Your preferences are valid.
Your perspective is true.
Your input is invaluable.
In the world of UX, however, "your" has to take a back seat to "user".
It's challenging to look at something that makes total sense to you and then bow to the collective will of the masses. You might have seen something on another site that was amazing, but in the context of the larger audience, might not be beneficial for this effort. While there is a color that resonates more with you or a font that reads more clearly to you or a navigation style that you might find more comfortable, these types of decisions cannot just be made based on your lens.
The only way to defeat this preferential perspective, and honestly this is really challenging in the Enterprise Service Management (ESM) space, is to have data to back you up.
Data has to drive the discussion and data has to be the indicator of success. If you individually love it, that's a major bonus! As an organization, you have to drive to quantifiable measurement to make sure that what you are delivering is actually doing what you want it to do. Your site will become more "sticky" the more you focus on the data.
The greatest enemy to amazing UX is time. You can spin up a website fairly quickly/easily these days; slap up a template, change some link names, adjust the logo and you're done. The process to actually go through and make an incredible user experience takes effort. The time you take to go through and analyze the data you are getting and the feedback you receive will make all the difference.
To help the cause, here are 5 simple steps to a more data-driven user experience:
Plan
Get all the ideas out in the open. Make sure everyone on the team and every stakeholder has been able to give input. From that initial pass, come to a preliminary consensus of ideas that need to move forward. Ideas that don't make the initial cut can be utilized in future tests if necessary. NOTE: if you are a manager or sponsor, know that your opinion holds a lot of weight. Make sure the environment is such that everyone feels completely free to speak up.
Model
Put together a few different examples that you are going to use for testing. This could be 2-3 different options for a home page. Or maybe it's one home page but 2-3 different ways of serving up the navigation. Or maybe it's just a different way of naming the menu items. Either way, give a few options so you can start to get some good data.
Test
Come up with a few different user scripts that you want people to go through to see which of the options you've served up meet their needs the most. Allow them to produce their own use case to see if any of the given concepts work for them. Keep scoring or tracking simple to work with, easy to compile. Make sure to have representatives from as many different departments or groups you can within the organization. As you scale with ESM this is critical to the overall user experience success.
Evaluate
Gather your data and dig in. Take time to go through and really analyze the feedback you've received. If the data doesn't satisfy, consider other options for testing or other ways of asking the questions. Either way, make sure to take the time to go through the results. A lot of people will have contributed input by this point — a great cross section of the organization — so make sure to value that time and effort by combing through the data.
Review
Gather the group together to go through the results and come up with a plan. What is going to change as a result? Is there data supporting that change? What do you expect to happen as a result? When will these changes take place?
And then repeat. Then repeat again. Keep on repeating this same process to make sure your users are completely satisfied. This cycle can happen at a micro and macro level (and probably should).
No, this all doesn't have to happen before launch. The value of the online space is it is organic. If you decide a week later that something is not working (based on the data you're getting), change it! Roll out version 1.2. But when one of your stakeholders comes to you with a complaint or a "why is this that way?" comment, your data has to win in that conversation. If you have some great idea come floating by your desk, before you scurry to make the change, go through the process above. The more these steps are used, the easier and more fluid they will become.
In today's online climate, the user is far more sophisticated than ever and has higher standards, but as a friend once told me, "One man's cool is another man's iceberg".
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