Make Space for the Customer: The Shift towards Customer Centricity

Abstract

Companies need to understand what their products and services do for their customers. But how can we encourage the organizations that we work for to concentrate more on the needs of their customers and end users? How can we inspire each other to deliver more innovative products?In this paper, we will discuss the impact of Design Thinking, facilitated by User Experience Design (UxD) on different levels and divisions of an organization and show how UxD can help support an organization's shift towards customer centricity.

Agile User Experience Development in a Large Software Organization: Good Expertise but Limited Impact

“…[4,22], one sprint ahead of development [4,10,21,27]. Some design upfront [11,25] UX design is not ensured during development Acceptance criteria for UX issues; team owns UX implementation, PO or quality engineer approves [22] UX work is bypassed because of tight timeline Criteria for minimum/desired UX at project start [30] UX elements dropped arbitrarily during implementation Plan for minimum UX design realization; essential and optional parts or solutions [29]. Power of decision for UX people [6,11] UX team doing lots of reactive work UX team involved earlier [4,8,10,25].…”

“…UX work conducted within a development sprint caused confusion and problems in communication and off-shore coordination [4]. Petrovic et al [22] state that in many cases, UX specialists are those who end up in quality assurance work. The above issues still remain unsolved, since they are considered as too expensive or difficult to improve.…”

“…In addition, design vision and information architecture ought to be understood before starting implementation, and their realization assured in development. Such practices prevent the situation in which problems are discovered only after implementation [22].…”