in digital marketing than in more traditional media for two reasons:

1. Availability – the internet has simply made it possible for us to access deep levels of data like we’ve never been able to easily capture and review before.
2. Immediacy – for the first time, we have an instant view of what’s happening. We can literally launch a campaign today and gauge its (initial) success tomorrow.

Subsequently, the digital marketer has to be even more on top of data and analysis than marketing professionals have previously been. This hybrid field requires a balanced staffing solution.

Evolution of the e-commerce professional

Over time, there have been trends in hiring to meet the e-commerce needs of organizations. What started out as an indistinct, mysterious, IT-managed project, became an outsourced service, often provided by a single consultant. Managing the digital channel was one of the newest, and still very ambiguous, job duties in many organizations. As the economy tightened, it was therefore one of the easiest to hire out rather than supporting dedicated staff.

As the role evolved and swelled with responsibilities, it became necessary to hire more than just one handy geek to keep things moving smoothly. Many companies began to bring it back in-house, but this process has been rocky for many. It’s very challenging for managers to define the necessary roles, figure out how to delegate responsibilities, and understand when to bring in additional help for what is still a very new specialty and largely unknown to many hiring managers.

For small to medium sized business, this model has prevailed:

An in-house core team is responsible for overall strategy and direction, under either sales or marketing. That team is owns whatever the company views as either the most crucial, or the easiest to manage, areas of the e-commerce need. For instance, a brand that has strong design skills in-house may keep much of that oversight while hiring out for website management. On the flip side, if technical skills are well developed, coding and development might be maintained alongside some marketing and analytics, while the creative bits are outsourced.

A word about marketing in the digital age

Marketing is creative, nuanced, artistic and intuitive. Digital marketing is technical, agile, and in many ways, worlds apart from traditional marketing roles.

There is nothing else like the roles in a small e-commerce team structure. I’ve found that the larger a company is, the more their e-commerce positions look like traditional marketing. They morph into things that sound much less digital, and much more specific (like Customer Acquisition Manager) and relegate the more technical stuff out separately. They may also just fold all digital marketing in with the traditional side, treating it as a small off-shoot.

While larger teams have the luxury of getting granular with their needs, in-house digital departments in smaller businesses need to be lean and flexible. More than that, I see a deep benefit to keeping the specifically digital perspectives embedded in the business roles.

These are new rules we’re playing by. The “old” approach to business growth, brand building, and marketing just doesn’t work anymore. Unless the digital is built into the marketing, the e-commerce and mobile inherent to the business, we’re likely missing a large and crucial piece of the big picture. Roles become siloed and the digital side – the people who maintain the channel that interacts with consumers directly, every day – is overshadowed by the traditional (and potentially inappropriate) methods.

Start with your department head

Whether you’re hiring a digital marketing manager, e-commerce director, or VP of digital, you must start with this pivotal position. Responsible for oversight of your website(s), digital sales channels, online branding, and all related areas, your one key player must have two vital characteristics:

1. Broad e-commerce experience with at least one specialty (digital marketing, website management, etc.)
2. Management skills (proven experience fostering teams)

Depending on the size of your company, the other resources you have available, and the sophistication of your digital channel, you’ll need to first identify the experience level required. You might be able to get by with a lower level manager who has some digital marketing experience and can keep projects on track because they’d report to a deeply engaged and savvy Sales/Marketing professional… or you might need someone who single handedly spearheads the digital channel for a company that is competent with internal supporting roles like Finance and IT, but does not otherwise have a strong handle on online business.

If you’re lucky, you might stumble onto one of those few e-commerce professionals who got into the industry early enough to have seen it evolve over the past 15-20 years. They’re a rare breed, and because that moment has passed, there are no new inductees. But those of us who have been steeped in the culture of e-commerce since the ground floor have a big-picture understanding that is hard to come by in those newer to the field.

With your e-commerce leader at the helm, and the full buy-in of senior leaders, begin to develop the team around that key player.

Three ways to form small, in-house e-commerce departments

Be proactive as you establish your in-house e-commerce team. Building these groups with a clear philosophy will help managers slide talent in where they fit well, make sure all bases are covered, and feel empowered to motivate and inspire.

As you’re building your small internal team or bringing it back in-house, choose one of the methodologies below as your starting point for the department. Each one lends itself to expansion over time, so you can logically break apart each position and make the roles more granular as the workload increases.

Option 1: Establish roles by general function

This methodology is common. There are traditional ways of classifying job functions, and we can apply those groupings here as well.

Start by mapping out the broad collections of responsibilities:

• Marketing (analytics, promotions)
• Data (product, reporting)
• Creative (graphics, html)
• Content (product descriptions, blog, emails)
• Social media (may be absorbed by marketing or content)

While this seems logical, these days there is so much cross-over. In this industry, it’s unusual to find someone who has focused specifically in just one narrow path. Remember that if your online presence is new, you may be able to group some of these together if you can find a good fit for the combined role. Understanding the differentiators between them, though, will allow you to logically split them when the need arises, as your channel becomes more demanding.

As you grow and find that it is time to split a position into two, please stay closely in touch with the employee whose role is about to shift. Ensure that the conversations flow both ways. Ask which responsibilities they feel most competent at, which they think could be most easily handed over, and in which areas they feel the deepest sense of ownership. Support the dedicated staff you have to avoid  alienating them or causing feelings of relegation.

Option 2: Hire a left brain and a right brain

Not everyone subscribes to the theory that each side of the brain controls certain types of thinking and that people are generally left or right brain dominant… but the science aside, this is a valid approach to hiring a small starter team to help get you off the ground.

Consider your personality types. A “left brain” person is analytical, preferring logic and data, while a “right brain” person is creative, intuitive, and thoughtful.

Now, find someone who has some experience with inventory management, analytics and reporting, and who enjoys geeking out on numbers and statistics, and you’ve got a left brain rock star!

Next, look for a creative type who has some experience with content and writing – that’s crucial here, as those communication skills are not optional in the department. Marketing experience is helpful as well as the ability to keep a promotional schedule on track – and boom! Right brain perfection!

Your tasks will generally categorize themselves into one bin or the other. When there is crossover, I find it best to let the two roles duke it out (or preferably, work together). For instance, SEO research is data for sure, but it’s also about content and presentation. If you allow your left brain to own it alone, you’ll wind up with word choices that may not be compelling to the consumer. Whereas if your right brain is in charge, your product names might sound fabulous, but miss major opportunities for traffic building.

I find that these gray-area tasks are most common shared or doled out according to the specific personalities of each employee (or managed by the department head, perhaps with input from the two brains):

• Search engine optimization and research
• Merchandising on site
• Search term monitoring and opportunity identification
• Outreach (bloggers, larger customers, partners, etc.)
• Other areas that require analytical reviews and adjustments

Get to you know your employees, figure out who would shine in those gray-area tasks, or encourage collaboration for a balanced approach.

You’ll need to have your manager in place to keep the two brains on track and take ownership of the larger, strategic management of the channel, including:

• Selecting, budgeting and managing third party partners
• Strategic initiatives and overall management
• Product selection and merchandising strategy

This plan leaves plenty of room to expand over time as workloads fill up. There are bits you could peel out of both to form a new role. In the meantime, share the burden and run a lean department as you ramp up.

Option 3: The fill-in-the-gaps approach

Beginning with your e-commerce team leader may put you in a strong position to have a number of duties already covered. If you promoted someone internally, or found a diamond in the rough without very deep experience but with glowing recommendations, a solid foundation, and a major drive to grow, let your leader own some pieces initially.

They might be experienced or particularly adept at specific areas. If so, let the manager keep some bits within their job description. It often makes the most sense to start with marketing tasks, as these feed most directly into high level strategy.

Next, tap your other internal teams. Have a strong data person in Finance who’s chomping at the bit for increased responsibilities? Maybe they could pitch in on some data management. Is there a creative type who’s well versed in print collateral but inexperienced at digital design, invest in an online course and give it a whirl! Pull resources from IT for integrations and inventory management, or from just about anywhere for the administrative or logistic needs such as organizing physical samples or managing communications with bloggers.

Obviously, capacity must be considered, but those who are looking to bring more value to their positions should welcome the opportunity to contribute to this exciting initiative and a strong manager will understand how to inspire and solicit help without sapping too much time and souring relationships with other managers. Make sure basic business etiquette practices are maintained, such as keeping managers in the loop when requesting help from their employees, and respecting busy times in those departments by submitting requests well in advance and pulling back when things are heavier.

Then you can identify, with your manager’s guidance, the other functional areas that require new hires. Fill in the blanks. Over time, as the team grows, you can either move some of those pinch hitters from other departments into e-commerce full time, or release them back to their original positions and hire a full time replacement.

By evaluating the personalities, interests, skills and experience of your internal staff first, you create the opportunity for advancement which is great for morale, and move proven performers into positions they might find newly engaging and energizing. Let those “blanks” between your talent translate into a need you’ll fill with hires.

Keep anything that’s not e-commerce specific outside of the department

Finally, identify the bits that you do not have to take on as e-commerce functions specifically. These areas can be covered by the business services managed elsewhere in the company. You’ll need to come to terms with the fact that the business needs of this technical department will differ from others. But establish the expectation that the digital channel is highly valued and that these other players help to enable its success.

Some areas that can be successfully handled outside of the e-commerce department:

• Finance and budgeting
• Administrative, Data entry
• IT, Anything you can automate
• Strategically selected out-sourcing, Strike mission consultants
• Third party partners that do some of the work for you (some providers are more hands-on than others)

The E-Commerce team structure in the long term

Over time, you have the opportunity to empower a strong digital team to carry your company through these changing times. Make sure not to treat this as an after-thought. Mark my words, this is the direction everything is moving.

By owning these processes in-house, you are embracing the current state of business and fostering the support your digital team needs to carry your brand through with its unique voice and message, whether you ultimately keep your e-commerce team embedded under a larger umbrella or allow it to stand alone as a digital department.

Following Through with Post-Launch Strategy

The best and worst part of the web development industry is that we get to make up all the rules. The jobs we’ve created for ourselves let us focus on our craft, and most of us have had to make very few promises when it comes to ongoing “marketing.” Even so, our expertise as consultants is always going to be tied to the success of our work. And if that work is underperforming, we’re encouraging clients to leave.

The uncomfortable truth is that, left on its own, our work is almost always underperforming.

So we hired an SEO…kind of

We’d known for years that our clients needed more help post-launch—mostly because they were on the phone asking for it—but the help they needed didn’t seem to fit into the services we wanted to provide. The underlying issue was that we’d drawn an ethical line in the sand. On our side, SEO meant informative code and compelling content. On the other side, there lived people who would email at 2:00 a.m. looking for FTP access to the production server. The glimpses into their world gave us a false affirmation that SEO (which, to us, somehow enveloped post-launch marketing) was about gaming the system.

Eventually, though, it became clear that the legitimate demands of our clients had outpaced our willingness to adapt. So we hired.

When we posted the job, all we really knew is that we didn’t want the kind of SEO specialist we were familiar with. We fought the SEO title and made a joke about link farms. We figured we’d work out training and service contracts and all the foreign things related to the position if we could just find the right person.

We got lucky. We found someone able to consult and help implement honest solutions right out of the gate.

It only took one client meeting with Christopher, our new digital strategist, to realize how wrong we’d been to exclude post-launch efforts from our craft.

We’d been working with that client for years. When transactions or conversions started to go flat, we’d hit it with our design hammer. But now, with Christopher focusing on new angles, we were able to back up our development recommendations with data and suggest ongoing work that could greatly enhance our design work.

We scheduled A/B interface tests. We explained all we could be doing with retargeting. And, yeah, we did an SEO content audit. Each of these efforts was straightforward and accountable.

When we implemented conversion optimization with A/B interface tests, we could clearly see whether the challenger was outperforming the champion. When we ran the retargeting campaign or email promotion, we knew how much revenue it drove. And when we focused on on-site optimization for search engines, we reported actual effects.

Our negative preconceptions of post-launch marketing went out the window. We didn’t have to resort to keyword stuffing or farming out links or whatever we thought we saw the sketchy consultants implementing. We simply found profound complements to our work.

Having a digital strategist has allowed us to address specific plans to improve traffic, conversions, and revenue. We’re able to detail how our clients can make money, not just spend it. It feels good.

A walk on the business side

Maybe you’re somewhere in the “Do I need to hire a digital strategist?” decision tree yourself. I can give you a little perspective as an owner of a small consultancy.

Retaining clients

In the past, we’d been kindly abandoning clients at launch. We were around, of course, for tweaks and updates, but mostly we handled these in response to a client’s request. If we were lucky, we’d get pinged when they had a new project, but this was random.

Even if we could have convinced you that our “launch and run” model was working well, we couldn’t have explained the hole in our services. A lot of our clients are retailers, many of whom need help with monitoring, A/B testing, retargeting, search, etc. But since we weren’t there to lead through these needs, our clients were left to take it on themselves or bring someone else in. In either case, we were more or less encouraging the client to eventually drift away.

With a digital strategist on the team, we’re talking with some of these clients almost daily, either through scheduled, weekly status calls or ongoing phone and email correspondence. We know what they’re up to at all times, and we know how their sites are performing. Long story short, clients don’t drift.

Okay, some do. We definitely had our share of clients who were pretty far gone by the time we figured this out. Each was sure the sum of the work we were willing or able to produce had already been done.

We were able to win a few back, though. We took on the post-launch work they were struggling through on their own (always pay-per-click and SEO) or had given up on entirely and graduated them up to new, more rounded strategies.

It took some time to prove ourselves, but it wasn’t hard. Turns out traffic, conversions, and transactions all go up when you tend to them. It also turns out clients are happier when they’re making more money.

Driving revenue

I don’t want to lose anyone this far in, so I should mention that this position drives direct revenue as well.

Typically, we structure service retainers for a fixed number of hours over three-, six-, or 12-month terms, depending on client needs. We outline the actual plans we’ll be implementing (search, A/B testing, monitoring, retargeting, etc.) and re-evaluate priorities each month to make sure we’re devoting the appropriate effort to each channel.

Did I mention we’re a fixed bid shop? It’s hard not to get a little excited about recurring billing.

Your mileage will vary here, of course, but it only took a few months for the position to pay for itself. By now, it’s doing a lot more than simply washing out the expense. It’s hard to remember the reasons we dragged our feet in the first place.

Forecasting further

We’ve always had a few clients asking us to help them plan for growth. We’d built enough trust in these relationships that we could help put together long-term road maps for site enhancements, campaigns, and ground-up redesigns. These were, of course, our biggest clients in terms of billing and, for a lot of reasons, also some of our favorite clients to work with.

We thought finding similar relationships meant finding new clients. With our post-launch services, however, it’s become clear that we already knew them. We just weren’t talking to them.

Now that we’re planning ongoing site enhancements and campaigns within our digital strategy retainers, scheduling for larger projects just falls into place. And I probably don’t have to tell any of you that being able to plan is huge for a small consultancy.

We typically know a lot more about budgets and goals now as well, so we burn a lot less time negotiating through unknowns. We aren’t waiting for RFPs or trying to guess how much a client wants to spend. We’re getting good work on the calendar sooner, easier.

We’ve gone from a few of these types of relationships to a handful. I’m not sure what comes after a handful—a gaggle, maybe—but we’re hoping to get there soon.

Leveling the field

Having a digital strategist on our team also gains us a better foothold with new work.

It’s not uncommon to find ourselves in a competitive bid situation against a much larger agency. The clear advantage they’d have over us was a more complete skill set. Their proposals would detail ongoing services, and ours would detail a product. We’d be characterized as the “boutique design shop,” and it was often up to us to be so much cheaper that the client would give us a shot.

Now we’re able to involve our digital strategist right from the initial meeting. It allows us to make sure we’re asking the right questions about traffic patterns and sources, conversion and transaction goals, and related marketing. All this gets fed back into our proposals along with specific plans to address and improve overall performance.

You can still call us “boutique” if you’d like, but our proposals should make it clear that we provide end-to-end ecommerce work as well as sophisticated post-launch strategy. We’re able to articulate that we understand specific goals the potential client is trying to accomplish and that we care enough to help them get there. Throw in some nice design work as spec, and we’re right on par with the big guys.

Just kidding.

Adding to the arsenal

For those of you keeping count, this one position has helped us retain clients, develop residual income, and drive new business. The part that surprised us, though, is how the new role has actually helped to inform our design decisions and improve our craft.

For one, some of the basic tools we use in post-launch campaigns can easily be plugged into existing sites before we even start working through design. Heat maps, for instance, give us great data on visitor behavior. Anyone can make a guess about what’s important to site visitors, but with a little extra data, nobody has to. Intuition plus data beats intuition or data.

By now, we’ve accumulated ten months of data testing usability variables and messaging, and the takeaway is that our decisions aren’t always right. Some of the things we might have previously defended as a best practice or design principle just don’t perform. Not including the auto-play video, for instance, isn’t always going to be backed up by conversion data. Don’t worry, I’m not going to spin this off into a “sometimes ugly converts” proposition. The point is that we’ve learned a huge amount by constantly testing, something we never devoted enough time to prior to having our digital strategist.

The data isn’t always inconvenient. Take responsive web design. We’ve run enough tests now to say that it really does work. So when we tell that client they need a responsive website, we have anecdotal data from multiple tests to support our recommendation. We’ve even gone so far as to calculate potential revenue increases for ecommerce stores based on percentage increases from similar test cases.

Whatever the recommendation, we’re able to test the specific implementation. We can even A/B test making the logo bigger if that’s what you’re into. It’s a brave new world.

I have a small dream

The benefits we’ve reaped from our digital strategist go on and on, but I still feel like I’m trying to convince you that none of this is weird. The web development industry has been squared off against the SEO industry for so long now, we barely know what the people are like over there, or why they’re “over there” to begin with. What I can tell you with certainty, though, is that we’ve developed some strange prejudices.

We’d all do well to stop thinking of post-launch strategy as a bundle of SEO tricks or otherwise brand it as marketing excluded from our work. There will always be unqualified or unprofessional consultants willing to sneak in and pick up where we leave off, but that doesn’t mean the need itself is somehow suspicious. There’s a huge amount of value in becoming a more rounded craftsman inside a more comprehensive industry.

Remember, we get to make up all the rules.



via A List Apart: The Full Feed http://alistapart.com/article/following-through-with-post-launch-strategy

4 Reasons Your UX Investment Isn’t Paying Off

ARTICLE NO. 943    JANUARY 22, 2013

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by Hilary Little

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“Every dollar spent on UX brings in between $2 and $100 dollars in return.”

We all know the business case for doing user experience work: investing upfront in making products easy to use really pays off. It reduces project risk, cost, and time while improving, efficiency, effectiveness, and end user satisfaction.

(Don’t know the business case? Read this or this. Orthis.) But what if you’re investing in UX and not getting results?

There can be many factors behind an under-performing user experience effort. Anything from a lack of tools to the zombie apocalypse can wreak havoc on your teams. Addressing either of those factors are outside my area of expertise.

Here’s where I do know what I’m talking about. First, rule out the obvious: your UX folks are jerks, they don’t communicate well, they don’t understand business, they aren’t team players, they have such terrible body odor people stay 10 feet away …

Next, look at your organization. I’ve based the following list on observations accumulated over my years as a UX professional. These are some common organizational “behavior” patterns that can make even the best UX efforts ineffective.

1. You Hired the Wrong People.

User experience design is getting a lot of attention lately and UX is a buzzword many want to add to their resumes. But the field has been around for several years (although under different names) and is fairly mature. Until a person has done full-time UX work—not as an aspect of their job, but as their job—for at least two or three years, they are generally not at a professional level.

How to spot a UX pro:

• He displays a high level of empathy, excellent communication skills, and lots of curiosity.
• She doesn’t design based on personal preference or opinion, and will try to make sure you don’t either. She bases her design decisions on user research, heuristics, test data, and UI design patterns.
• He is not attached to his designs. In fact, he starts with sketches and wireframes and happily crumples up multiple iterations before progressing to a detailed level of design.
• She starts with concept, structure, and information design before progressing to interaction and visual design. If the first thing she shows you looks like it could be the final product, she’s probably not a UX pro.
• He is very interested in measurable success metrics and uses them to drive design direction and test protocol. If he speaks of making something easy, but can’t say how he’ll measure how easy it is, he’s not a UX pro.

2. You’re Not Letting the Right People do Their Jobs.

Great! You’ve got a solid UX pro or team and an exciting project kicked off. I hate to say it, but sometimes the very organization that values UX and hires us to do UX work is also the biggest impediment to a UX team’s success. Here are some rules of engagement that will enable UX teams to do their best work.

• They really do need to talk with and observe end-users before the design is finished. This is the underpinning of what UX does. Give them reasonable and timely access to end-users.
• Don’t provide subject-matter experts in place of users. Your team will tell you they’re not appropriate substitutes, and they will be right.
• Give designers the authority (within technical constraints) on design decisions and researchers authority on test protocol and data interpretation.
• Never design by committee. It’s a quick way to degrade a design.
• You’ve hired your team to make a successful product. Be ready to make design changes—sometimes big ones—following user research and usability testing. The more usability recommendations are declined, the poorer quality the product’s user experience will be.
• Don’t nibble the design to death. Making a series of minor changes here and there, or picking and choosing which aspects of a design to keep or omit almost always creates new usability issues.
• Clearly define roles and responsibilities for all team members at the beginning of project work.

3. UX Work is Done in a Silo.

User experience work touches almost every aspect of an application or web project. Your UX resources will need regular check-ins with a multi-disciplinary team. At the very least, a development resource must be available to vet designs for technical feasibility and a business resource needs to make sure you’re aligned with their goals.

The risk of not having a technical resource aware of the design direction from the beginning is that time gets wasted working on a design that the coders can’t build. The risk of not having a business resource communicating with the UX team is that your design will not meet business needs, making it a waste of time and effort.

Even with a UX team ultimately responsible for designing your product, many other groups contribute to the final user experience. Establishing a shared vision across all the groups involved in a project encourages effective teamwork—a coordinated effort is far more likely to lead to a great design.

For more information, see "Breaking Down Silos."

4. The UX Team is Brought in Too Late.

Tragically, many people view UX work as something that is done after coding to “make it look good.” They couldn’t be more wrong. We not-so-secretly call this “putting lipstick on a pig."

The best time to bring in your UX team is at the initiation phase of the project lifecycle. The role of UX at this stage is to help define requirements and structural design based on user needs. This is where we have the biggest impact.

Because user experience pros follow a methodology called user-centered design, they need to stay consistently ahead of the development team. For product design to be user-centered, the design should be iterated and validated before it’s coded.

Have you observed other reasons UX teams might fall short? Please share your own experiences and thoughts by commenting.

Effectively Planning UX Design Projects

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• By Jesmond Allen and James Chudley
• January 24th, 2013
 
• Research, Usability, User Experience
 
• 7 Comments

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Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand.

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Getting Started With UX Planning

The planning phase is all about understanding what you have been asked to do and working out the best combination of activities that will give you the outcome you need, within the time, budgetary and resource constraints of the project. It is your job as a UX professional to deliver the best user experience within the time and budget available.

The planning of projects may take place when you are writing a proposal to do work that is yet to start as well as at the beginning of a “live” project. When planning work for proposal purposes, you can be faced with issues such as lack of information around budgets as well as limited access to clients to ask questions.

In many ways the planning of UX projects can become a design challenge in its own right. You have an outcome that you need to get to and it’s up to you which approach you take to get you there. You need to be confident that the tools and techniques you choose will be the right ones to get you the insight you need within the constraints of the project.

The budget for the piece of work is always the key piece of information that can be really useful to help with planning, but often this is not always available. This information is useful if you charge by a daily rate, because it then determines the time you will have on a project, which in itself will determine the approach you take.

The beauty of UX projects is that there is always something you can do to add value regardless of the budget. A low budget may result in a lighter touch, “guerrilla” approach, whereas a larger budget may allow you to do more extensive user research. If you can, always try to get an idea of budget as it will save both you and your client time by avoiding re-cutting proposals. Your client may not want to share their budget (as they may think you will spend it all for them), so have a few different options to present if they cannot share this information to suit different potential budgets.

The key principle for all UX projects is that you must ensure that you involve users in the design process in some way. Challenge yourself to see how you can work within the constraints of the project to involve users as much as possible. User involvement will not only improve the output of the project but will also help to inform decision making which can often delay projects. UX projects typically consist of three main phases: a research phase, a design phase and a further research phase, designed to test and validate the designs.

• The research phase is where you immerse yourself in the project to get the background you’ll need to make design decisions later in the project. During this phase you will try to learn as much about your client’s business, objectives, users and competitors as possible.
• The design phase is where you work out how what you are designing will work and how it will fit together. This phase will define its scope, its features and functionality and how it behaves.
• The validation phase is where you identify whether what you came up with in the design phase actually works with its intended audience. This phase is typically followed by further rounds of design and testing to solve the problems you inevitably find when you test with users.

We find that using a research, design and validation framework helps to structure your projects. We often start working out the approach we would ideally like to take and then calculate how long we would need to do that work and then adjust the methods, tools and techniques to fit the constraints of the project. The photo below shows an early sketch of a project taking shape:

Project constraints include factors such as budget, time available, delivery deadlines, resource availability, information availability, related projects, access to tools and legal documentation. Regardless of the constraints, you must be able to focus on the objectives of the project and how you can deliver the best user experience that meets those objectives. Often this is the true (and hidden) skill of a great UX professional.

Once you have defined the approach you want to take, is much easier to talk to a client about flexing project constraints such as increasing the scope of the project or changing your original plan. All clients have to start with some sort of ballpark budget and approach, and if you can justify why you might need more time and budget, you will clearly be more likely to get it!

Later in this chapter, you’ll see a matrix of UX tools and techniques that you can use on your UX projects. These are all fully explained within their corresponding chapters within this book. We also share some case studies of real projects. These examine the clients’ objectives and highlight the approach we took to the project. These are designed to provide you with a template approach, which you can compare and contrast with your own project challenges and proposed approach to tackle them.

Selling User-Centered Design To Your Clients

Despite the huge growth in the awareness of the importance of user experience over the last 10 years, you may still have to sell the benefits of this approach to your clients and colleagues. Here are some of the many benefits that we have seen from adopting a user-centered design (UCD) approach:

• Better products
  A process that deliberately involves end users as well as one that understands the commercial objectives will always result in a product that works better for its intended purpose.
• Cheaper to fix problems
  By involving users within the design process, you learn what doesn’t work when it’s most cost effective to fix it. An amendment to a wireframe or prototype is many times cheaper than a technical fix once a product is launched.
• Less risk
  A UCD approach helps to ensure that design issues are discovered and fixed in the design phase and not once products have been launched. A digital product may never truly be “finished,” but a UCD approach will result in products with a lower risk of failure.
• Deliver to deadline and avoid scope creep
  By identifying more of the dynamics at play and addressing these challenges earlier in the process, there will be a better chance of avoiding scope creep and delivering to meet your deadline.
• Research brings insights
  A UCD approach provides in-depth analysis and research that uncovers opportunities to differentiate products to gain competitive advantages. A UCD approach provides a solid and robust research-led approach to design. Design decisions, after all, should be based on evidence and not opinions.
• Products that are easy to use make more money
  Often this is the primary commercial reason behind adopting a UCD approach. The reality of many UCD projects is that despite being “user-centered,” the focus is really on designing something that primarily achieves a commercial objective. The UCD process provides the rigor that ensures the commercial objectives are met while still providing the best user experience — so everyone wins.
• User-led projects can get products to market more quickly
  Projects that take a pure UCD approach let the customers decide which route to follow. This can circumvent time-consuming client-side decision-making processes and politics. When you reach a point of conflicting views that stalls a project, the involvement of users can be a great way to help to make decisions and get the project moving again.
• Ease of use is a common customer requirement
  In our user research, we often hear customers using terms such as “usability” and even “user experience” when describing what qualities they seek from products. This is often a result of products being advertised as being easy to use and as such it’s a selling point that customers are seeking products that they buy.

How Much Time And Budget Should You Make Available For UX?

This is a common question that we are often asked, particularly by clients or designers who are relatively new to UX. It often comes from a full-service agency mindset where client budgets are fought over by representatives of each main discipline such as UX, visual design and development.

This “departmental” mindset can be detrimental, as UX can become something that is dialed up or down, whereas in reality it should be a component of both the visual design and development work as opposed to being considered as a separate work stream or cost center. A different way of considering this question is to think of UX as a project philosophy as opposed to a set of tools, methods and deliverables. If your client has bought into the principles of UX, then in effect their project becomes a “UX” project so all of their time and budget is dedicated to it.

When considering client budgets, you’ll get a feel, with experience, for what is the right amount of time to apportion to the different phases of the project. It isn’t as simple as offering a rule of thumb such as “dedicate 20% of project budgets to UX,” because each project will have its own unique priorities, challenges and objectives that will require different levels of UX input.

The matrices shown below will give you an idea of which different tools and techniques you can use to suit different types of projects with differing budgets. In reality, there is always some form of user research you can do even on the smallest budget projects.

Choosing UX Tools & Techniques

This table shows all of the tools and techniques that we describe in the book. Use it as a cheat sheet to help you decide which activities best suit your project:

UX Activity	Good for	Bad for
Stakeholder Interviews: Talk to key individuals within your client’s organization to understand business requirements.	Clients with lots of people who have something to say about their new project. When you need information about the goals for your project.	Making design decisions. Projects that are very short on time.
Requirements Workshops: Gather key stakeholders together to discuss the brief and conduct exercises to give you a deeper understanding of the project.	Complex design challenges. Complex clients. Disparate teams.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets.
Guerilla Usability Testing: Very informal user involvement when little or no budget exists for usability testing.	Involving users when budgets prevent larger scale user research. Gaining a quick user opinion to help to progress designs.	Recruiting participants to a specific brief. Difficult for clients to observe.
Lab Usability Testing: Involving end users in the design process to understand their needs, find out how they do things and see if they can use your products in a controlled environment.	Involving clients in user research as they can observe tests in real time. The controlled environment allows you to test what you want with the right people.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. An artificial environment may influence user behavior on some projects.
Remote Usability Testing: Conducting user research in a different location than where your user is situated.	When you need to test geographically dispersed groups of people. When people can’t travel to a lab. When time is tight, as you can run tests in parallel.	Involving clients is difficult. You can lose a sense of empathy with people when you’re not meeting them face to face.
Competitor Benchmarking: Evaluating competitor products to determine their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to innovate with your own product.	Projects where lots of competitors exist. Clients who work in unfamiliar sectors: a great way to immerse yourself in a new world.	Some projects may not allow the time to do this activity. In sectors you are familiar with, this becomes less important.
Contextual Research: Conducting research in the environment that users are naturally within.	Gaining the most representative insight into how people actually behave in their own environment and the methods they use to overcome the problems they face.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets.
Analytics: Evaluating quantitative data to understand what people are doing when using a product or service.	Identifying interesting user behavior to focus research activities to find out why.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Clients who have no analytics data! Analytics do not uncover the reasons behind user actions.
Surveys: Collecting information from a dispersed set of people by asking them to respond to a predetermined set of questions.	Collecting information from dispersed sets of people in a relatively short period of time. Collecting qualitative and quantitative information.	Can present issues with data accuracy. Analysis of qualitative data is notoriously time consuming.
Expert Reviews: Evaluate an existing product based on a set of usability guidelines, the target users and their tasks.	Gathering a quick understanding of a product’s key usability issues.	Acquiring a deep understanding of real user issues.
Ideation Workshops: A collaborative design method to help you and your client decide on design solutions.	Generating a shared vision for the UX design work. Getting early input from different disciplines such as visual designers and developers.	Clients who don’t want to be involved in the design work — they want you to go away and do the “magic.”
Task Models: Descriptions of the activities users perform in order to reach their goals.	Ensuring your product matches user expectations. Providing insight into buying processes and thus helping you design transactional websites that support user needs.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets.
Customer Experience Maps: A visualization of a process that users follow before, during and after using a product or service.	Visualizing the entire customer journey and highlighting the specific areas where a product or service meets and fails to meet user needs.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets that don’t allow you to gather the research you’ll need for this approach.
Personas: Short, vivid descriptions of fictional characters who represent a product’s users.	When production teams need an easy way to understand user needs and core tasks. As a collaborative exercise to get production teams to think about their users.	When you can do no research with real users to generate personas from. When the personas are generated externally with no opportunity to integrate them with the teams who will go on to use them
User Journeys: Identify how users flow through your product. Design the structure of your product to ensure users can flow through it efficiently.	When it’s important to keep steps to complete a task to a minimum. To ensure key tasks are easy to accomplish.	Single step tasks.
Information Architecture: The process of organizing information to make its retrieval as simple as possible.	An essential component of any project, as it provides an information structure and means of navigating that has been designed to reflect the specific user and business needs of a product or service.	Some small projects such as designing emails and campaign landing pages will require significantly less IA work than large- scale redesign projects for information-rich and complex products and services.
Sketching: Hand-drawn design ideas.	Quickly generate and gather feedback on lots of design ideas. Decide which ideas to pursue in higher fidelity.	When clients expect higher fidelity work from you as a designer. When clients can’t see beyond the unfinished nature of a sketch.
Wireframes: Static diagrams that represent the framework of a product, exploring content, navigation and interactions.	Explore design and interaction ideas before they move into graphic design and development. Agree on the direction with the clients. Test ideas with users. Refine ideas based on feedback and test results.	Highly interactive products that need to be used in order to be understood.
Prototypes: Mocking up ideas quickly in an interactive form that brings them to life to elicit feedback	Producing something so that members of a project can have a shared understanding and approval of the direction it is taking. Creating a candidate design for user testing.	Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Complicated prototypes can be time consuming to amend.

Planning UX: Case Studies

The tools and techniques you select are determined by the design challenge you have been given, as well as the time and budget available. Clearly, a different approach is required for designing a campaign microsite from scratch, compared with making large-scale usability improvements to an existing shopping website.

DOING UX ON A SHOE-STRING BUDGET

When a client or organization is unfamiliar with usability and user-centered design, it can often be difficult to get the budget you want to involve users regularly during the design process. The joy of UX is that there are so many tools and techniques that you can use to suit the specific constraints of your project so you can still involve users in some way.

Recently we were asked to provide some UX consultancy on a new website. Our client wanted an expert opinion on how usable it was and how it could be improved. Our client had spent a large amount of their budget on designing and building the website, and had then been told by their boss that they should do some user testing before it went live. The budget was so tight that we had a day in total to do the work.

We decided that the best approach was to run an internal workshop and invite a bunch of our consultants along to critique the website as we looked at each of the designs. This identified loads of issues in a short period of time. We also managed some guerrilla user testing. A few of us went to local cafes and asked members of the public to show us how they would use the website to complete some simple tasks. We offered to buy them coffee and cakes in return. Within a few hours we had some great user insights to add to our expert review.

All of the issues were documented as a simple bulleted list in an email, which we followed up with a quick call to discuss the biggest problems that we had identified. This demonstrates how you can always do something, no matter how restrictive the project constraints. Any user testing will result in improvements to the product or service that you are designing.

SHOE-STRING BUDGET PROJECT OUTLINE

Constraints : Tiny budget!

UX Activity	Timing
Internal workshop	0.25 days
Guerilla testing	0.5 days
Summarize findings and feedback to client	0.25 days

A USER-CENTERD REDESIGN PROJECT

We are lucky in that many clients come to us and ask specifically for user-centered design projects that include specific UX activities such as user research or that deliver specific outputs such as customer journey maps or persona profiles.

We were asked by a client to design an online quoting tool. Our client was fully versed in the benefits of involving users throughout the process and requested that we run regular user testing and UX seminars within the business to educate her colleagues.

The project began with a large user research exercise that involved benchmarking competitor services. This gave us a unique insight into what the competition were doing, how well they were doing it and also what the specific user requirements were from such a tool.

In parallel to the user research, we conducted a wide range of stakeholder interviews as well as a series of workshops with some internal business analysts who had been collecting detailed functional requirements.

We presented our findings from the user research exercise to the business. The key part of this presentation involved discussion around some ideas we had had for some features we thought they should offer which would give them a significant competitive advantage.

This identifies how user research can be far more than just involving users. Often you will see opportunities for features, content and functionality that will meet some quite unexpected user needs. Once met, these can often result in significant increases in product performance as well as huge financial returns for the service provider.

Following the research phase, we developed some early prototypes of the different elements of the quoting process. This involved breaking the required set of data into logical chunks and working out how a user would move between them. Once worked up into rough wireframes, we shared this with the project team, amended it following their feedback and then tested it with users to improve it further before entering the wireframe production phase of the project.

Once a set of complete wireframes was produced, these were tested again to further refine them. During the process we met with designers and developers to share our vision for how we should work to ensure that when it was built it retained the features that we deliberately added to meet specific user needs.

Later in the project we were involved as a point of sign-off for the final designs that were produced by a third-party agency. Users were also involved at this stage, as we wanted to ensure that the execution of the quoting form was suitable for the target audience. This was also critical once some front-end elements were available to test, as it was important that interactive elements such as error-handling worked as well as possible.

Finally, we were asked to conduct a review of the live website six months after launch. This was to evaluate how well the form was working and also to evaluate how users were responding to the new product features that we had helped to identify.

USER-CENTERED REDESIGN PROJECT OUTLINE

Constraints: Huge complexity, high-profile project but good budget and excellent client buy-in for a UX approach.

UX Activity	Timing
Kick-off meeting	1 day
Desk research and document review	2 days
User research	10 days
Stakeholder interviews	3 days
Presentation of findings to board	1 day
Stakeholder interviews	3 days
Prototype development	10 days
Validation testing	5 days
Wireframes, stakeholder interviews and amends	10 days
Validation testing	5 days
Wireframe amends	2 days
Handover to visual design and development	0.5 days
Sign-off workshops	2 days
Post live usability review	10 days

Editor’s Note: We are delighted to share this chapter on “Planning UX Projects” which was taken from the book “Smashing UX Design : Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences.”

Help yourself to free PDF downloads:

• Full “Planning UX Projects” chapter (5.9 MB) (PDF)
• Table of contents for “Planning UX Projects” (271 KB) (PDF)

More Resources To Help You Plan Your UX Projects

• A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making(2009), Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
• Undercover User Experience Design (2011), Cennydd Bowles and James Box
• A Shared Vision — the coordinating force behind great UX, Alan Colville (slides)
• What does a Product Manager do?, Jesmond Allen on the cxpartners blog

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