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Advocating User-Centred Design to Your Company?
Bertie asks: "I'm a UI designer at a small company who has recently found himself sidelined on certain projects. It seems that they've been sold without enough consideration given to providing a good user experience, because the deals were done on the cheap. From my point of view, providing a satisfying user experience is not an optional luxury, it should underpin every other aspect of the project. If you were me, and you had a couple of hours to promote the importance of what you do to various people — execs, sales, developers, project managers, and the like — how would you use the time?"
Be sure to word your presentation in a way that they feel they will benefit. Show them what increased weight in your job can offer them, rather than explaining what you want.
Better yet, apply this to other aspects in your life. Everything will be much more successful.
Generally speaking, if you are working for a company where your philosophical outlook doesn't match theirs, it is unlikely that you will be able to change their minds. The best thing to do would be to jump ship, and find a company that is more aligned with your ideas. For example, in my company, a huge emphasis is put on everyone coding in the same style, at least for the code that is actually delivered in the product. Utility tools that are written to support the product (compilers/debuggers,test systems, etc) can be written pretty much any way you want, in any language that you want). But for the code in the product itself, everyone has to write in exactly the same way. You want to implement the Singleton pattern in C? Ahhh, there is only One True Way to do so in my company. Want to write an assert macro that also sticks out an informative message to trace at the same time? Sorry, that's not in accordance with the One True Way to do an assert, so no soup for you! I drove myself, (and everyone around me) insane, trying to convince management that if you want to keep the best programmers, you can't expect them to accept having to code to someone else's idea of good code. It's just going to annoy them, and they'll look elsewhere for a job. It took me a while to realise that they were never come around to the philosophy of hiring good programmers that don't care about what style code has been written in, provided that it is clear (I mean, a competent programmer should not be phased when faced with any style that is relatively clear). Finally, looking around, I noticed that none of the really good programmers at my company spent much time working on the actual product code. They were either writing tools, or moved into management as fast as possible, depending on whether they wanted to keep coding or not. I followed suit. I am now working on a project where I am writing a virtual machine for the product, in C, and in accordance with the pathetic coding rules, but at the same time I'm writing a high level assembler and a debugger for generating code for the VM. These two tools are written in Ruby, and I'm really enjoying the work. Enough that the code rules that I have to obey when writing the VM have become only a minor annoyance, rather than a major pain in the neck every time I sit down at my desk. Anyway, my point is that it's highly unlikely that you will succeed in changing your company's outlook on the importance of UI design. There's too many egos, and too much inertia involved. Either you have to redefine your job so that the standard rules don't apply, or you have to change your job....