This series of articles will describe our journey of discovery in learning how to measure the ROI of User Experience at a large, Fortune-500 company that develops human capital management software and services.

Today, most mobile sites and applications offer a good user experience. There are still the occasional glitches and sacrifices of usability in favor of aesthetics, but we can confidently say that the field has progressed in the past two years since the last report. Most of the egregious errors are not there anymore. When we tried to update the examples for many of our mobile guidelines, we discovered that the companies had fixed their problems and some of the issues that we discussed were no longer common. Yet we also encountered revivals of problems we thought almost extinct two years ago. In the business of usability, mistakes (like trends) tend to be cyclic: one generation identifies them and creates design patterns that avoid them, but later generations, no longer having witnessed the UX problem, make the same error again in their quest for refreshed designs. It’s always two steps forward and one step backward.

Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.

Both these complementary types of user research play important roles in an iterative design cycle. Qualitative research informs the design process; quantitative research provides a basis for benchmarking programs and ROI calculations.

Agile and UX work well together when management values UX, UX practitioners show leadership, the process isn’t strict, and UX is embedded on teams.

The phrase “validate the design” discourages teams from finding and following up on UX issues in user testing. UX research must drive design change, not just pat designers on the back.

Is User Experience (UX) important or is it just a buzzword? This article analyzes the usefulness of UX in an application development process. We as developers and designers have stumbled upon the term - UX aka User eXperience, quite a few times in the past few years. So what really is UX? Is it something that adds real value or is it just another buzzword? This article is an attempt to analyze and assess the usefulness, relevance and importance of UX in an application development process.

As a senior UX designer and agile coach, Claire and I would often talk about ‘what’ we did and ‘how’ we did it, but rarely stepped back to ask, ‘why?’ Why do we do Agile or Lean? Why do we do a particular practice or framework? Why do we decide to build a particular feature? The easiest way to enact change is to get people to move to a place where they always wanted to be; the message we used to show that shared place was Lean UX [1]. This is about how we came together to introduce Lean UX at BNZ and how our biggest insight was the power of the language and the vocabulary we use. How language has a massive impact on our mental models and the way we view the world. Language can inspire and unite, it can also confuse and alienate. The vocabulary we used as part of Lean UX worked on a tribal level to empower teams to make better decisions through getting people to unite behind the ‘why’ not ‘how’ or ‘what’.

Focus on UX goals to drive analytics measurement plans, rather than tracking superficial metrics. Identify the core goal of a design to meaningfully measure it.

To make UX research more efficient and effective, get everyone involved. When teams understand user concerns and usability issues, they become better at preventing problems.