Women in UX: Leah Buley

For many of us, learning about user experience was a classic, “aha!” moment. User experience is design, coding, engineering, psychology, and human-computer interaction coming together in a career that has meaningful impact on how the technology of today can become the technology of the future. Dramatic? Maybe a little. But I remember being fresh out of my communication undergrad, disenchanted with the idea of entering the boy’s club known as the film industry. I remember the rush of understanding that came with learning what UX really meant. I remember thinking, “This is for me.”

Leah Buley got into the UX game long before I did, but had a similar moment of realization. She went from being an “HTML hack” to a bastion of the UX community, an advocate for users, and the sage behind the book often handed out as gospel in classrooms: The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. This is a book that has guided my approach to countless projects, and indeed my overall outlook on the UX industry. Being imbedded in the industry, it might not seem necessary to advocate for user experience: we already know how important, effective, and beneficial it is to know what your users want, need, and expect. But Buley’s book gives readers guidance — it truly is a survival guide — on navigating a workplace where UX might not be appreciated.

The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2013)

Buley’s career has time and again proven two things (our takeaways for this article): caring about users isn’t enough, you have to do the work to prove their worth and that design shouldn’t be sequestered away from other departments.

UX Team of One

Buley described her work before discovering UX as “pushing pixels.” This was when she was a front end engineer, or as she put it, an “HTML hack.” Like many of us, she was self-taught, a tinkerer with tools like Adobe Illustrator. She wanted her design to be more meaningful, she wanted to have more influence on what was being designed and why. After discovering the term user experience on a blog and having her “Nirvana moment” she started on the path toward becoming a user experience professional. She was, at this point, a UX team of one.

“What that meant for me was that I worked in a number of different organizations over a period of time where they didn’t necessarily know this term ‘user experience,’ or didn’t necessarily believe that it was something that they needed. But I thought that I was a secret, covert operative bringing it into the place nonetheless.” Buley said at her 2013 presentation at the Delight conference.

Leah Buley Shares Secrets of Being a UX Team of One (2013)

She felt keenly the frustrations that the burgeoning UX profession suffered from at the time. Designers and researchers had to work the extra job of convincing their coworkers and supervisors that working with feedback from users was valid, indeed key, in the process of creating successful designs.

Buley then joined Adaptive Path, a design firm and user experience consultancy that she believed could teach her how to do UX the right way. This shift shifted her own approach to design, going from a screen-first approach to thinking instead about user needs, feedback, iteration, prioritization, research… the screen was just the product of a much deeper process. Designing screens was not the same as understanding customer needs.

What Buley gleaned from Adaptive Path was synthesized into The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide. The book is written in a, frankly, user friendly way. Buley greets readers with a section on how to use the book — who will benefit from reading it, what is contained within the pages, and frequently asked questions. Likewise each chapter is laid out in a similarly transparent way. Buley writes friendly, clear paragraphs that guide readers through both the philosophy behind user experience and actionable methodologies used for gleaning important insights that designers should consider before creating certain screens.

Before even the introduction Buley warns us that caring about the user isn’t enough. To be real champions of users, we must monitor products, test designs, make sure those designs are explored and probed, improve upon them, and do the work to prove why certain designs work better than others.

Buley has done the work.

Championing the power of design with proof

Buley headed InVision’s Design Maturity Report that surveyed 2,200 companies.

Some of Buley’s most influential work was at InVision, a company whose footprint on the industry cannot be overstated. Her job title there perhaps encapsulates what she was already doing informally throughout her career, Director of Design Education. It was here that she was able to amass an indisputable amount of proof concerning the power of design in all aspects of business.

Buley led the creation of InVision’s proprietary design maturity model. This study, which surveyed 2,200 companies across 24 industries, identifies design practices that correlate with business impact. Design does not just make things look good — it affects the bottom line. In Buley’s words, “Design has a seat at many tables, beyond just the boardroom.” Those methodologies laid out in her book? They’re potent when non-design peers get involved. Companies with the highest level of design maturity (5) involve design in all aspects of their strategy.

“When we say a business is expanding its design maturity, we’re really saying: these are the organizations getting more benefits, most broadly. Advancing the design maturity of a business means fine-tuning its processes in a way that enables it to increase key business goals.” Buley writes. Those benefits include increased revenue, increased customer satisfaction, cost savings, product usability (of course), and entry into new markets among others.

There are unbelievable benefits to increased design maturity.

The higher a company’s design maturity, the more data-driven design is emphasized. Design is not episodic, not occasional workshops — it’s a key part of strategy. These organizations foster deep partnerships between different teams, because yes, even the legal department can get in on some whiteboard sessions. Forget presumed personas: the higher an organization’s design maturity, the more time they spend with their users, really learning about what they need.

These findings are a natural extension of Buley’s work as a UX team of one. Her Research and Design Survival Guide implores UX pros to get non-design professionals involved in the process of design. Guerilla user testing yields powerful results, just as sketch sessions with engineers can boost an organization’s design maturity.

Leah Buley has put a plethora of design tools into the hands of prospective, and professional, UXers. Then she took it a step further and proved with empirical evidence in a 40-page study that proved that they pay off, significantly. Her work brought me from that initial “aha!” moment to where I am now as a fervent advocate of users, design, and the power they bring to organizations.

Key Takeaways

You have to do the work

You can say that you value and care about your users. You can create personas and consult them frequently, but this should not be a replacement for actually talking with users. Generative and evaluative interviews cannot be discounted. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide encourages us to lead the charge to see opportunities for user-centered approaches, and to then bring along others.

Bring on the whole team

“While many organizations have isolated design-impact stories, more broad-based adoption indicates that the organization is using design repeatedly and sustainably to drive business value.” Buley tells us time and again that design benefits from the diverse perspectives of the entire organization, not just the design team. Sometimes “the more the merrier” rings true. When we work as a UX team of one — or even on a team of many — part of that job is advocating for users and for other departments to see themselves not only as users, but as participants in the design process.

Who is next?

This article is part of a series celebrating women in UX. I would argue that there is and perhaps never will be enough acknowledgement of women’s contributions in tech. Let me know who you think deserves recognition and celebration — maybe they’ll be next week’s article!

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article we publish. This story contributed to World-Class Designer School: a college-level, tuition-free design school focused on preparing young and talented African designers for the local and international digital product market. Build the design community you believe in.