UX/UI teams often receive requests for outputs from teams across the business. And, well-intentioned though they are, these requests can be rooted in individual or department wants and needs and siloed in nature. There's also a tendency for them to take the form of solutions to be visually designed, rather than problems to be solved.
It can be all too easy to slip into habits of 'just doing this one little thing' or servicing senior stakeholder needs. And, when we do this, it's at the expense of doing great work that makes things better for users.
A standard part of our role as a UX team is to validate requests, ensuring that they're driven by insight and aligned with business goals and to help propose alternative solutions if appropriate.
But equally important is to work with our colleagues across the business to help them understand how to interrogate their own requests to ensure that, when they approach us, it's with insight and problems, not rushed conclusions.
I'll be talking about how we're updating processes at Beauty Bay to challenge requests coming to the team to ensure that all work we do is driven by both user and business needs. And how, by doing this, we're working more collaboratively across the business to understand problems and come up with better solutions that work for both internal teams and our customers.
About the Speaker
Llara Geddes is Head of UX at Manchester-based online make up and skincare retailer Beauty Bay. With a background in marketing and customer service at schuh, she spent 4 years in agency-side UX at Edinburgh's Whitespace and Tayburn. In 2016 Llara moved to Manchester and joined amaze, where she spent just over a year as a UX consultant before taking on her current role at Beauty Bay.
Llara firmly believes in seeing UX permeate through an organisation, and sees customer service as just one part of that. She's also a believer in looking laterally to find talent within an organisation and is a supporter of promoting women and young people in tech. She's a STEM ambassador, a volunteer organiser with Ladies that UX Manchester and a speaker with TechNorth's Northern Voices programme.