The EchoUser Experience

Great weekend turning three years old. All that hard work that you don’t normally see in the day to day was on full display. I love it when the whole team gets together. It was also much fun sharing with all our friends.

We pontificated in our global all hands.

We partied at the Epicenter Cafe.

We partook at the Slanted Door.

A lot of fun things to celebrate. First, simply making it to three. There are several “business” books out there that say we’ve beaten the odds. We had a global all hands! Who knows when that will be practical again. We opened EchoUser India, who joined us in San Francisco. Several cool people have came on board over the last year. They definitely bring passion and moxie to our company. Client work is rocking. All our tools and methods are constantly innovating.

It’s a lot of fun and very rewarding working with the EchoUser crew. (That’s a personal statement from me, not an advertisement, but definitely something I hope that everyone else in the company feels.)

The delicious dining and fun happy hours were highlights, but for me it was the brainstorming session that made the weekend. It was great to reflect on where we’ve been over the last three years and all the hard work we’ve put in. It was also highly insightful to brainstorm about where we will go in the future. We’ve taken a lot of strides in the last three years, but it’s good to realize that you’re still growing and have a long way to go. Several exciting new ways to think about ourselves came out of the weekend. Each time we’ve had an event like this we’ve made significant changes. I’m eager to see what they will be this time.

I also can’t wait to see what next year will bring before we turn 4. (Protip: It’s going to our most important year. I have inside information! )

Cheers,
Mick

One of the biggest gripes among usability professionals is that their client/boss waits until the end of a product or service’s development life cycle to start worrying about user experience.  This is like slapping a nice paint job on a jalopy, or building an entire stack of Jenga before checking to see if the table has a wobbly leg - in the long run it’ll bite you in the rear and all come crashing down (literally).

This is all very well when applied to a tangible product, a visible service, but what happens when it’s applied to something a little more fuzzy, say, like team building?

A friend was recently describing his attempts at building his team within a larger organization.  His goal, he explained, was to build out his team so he could then more effectively tackle larger organizational problems beyond his unit.  By hiring product managers, designers, marketers and the like, he was desperately hoping to buy himself the space - organizational and mental/emotional - to think about how to engage in larger scale change management.

To me, this seems like a dangerous game.  Sure, building out your team might buy you more time as you delegate to others, but with delegation comes responsibility, which itself takes time.  Indeed, much more time than we all initially think.  Furthermore, a bigger team makes for a bigger target within the organization, so there is the potential that any gains will be lost in the bigger organizational chess game.

My advice? Start with the connective tissue, the core usability and user experience. Don’t build out a team when the core is rotten, and risk creating a silo whose walls will need to be broken down anyway.  Start with the human-t0-human interactions that define the basis of the organization, no matter what size it becomes.  And don’t stop until you feel it in your gut.  Think you have it down? Tear it all down and start again, and again, and again.  Conversely, don’t drag it out for months - set the ball rolling and maintain momentum into the future.

Call it office “culture”, a philosophy, or whatever; slap guidelines into a pamphlet if you like, or conduct executive seminars during lunchtime; whatever it is, make sure you deal with the baseline usability and connective tissue first, and that you’re not just putting lipstick on a pig.