Aligning Vision with User Needs: Expanding on Our AMA Being Human Day Talk
In our recent talk at the Arts Marketing Association’s ‘Being Human’ Day, we explored the importance of aligning the vision of internal stakeholders with the actual needs of users—a critical step in successful UX and web design.
Our session highlighted how often organisations overlook the necessity of both user research and internal alignment, leading to websites that fall short of their potential. In this post, I’ll be expanding on the insights we shared at the event, diving deeper into the process we followed during a recent project with the Rose Theatre.
By examining how we aligned internal goals with real user needs, I’ll demonstrate how this approach is key to crafting a user-centric website that serves both the organisation and its audience.
Conducting and Interpreting User Research
User research is an integral part of the design process, but it can be overwhelming if not approached thoughtfully. While it’s a vast topic deserving of its own discussion, let me give you a quick overview of how it played a pivotal role in this project.
To create a website that truly meets user needs, we must first understand those users deeply. This isn’t groundbreaking advice, but from experience, our own biases and assumptions can often cloud our ability to truly see what our users need. To ensure we stayed objective, we grounded our decisions in actual user research.
For the Rose Theatre project, we conducted interviews with a wide range of users to capture a broad spectrum of experiences and expectations. These interviews covered various demographic groups, including frequent theatre-goers, casual visitors, and people from the local community who each interacted differently with the theatre. Additionally, we analysed user behaviour on Rose’s current website and studied patterns in their interactions, both online and in the real world. This helped us gather insights that weren’t influenced by subjectivity.
The Rose also provided us with quantitative data from their previous user surveys. This was invaluable, as it added another layer of insight, allowing us to compare subjective findings with hard data.
Through a blend of qualitative and quantitative research, we uncovered valuable insights into the users—their values, their level of satisfaction with the existing website, and the key behaviours that drive engagement. This research became the cornerstone of the project, providing a thorough understanding of the users and their needs to guide every decision that followed.
Aligning a Team of Internal Stakeholders
When it comes to UX design, we often focus on the users outside the organisation. But it’s equally important to align the internal team around the website’s goals. After all, you can’t design a user-friendly website if your internal stakeholders aren’t on the same page.
The Rose Theatre’s internal team was a diverse mix of senior staff members, each with their department-specific objectives. For example, the artistic director wanted to project a high-quality, contemporary image of the theatre. The box office team was focused on driving ticket sales and ensuring easy booking processes. Meanwhile, the participation team, responsible for community events and school programmes, had different priorities altogether.
Although everyone shared the common goal of improving the website, each department had different visions of how it should function, leading to potential conflict. Without resolving these differences, we risked creating a website that tried to do too much but didn’t do anything well—resulting in a poor user experience and a frustrated audience.
Prioritising Goals and Forming Connections
So, how do we bring a diverse group of stakeholders together and align their goals with the needs of the users? The key lies in communication and prioritisation.
For the Rose Theatre project, we facilitated a series of in-person workshops to help the internal team connect and understand each other’s priorities. These workshops were structured to encourage open discussion and collaboration. We used several UX exercises, such as Post-Ups, Affinity Diagramming, and Forced Ranking, to help the team identify and prioritise the website goals. This process allowed us to establish a clear set of objectives that reflected both the organisation’s needs and the users’ expectations.
Once we had this foundational alignment, we presented the findings of our user research to the internal team. The goal here was to highlight the overlaps between the users’ needs and the theatre’s objectives. To deepen the team’s understanding of the users, we used empathy-building exercises like role-playing and empathy mapping. These helped the team see the project from the user’s perspective, fostering empathy for their needs and motivations.
By the end of the workshops, the internal team was fully aligned, with a shared understanding of both the website’s goals and the users’ needs. We had established a framework that connected the organisation’s vision with real user requirements, ensuring that the design would meet both strategic objectives and create a seamless user experience.
Conclusion
Aligning a team’s vision with user needs is not a one-step process. It requires thoughtful planning, open communication, and a commitment to understanding the user’s perspective. Through user research and internal workshops, we were able to create a clear, human-centred framework for the Rose Theatre’s website redesign, setting the stage for a design that serves both the organisation and its users.
In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into the specific strategies and design solutions that came out of this alignment, and how they helped deliver a successful user experience, with a focus on human-centered content. Stay tuned!
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