MOVING FORWARD – CONCLUSIONS

The experience of working with Bank X has been challenging, rewarding and at times frustrating. It has forced us to adapt our working styles and processes in unprecedented ways, and made us confront our own established attitudes towards UX methods. Recently we received a new RFP from the bank, in which they overtly stated the intention to adopt a UX approach, but still struggled with what stage in the project to include UX and how to derive the full value from it in terms of product and service development. That specific RFP was commissioned by an individual department, showing that there is still a strongly compartmentalised approach internally, which will need to be addressed and re-addressed by consultants in each new project they take on, for quite some time to come.

Change is most definitely slow, and while our collaboration has resulted in several strong product and service outcomes, with a real impact on how Bank X approaches product and service development and company strategy, there is still much work to be done in each of the aforementioned roles.

As UX professionals we can play a vital role in large institutions’ and complex systems’ evolution toward a culture that is equally focused on user experience as on products’ financial performance. But this role as agents of change is not a straight-forward process. We believe that multi-disciplinary teams have a strong value when creating user-centered business strategies, but that the “pollution” of methodologies needs to flow both ways, with the consultancy committing to a flexible, empathic approach to the client’s traditional working methods, in order to move from mere educators to trusted partners. To be effective educators, it is important to offer the client the respect of understanding their mental models, history and training, and making an effort to catalyse a process of change while meeting them halfway. Henry Bauer, an emeritus professor of chemistry and science studies, recounts an instance where sociologists rolled their eyes in disregard at philosophers, remarking that they were “more likely to wage war on other tribes than to regard them as equals worthy of meaningful collaboration” (Bauer, 1990). In other words, the ‘battle of the disciplines’ is not only found between disparate disciplines, but also within the disciplines themselves, which is why we need forums for discussion such as Epic. To be educators to institutions, we have to learn about different disciplines’ mental models, learning cross-disciplinary comprehension and empathy– crucial to the future application of service design thinking to business challenges (Madano Partnership, 2012).

Instead, moderators require a behavioral change approach to adaptation and adoption, which gently nudges the subject to desired behaviors. This can be achieved through emails, phone calls, meetings, collaborative workshops, and various other forms of engagement where UX practitioners themselves embody the behaviors they would like to instill. As moderators we can gently guide institutions to redesign how they distribute business units and organize departments, by bridging communication gaps. Persistent engagement efforts can connect multi-departmental business goals and have a transformational effect on corporate professionals and their organizations. Our actions should be exemplary, in order to prove that a real UX approach is not about inserting interviews into linear procedural projects; that really thinking about people requires organizations to shift from dated assembly line models where individual departments have singular tasks with singular objectives. This process is slow, with consultants incrementally moving one step forward each time, building on the moves already made.

Even though banks are starting to reach out to UX consultancies, barriers to implementation of UX services and products remain, and UX consultancies must change approach to give their concepts the best shot at becoming reality. This requires flexibility, eagerness and capacity to adapt to new practices and develop new models of thinking, whilst simultaneously dialoguing with banks to accustom them to implementing a user-centred design approach. Within this change process, a framework for adding value can be that provided here: educators, moderators, and finally trusted partners, who can compromise as well as evangelize, to achieve the best outcomes possible in the context.

Erin O’Loughlin is a writer and storyteller for Experientia, a UX consultancy in Italy. She writes about the many facets of user experience design, touching on themes like sustainability, participation, and behavioral change. She works with Experientia to craft narratives about the UX discipline and its applications. erin.oloughlin@experientia.com

Gina Taha is a senior ethnographic researcher. Her industrial design master’s degree focused on UCD, which she uses to bridge research and design at Experientia. Her research interests focus on the intersection between culture, technology and behavioral change, and how user-centered design can be leveraged for social innovation in healthcare and education. gina.taha@gmail.com

Michele Visciola is President and one of the founding partners of Experientia. He is an international expert on usability engineering, human computer interaction and user-centered innovation. Michele has specific interests in new interfaces, notification systems, scenario design and the usability-aesthetics relationship. michele.visciola@experientia.com

2014 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918. © American Anthropological Association and Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, some rights reserved.

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