Commentary

Last month I suggested that any piece of Architecture is necessarily a political act. Whether the architect is fighting for the rights of neighbors to maintain their neighborhood’s character, or acting on behalf of those in power or with authority, the architect’s work has significant impact on the lives of thousands of people. The cost of building, and more importantly the cost of building badly, tightly binds Architecture to the political process; for the same reasons, owners think carefully—strategically—when they consider embarking on a building project. From a design perspective, to not engage Architecture’s political aspects is to miss one of the most important pieces of the design problem.

The strategic value of Architecture

Companies that employ architects early in the decision making process reap benefits beyond having a single party to sue: Architects are trained not only in the art of building, but in the humanities and liberal arts. Architects are expected to understand the impact of a building not only on its local site, but on the occupants, how they arrive there, what they do during their stay and how they relate to the environment both inside and outside the building’s walls. Architects are expected to understand a broad set of costs for the building—from construction costs through life-cycle costing; from the building’s environmental cost to the cost of its long-term maintenance. By being responsible for these disparate concerns, Architects are uniquely positioned to assist owners in devising appropriate strategies for the building: how it will integrate into and support the business goals of the company.

Architects generally have a “seat at the table” simply because seating them anywhere else has proven unacceptably costly to owners. Economics make the Architect a strategic player.

What will it take for User Experience Architecture to be moved “upstream” into the business?  How many Business Week articles on the power of innovation will need to cross CEO’s desks before they recognize the impact of design on the fundamentals of their business?

The risk of keeping design tactical

Examples abound of the risks businesses face by not bringing UX into an architectural/strategic level. Consider the plight of a startup I recently heard about, focused on changing the experience of watching television. They’ve assembled a team of the best and brightest from all sectors of the television spectrum: creatives, marketing types, business execs with deep roots in the industry, software and hardware engineers with several hundreds of years of combined experience.  Although they have a strong visual design group, they have brought in only one interaction designer very late in the game.  Each stakeholder (based on their personal experience) believes they have a strong understanding of the television viewing experience; they can’t imagine what they might learn from basic design research.  What could their prospective viewers tell them about watching television they don’t already know? 

Assume, based on this inauspicious beginning, they “throw the first one away” and only then decide to bring in a user experience architect. My sense after chatting with them, was that they would frame the problem too narrowly: How can we fix the interface? What should the television set look like to get people to watch it? What remote will work for ages 8 to 80? 

Though narrow, these questions are important, and no doubt they could be answered through straightforward design research. But the bigger questions likely raised by design research—the strategic questions—might overwhelm the very nature of the business: What segment of viewers will be interested in our offering? What types of interactions distinguish one group of viewers from another? What business model would best support the viewing habits of the individuals most likely to pay for our offering?  All of a sudden, the problem is not how to fix the software, the television set or the remote control, but rather, whether any of these components are doing any of the right things to support the business.

When businesses position design at the tactical level, any of these strategic questions revealed through design research will likely go unheard and unanswered. That is, the people who need to hear these questions and who have the authority to act on them—the business managers, marketing directors and the staff who drive the business—may never hear them at all, because the design research was commissioned within a product development process, a tactical context.

Personally, I’ve concluded it’s no longer sensible to take a position at a company that hasn’t established UX at the strategic level and isn’t prepared to absorb the impact design will have on the business (I’m reminded of the homily about teaching pigs to sing).  Seriously, why bother? If the team has discovered the very thing your customers want—for which they will pay a premium and isn’t supplied by any competitor—but it will never see the light of day because it runs up against a preconceived strategy, what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong: designing user experiences, even at the tactical level, is hugely satisfying. Given a choice between working in any other function and designing, I’ll choose design. The difficulty is, without an enlightened management team who truly understands the strategic benefit to the business of user experience design, the opportunities to “do good” by users are fleeting, short-lived and likely to evaporate at the first economic or financial downturn.

In next month’s article, I’ll discuss how Architecture is more than just design on steroids - in the context of user experience, it defines a sustainable process of design that drives business decisions.