By and large, the user experience of your organization, product, service, or system depends on how effectively can a UX practitioner collaborate within the organization. Design is a function of organization-wide collaboration, shared vision, and coherent action towards business objectives. Ideally a UX practitioner should operate away from the desk (mostly); and that's how one can differentiate between a seasoned UX practitioner from the novice — those who are mostly staring at a screen to solve a problem, that is actually beyond screens.
UX is beyond screens — it's an understanding of your ecosystem and all related systems. Having said that, here's 10 ways to improve your UX, right now. All it takes is passionate collaboration, keen observation, and extensive documentation in this approach. After all, UX design is understanding the user, brand, and business objectives and solving problems collaboratively. Most of your user-research opportunities are available right before you. The question is how resourceful can you be in terms of tapping these resources, even before you venture out, seeking for insights.
Note: Some of these ideas might not be suitable in your business context, so feel free to adapt them to suit your objectives.
Here are 10 ways to improve your UX, right now. (The collaborative way)
1. Customer Service
Talk to your customer service teams and identify the most pressing problems. The data available with your customer service teams is an untapped gold mine. Obviously you have to work within the constraints of data protection guidelines. Take a close look at call records, chat conversations, emails, support tickets and identify the most pressing problems. To make things easier, just talk to veteran customer service agents and identify the things that need to be fixed today, right now. Once you see these patterns, you can delve deeper and explore possibilities to address the root cause.
This is your opportunity to understand why recurring issues aren't being fixed — already. Learn the bottlenecks in your user's journey by knowing what's really breaking the user experience. Customer service agents might not be in a position to see the big picture, as they are mostly microscopic in their approach to problem solving — due the very nature of their job, which is mostly tied to the speed-of-resolution. As a UX practitioner you should have a dialogue from a big-picture perspective, while capturing the details. In this process, you can discover / uncover new product feature, design ideas, competitor info, purchasing patterns, complaint patterns that can help you solve most bottlenecks.
Set up monthly meetings to liaison with customer service leaders and in this way, you can create an open channel to help each other at a strategic level and improve the overall UX of your company. As problems are being addressed, you'll help them with higher customer-satisfaction scores, saving your business the high cost of service, improve brand equity, generate more business, and gain the time and space to innovate further. After all design is in the finest of details. Start now, go and set up a meeting with service teams. Make it a practice to document all meetings and show this improvement month-on-month to product and business leaders. Also don't ignore what your loyal and happy users are saying. Double down on what works through incremental innovation.
2. Sales
You should talk to your sales teams — pre-sales, inside sales, channel sales, and field sales. They are the people who are selling your product in the market. You should liaise with sales team to understand what competition is doing in terms of UX and what is stopping them from closing sales and how you can help in designing a better product vis-à-vis other alternatives. Also learn about the driving factor that's helping them close sales and double down on that aspect. For example, if the onboarding is the one thing that's really accelerating in closing a sale, you can focus even more on how to make a superior first-time experience compared to your competition and enhance micro details.
This is your opportunity to learn about competition (professional sales folks are thorough on this aspect) Know how your competition is beating you in terms of design — document the same and chart out a strategy to mitigate this in consultation with your product team. However, not addressing a specific feature of a competitor could be a strategic differentiator and ignored by the business / product team on purpose. Hence always know what you are solving. (The key again is your collaborative problem-solving skills at play) Also work toward fixing any sales closure gaps via design. Your sales team will thank you for easing their job and will be supportive of you in your future requests.
3. Customer Success
Customer success teams are empowered with rich data from new customers. They know what it takes to onboard a new customer and what are the most pressing things that need immediate attention from a design standpoint. This is your opportunity to fix onboarding, initial engagement and customer loyalty. You can also assist your customer-success teams by designing playbooks, product tutorials, and any other documentation that can ease the learning curve, accelerate adoption and improve user engagement.
If possible, do join the onboarding training calls to hear what customers are saying first-hand. You might even use this as an opportunity to continue your user research efforts as new users get chatty and tend to provide information about their needs and wants with a new product. Be an observer! Observation is an underrated skill in UX design. Just observe, make notes, and take action. It's as simple as that.
4. Social Media Pages
Scan your company social media pages and look for issues raised by customers. Scan the entire history of these pages to identify patterns that can be fixed through design. Your efforts in scanning hardly requires any permission, support, and involvement of other people in your organization. As a UX practitioner your job is to own the UX for your company and be proactive in your research. Document recurring issues and present them to product and business teams. Nip it in the bud by providing better design solutions. Social media pages are the best way to find both your frustrated customers, as well as those who are delighted with your company.
Don't think someone else is watching these pages and you should give this a miss. It's your unwritten job responsibility as a UX practitioner to watch trends, complaints, and recurring issues on social media or otherwise. This is real time feedback that you can't afford to miss. When users post on social media, there's a huge diffusion-of-responsibility effect across the organization. There's no harm in taking the lead. Build a weekly or monthly scanning schedule for all your pages and schedule a knowledge-sharing session with your peers in design. Take steps to build a design culture that is constantly seeking and open to user feedback.
Most complaints on social media are met with template-based responses from customer service teams causing more harm to the problem and fueling a bad user experience. Even if the problem is addressed, it's highly transactional in nature. As a UX practitioner your job is to take a long-term view and avoid this transactional approach and fix an issue forever. That's what design is all about. As you build new stuff, you need to iterate and improve your existing design, on the move. Design at it's very core is a two-pronged job that involves creation and continuous maintenance.
5. Usage Analytics
First things first. You need access to your product usage analytics. If you don't have access, get it. You can build a business case and ask for permissions within your company. This access is paramount for your survival. If you're working for a product firm, keep a track on the usage analytics of your product's website, landing pages, microsites, and the various interfaces of the product itself. The tool does not matter. It could be Google Analytics or some other tool. All tools are more or less figureoutable. What matters is your access to it, and your ability to note the patterns, and finally take action on the insights.
Keep a watch on what is working and what isn't. Keep track of page exits, recurring drops in usage on certain pages or areas of your product. You should know your user experience very well to understand where it is broken. Ability to connect the dots is another skill you need to build as a UX practitioner. (UX by definition is a multidisciplinary skill) Setup a regular cadence to watch the user behaviour of new, active, disengaged, and ex users.
6. Be the Persona
This might sound contrarian, however this is as practical as it gets. Picture this. You are working for a ride-hailing app's user experience and you have never taken a ride with them. Sounds terrible, right. You can't be the user always. At least enact this with companies where you can act as a user, and take the opportunity to be the user and get a first-hand experience of the entire customer journey. You and your design team should be exploring various user scenarios — from simple to complex, and get to extreme situations to test how good is your user experience in real time scenarios. For example, in this context, what about passenger safety? Real scenarios give real information.
There are many examples of even executive leaders being on the ground and testing their user experience in real-time. So what's stopping UX practitioners? For example, If you're working for a food-delivery app, deliver the product yourself and see what are the subtle things that can be improved. You have to be the persona in a given context. This can be extreme, and extreme works well when you are passionate about something — in this context, the user experience. If you're working for a eCommerce company, order products, make notes of the entire experience from discovering, to ordering, returning, and even complaining to customer service. (Just see how everything works. Keep your product and business leaders in the loop about your little design experiments)
You're-not-the-user philosophy is a no-brainer, however we want to be the user in these experiments. How would you treat yourself is a fundamental question, when you design for yourself? Make it a point to document every step of your journey and show how you and your design team are committed for a superior user experience and will not settle for anything less from various departments involved in the user's journey. You'll raise some eyebrows, however you'll also gain respect from people for your effort and commitment to raise the standards of your company. Go, be the persona.
7. Ground Staff
This is as simple as it gets. Talk to your colleagues — the ground staff. This is your final frontier in terms of UX for your company. Your ground staff have direct conversations with your users / customers and it's your job to start conversing, shadowing, and observing your ground staff to learn more about your users as well as these colleagues of yours, who are on the front lines. To improve your UX, you need to improve your EX (employee experience) It's the UX practitioner's job to take a service design approach to build the UX and address the backstage. How can you — as a UX practitioner fix the frontstage, without fixing the backstage. Your users are the frontstage, your ground staff, you, and your entire organization is the backstage. Start with the backstage, first.
You can arm your backstage force with the right tools, only when you talk to them. By observing the journey, you'll understand the right tools that are required by the backstage team to address the needs of a frontstage. As a UX practitioner, you don't need to fix a screen always. As I mentioned earlier, you should be thinking beyond them in the first place, anyways. Here's a simple example (Image 1.1) of what IKEA (Hyderabad, India) staff has done to enhance the user experience of the store visitors. This is a simple tool, that saves staff time in answering and attending to customer queries and customers can self-serve and pick up products for purchase. This is also a conversation starter and engagement method for even slightly interested customers, considering a purchase.
When you build the UX for your users, you need to simultaneously think about the backstage and how you could simplify a specific user interaction by understanding the experience, process, policy, or interface for the staff on the other side of the screen. Always think about the backstage and question as to what happens when something is clicked (or an interaction initiated) by the customer. Every interaction can lead to a chain reaction within your company, and you should be knowing this thoroughly — as a UX practitioner.
You don't need to know the technical aspects of how technology works, all that matters is what happens when something is initiated by the user. You need to know the entire journey of your users and staff in simple terms. How well you balance this is what makes you stand out as a UX professional. Service design is user surrounded, product design is user centered. It's your job to be familiar with all the touchpoints and leverage them to build the ultimate user experience for your customers.
If your business is operating via both physical and digital channels, then you have an interesting problem to solve and numerous touchpoints to connect. Talk to your ground staff, or go one step further and become the staff for a few days and experience their work activities.
8. Reviews
Online reviews are a rich source of information on how your user experience is perceived. If you're into apps, it's a no-brainer to look into app store reviews and first fix these problems from a design standpoint. If you are building a SaaS product look for reviews on portals like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, GetApp, ProductHunt and focus on what users are saying about the experience. Social proof can make or break your company. Issues if any, need to be fixed on priority.
This is als your opportunity to look at alternative products and user reviews on their user experience. Build talking points with your design peers and extended teams like product, business, and engineering teams. Arm yourself with important data points on what the market is really saying about your product. There's nothing better than embracing reality and calibrating your design efforts.
9. Vendors & Partners
Don't underestimate the inputs of your business vendors and partners. No business can operate in silos. Today products and services are interconnected with other companies and systems. One needs to understand how various vendors and partners come into the picture in your user's journey. It's imperative to talk to these people and see if their are any challenges and if existing user-flows an be improved to create a seamless user experience.
For example, payment systems, logistics, authentication mechanisms, and brand collaborations require your users to interact with third party systems via your product. The fundamental question is do you understand the entire customer journey and all related third party journeys thoroughly? Being isolated and not interacting with partners can lead to a broken user experience. Integrate them into your regular meetings and closely work the designers of your partners, understand their design systems, challenges, and further interconnected systems on their end — for delivering the most efficient design outcomes.
10. Marketing & Brand Comm.
Alignment of your user experience with brand guidelines, values, and promise should be a top priority. Be it your design system, visual specifications, imagery, and even the right tone matters as it needs to be in sync with your brand. Connect with brand teams and see if your design is staying true to the brand offering and promise in the market. Ultimately, every user touchpoint or an interface is a brand asset and a brand channel.
The interfaces can't have a different tone and your other brand channels talk something else. It would be absurd to have such an inconsistent user experience, leading to loss of brand equity and brand mind-space. Your corporate website, product website, landing pages, microsites, product interfaces, employee interfaces, retail touchpoints, packaging, communication, and all service touchpoints are channels for your brand and intrinsic part of the UX. So it's imperative to closely work with brand comm., and marketing teams and synchronize your design efforts in the right direction that balance user, brand, and business objectives.
Conclusion
Do an audit of your user experience every quarter and involve all key personnel from various departments in the loop. Make it a practice to see UX as an organization responsibility and make statements about how you — as a UX practitioner are owning this at the forefront. This is UX advocacy in action. As you build this collaborative design culture, the design team will gain respect and admiration from various quarters within your organization. You might see some pushback initially, however once streamlined, these efforts start to pay off in the long term. It's a win-win deal for one and all.
UX is an organization-wide shared responsibility. A passionate UX practitioner owns this and leads from the front.
Finally, ensure to document your work for the benefit of all associated teams and make this documentation assisted presentation, a reference point to see how you have progressed with your efforts in improving your UX. Research and design documentation is a good practice that can help you avoid redundant efforts, ease the onboarding of new UX practitioners, and becomes a readily available study material for design, product, and business leaders.
Originally published on LinkedIn on March 5, 2025