The organisation first needs to have the mantra of user centred design.

Before you implement a UX lab, you need to recognise that there are lots of potential pitfalls to avoid. Some of the more common ones include:
1) Assuming that everyone in the organisation values a good user experience as much as you do
2) ‘Stepping on the toes’ of other groups and not being sensitive to their priorities
3) Introducing a new methodology on top of an existing methodology
4) Transforming internal staff into user experience specialists without training
5) Bringing in a consulting company without knowledge transfer

My four recommendations for a new UX lab will be:

1) Embed UX work in the development cycles (this often requires adapting to multiple dev processes used across different teams). Learn, use, and promote “agile” methods. I’ve often that once I understand the people around me it’s much easier to embed UX into the development cycle. For instance talk to a developer, see how you can work with them, and what type of thinking they need from you. Once you’re a player in the team you then have a bit more room to promote and prove the worth of UX.

2) Foster executive stakeholders that are strong advocates. The higher in the organization the better. With access to funding. Respected (even if not loved) within the organization.

3) Train designers with usability evaluation skills first (rather than focusing on user researchers and usability specialists without augmenting the design capacity of the organization). Also, visual design is critical to most products these days; don’t overlook this when hiring designers.

4) Invest in user testing tools. As someone who works with start-ups and SMBs, finding low-cost, high-impact tools is an absolute necessity. Fortunately, the usability world has been blessed by dozens of new tools over the last couple of years. The web/ apps don’t live on a desk anymore. The reality is that we now need to test our work on multiple devices our users own, instead of just few desktop browsers. We need to open a device lab to help the local web developer community test their work on the ever-growing range of mobile devices. I believe in testing on real devices. Software emulators and simulators can be useful, but in the end they can only do that; simulate the experience . To make testing on real devices possible for everybody, we need open device labs.

However, understanding these business goals is not enough to ensure success. You also need to understand the organisational barriers and opportunities to introducing usability, user-centred design and broader UX activities, as well as the cultural myths and values held within your organisation. By understanding these, your team will better understand how to work within the context of organisation, and also with others on your team. Such barriers have the potential to prevent or undermine the adoption of your UX design activities. Think of it as an existing or planned circumstance that may get in the way of your ability to carry out UX activities. Such as:

1) Inadequate communication between developers and users
2) Clients not understanding usability or UX and therefore not wanting to pay or embrace for it
3) Different groups within your organisation “owning” the user experience
4) Not enough skills in usability and UX design
5) Most of the projects are too small to incorporate explicit UX design
6) Overloading the UX specialist(s) with too many projects to support
7) Having projects which are located across the organisation and are hard for the specialists to reach
8) Demystifying UX standardization so that the practice is not difficult to sell

It is not until you understand your organisation at this level that you can start to craft a UX lab that will really work. It is essential to recognise what they are so you can determine how best to introduce and foster a user-centred culture and a UX team.

It is always important to remember how to evangelize the IA and UX practice. I have found that lately our community (we) have been focusing on Enterprise IA or IA/UX for major projects, but, what about small projects? What about small-to-medium businesses that are just learning what IA/UX means? Or don’t have an idea of what IA/UX is? While I feel that large corporations need to be the driving force and know about it, we still have to educate small-to-medium businesses about IA/UX methodologies and the ROI of implementing them. Like Often times, it’s more about the person than the process. We need to document our Wins, then Publicize Ruthlessly