Earlier this year, Founder & Principal Consultant Erin Young sat down with Greg Hickman from Alt Agency to talk about how Slide UX has focused and systemized our UX services. She covered:
Who Slide UX is and what we do
How we slashed through the baggage to focus our services down to a lean, core program
Why clients love it
Advice for other leaders
Highlights from the Conversation
Greg: Who are you, and what does Slide UX do?
Erin: “I'm Erin Young, I am a user experience consultant by trade. I've been working in this industry for–I recently calculated it–17 years. We help digital product leaders to improve their user experiences. We're really looking to work with product leaders who want to both create a great user experience, but also want to create a situation in which they can continue to create great user experiences beyond our project.”
Greg: How big is your team? What type of roles do you have?
Erin: “Right now we're a team of about 18. And we're actually hiring right now. So that number will probably go up in the coming weeks. [Editor’s Note: We’re now a team of 23.] This is around the size that we've been for a couple of years now give or take, the vast majority of my team is in fulfillment. So there are only a couple of back office roles. Everyone else is designing or consulting with clients pretty much all the time. We basically have project management and account management as a part of fulfillment here, everyone is a UX expert, pretty much.”
Greg: People in Creative Services sometimes think that if you standardize, there's no such thing as creativity anymore. Did you feel that way?
Erin: “I was interested. But I was also skeptical.
“We had a playbook of all of the things that we could do. It was so long.
“One of my first steps was to ax 75 to 80% of the lines out of that playbook. It felt really dramatic. But the truth is, a lot of it was baggage that we rarely use that I was just carrying around and maintaining. Standardization felt impossible.
“But the feedback that I've gotten about it has been so good both internally and in sales, I'm surprised by how reassuring it is to the clients that we talked to. They like knowing that we have a process that we're going to take them through–something that we do all the time. And that we can tell them exactly what that is on the call, we can hand that over to them within hours after we get off the phone with them. This is all stuff that I just I wouldn't have tried before I wasn't open to and now that we're doing it, the feedback is undeniable. Sometimes you just need time to process an idea.”
Greg: You've shared the response you're getting within the sales process. What's changed, and and what sort of feedback are you getting?
Erin: “Right after we launched our sales flow, we had a guy who a couple of times along the process, he ultimately went a different way with good reason. But he kept stopping us to tell us how our sales process really blew away that of our competitors, and that he could tell we were super legit, and that we had really thought things through because of the sales process. That felt good to hear. Because from our perspective, as user experience designers and conversion experts, we're always thinking about removing hurdles. And we added a lot of hurdles in the process that we implemented. So getting good feedback about this sales process was very reassuring to me.
“They [Prospects] are learning about the fact that we're gonna give them a pre-structured program. I don't have to do any of those things myself, and I have so much more information than I had before about what they really need. All of the answers are right there, and systems are talking to systems and it's reduced the amount of busy work that we have to do to serve the client, which is really where our focus is.
“It's also more convenient for our clients. They get their work handed to them in a form, it's front loaded for them, they can sit down and do it all. They know that we're taking them seriously because we're asking the right questions the right way every time versus trying to train 20 people to ask the right questions.”
Greg: What advice would you give another creative service provider to inspire or motivate them?
Erin: “One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about lately is that you only have so much time. Each of us only has so much time, and the time that we spend now, we're planting seeds for what's gonna come next. With smart, talented people, you can do anything you put your mind to. So the challenge becomes: what am I going to put my mind to?
“What I would say is: Look for ways to invest your time, just like you would with your money–in the things that are going to have the highest ROI. Thinking about ways that you can produce something that sells more than just your time. The sooner you start thinking that way, the more likely you are to be able to make decisions that help facilitate that in the future.”
Greg: Where can people learn more about you?
Erin: “Check us out at SlideUX.com. We have a newsletter called The Brief where we user experience insights and inspiration for product leaders. So if that sounds like you, we'd be honored to have you on our list.”
A huge thanks to Greg and the team at Alt Agency for hosting Erin. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to cover, please send them our way at info@slideux.com and we’ll work them into an upcoming post!