Culture Hacking: Shaping a UX-Friendly Organization

UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

Last week, I talked about how to boost your influence as a UX leader by focusing on the right activities and building your reputation. This week, I want to explore something closely related. How do you actually shift your organization's culture to be more user-centered?

I know that sounds like a lot of work. And yes, there is effort involved. But if you've been applying what we've covered in previous lessons, you've likely done much of the groundwork already. Plus, culture hacking can be surprisingly fun.

Four approaches to culture hacking

There are four main techniques you can use to embed UX into your organization's DNA:

Engagement and collaboration. You're probably doing this already in your day-to-day work. The goal is to amp it up and bring more people into the UX conversation.

Education and awareness. We've talked about this extensively in earlier lessons. It's about helping colleagues understand what UX is and why it matters.

Feedback and iteration. Creating systems that give people ongoing visibility into how users experience your products.

Celebration and reinforcement. Recognizing and highlighting UX wins to build momentum.

Let me walk through each of these with some practical examples you can try.

Engagement and collaboration

This is about bringing people together and getting them excited about user experience. A few tactics that work well:

Hackathons. Organize events where diverse teams collaborate on user-centered solutions. The emphasis should be on creativity and fun. Let people dream up great experiences without getting bogged down in compliance issues or technical limitations.

UX champions. Find people across your organization who already care about user experience. There will be more than you think. Create a space where they can come together, whether in Teams or Slack, to share experiences and frustrations. Share educational materials with them. Invest in these people so they become UX ambassadors across the organization.

Inclusive workshops. Consider traditional workshops but expand who you invite. Include people from legal or compliance teams. The more you engage with them, the more they'll understand what you do. And the more willing they'll be to adapt their way of working to support better user experiences.

Education and awareness

Here are some techniques for building UX awareness that go beyond standard training:

Storytelling sessions. Run lunch-and-learns where you get people together for 20 to 30 minutes. But instead of presenting UX best practices, ask people to share terrible user experiences they've encountered. Not from your company, obviously. People love sharing their frustrations. It builds empathy for what users go through.

Gamification. Introduce game-like elements to incentivize stakeholders. I once created a leaderboard ranking different departments based on their ability to deliver outstanding experiences. Instead of boring monthly analytics reports filled with vanity metrics, we showed UX performance metrics that sparked healthy competition between teams.

Empathy training. Create exercises to help stakeholders put themselves in users' positions. This might involve completing user tasks themselves, viewing pages for limited time periods to simulate scanning behavior, or sitting in on user testing sessions.

Culture hack days. Dedicate time for teams to discuss how to create a more user-centric organization. Ask them directly what needs to change and encourage brainstorming sessions.

Feedback and iteration

Visual management tools. Use dashboards or leaderboards to display user feedback and UX project metrics. Keep UX goals visible and actionable.

For example, in one organization where I worked, we updated the content management system with a new, user-centric information architecture. To help content creators adapt, we created a dashboard showing their responsible pages alongside user feedback. We included a simple poll asking users if they found each page useful. We provided tips for improvement right there in the dashboard. It created a continuous feedback loop that kept people engaged with how users experienced their content.

Celebration and reinforcement

It's important to build up your colleagues and acknowledge success. Celebrate user milestones and project successes related to UX improvements. When you celebrate, focus on the product owner and team rather than individual contributions. Highlight the techniques they used and the results they achieved. Try to attach financial value when you can.

Consider implementing recognition programs. Annual awards for the most user-centric people or teams can work well. It might seem cheesy, but it generates genuine excitement around user experience.

Finally, maintain regular check-ins with product owners and stakeholders. Hold discussions about UX best practices, share updates, and celebrate progress to sustain momentum and enthusiasm.

Outie's Aside

If you're a freelancer or agency working with clients, culture hacking looks a bit different. You can't restructure their organization or set up internal champion networks. But you can plant seeds.

Try running a single culture hack day as part of your engagement. Frame it as a workshop where you facilitate discussion about barriers to great user experiences. You're not telling them what to change. You're helping them identify it themselves.

Another approach is to create mini feedback loops within your project scope. If you're redesigning a section of their site, set up a simple dashboard showing before-and-after user feedback. When stakeholders see real user reactions to improvements, it often sparks wider conversations about user-centered culture. You're modeling what ongoing UX practice could look like.

The key is showing, not telling. Demonstrate the value through contained examples they can then scale internally.

Marketing UX internally

These four techniques give you a solid foundation for culture hacking. But there's one thread running through all of this. The need to actively market and promote user experience across your organization.

Next week, I'll explore specific tactics to proactively market UX design within your organization. Because sometimes being good at UX isn't enough. You need to be good at talking about it too.