How culture has aided UX and the Quest for Awesomeness

6 minute read

Culture:
The ideas, customs and behaviour of a particular group or society.

Awesomeness:
An extremely, amazingly good or impressive, powerful quality.

Exactly three years ago, I produced a UX roadmap. I had been with AJ Bell for six months and was settling into my role as a solo UX’er. I had been in this position before and failed to convince my previous employers about the importance of UX as they didn’t understand design. UX was considered to be the place where things were “made to look good” and nothing more. At the time I took that failure personally, but I have come to understand just how important culture is within a business.

My beliefs about design and what great UX should be haven’t changed and I’m implementing the same fundamental principles.

However, at AJ Bell I found myself in an environment that encouraged me to set big ambitions. I did! The three-year UX roadmap was the basis of a talk I gave at UX Scotland back in 2019, “UX and the Quest for Awesomeness”. I talked about my central beliefs of design and the foundations upon which I would build the UX function as well as how I was engaging with the wider business, not just with Tech Services, but with stakeholders, senior management and directors. What my roadmap centred upon was not a ‘big bang” approach to UX but lots of small, incremental changes. Some things that, on their own, seemed insignificant but together, over a period of time, would make awesome things happen.

Looking back, I think there are two important things that helped me, and they both highlight the culture at AJ Bell.

Firstly, the business has six guiding principles:

  • Straightforward
  • Intelligent
  • Personal
  • Principled
  • Focused
  • Energetic

Now, I know what you are thinking – we’ve all seen stuff like this before and really, how much does it mean? Well, at AJ Bell, a helluva lot! In my role, I am looking to instigate change and that’s very difficult to do. However, in every small change I would use one or more of these principles to back up the idea. Therefore, I never got a “no”, instead what I got was “ok, prove it”. For me, this was hugely empowering and very much crystalised the importance of culture.

Secondly, accessibility. Not from a website point of view (that’s part of the day job) but accessibility of people within the business. In previous roles, being able to talk to senior management was always extremely difficult as it was a battle to get attention and get backing at a high level to instigate the changes required to embed quality UX processes. Not at AJ Bell. The ability to engage with people at different levels across the entire business has been a cornerstone to the success of UX.

“Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything for better or for worse.”
Simon Sinek, author of “Start with the Why?”

Culture to me is a pretty big deal as it is an enabler of grasping the opportunities and changing things for the better. In my world, that means changing things for our users and putting them at the very centre of what the UX Team does.

So, where are we three years on? Did my roadmap go to plan?

Not to plan, no. In the past 18 months, we’ve all had to adapt to new ways of working and certainly some of the areas of UX focus have changed and evolved to meet new opportunities. But the goals and objectives I set out to achieve three years ago have been realised.

From solo UX to centralising UX as a function; my new three-year roadmap will look at how we meet the challenges that lie ahead as well as how we design solutions for the unique challenges we have for specific products and users. We aspire to create delightful experiences and want these to become synonymous with our brand(s) and AJ Bell as a whole.

The Quest for Awesomeness continues…

By Lee, Head of UX