This article retraces the round table “Unleashing the power of UX: best practices for establishing and developing a UX culture”, organized on June 13, 2024 in Tourcoing during the fourth edition of UX-Conf – Human First . Hosted by Nicolas Lepelley, UX/UI Coach and Product designer at UX-Republic, this round table brought together three Design experts:
- Sophie Morin, Lead designer at Leroy Merlin
- Cedric Cognon, Lead UX/UI at ÏDKIDS
- Marie Raccuglia, Senior Innovation Expert at Chanel
The themes and issues addressed
- The strategies used to implement a UX culture in environments where mentalities are already well established.
- The effective development of a mixed and sustainable culture in the company.
- The establishment and gradual strengthening of the UX culture within organizations through dedicated governance.
- Obtaining essential organizational support in order to prove the positive impact of UX on performance.
Creating a corporate symbiosis: UX at the heart of the challenges
The vision of UX as a trainer
Cédric Cognon wears two professional hats: that of digital experience manager at Jacadi, but also that of trainer for the Rubika school. He then discusses the difference between training professionals and students in UX:
“Today, training future UX professionals is rather “easy” because we are addressing people who know and grow with UX. Whereas internally, we are rather faced with employees who come from different experiences, who are in different positions. We are not there to train them in a certain way, but rather to acculturate them generally to the culture of UX”.
What we must remember, as Cédric said, is that we must “seize the slightest moment, the slightest moment of the company to talk not about the UX but about the customer”. Indeed, he ends by affirming that it is necessary to use the “language of the people to whom we are speaking” in order to convince them. All this then makes it possible to “push the UX stone within the company”.
How do we measure the impact of UX on business according to Marie Raccuglia?
The Senior Innovation Expert begins first by emphasizing the importance of “translating UX issues as best as possible with business issues, and vice versa”. According to her, it is essential to understand that UX is a “strategic lever” for the development of business visions. To do this, UX must also immerse themselves in business practices in order to grasp and understand the mechanics of business issues in their entirety, but also all their complexity and transversality to translate these same sprawling issues in an optimal manner. Furthermore, beyond defining the KPIs, it is also necessary to define the Key experience indicators that are often forgotten in the definition of visions and strategies.
Marie Raccuglia is also a speaker, teacher and speaker in design and business schools including the Sorbonne business school and the fashion and luxury business school. The main rule she gives to her students is to learn to “translate their UX challenge according to the stakeholders in front of them, whether business, tech or others”. It is fundamental to know how to adjust and align your speech, to demonstrate the importance of their UX approach and maximize their impacts. As we continually say in UX, it is important to contextualize your work.
The history of the design framework at Leroy Merlin
Almost two years ago, the company had a completely different organization for designers: in fact, they were scattered throughout the product teams and were not managed by designer profiles. They did not know each other, did not share their problems, their artifacts, etc. In other words, and as Sophie Morin points out, “there was no UX culture, at least as it may have been anchored before at ADEO”.
As the Lead designer explains, the Digital Data department Leroy Merlin finally made the decision to hire a Head of Design, who was able to join the co-lead of the Digital Data department. Subsequently, she surrounded herself with Lead designers with the aim of “starting to structure a team with hierarchical management of designers”.
She adds: “We already had to get to know each other between designers, and then, we would be able to show what we could bring to the organization, by acculturating the organization to our professions, our methods and the value that we could bring in the life cycle of products and services.”
She concludes by saying that ultimately, “beyond the method, the creation of this framework was aimed at helping people to know themselves, to know our daily lives, to break down the teams, and to understand what we could contribute to each other to create this corporate symbiosis”.
The UX engagement of C-levels with ÏDKIDS
For Cédric Cognon, there are two important points to keep in mind:
- UX struggles to position itself as far upstream as possible in organizations, in order to be the initiator of projects: “We are supposed to be at the basis of the voice of the customer, of listening to the customer…”
- It is necessary to communicate as frequently as possible about everything that is done with the client. He then mentions the use of the tool Meet which allows ÏDKIDS teams to share their live user tests with the entire company.
“We need to connect and, above all, hear customers express themselves live. This makes it possible in particular to communicate on current projects at the digital level.”
How do we align UX objectives with business objectives according to Marie Raccuglia?
One of the most important points: the mindset. It is necessary to “demystify” the idea that these two areas are not linked. On the contrary, they are two sides of the same coin.
For Marie, in order to enable this alignment, UX must be integrated into governance and arbitration bodies, but also that it has “decision-making power”, as well as a vision of the issues. cross-disciplinary.
“The UX prioritization part within the overall plan of the company's challenges is also fundamental to give meaning to the UX approach and demonstrate its importance to the various internal stakeholders”. Today, this approach and its challenges are communicated in a restricted manner within UX practices. We must make visible its issues and especially its impacts, but also its gains in a concrete way.
The Design Experience team at Leroy Merlin and the promotion of a UX culture
Sophie Morin explains that the Design team at Leroy Merlin has rituals on several levels:
- each of the designers have rituals within their product teams
- each of the feature teams of designers (who work on common issues) meet weekly to talk about roadmaps, challenges, reviews, etc.
- then the entire team of designers (around twenty) meets monthly (construction and monitoring of team OKRs, feedback on projects, sharing of good practices, etc.)
The goal ? An alignment of teams operating on the basis of sharing, and promoting transversal visibility of subjects.
An alignment between UX and innovations
What role to play in the face of emerging trends as a designer according to Cédric Cognon
Two essential questions arise:
- How will the designer be able to use AI in his daily professional life?
- And above all, how will the designer not lose his added value?
He explains the importance of the UX designer in the research part: “the UX designer will be interested in history, that is to say what has been done before.”
According to him, AI is not a replacement solution. Indeed, the UX designer will be able, unlike artificial intelligence, “to have his sensitivity and his training in relation to the brand, the projects within the company that he knows, and his response will be always much more sensitive and adapted, due to his personality itself”.
On the other hand, the UX/UI Lead maintains that AI is a useful tool, capable of freeing us from time-consuming and routine tasks, in which we do not bring real added value.
Innovation and UX: feedback from Marie Raccuglia
According to her, everything related to innovation is a real added value, and will allow us to capitalize on helping other UX departments.
To justify this assertion, theSenior innovation expert will give an example that she may have encountered: she explains that before this emergence of AI, it was already used by her teams. This then allowed them to be able to apply and optimize the use of these tools subsequently more widely in order to allow:
- the harmonization of tools, methods, frameworks and new approaches internally.
- the implementation of the most relevant AI tools throughout the value chain of the different departments.
- maximizing team velocity and efficiency.
As she points out, this expertise also has the role of organizational and structural innovation internally, making it possible to streamline the employee experience to make them more efficient and simplify their daily lives.
Improve and develop UX within design teams
Spread UX culture with the “step by step” method according to Sophie Morin
She is convinced, this method works! Leroy Merlin also uses this technique, known as “framing”. Here is their approach:
- Exploring a topic and aligning it
- The reunification of all project stakeholders
- Rewriting the target user experience to achieve (vision)
- Prioritizing the elements “the most irritating to resolve and which would create value tomorrow”
- Creating a trajectory and its priorities
Sophie adds an important point: “developers must be included as early as possible in the process! This already allows them to immerse themselves in the context, in the problems, in the priorities, to have a look at the relevance and efficiency of this user story: the effort and the value”
Cédric Cognon’s tips for a successful internal workshop
He begins: “everything that is an ideation workshop is something that is really exciting! ” According to him, this relates to the “notion of facilitator within the company”; the aim being to “bring together collaborators from completely different worlds, around a particular problem via UX workshop methods, to finally make them converge towards a common solution”.
For the UX/UI Lead, there are not necessarily any tips strictly speaking. However, he adds: “the most important thing is to succeed in getting across the idea that everyone is going to come up with ideas and will collaborate around a common idea. We have to show them through our small, diverse and varied methods that we are going to make these ideas emerge.”
UX research at Leroy Merlin: a powerful approach for the development of UX culture
Sophie Morin sets out the context of the company: at Leroy Merlin, field culture is an already acquired value (the importance of employee feedback, etc.). On the other hand, this user research is not always carried out by designers and this poses a problem. Indeed, it is difficult for them to recover insights on projects that they have not directly mastered. Results may be biased.
The solution according to her: “you have to certify your bias! This is the responsibility of a designer: he must carry out his research plan, his research scope and take with him all the project sponsors as well as the project stakeholders as observers. There must be awareness, without biased analysis, to really be sure of having identified all the deserving elements and detect all the sources of priority values to be addressed tomorrow”.
Conclusion
In this round table, several key points emerged to establish and develop a UX culture: firstly, it is crucial to develop a collective dynamic through design, which Nicolas Lepelley describes as “a powerful tool not to be neglected”. Training and raising awareness among teams by adopting a coaching posture is also essential, while actively integrating users and C-levels into the process.
Measuring indicators over time and integrating them into the company's strategy from the start is fundamental. Cultivating a culture of user experience research without forgetting the political dimension of the profession is also important. Proactivity in the face of new technologies and innovations, as well as a human-centered approach, with an emphasis on ethics, societal issues, co-design and inclusion, are essential aspects.
Finally, to continue to develop the UX culture, it is necessary to work transversally in order to place the user at the heart of the design process.
Now you have all the cards to achieve the key to success 😉
Inès Barbara, Communication and Marketing Assistant at UX-Republic
