The rapid proliferation of digitization at work often leads to increased use of apps and digital systems required to perform a task at hand. Each additional app augments the burden on end-users. Aiming at approaching the challenges of digitalization from a holistic work perspective, we envision that the transferable UX efforts across products and services can facilitate this.
As a part of ECSCW’21, we organized an online workshop with a group of UX researchers, practitioners, leaders, and managers from academia and industry (incl. Transport, Public Services, Pharma, Service Design, UX Consulting, Cultural Heritage, and Aerospace Engineering) to discuss emergent challenges around transferable UX and to share their experiences on the subject. We systematically unpacked development, change, and workers’perspectives to aid UX knowledge transfer across projects and over time.
We identified three key challenges and opportunities in the space:
- It is crucial to adopt a holistic approach, engaging with the organization as a whole, not just end-users, to understand how people work and why they work this way. This means questioning our methodologies and including observations to complete interviews and to engage users as participants.
- Linked to methodological considerations, we have to find ways to conduct fast experiments to learn faster, document these learnings and failures, and share them.
- In practice, we have to create conditions of designing for multiple products and focusing on systematic problem-solving throughout the whole user journey, which requires some work at the architecture level.
These three challenges will only be possible if we can promote UX in organizations by getting access to managers and developing alternative benchmarks to contemporary finance-driven measures (e.g., ROI), which allows us to reflect on the long-term impact of the ecologies of products on people, their work, and the organization.
Finally, we observed that researchers and practitioners might face the same issues while expressing them differently. As we did in this workshop, building bridges between academia and companies is a good opportunity to tackle the challenges mentioned above and start finding solutions that are both empirically and conceptually founded.
Join the conversation
If you are a UX researcher or practitioner interested in improving UX practices and processes at work, we would be pleased to hear your thoughts: get in touch with one of the authors! We encourage you to join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #TransferableUX. We hope this can also serve as a step toward new collaborations, be that in the shape of special interest group sessions, workshops, or other forms of activity.