As a general rule the best pitch is one designed for the person you are pitching to. If you're pitching to a marketer, speak in marketing terms. If you are pitching an engineer, pitch in engineering terms. Extra work is required to do this and you do have to study their turf, but you really have no business telling them how they should do things differently if you don't know anything about them, their goals, or their problems.
Most UX consultancies wear their pitches on their websites. Go to http://www.cooper.com, www.adaptivepath.com, www.uie.com, http://www.nngroup.com/, etc, and you'll see their pitches plain as day. Frankly if a UX firm can't express their pitch well on their own website something is wrong, isn't it? (You can find examples of this btw :) The biggest mistake I've seen UX folks make in pitches is not being specific in what they want. There is often a philosophical war they wish to wage - they want to show a VP/Engineer/Marketer that they are wrong about their view of the world, and that design is more important than they think, which is mostly a waste of time. If you are outnumbered and outgunned, do not fight philosophical battles out in the open because you will lose. If you drop the philosophy war for awhile you can find easy ways to pitch UX without ever making people defensive. Instead of "UX process lifecycle model" say you have a way to make the development team more efficient, or a way to raise customer satisfaction. All progress on tough turf begins with friendly trojan horses. Use their language and framework and make arguments in terms of their goals. After you have some wins, then talk people up with your philosophy and language - they might actually be open to listening then. So to be clear, I highly doubt I'd come running in the door with a UCD PROCESS banner trailing behind me. Or ever give a talk about "THE UCD MODEL". It's offensive to all the managers and engineers who likely believe they already have a UCD PROCESS in place, however ridiculously bad it is. They don't know how ignorant they are and likely don't like feeling ignorant, especially if your UCD Process is going to take away fun parts of their job they'd rather not part with (tip: know who will be threatened by your pitch, and why, before you make it). I wouldn't say "design thinking" either - you'd be muddying water you need to cross. Instead I'd look for the most leveraged thing I can do first - e.g. an area where easy moves have big payoffs. And that's what my first pitch would be about. "How we can improve the Flooby Dooby widget customer satisfaction by 50% in two weeks". If I did my homework, that would be as large a part of my pitch as I could comfortably make it. In all cases always have clear, specifc, actionable things you are pitching for. If you want veto power on feature decisions, ask for it. If you want a seat at the table at requirements discussions, say so. Money? Budget? Fine. ask for a reasonable thing, not too big but not too small, then totally kick-ass at it - only after your asskicking performance is acknowledged should you come back to ask for the rest of your shopping list. If you do kick ass, which if you've chosen wisely should be entirely possible, important people will ask you "How did you do this!? It kick-ass!" And then you can smile as you talk about UCD PROCESS diagrams, UX methodoliges, design thinking frameworks, rapid prototyping sessions, and whatever else your heart desires. They'll eat it up, because they've already seen it work on their own turf. Consulting situations have more wrinkles than the mostly in-house advice I offer above, but the spirt is often the right one in both kinds of pitches. -Scott Scott Berkun www.scottberkun.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kelvin Dai Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 10:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [IxDA Discuss] How do you pitch UCD process (or design thinking)? Hi all, I am a graduate student at Stanford doing a course project for a design consultancy startup. We are trying to understand how to effectively promote the user centered design process (or the buzzword "design thinking") to potentially unaware clients. During my internship at Google as a user experience researcher, I recall we used different methods to accomplish a similar goal, such as inviting engineers and PMs to the usability lab observation room, designing and promoting posters and brochures about user personas, and having sessions for engineers and users to have conversation face-to-face. Also we think that IDEO gave a nice example by their "deep dive" TV show. So, we would be interested in hearing more examples, ideas, and stories from you. How do you tell people what you are doing everyday as UX designer/researcher? How do you convince engineers/PMs/stakeholders/clients that the user-centered design is the right way to go? They are very important to us as we are in our "observation and understanding" stage. Thanks a lot for your time, and we hope to learn from your experience! Best, Yusen Dai MS, Management Science and Engineering Stanford University 650-575-9382 [email protected] ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
