Despite being a challenging endeavour, the adoption of UX approaches is critical for all types of organizations. It is a brave new world, and global enterprises are increasingly developing their UX teams rather than utilizing external agencies. Having said that, building an in-house team is not an easy feat.

Successful enterprise UX is a result of teamwork. To create a solid UX foundation in your business, you need to build a culture of UX across your organization. You must involve the entire enterprise in the process and help create an environment where UX can evolve and expand. It may require a paradigm shift in your organization.

Building an effective UX team may be a complex task. This article will demonstrate how to build an effective enterprise UX team, which constitutes a design team, by breaking down the various UX disciplines and discussing the common UX structures. We will also outline a few tips for hiring the perfect UX team.

UX Team: The Core Disciplines

In agile companies, it is often seen that single employees take on multiple roles. These are called cross-functional roles that exist in various UX disciplines. This is a common feature of many companies that cannot afford an all-around UX team. However, a well-rounded UX team consists of many talents in various roles. Some of these roles include:

UX Researcher: The person(s) in this role is responsible for gathering information about products, their usage, customer review, and requirements. The researcher may employ various methods such as surveys, feedback forms, interviews, etc., to investigate until the right answer is received.

UX Designer: People with such roles analyze and interpret the gathered information collected from the researchers. They create user journey maps and use interview data to comprehend user needs accurately. Once done, UX designers identify needs and provide possible design solutions.

UI Designer: UI designers are responsible for creating aesthetically pleasing user interfaces that are also easy to understand, navigate, and helpful. The main focus is on the product's appearance that includes layouts, fonts, patterns, design systems, etc.

UX Writer: These people develop a content strategy and make sure the communication towards the users is credible.
Front-end Developer: The main job of a front-end developer here is to execute the designs and deal with application-level development matters. They also create HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code for the product.

Typical UX Structures

The UX team structure is often disregarded or not given much priority. However, this discipline needs more weight because the structure facilitates collaborative and efficient working environments. Many things change the structure of your team, such as recruits, employees who quit, new products and features, etc. Therefore it is essential to develop a solid structure that suits your enterprise's requirements. Listed below are some common UX team structures found in organizations:

Centralized: The centralized approach is followed by many organizations where all UX staff members report to a UX team leader or manager. The team members work with multiple departments but report to only team leads or executives. For this reason, this approach is a bit complex.

Embedded: This is a decentralized approach where the team has multiple members with different areas of expertise. Therefore, they don't have to report to a single person and are the opposite of a centralized approach.

Matrix: A matrix UX team would be a hybrid of the centralized and embedded structures. This type of structure follows a system where UX staff reports to their specific team and a UX team lead, as seen in a centralized model.

Five Steps To Building a Strong UX Team

One of the perks of having your in-house team is that you will have the added advantage of a dedicated team that functions within your enterprise. However, a peril is that you may incur financial and operational costs while managing this team. Nevertheless, you can outweigh this disadvantage by hiring an efficient UX workforce that will be worth your money in the long run. Here are the five steps for you to follow to build that strong and sustainable team:

Develop Core UX Disciplines: Like mentioned earlier, UX is a cross-team effort and cannot be seen or made to function in isolation. Therefore, the first and foremost step to creating a UX team is to ensure that the core disciplines are identified and well established. These disciplines are encouraged throughout your organization.

Know Your Team: The nature of your enterprise would depict the required UX roles. We can all agree that an organization doesn't hold weight sans its employees. So you must get to know your team. Identify specific job roles, assess in-house skills and talent, and encourage a diverse workforce equipped to handle multiple job roles.

Bridge team's learning gaps: You must incorporate business processes that are smooth to support your team. For example, observe transactional onboarding, organize brainstorming sessions, hold team days, encourage teamwork and feedback loops, evaluate using SWOT analyses, and examine individual progress reviews.

High cross-team visibility: Transparency between team members and team leaders or executives is crucial when building a strong UX team. It helps sustain and promote an effective team with an efficient workflow. This also shows where the team fits into the organization as they understand the organization's goals themselves.

Testing: Testing within your organization team improves usability. It leverages the team's potential when you evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

Building a UX workforce requires a team culture that regards UX throughout the organization. Most UX design companies hire team members that practice role diversification and transparency. If your team misses a particular skill set, then start pairing skills or talents or recruiting additional ones. Remember, UX will evolve as your team evolves, and cultivating a team is an ongoing process.

How much does an average uX design earn