DESIGN PRACTICE INNOVATION
UX design considerations for acquisitions: Standalone Products
Making acquisitions part of your UX family — A model, a menu, and addressing standalone products. (Part 1 of 3)
Written in collaboration with Misha Vaughan, VP of UX at ICE Mortgage Technology.
This is a 3-part series on the UX considerations for any designer, design leader, or architect charged with developing the plan for alignment of user experiences of acquisitions.
In this part of the series, we introduce the idea of a continuum of choices and show how they apply to stand-alone products. In the second part, we will present a design framework for approaching integration. In the 3rd part, we will review a set of additional considerations and steps you might take on the journey.
Your company bought a product…
And when a company acquires a product, financial considerations drive us to get the most out of it — whether it’s a complementary customer base, a phenomenal margin, or staying competitive by growing a feature footprint. A hidden cost to these decisions that are often overlooked and can have expensive consequences is the plan for aligning the user experience strategies of acquisitions. Part of getting the most out of the acquired product is developing a strategy for merging user or product experiences.
Let’s dive in and examine the considerations a UX team should make about an acquired product’s user experience.
If you are a UX professional, you are often in the position where you have been informed of a buy decision (your company bought another company), and it’s your job to pick up the UX strategy from that point. While it would be ideal to do this kind of planning earlier in the process, it is highly unlikely that this will occur. The UX contribution to revenue and cost savings is not large enough to merit early consideration relative to other M&A priorities. In an acquisition, leadership focuses on business functions such as aligning C-level leadership (Who is in charge?), sales, IT, and legal organizations during the 1st hundred days. The most they may think about UX is dealing with a little brand identity.
A UX model for integrating acquisitions
How should a UX leader get started? We’ll share a framework we have found useful and walk you through how we think about it.
Think of the process along a continuum of integration. This helps provide a yardstick to measure what will be done to the product. Starting with low-impact change like branding up to completely rearchitecting the experience, for the purpose of focusing conversations, we recommend taking the continuum and segmenting it to specific levels of effort that an organization can engage in.
The levels correspond to the values UX cares about from the diagram above and can be translated into projects to address them. First, figure out a project to deal with visual consistency, then consistent interaction, and so on.
In order to advocate for the projects, you may need to build a case for the user experience point of view (POV) for an acquisition. This can be formed around four factors:
- Change — The actual UX changes that need to be made. Everything from branding to completely reimagining the features of merged products.
- UX Message — What opinion about the product experience or company do we expect the user to have about the change.
- UX Value — What does UX feel will be the positive impacts on the product experience, if any.
- UX Downsides — What do we feel will be the negative impacts to the product experience — again, if any.
The menu of choices
Each company has a different appetite for change. This varies per product and the amount of revenue the product brings in versus the cost of the change — less appetite for change for lower revenue products and more for higher revenue products. It also depends on the point of view of executive leadership; are they focused on reducing cost through synergies, or are they focused on growth? The following are possible items on the menu of integration directions for standalone products.
3 Integration Considerations for Standalone Products: Branding, Reskinning, Replatforming
Standalone products are those whose users will not be users of your company’s existing products. Often these acquisitions are complementary to the company’s functionality but from a different user’s perspective. These roles may not need, use, or care about the objects, flows, or roles in the system of your primary products. The activities these roles will take support or complete activities within your main product but with different or limited needs for access or understanding.
Branding
A low, swift pass is advocating for alignment on a brand level. It’s not so simple as swapping out a logo, though. The usual visual design considerations apply, eg., how will it render on mobile, how does it look in context, along with the need for engineering and documentation estimates. This communicates to customers, “this product is under new management.” The cost associated with this effort is traditionally low.
Reskinning
The simple act of updating the colors and fonts to be in more alignment with a current product family sends a message of visual cohesiveness. At its core, this communicates to customers, “this product is now part of the family.” The UX risk to be on alert for is whether this visual similarity obscures important differences in interaction paradigms, such as save models or document models. The cost associated with color and font updates are also generally lower. The largest cost with this may be in redoing documentation images.
Re-platforming the UI layer
If the product is standalone or has a standalone portion to its business model that it needs to maintain, there are benefits to shifting the acquired UI technology over to whatever the existing products are built on.
You now have access to UI innovations from across the company. Products don’t have to create every UI feature, they can just uptake ones the design system provides. You have a more flexible talent pool knowing the design system, designers and engineers can apply the knowledge to any product.
Additionally, this move can enhance the existing design system by forcing an examination of new needs and new ideas and adopting them.
From a UX perspective moving the acquired product to the existing design system creates a common product experience for customers. This does not necessarily create value for users, and the engineering cost on this can be non-trivial, but there may be long-term value to the combined organizations.
Next…the big integrations
In the next article, we’ll look at the more complex strategies for integrating acquired products into your existing product line.
Make sure to read Part 3 where we provide steps and direction to an integration plan.
Thank you to Joe Dumas and Andrew Avedian for their thoughtful insights and proof reading.
