Neelima is the company’s chief global delivery executive nut butterco-founder of Spectrum North and tireless advocate for women in technology.
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Because technology moves fast, a breakthrough made today will often be in the news tomorrow. You produced a top-notch product. So, why are sales not good? Why are there bad reviews?
Companies are expected to work harder on developing a “user-centric” culture in 2023 due to increased competition and customer expectations. Due to the increasing use of technology, customers are becoming more knowledgeable and demanding. If businesses want to remain competitive, they will need to offer products and services that are tailored to customers’ needs and preferences.
Today’s IT leaders must set a good example for their engineering teams by encouraging user research, feedback, and empathy, opening doors for cross-functional collaboration, and promoting transparency and open communication.
From my experience in the industry, a user-centered culture can greatly impact a development team’s ability to consult users, conduct user research, and work closely with teams such as product management, customer service, and UX design to understand user needs and create solutions. ability to measure them.
Code-centric or user-centric?
Technical aspects of software, such as its architecture, design patterns, and performance, are the main focus of the code-centric approach. Developers and technical teams often prefer this strategy because it enables them to produce high-quality, maintainable codebases that are easy to understand and use. However, this can also result in a lack of focus on the end user and their needs, resulting in the creation of a product that is difficult to use or does not meet their expectations.
On the other hand, a user-centered strategy puts the needs and goals of the end user first. This approach is often used in user-centered design, which requires extensive user testing, research, and feedback to ensure that the final product fits their needs and is easy to use. Product managers and designers often choose this strategy because it leads to more successful products.
The best strategy may vary for a particular project or organization, as both techniques have pros and cons. Finding a balance between technology and user needs is often a wise strategy.
Clarify your goals, what you need to optimize, and what you can live with in terms of organizational design.
A user-centric strategy encourages accountability, aligns product and engineering, accelerates product development, drives engineering accountability, and resolves technical debt.
Promote a user-centric culture
Here are 10 strategies tech leaders can employ in 2023 to encourage a user-centric culture in their engineering groups:
1. Facilitate user research and feedback. Have the engineering group conduct user research and get feedback on a regular basis. This can be done using surveys, interviews, usability testing, and other techniques. If user research and feedback are included in the development process, the team will be more likely to consider users’ needs and desires when making decisions.
2. Facilitate trials. By encouraging experimentation with new ideas and approaches, engineering teams can maintain their creativity and find innovative ways to create user-centered products.
3. Encourage a culture of continuous improvement. Encouraging engineering teams to regularly review and improve their work can help ensure that products continue to meet consumer needs over time.
4. Use metrics to track the performance of user-centric efforts. Share this information with the development team to help them understand how their work impacts users.
5. Emphasize empathy. Motivate the design team to put themselves in the user’s shoes and understand their needs, desires, and pain points. To design user-centered products, empathy is essential.
6. Create a dedicated user experience cabin. Having a pod entirely focused on user experience can help ensure that user-centric thinking is included in all aspects of the development process.
7. Lead by example. By citing their own work as an example of a user-centered approach, IT executives may raise the bar. This may entail doing things like prioritizing user feedback, making decisions based on user research, and promoting an empathetic and customer-centric culture.
8. Encourage the use of design thinking methods. Focus on empathy, experimentation, and iteration to help development teams produce more user-centric products.
9. Encourage the formation of cross-functional teams. To ensure that all perspectives are considered during development, it may be helpful to form a team with members from multiple departments (e.g. design, development and research)
10. Encourage creativity and experimentation. If development teams are given the freedom to think creatively and experiment with novel features, technologies, and designs, they are likely to produce better user-centered products. Be open to innovation.
Because each of these approaches puts the needs of users at the center of the development process and encourages teams to communicate, be flexible, and receive user input, IT leaders can foster the following in development teams by implementing one or more of these approaches. User-Centered Culture. Still, it’s important to remember that, in addition to technology, leadership, user-centered attitudes, organizational practices, and a willingness to learn and adapt are all factors that support a user-centered culture.
Overall, a user-centric culture in engineering cabins is critical for businesses to remain competitive and produce goods and services that are personalized to customer needs, thereby increasing customer satisfaction, engagement and business success levels.
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