How I learned not to tell clients the wrong thing at the wrong time
Has UX changed for you? Not so long ago user experience expertise was bought in for occasional projects, reporting to Sales or Marketing or Engineering. Now consultants regularly work with experienced internal UX teams, with their own methods, problems and even ideas…
Complementing in-house teams isn’t always easy, there’re the mysterious journeys the team have taken, the ideas they’ve kept and those taboo decisions that must never be mentioned.
Drawing on personal experience of work with in-house teams I’ll explore projects where I’ve got it wrong and what I’ve learnt from my mistakes when working with:
- Demotivated teams, when their project never ends.
- Dysfunctional teams, do we even want to know?
- and managing the boss who asks his team… “And why didn’t you think of that?”
There’ll be practical insights from my experiences around collaborations between consultants and the real experts, such as:
- Scouting the territory, or knowing the context and environment the product and team has evolved in
- Understanding their perception of you and why they’ve asked you to work with them
- Enabling clients to reframe problems and helping them evoke change
- And, crucially, making sure you never find yourself in those awkward positions in the first place.
The objective of this talk is to provide you with clear insights into getting the most out of the relationship between consultant and client. The story’s a shared one and I’m still learning as I go along.
Resources
- What it’s like being a client by David Jarvis
- It’s our research by Tomer Sharon
- Selling the invisible by Harry Beckwith
- Management Consulting: A Guide to the Profession by Milan Kubr
- Researching culture: a practical how-to for designers by Dr. Sam Ladner
