Seriously Curious: Organizational Maturity and User Experience (Part 2)

CHRIS: Hello everyone, and welcome back to Seriously Curious, a podcast on all things UX for business strategy and design. I’m Chris Rockwell of human experience firm Lextant, and I’m very excited to continue our conversation today with Heidi Munc, Vice President of User Experience at Nationwide. Tell me a little bit about within your group, what have you had to do to become more mature, and to build your capability to deliver? I think, you know, you mentioned, I mean, like if you think about standards or knowledge management systems. Tell me a little bit about how your team has matured.

HEIDI: Yeah. Next level of performance we’re always looking for what’s that next level of performance. And you’re right. I think one of the reasons the UX team at Nationwide has been successful is that we’re always looking around the corner for what’s next. Like, what do we think is on the horizon that we are going to need to develop those skills in ourself? The business doesn’t even know that’s out there. They’re not ready for it, right? That’s great. That gives us time to develop our skills. And then we can start educating them about it. And then eventually

they’ll be ready for it. And then they’ll ask us for it. So we did that several times. I mean, okay, again showing my age, but just with mobile, just with mobile development like we used to, we used to deliver specifications to our tech partners in the form of a, you know, like 70 page PDF document. And then there was a responsive design. So we had to learn that. And then there was mobile design. You had to learn that. So just always, you know, keeping up with trends. Yes. But can you take it beyond that. Can you look beyond the trend of now and see where do you need to go next and start developing those skills? So the skills we’ve been working on for a while now, but we’re really going to amplify it this year, is in generative AI and conversational design. So what do UX folks need to train themselves so that I’m sure we can spend a whole lot of time on on generative AI. But before we get there, the other couple of competencies and capabilities that we’ve built, one that I’m very proud of is the Insights Hub. And this is a repository that’s a database of all our past research reports. But it uses natural language processing so people can just go in and ask questions. And it does a fairly good job of returning, like the insights, like the high level insights out of that document. Prior to that, you were kind of dependent on knowing which UX person did that research three years ago, and is that even relevant now? That was like right on the cusp of a pandemic. So we try to like, look through the reports and find out what’s durable, which insights are durable, and will stand up over time. And what do we need to scrub things. So, I will feel awesome if this database grows and becomes an enterprise capability that moves out of my team and is managed by the tech team and is managed by another group. Right. I really want it to be open to everyone, but we’re taking, you know, an approach where we’re like, we tested it out within UX. We opened it up to the next concentric circle. We’re opening it up to the next concentric circle this year. But eventually I would love for that to be an enterprise wide tool. That’s just making your research work harder.

CHRIS: Yeah,

HEIDI: You shouldn’t have to rediscover insights that you already have somewhere in a deck, right? So we’re trying to avoid that problem. Another thing that we’ve built is a journey mapping system that’s shareable across the entire organization. So we have 11 businesses that we support. We cannot do all the journey mapping for all of their key journeys. If each of them had three key journeys, like that is too many to do properly in a year. So the businesses owned the journey mapping and we provide the consultation and the tool to support them. So our software that we selected was cxomni. Highly configurable. We’ve set it up for, you know, the way Nationwide works, for the way Nationwide views the moments of truth across the businesses. And you can open up the access so that only a few people can map the journeys, but everybody can see the journeys. So it’s provided this level of transparency where you can go in and see, like, has the annuity business mapped any journey is this this one feels a little similar to the life insurance origination journey. Can I see what they did. So this just drives efficiency through the organization where again you can kind of peek under the hood and see like okay, you can have a hypothesis. I think 80% of this is similar. Yeah. Let’s go stress test the 20% that I think is different. And it just makes everybody faster and better.

CHRIS: Yeah, I think it’s also becoming a forcing function in meetings like okay, well what is your customer journey? Say like, you know, like, oh, we haven’t done that. Well, maybe we should start there. So that’s right. Yeah, yeah. I love the, it sounds like you’ve built like points of immersion for the larger organization. So they have access to information they didn’t have access to before.

HEIDI: That’s right, yep.

CHRIS: I remember you told me a story before the pandemic where you actually had, like, a customer experience center that you had built. 

HEIDI: Yes.

CHRIS: And I love the idea. In fact, we built similar ones for some of our clients. But, I love the idea of, like, having a place where it’s like, okay, I’m going into this place to be customer centric. I’m going all the noise of like, what email or what fire I have to put out, and I’m just really going to focus. I love that idea. And you’ve sort of built, taken that idea, and now I’ve built it digitally across your organization with knowledge management customer journey maps.

HEIDI: That’s right. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll spend a minute talking about that room because I do love that room. Yeah. So this was a customer experience room. It was like we kind of joked internally that it was a museum to the member. And so we were working with our financial services partners, and they wanted us to come up with recommendations for effortless servicing, because our call centers were getting swamped and they were growing like they’re adding customers and now they don’t want to add to their call center. Like, so how do we make it this more effortless experience? Let’s figure out where the pain points are. And boy, did we find them. Like, you know, searching for forms that you then have to download and fill out and fax in, like fax in. So we’ve changed. This is no longer the situation, but back when we did this project, it was and people had a lot of anxiety about that, like, wait, I’m bringing this three pages that basically has my life’s information on it to Fedex for the 19 year old to, like, go behind a counter and do something with like that doesn’t feel good.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: So we discovered what all those things are, and we built a physical space in one of Nationwide’s buildings. There was a retail space on the first floor that had opened up. We took it over. We built a museum with like seven different rooms that illustrated on a very visceral level, the anxiety and complexity of trying to service online your financial services products. And one of the rooms we had, we built a mobile where we had financial services terms on the like an overhead mobile. Yeah. Electronic. And you turn it on and it would whiz around so fast that nobody could read any of the words. And we’re like, this is what it feels like when you don’t know any terms. We know all the terms. We work in this. We know all the terms. Right? We built a better mousetrap where you would put the marble in one place and would go through the mousetrap, but it would get stuck at seven different touch points. And those represented the seven different touch points where you had friction in the process. And so the executor would have to pick up the marble and move it to another place. And executives are very, very like action oriented, like just having making them go through those seven steps was frustrating to them. Yeah. And I was like, well, you know, this is what our members feel like.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: Having a physical stack of all the forms that people had to wade through. This thing was 3.5ft tall. Like just like showing all of that physically to people. Something about movement and walking around in a physical space, especially as we became more and more dependent on conducting all our business. Yeah, digitally, getting people to get up and walk through a place really left a profound impression on them. And, you know, we’re not in the business of just trying to terrify people and make them feel, oh, everything we do is terrible. We want people to move to action very quickly. So then after that, we had a quick workshop, like a 30 minute workshop where we would sit down with teams and get them to make commitment cards, like, let’s think about how we can move past barriers that you’ve experienced in the past. What can you do in your role right now to make this better? And they would kind of sign that commitment to it. And then when they went back and did it, we would put a big gold star on their commitment card on a wall in a physical location that everybody walked by. So it was very transparent and open and we had so many teams go through that and they absolutely loved it. Yeah, that was probably a once in career thing thanks to the pandemic where we don’t really like build those kind of spaces anymore. But yeah, that is something that can absolutely be replicated digitally. And the outcome is still the same. Like how do you get your business partners to see the problem, believe in the problem, want to fix the problem, do what they can to fix the problem. So it’s still all about alignment. It’s just a different it was just a different way to align folks. 

CHRIS: Right. And I think we do have digital tools now that we can use. You know we’re meeting more than ever right. Yeah.

HEIDI: Yes, we are right.

CHRIS: And there are some digital tools that can give us a similar type of at least the ability to tell, do storytelling and then activate it.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: But yeah, I think sometimes giving like shifting their mind, like sometimes you have to shift physically there where they are in order to innovate.

HEIDI: That’s right. Well, the CX team took that and brought it to the next level and pandemic. So they brought it. They took it outside of the businesses that we created it for, expanded it. So it went across multiple businesses and put it in an immersive online environment. So it was available to associates in any location because one of the big pandemic changes is we could hire somebody all over the country, right? So we didn’t want to, you know, like restrict knowledge of the space to those who could be in Columbus and experience it in Columbus. We wanted it to be open to everyone. So the CX team did a great job, just like kind of leveling that up into a digital experience. 

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. We’ve been using like just consistent artifacts, using mural boards and things like that. I think can be powerful ways to give teams sort of consistent access to insight and ideas. But it’s not quite as nice as those those immersive experiences. So it sounds like you’re working in a hybrid manner. It sounds like 

HEIDI: We are.

CHRIS: Has that impacted your ability to be a mature organization? Do you think from a customer centricity or standpoint, or do you as we not really missed a beat?

HEIDI: I don’t think it is prohibited us at all. And in fact, I think it’s just possibly made us a stronger team just because you can have more diversity in hiring from different geographical locations across the country. Yeah, I am really impressed with how quickly we flipped the switch, especially my research operations team. you know, in that wonderful space that we built, that purpose built space that opened, I think, four months before the pandemic. One of the things we had was a user research lab on the second floor. It was state of the art. Everything was so awesome in it. And we had all this research scheduled for the next several months. Pandemic happened. We shut everything down. Everybody’s working from home overnight. And I tell you what, that research operations team just like went into overdrive mode looking for online tools, video diaries, all of those kind of solutions. And that’s been a game changer for us because recruiting is so much easier if you don’t have to limit yourself to people who can get to my space right during these hours. Right? So that’s been a Fanta will never go back. There’s no reason to build a lab. We’ll never go back. 

CHRIS: yeah, we’re still doing some because, I mean, we test vehicles and.

HEIDI: Yeah, well that’s different.

CHRIS: we do research on all sorts, but but you’re right. I mean, much of our, work is remote with remote tools now, even co-creation tools, I mean, observational research, co-creation, all sorts of cool stuff.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: one of the things that I wanted to discuss quickly, it sounds like you’re teaching the organization to fish as much as you’re fishing for them, because you can’t you can’t fish for everybody.

HEIDI: That’s right.

CHRIS: So you’re giving them tools, when it comes to, and so the insights, and the awareness building and the customer journey, what about equipping them from a skills standpoint? I mean, does everybody in the organization need to be able to have good conversations with customers or to do customer journey modeling, or, or are you selective about.

HEIDI: We’re selective about it. I don’t think it would be efficient to upskill every single person. There are certain roles that need certain skills. And to be clear, the teaching teaching folks to fish really is centered around like that journey journey mapping, journey enablement, journey management.

CHRIS: you’re not asking them to design stuff

HEIDI: Yeah. So I’m not trying to teach the rest of the organization to be a UX designer or a UX researcher. I, I do not think that everybody needs to know how to have or should be charged with, like having interactions with customers. The UX team should lead that, so we lead that. But we do that in partnership where if like people want to pick things up and we want everybody to think from the user centered perspective. So we talk about teaching people to fish. That’s the first skill that I think everybody in the organization needs to have is, how do you truly put the customer at the center or CEO always talks about putting customer at the center? That’s been hugely helpful. He’s been in his role about four years now. He says that all the time in every single meeting. So the organization believes that. And we can help the associates in all parts of the organization understand how functionally, how do you put the customer right in the center in your role, which may not be a customer in most cases? Isn’t customer facing at all. So how are you doing that?

CHRIS: Yeah. So I think it’s it’s about build giving them a language right about customer centricity, even though they may not necessarily have the tools to do it, but they need to be able to. Yeah, I think one of the things that’s been helpful, sometimes we’ll give executive level presentations on customer centered design just to sort of give them the terminology so they can know, oh, I should be, you know, doing ethnographic. I should understand what the experience is like today, or I should try to understand what desired experiences or we need a customer journey map. Right. unless they have the language in the tools, they kind of don’t know what to be asking. So I you guys have done an amazing job of sort of giving them, awareness and sensitivity, like design and sensitivity and then giving them some core tools for decision making. And I think it’s a sign of a real, you know, a maturing organization. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. one of the things that, I know I sent you before him, but we hadn’t we didn’t really talk much about. But ISO 9241, you know, came out with this standard. And, I don’t know many people that are, that are using it. but I think it’s interesting to think about from this, this, you know, discussion around maturity. So the ISO 9241, you know, talks about mature organizations. First, recognize that the product and use like they understand the experience at the moment of truth. And then and then they are building, an ability to deliver product quality. Right. And then they’re, they’re building process quality. So they can do that consistently every time. And then eventually they have organizational capability. So it’s a pretty simple model.

HEIDI: But yeah, makes sense

CHRIS: but I like and I like the idea though, to be able to assess at every point like, okay, their assessment models are like, you know, we don’t even recognize that this is important to like, yes, we’ve built, proficiency in institutional, institutionalized it. How do you when you think about where you are and where you want to go and how your what next step you need to take for nationwide to build, even more mature organization. How do you do the assessment? How do you know where you are, where you might need to go? Yeah.

HEIDI: Great question. So we have a quarterly UX metrics, touchpoint with my leader who leads the innovation and digital organization. And it really is showing him where we have stacked up against a couple of different measurements systems that we’ve put in place for ourselves. And they’re very similar to this. Right. Like we didn’t feel the need to recreate a framework, but it’s like, right, you know, our is UX being included when the business is making roadmaps for next year or when are they reaching out to us? How are they reaching out to us? When are we adding value? What activities are we doing for them? So that’s kind of like your standard stuff, but it is, I think, very interesting to look at it across the different lines of business that we service, because they’re all kind of in a little bit of a different place. So that’s really about utilization, that’s more about utilization of the UX competencies that are existing. And then the other part of that is what are the competencies that we need to be building, and how are we going to measure ourselves against that. And about 18 months ago, when everybody really started waking up to AI is probably really, really here. Yeah. and you know, we I didn’t have cognitive systems engineers on staff. I didn’t have people who could understand how the models work, which is probably, pretty important if you’re going to design for them. Not everybody needs to understand that. But do I need a couple people who understand that? Yep. I need a couple of people who understand that. So I started going out looking for folks with those skills to add to the team and really working in partnership with them. what else do we need to know? So it’s really fortunate to bring in a couple of folks who are, you know, have the human factors background and also has cognitive systems engineering degrees and they were really instructional in like, here’s what we think UX folks are going to need to know. Statistics usually isn’t high on their list, but they should probably know a little bit about that. Now if they’re going to understand how these models work and how to design for these models. And when I say how to design for these models, I’m really talking about associates who will be using the models, not even end use or customers. everybody’s a little concerned about to what extent will, you know, generative AI replace researchers and designers and coders, right. It’ll probably replace my husband before it replaces me. So people are naturally anxious when you hear like part of your job is going to be done by generative AI. So we spend a lot of time thinking about what does that experience

need to be with the associate so that they’re feel like they’re a true partner with generative AI and not like working for the generative AI?

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: and so we had to map out what is that maturity look like. And we put it on paper. Here are the skills that the UX team needs to learn over the next 12 months. Here is how we’re going to measure ourselves against those skills here is how many people I want skilled to this level. Here’s how many people I want scale to this level. And I brought it to my boss and I was real, real proud of it. And he took a look at it and he’s like, the rest of the organization is not going to get out of here in 12 months. It’s like, so you don’t need to go that far. So he had a very pragmatic approach, which I appreciated and was kind of like, dial it down a little bit here. Let’s be realistic. You can be a little bit ahead of the organization. You don’t need to be that much ahead of the organization because there’s so many other components to it. Legal risk, ethics. We have all of these different groups that we’re partnering with. And it’s been fascinating because we’ve never had to partner with so many different support organizations that are outside of the direct lines of business. So having ethical discussions about the experience has been really exciting for my folks, and confounding and a little unnerving, right? But those are all really, really important discussions to have.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. I, I as a disruptive force, you know, you mentioned both. How do how do we create AI powered experiences in ways that are ethical and good for the customer? You know, and I think is one question that I’m hearing from a lot of, my clients, you know.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: in fact, some of sometimes the request comes in like, hey, we’re going to do I. Yeah. Okay. Wait a minute. That’s exactly. It’s like, okay, well, let’s, what’s the value proposition? Why is it different than what we have today?

HEIDI: Right.

CHRIS: so in the same way, though, that AI is kind of, I see it as a, a copilot or a facilitator of experience. It’s also a facilitator of the kind of work that we do. It can be an accelerant. Yes, in a good way. 

HEIDI: Absolutely.

CHRIS: It doesn’t have to be. and it shouldn’t be a replacement for what we typically.

HEIDI: That’s right.

CHRIS: It can help us go faster and go smarter. and I think I’m glad that, you know, as a human factors guy, I’m glad that you’re finding a place for, you know, some of that hardcore human factors, folks.

HEIDI: Oh, yeah.

CHRIS: and you guys have always done a good job with, from a, you know, systems standpoint.

HEIDI: But one thing that I think UX teams can really advocate, one place that can really add value when if you’re working for an organization that’s doing generative AI, right, they’re here’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to want to go headlong into it and prove that it’s a capability that they can deliver. And so it’s going to naturally very be very tech focused.  Have we been in this movie before? Have we ever been here before? We 100% have been here ten times. Right. And so how do we help them? Where can we add value and how can we help them without slowing them down?Because everybody is feeling this urgency. I mean, open up any, you know, online news application any day and there’ll be three stories about generative AI or AI or something.

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: So your business leaders feel a lot of anxiousness, angst about this. They don’t want to be left behind. So they’re going to go fast and you are not going to stop them.

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: So rather than try to stop them, where can you add value. Yeah. One place you can add value is you’re going to have them people coming out of the woodwork with ideas like all these use cases, all these things they could do. Right. And your UX team is uniquely qualified

to think about this from a jobs to be done perspective. What are the kind of jobs that this can solve, and which ones are less likely to cause a bad experience for the associate or the end user? Right. So if we go out the door with, let’s have I write all the marketing copy, well, that’s going to feel real, real bad to your marketing people. Maybe not the best one. If you want to like, keep morale up as you’re working your way through this, what if you have a use case where you want generative AI? To summarize the research reports that are in the insights hub so that when something gets delivered, there’s a summary there and you don’t have to read through the 76 page report, hey, that’s great. That’s it. That me that makes everybody feel good. Your research is getting used. More people have an easier time to find it. So we’re the ones who think from that perspective. And I strongly encourage people to think about that, because I think there’s a whole lot of us in the same movie right now where everybody’s moving really fast, trying to prove they can do it, and we want to make sure that they’re not sacrificing quality in sake of going fast. And that’s where we can help.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. And I think from a customer facing side, it’s a it starts with value for me. It’s like, okay, where’s the value proposition. And what we’re, we’re, we’re looking at it is we’re breaking down into what are the attributes of AI powered experiences and how do we leverage those as design tools. Right. Predictive knowledge personalization. It’s like okay, well how do we use that? Oh okay. That’s how we want to use. And I think you can help organizations see where the fit is right and how you can, you know, create either evolutionary or in some cases, information experiences. Yeah, it’s such a great time to be doing what we do. Yeah. When you think about automation and AI or you think about smart and connected experiences, all that transformational thing that’s happening across all organizations  and all businesses, it’s such a great time to be thinking about experience and to have people, organizations realize that experience matters, right? It’s just such a great opportunity for us right now. But it is interesting. The temptation is to go back and be technologically centric, you know?

HEIDI: And yes, yeah,

CHRIS: we do a lot of work in the mobility and automotive space and, for a while there it was like, well, wait a minute. You know, we just spent the last 25 years, you know, getting out of technology centric development processes. And here we are going back and going back in just like, light our radar, you know?

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: So it’s, it’s interesting to, kind of remind people, hey, this at the end of the day, the technology is a means to an end.

HEIDI: And I think that’s probably natural. Absolutely. We have to continuously remind people of that. Like, I like to joke that don’t get into UX. Yeah. If you don’t think you could be a good Southwest Airlines flight attendant because you are going to be saying the same thing over and over and over again with a smile, right? Your entire career, right? Because we do have to continually remind people, how do you put the person at the center of the human at the center of all of this? And technology usually has. I mean, let’s just be frank, it usually has the lion’s share of the budget. So it’s the one that’s going to drive things. And we have to like we have to figure out how do we get included in the right places. So they’re not just running and they don’t mean to run over us, but they like they’ve got their budget and they’ve got their mandate. And I think using our powers of empathy on the rest of the organization to see like, okay, this is why technology is behaving this way, because this is what they were told to go do. This is what they were told to drive. How do we align these competing organizational like group goals and achieve something together? Yeah. And sometimes it’s hard.

CHRIS: Back to the alignment.

HEIDI: Back to the alignment. It always starts with alignment.

CHRIS: Like I just always try to remind I said, you know I remind teams it’s about psychology not technology. Yeah. And and sometimes it just shows them down enough to go, oh yeah. Yeah. Let’s think about the experience we’re trying to create. Right. For sure. is there anything that we’ve missed when you think about organizational maturity, maybe that we haven’t talked about today, you know, if you were speaking to a young leader, at an organization that maybe isn’t where nationwide is today, what would your recommendation to them be? I mean, what are the quote? Let’s start with this. What are the qualities that you think, make for a good UX leader to drive towards maturity? What would maybe a few characteristics be?

HEIDI: Yeah, a couple come to mind. one resiliency and adaptability. Because things are going to change all the time, particularly if you’re in an organization where UX is new. I think I spent three years with five leaders. Right. And so they just didn’t know where to put UX. So we moved to different places. I learned something from all of those leaders. They were all great leaders. But yeah, each one of those moves I had to teach a new leader about UX and the value of UX. So back to that southwest flight attendant kind of line.

CHRIS: Why do you think that is? Why is it hard to locate a UX organizer? Is it because it just covers hits? Everything?

HEIDI: it happens as you mature. It’s really easy to kind of keep UX close to tack at the beginning. When you’re doing feature creation and evaluative research, as you mature, it’s more difficult. And so standard places are, you know, technology or marketing. sometimes in operations centers, we’ve been in all of those things.

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: And so you kind of move around until you find the place, if you can orchestrate where you go next, that’s fantastic. And the further upstream you can get, the better it is for being able to add value across the entire lifecycle lifecycle of a project or a program.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: So if you can get up front with strategy, that’s, you know, that’s where we are now. And that feels real good to us for where the maturity of the organization is. But to go back to the very beginning, you know, when the team was seven people and we were doing evaluative like, don’t be too good to put lipstick on the pig.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: Sometimes you got to put lipstick on the pig so you can like create a permission structure to do something more challenging.

CHRIS: I’ve seen some people really die on, you know, fall on swords.

HEIDI: I will not read, I will not do this

CHRIS: So, you know, it’s like, I really don’t like, you know, come on.

HEIDI: Just, you know, just do it and then tell them what else you could do. Like show them and show them what else you could do. So yeah. So there’s just be prepared to reinvent yourself and your team along the way. And as far as additional personality traits, storytelling, like you mentioned at the beginning, I think is is really critical that that UX leaders have storytelling. You know, experience, persuasion, can compromise, can meet in the middle. Yeah. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is another thing because we feel, again, this doesn’t

come from a bad place with UX folks. We just feel so strongly that we want this to be very, very, very good for the folks who use our products. And that is noble.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: but sometimes we can get in our own way. Yeah. So the skill of compromise is important.

CHRIS: Yeah, those are great ones. I think, I would aspire to that for sure.

HEIDI: me too some days 

CHRIS: when I grow up.Yeah, yeah. I, I think too, that sometimes we see when we see these changes in the organization, like you’re moving from leader Group to group, you can see it as a negative.

HEIDI: Yeah right

CHRIS: Or you can see it as a positive. Like like they are, they’re searching for

the best place to maximize your impact.

HEIDI: That’s right.

CHRIS: and so, I think, you know, you have to do you do have to be just a little resilient and a little patient. Yeah, maybe. but if you keep telling the story, you can build a grassroots, support, and then you can gain top down support, you know, which I think when you, you were mentioning the CEO, talking about the importance of this.

HEIDI: I mean, like, every meeting. Yeah, we put the we put the customer at the center of all we do.

CHRIS: That’s great man. I mean, you have that, then, you know, you know, you’ve really made some progress. Yeah. For sure.

HEIDI: We protected people, businesses and futures with extraordinary care. The only way you can do that is if you know what extraordinary care looks like to our customers. And we’re the ones who uncover that.

CHRIS: Right, I understand it. What it’s like today, what it needs to be, how to deliver it and how to measure it. That’s right. Right. So where would somebody go to get better at this organizational maturity? Things like I know that you’re participating in many different kinds of groups. What have you found most effective for you?

HEIDI: Most effective for me personally has been involved in getting involved at different user groups. So if there is a localized chapter, you know, in your city getting involved, they’re meeting other people who are in UX teams and other organizations talking about their journey and their advancement in their organization. Just like making those connections with real people, I have found more valuable than going to large, really large conferences. Right? So it’s more of that personal connection. There’s a couple of groups that I go to where it’s like design leaders who all get together, just peer groups and talk. So yeah, those are those is what I personally have found the most value out of.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: I’ve also found value as a leader speaking at conferences, and I don’t have anything lined up right now, but I do try to speak at conferences at least once a year. because we do great work and we have great stories to tell on, you know, who gets really excited about it? UX folks who are looking for a job. So it is. I found it to be a really great recruiting tool as to speak at different places.

CHRIS: I think it also forces us to like, yeah, be able to communicate like crystallize. What’s happened? That’s right. Communicate about it. Yeah. I love the peer group idea. Just because I think sometimes there’s so many of us that are solving the same problem, right. You know, there’s competitive considerations and all this kind of thing, but sometimes just getting in a room and be able to go, oh yeah, how did you fix that? And then here’s how I, you know, and you show more stories, you know.

HEIDI: Exactly. And you don’t even have to exchange information on the work.

CHRIS: Right.

HEIDI: you can exchange information on the process of the work because it usually comes down to like what people need help with is the alignment component, right? Like, how do I get this group to come along? How do I like, get these folks to do this and those folks to do that right with me together? So that is where I found a lot of value in the peer groups.

CHRIS: And sometimes you just need care and feeding.

HEIDI: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Leader.

CHRIS: It can be a lonely place, right? Like you don’t have anybody. you know, encouraging you and your. That’s right. In your review.

HEIDI: That’s that’s right, that’s right.

CHRIS: okay. Well, just a few closing questions then. Yeah. when you think about, like, the biggest challenging challenges facing UX right now, as a discipline, me, beyond this maturity thing, what do you think are the things that are really, most challenging for us moving forward and what we should we be focused on?

HEIDI: Yeah, I one of the things that I think is going to be challenging for my organization is because we came from a place where we are more tech focused, really close relationship with it, really working on those features. and then kind of spread out into a broader space. But now there is this focus on technology again, generative AI, large language models that is going to push us back more into the technology focused area. And that might feel uncomfortable for people. It might feel like a little step backward, even though I am sure it is three steps forward. It is also going to be a little more complicated to learn those skills. So it’s different than going from desktop to mobile. It’s going to be a different set. Those were different design. You know design thing is you had to learn this is going to be different completely different competencies. So I think UX teams need to prepare for more self-learning.

CHRIS: so specifically around these new technologies. Yeah, I think sometimes we fall in love with the process, but then we don’t take the time to really get our hands in some of that technology so we can communicate with the folks that we’re working with. Right. Because a lot of those folks are engineers. It’s a lot of engineering organizations that struggle with this idea of UX maturity, and sometimes they really lag behind it because it is so tech driven, engineering driven, and like you say, they have the big budgets, you know.

HEIDI: Right.

CHRIS: So yeah, so I think be adaptable, continue to learn and and I think as we move forward, help the organization marry up the importance of technology with the importance of the experience, because, you know, you’re going to have to have both cars.

HEIDI: several times a day.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. So Hiedi, do you mentioned, sort of the metrics process and the knowledge in, database that you’re using standardized, process. What other kind of things are you doing to grow the maturity of your, organization?

HEIDI: Probably the one we’ve had the longest and is the most mature in the organization is our design system. It’s called bolt. the lightning bolt. You bolt things together, or there’s different metaphors for it. But really, what it is is a repository of code snippets for standard UI widgets, date picker, you know, tabs, dropdowns, that are brand right, that are easy to use, follow best practices and are pass, you know, accessibility compliance from a code perspective and visual perspective. And the reason we did this is there’s a very large IT team at nationwide. And you can imagine there’s just like a huge variety of skills on that team. Right. So we wanted to ensure consistency and quality with our front end UI designs. And bolt is a real great way to do that. So the components are built, designed, tested in my organization. And then that design Standards team partners very closely, closely with the dev lines. So they’re picking up those widgets and just incorporating them into their code. And when they get stuck they consult that design standards team.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HEIDI: So they’re the keepers of the latest standards for everything. And then just like the repository for all of it is bolt. And we’ve driven a ton of efficiency just by having all these development teams use that system.

CHRIS: I love that idea of, like design translation.

HEIDI: Yeah.

CHRIS: Because sometimes as UX teams, we develop an experience as a prototype or whatever, and then it gets lost in translation. Right? Goes to right. And so giving them the tools to really see, how to bring that to life because there always be trade offs, you know, you’re always going to have to help them with that. Yeah. But give them the tools to actually be successful.

HEIDI: Exactly.

CHRIS: And we you know, we talk about insight translation, which is about connecting insights to strategy and design. and then design translation as a way to connect yes to implementation.

HEIDI: Exactly.

CHRIS: It actually comes out the way you 

HEIDI: and it drives efficiencies in your UX team too. When you have a UX team as large as mine, I don’t need five people designing a progress bar, right? There’s a one progress bar. We all use it, right? And now you can solve more complicated design challenges.

CHRIS: So solve it once and put it to you. 

HEIDI: Exactly.

CHRIS: Yeah it’s great. Great insight. Okay. Any final thoughts before we wrap up today?

HEIDI: I just really enjoyed this so much. It was a ton of fun and really appreciate you. Invite me on and happy to come back anytime.

CHRIS: I always enjoy our conversation. I’m so glad that we get to do it and so let’s not wait too long to do it again.

HEIDI: Sounds great!

CHRIS: Thanks everyone for tuning in today, and stay tuned for future episodes of Seriously Curious, a podcast for all things experience for business strategy and design. we’re going to be taking on topics like generative AI for design, what AI means for research, researching UX applications, experience metrics, and other topics that will be relevant to your organization. If you have ideas for future topics, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to hear about them or future speakers, and I look forward to seeing you again next time on Seriously Curious.