DESIGN PRACTICE INNOVATION

UX design considerations for acquisitions: Product Ecosystem

You company bought a product and now it’s up to you to consider the ecosystem as part of the UX integration effort. (Part 3 of 3)

Written in collaboration with Misha Vaughan, VP of UX at ICE MT.

If you did not catch them, in Part 1 we introduced the idea of a continuum of choices, largely focused on standalone products. In Part 2, we presented a design framework for integrating products.

Now in Part 3 we review a brief set of additional considerations we loosely label “product ecosystem” considerations and the steps you might take on this journey.

Product Experience Ecosystem Alignment

There are four main pieces of the product experience ecosystem that will eventually make their way across a UX leader’s radar for an acquired product. These include accessibility, login experiences, administrative experiences, and partner communities.

Accessibility

From https://sites.pitt.edu/~tyt3/wcag/wcag.html

If an acquired product was not used in a setting where accessibility was required, one of the efforts that may need to be made is an investment in accessibility. If the acquiring company has a design system in-place with accessibility built-in, it may be an opportunity to provide accessibility to the acquired product while also getting the benefits of the design system. If that is too big a hill to climb, and for an acquired product, it may well be, then simply conducting an accessibility audit to understand the product’s accessibility strengths and weaknesses is an easy first step. From there, you can develop a plan to address accessibility gaps if needed.

Login Experiences

The login experience is the first place to make a positive visual change that is noticeable to users.

Companies may approach roles and responsibilities and security of users differently and so creating alignment through Single Sign On (SSO) and addressing requirements like 2-factor authentication may need be done for an acquired product. Even while the company may need to maintain products separately until resourcing allows them to be integrated, users will appreciate being able to sign in at one screen and so is a starting point for showing integration.

Administrative Experiences

Administrators are often part of buying decisions. Making their lives easier can help sell the product.

Like sign-on, administrative experiences provides the opportunity for a single point-of-access and thus a unified perception for products. A UX leader can first look to understand what the administrative experience is for the acquired products, and then bring them together into a common experience. Over time, as the backends are integrated, building consistent UI conventions for elements like settings and information architectures across different products makes using, selling and supporting products a better experience.

Administrators also need access to additional resources such as learning, forums, knowledge base, and tools. Bringing these all together in an experience can help sell products as part of a singular whole.

Partner Systems

Each party will likely have their own partners whose integration experiences differ. Consider what can be done to make the end-users lives experience consistent.

When bringing an acquired product into the product experience fold, an additional consideration will likely be how partners interact with the UI ecosystem. For example, do partners leverage an existing design system and need to transition to a new design system for integrations into the UI. Is each partner integration a custom design job? Are these design jobs large or small? Understanding the amount of revenue partners bring to the table, can help prioritize the degree to which a leader puts effort into creating this alignment.

Concrete steps you can take…

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

If you are a UX professional in the all-too-common position of evaluating these considerations post-purchase, this will be a labor of love. These alignment conversations are necessary to maximize the ROI of the investment, and these considerations allow you to have a meaningful conversation about how to do that.

So what’s a UX professional to do with all this?

• Step 1. Develop your menu of choices. Make it visual and simple. Make sure to enumerate the harmonization areas and how accessibility will be impacted or enhanced. Feel free to lift directly from these articles as a place to start. And then delete what doesn’t matter for your situation.
• Step 2. Engage with your product management organization and discuss priorities and tradeoffs. Refine your presentation based on these conversations. You will likely have to divide up the steps on the roadmap into phases — For example: Phase 1: branding, Phase 2: harmonization, Phase 3: rethinking.
• Step 3. Take the same menu over to your engineering partners and begin costing it out. The question you are going to want to answer for any leadership to agree on the path is ”What is it going to cost to accomplish this?” Cost may be reflected in person hours, sprint weeks or size of the team.
• Step 4. Socialize the concepts with your leadership, get agreement, and be patient in building out the roadmap. Keep it brief as they likely won’t be interested in the details. They will just be interested in your recommendations.
• Step 5. Work with the product teams to get each step added to the product plan — ie Jira.

This is an exercise in empathy and understanding your executives. Unless you have a leader who is allergic to Powerpoint it will likely be the most effective medium to present to them. To communicate effectively, especially to executives, i.e. decision makers, you need whatever medium they are most comfortable consuming.

The specifics of this activity comes down to the character of your teams. Some teams will have more of an appetite for this than others. If they are technically astute it may be easier to sell. If they are more business-oriented you will have to make more of a business case.

Also, this might be of interest to your Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) team. Knowing about the design side of acquisitions can help them understand the costs and speed of ROI when looking at future possible acquisitions.

Did we miss some nuances or categories? You bet. Feel free to let us and the UX community know what you think is important in this conversation by adding comments below. For some related reading check out this article by Janaki Kumar

Thank you to Joe Dumas and Andrew Avedian for their thoughtful insights and proof reading.

Resources

“DESIGN LEADERSHIP FOR MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS” Janaki Kumar 2014

“Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0: Difficulties of Conformance”