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In this episode we ask how you can affect change to UX design in large organizations stuck in their ways. Vitaly talks to Marko Dugonji to find out.

Vitaly Friedman For him everything started with a passionate love for CSS and typography in early 2000s. He used to be a front-end developer and UX designer then moved to the role of user experience director. Working with plenty of clients such as Deutsche Telekom SGS Hrvatski Telekom Font Bureau L National Geographics and so many others. He also built a tool called Typetester which has gained quite a momentum in the 2000s and even beyond that allowing designers and developers to test their topography in the browser.

Vitaly Now five years ago he moved from Zagreb Croatia where hes originally from to Sacramento California where he now is working as a Director of User Experience at SymSoft Solutions. So we know hes an expert in UX but did you know that he has been an avid fan of Acapulco Beavers Handball team from Zagreb since the age of seven and remains one up until today My Smashing friends please welcome Marko Dugonjic. Hello Marko. How are you doing today

Web Programmer

Vitaly Excellent. Thats wonderful to hear. Its interesting because we have these conversations every now and again talking about the meaning of life and so many other things. But one thing that really excites me and I think it deserves a bit of attention I have this incredible story of how you actually just fell in love with the web many many years ago where you used to do something very very different. And look at you now work on enterprise applications for a pretty fancy company. Can you tell us a bit of that backstory

Marko Sure. Its a weird story in a way but maybe itll give someone an idea about how to start with completely different expectations about your career in life and end up in as you said in California. And so my story really began when I tried to build a website for believe it or not my dogs my kennel because I used to breed dogs. And at that time my full-time job was as a fitness trainer.

Marko So as I was working with people who would have rehabilitation needs or any type of permanent or temporary disability I also learned about how people who dont have the visual ability to use the web by listening to the web pages. And so one thing led to another and I was thinking about I have this website for my dogs. Is this even accessible

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Marko And so what do you do in early 2000s You find a web forum where real web professionals reside and you start asking questions about how to improve the accessibility of your website. And it was really just my hobby website and its almost something that Ive built out of my front-end or front page software Microsoft FrontPage. I dont know if you remember that one.

Marko And I dont know how but I never used tables for layout but I did. And this is probably the first time after almost 20 years that Im saying it I didnt use tables but I did use a bunch of frames. It was a frameset that pretty much I used to create the header and the sidebar and the footer. So I had four frames on that page.

Marko And of course it didnt validate and everything was really horrible from inaudible 000345 perspective. But I was hoping that the web design community would help me. And I started researching and learned about CSS positioning and that was the first thing that I fixed. And then I learned about Internet Explorer because at the time I was using Mozilla. I dont know what was even before Firefox. Maybe Phoenix or something like that.

Marko Netscape Navigator yeah. I knew about it but I think I onboarded with the Mozilla type of browser. But what happened is that at some point the web forums really werent enough for I guess my obsession with making things perfect. So I started reading web standards from the W3C website and I read the specs because I thought This is probably what every web professional does. And so this is how I learned about accessibility and web standards and all the stuff.

Marko So that was 2002 2003. And then one thing led to another again. I was participating in these web communities and eventually people from what today is called Human Design Agency from Zagreb had a call just like this one. And they said Hey would you like to be paid for what you know And I was like What are you talking about Im a fitness trainer.

Marko But they did convince me and then I joined that incredible team. We just had so much fun back in the day. And stayed with them for a couple of years then moved on to an in-house position and everything else is pretty much standard. But I think that moment when I realized I know something that somebodys willing to pay for was incredible for me. Again at that time it was still almost like a hobby to me. But soon enough it became a profession.

Vitaly Right. And then of course you also ended up having your own studio which then eventually after a couple of years moved you to this decision of maybe its a time to move to or try to move to the US. How did that happen

Marko Well I think what has always been following me is that I didnt really have any general plan. I knew what I wanted to do day-to-day. I knew what I felt about projects and work and skills and all that stuff but I didnt really have a general plan of moving from this company to another company and then to that company. It was really about maybe selecting good projects and good people to work with.

Marko And so when I had my studio we became pretty international. And you know that we also collaborated on a couple of projects in Europe. And for me it was really for the past couple of years in Croatia it was really just 100 international. And so one of our clients and through a good friend Christina Portner who also participated in some of the Smashing activities I think she gave a talk and had a couple of articles for you guys.

Marko She introduced me to Savita Faruki who owns SymSoft Solutions with her husband. And its a nice small family-run business. And looking at the projects that they had and still have it just made sense for me to move over here and so I accepted the offer that they extended to me after that visit. Where I really didnt plan to get employed but we were just discussing some of the collaboration and maybe working on some projects together but it ended up being me becoming a director of the user experience here at SymSoft.

Vitaly Right. Thats an interesting story and also chose a journey that one can take from one place to a very different place. Now youve been all around UX for now 15 or 20 years now. I dont even know. Who counts at this point anymore at this point And of course youve seen quite a lot of stuff happening in terms of just UX I would say.

Vitaly Weve been fighting as you could probably find thousands of articles stating that we need to have a seat at the table. And it seems like now at this point in 2022 we have a pretty solid seat at a table. Do you think that we are in a place where we wanted to be 15 years ago Is there still something missing Where do you see us as a community and just as an industry I guess in terms of the state of UX today

Marko So I think the theres a couple of things right in there. Its an interesting and also complex topic. So I think we do have a seat at a table however the horizon is now different. Because as you travel you just discover other things are behind the horizon. And so once you climb that first peak then you reveal more peaks to climb. So I think this is where we are right now.

Marko And a huge thing that nobody really talks about is that even IT or digital as a whole has had that problem in the past of the seat at the table. And so we just now joined the crowd of people who might have better access to decision-making but its still not at the level where we can really immediately influence any decision especially in big companies and enterprises.

Marko Obviously this is where I work at. Startups and younger companies are slightly different there. But enterprises or anything massive like big insurance companies or big telecoms or financial institutions or the government 90 of my clients are now the government these organizations have been around for years and hundreds of years even.

Marko So old ways and things that led to the success that they have right now are not necessarily something that you have to change but very often you can also change them by applying correct organizational change management principles. So I would say the challenge that we have nowadays is just general organizational change management. Thats a hot topic.

Marko And again its not just the UX people. I think its the technologies in general or anyone who just have this new way of managing things. I would say digital marketers as well. So all of us we have to sit at the table but theres just this huge job of driving and steering the organization into whatever is next whatever is the future.

Vitaly Right. Thats interesting. Maybe we should dive into this a little bit more in a little bit more detail. Just because of course we read and see and hear a lot of articles around UX and many of them are very much focused on traditional I would say good all startups digital products and so on and so forth.

Vitaly But at the same time I find it quite difficult to even find case studies about enterprise UX. So maybe you could actually share those insights about if you do have this situation where you might have a seat at the table but you actually need to change the organization. And organizations of that size are usually very reluctant to those changes and people dont like to change their habits quickly.

Vitaly So what would be then your process to make it all a reality to establish a user-centric approach in a relatively tight and conservative and maybe even quite dated lets say environment

Marko Well yeah sure. I wouldnt say necessarily that the organization is resistant to change or that people are not willing to change. Just I would say the volume or the size of the organization is really your biggest enemy because you can influence only so many people in your immediate circle in the organization. And then some organizations are lucky enough to have a big enough UX team or more broadly digital team that would also have a bunch of developers solution architects business analysts and any type of role that you can think of in IT.

Marko So its just a matter of how many people you can touch within the organization with the new principles how many people are actually in a UX type of project user-centered service something like that. So the change doesnt happen in the way of infecting people. You cannot just spread the UX type of virus to people and theyll all get it. It requires a lot of effort. It requires a custom-tailored approach to communication.

Marko Someone who has a desk job and is in departments that are understaffed for that matter they dont necessarily have enough bandwidth or capacity. And it has nothing to do with the personal preference of the individual person but just the organizational structure is such that you dont have access maybe to everyone that you would like to. And of course it would require a lot of a lot of time out of the regular day-to-day desk job for people to even get educated.

Marko So I think the biggest enemy is the size of the organization. So you have to strategically pick and choose your champions within the organization. People who whoever shows up on your open office or office hours whatever you call it meeting thats a good champion. Even if they have low maturity in UX these are people who have the intent to change something. And so strategically picking and choosing people and then helping them become almost like a mentor within the organization to the people around them. And maybe youll have that department embracing more of an interactive approach to understanding end customers.

Marko I think this is the way to go. But again I dont think people should be discouraged with that because even 1 improvement in the business process or in conversions or in optimization is Vitaly you and I work with web performance and conversions and E-commerce and all the stuff and 1 can be a huge improvement.

Vitaly Of course. Im wondering though just what your way of dealing with a situation is when you have people in front of you maybe higher up the ladder in senior management who just have a very different view on things. Who very strongly look of course at their data and their KPIs at their business metrics and try to move them.

Vitaly And how would you then in a case where you again have to work with a company that might not have a user-centric approach at all and maybe dont think about the customer experience as much as they think about the financial benefit by the end of the year How would you then argue in those kinds of environments about the role of UX or the importance of UX or the importance of customer experience

Marko Well I think the best way to sell something is to show them with a live example with a practical example. And you also know that whenever we would come to an organization and say Hey lets see whats the problem there. And you and I worked with a major German retailer couple of years back and they were saying Hey mobile is not performing really well. Desktop is much better. And then we realized that the average visit to a mobile E-commerce solution that they had was about 50 years or something like that.

Marko And so once you start showing off these numbers and say This website is now faster or This software will shorten the time from idea to conversion just I think performance is such an easy-to-use tool to convince people to invest into it that its just unbelievable Because you can measure the before and offer and this is something that my team at SymSoft always does. We always do the baseline measurement whether thats the conversion rates satisfaction whatever you name it seconds to load.

Marko And then we test and retest and retest and retest and then you have hard facts that you can actually tie back to dollar value. And this is how you convince people that this is a good investment. And again just starting small almost like when you work with a new chemical thats dangerous on your car or whatever they say Hey try somewhere where it wont mess anything up like in a corner that nobody sees. And so we can also pick a pilot project a really small case study prove that it works and then scale it up to something larger.

Vitaly Would you say that its important to have a buy-in at this point Or would you say Just go ahead experiment. Build a little prototype maybe even a little bit in your spare time just to convince that this is working Or do you think that commitment from management and green light and approval is critical here

Marko So I would say that and again this is my experience. I dont necessarily think this is something that happens in every organization But for me whatever worked whenever I was proactive and more on the side of Hey let me do something in my spare time or Let me finish the main task earlier so that I can actually work on the fun stuff.

Marko Also signaling to the management that you are proactive that you are self-driven that you are self-motivated that youre not waiting for someone to approve that youre not waiting to be served or approved or given the space. So I think management definitely likes people who are just thinking that way.

Marko And so you basically have two benefits. You dont have to ask anyone for permission you can figure out what is the scope and what is space available for you and just decide to do it. And then if it doesnt work you are not even embarrassed. Nobody needs to know. But if it works out if its a nice prototype if its a nice concept you can definitely present it to the upper management.

Marko And then again you get double credit. You create something fun but you also show that you care and that you are proactive and self-driven and all these qualities that everybody ever always writes on the job posts I guess.

Vitaly Right. Well you did mention scope and of course its a wonderful keyword for me because of course I can almost hear the voices in the back asking about how to deal with scope creep. I mean you are working with very different organizations and well of really big size. And eventually Im sure there will be situations where late changes come in poor specifications are in there communication issues delays and all of that.

Vitaly So what would be your way to prevent things like this from happening where youre missing deadlines because of the scope creep or poor estimates Whats your process in there to make sure that we dont get in trouble for delays and maybe underestimating the effort needed

Marko Thats really a great topic. I think there are two things in there. So definitely if we underestimate its completely on us and theres no Thats very clear. Its on us. We should have had our due diligence before the discovery stage of the project when we were estimating. But these things happen I guess in the beginning for everyone until you have enough experience to move from a one-page contract into a 50-page contract.

Marko And my friend Eva Lucas from NetGAN from Croatia he said once to me Hey we started with one page for a contract. Now we have 70 pages or something like that. So as you are more experienced you just put more things in the contract and you I guess put more things into researching and estimating and you probably track your hours and you know how much time for each feature is required. So as you grow more mature in the field theres less surprising when it comes to estimates.

Marko Now the second topic which is the scope creep usually in enterprise organizations they already have this type of they mitigate that with again other contractual clauses. Maybe something that you can communicate early on is the unanticipated effort budget. So that might be 10 or 20 of the budgets thats allocated to the project that we dont have to spend but this is our contingency plan.

Marko And then another thing thats very very useful and this is what my director of project management always enforces is regular meetings. Every week we have at least weekly meetings. If not daily stand-ups with the project management on the client side. And we have a really detailed status report that we carry over week after week after week. And we update it and share it with everyone.

Marko And we are not really afraid to raise any old risks. So whenever we see that theres a delay in reviewing and providing feedback we will put it out in the status report change the green light to yellow light and just say to everyone Hey we think that this is something that can get out of control.

Vitaly Yeah. So thats a very interesting point for me as well because I was working with a company where this turned out to be quite a helper. So really having a more clear overview I guess of what our expectations are what the process is going to be when we expect some feedback and what kind of feedback we expect as well. And one thing that was really critical and useful at this point was to actually explain to clients that late changes are expensive.

Vitaly Late changes are difficult to implement and they are expensive because if youre coming from a very different industry and youre expecting a product to be delivered you might not know just how expensive how difficult it is to actually make those changes later on because you dont have this technical knowledge necessary. So explaining this early on having this clear communication channel is indeed I think quite useful in many ways actually.

Vitaly From my end I think and one thing I actually definitely wanted to cover today is because this is something that comes up quite a bit and most recently is youve been again in this industry for quite some time and you had your own head where you had your own agency and now you are working for a company. What do you think especially for people who might have just a few years of experience in UX looking back what do you think would be the right way to just guarantee personal growth in the company Negotiate salary get more ownership all those things.

Vitaly How would you say what would you recommend maybe to people listening to this today if they want to maybe improve their salary maybe grow over time maybe take more leadership position What skills would be required and what would be the right strategy to get where you want to be

Marko Thats a great question. And so maybe from a manager position now I can talk about people that I had in my teams and what qualifies a successful UX designer or professional in general is its always I guess people who are able to manage-up are more successful. Managing-up meaning that understanding that your supervisor or whoever you report to also has their life and their problems and their different different tasks. And just understanding your overall environment its leading peer-to-peer.

Marko So the understanding is that if youre in UX theres another person at the same level in your organization in frontend or backend or marketing or project management. So just being aware of whos above below on the side from you and just understanding that these are also people. And then what can you do to really move everyone together forward And so this is I guess the attitude being proactive something that we talked about a few minutes ago.

Marko Just not asking for permission because its not true that you need weeks and weeks to create a concept. Maybe you can just catch something and say Hey You wake up one morning and you dont necessarily have to open up your company laptop or anything like that. But just put it on a Post-it and when its office time you just can say Hey I have this idea. Lets do this.

Marko And that really cost you nothing I mean you had that idea anyway. But youre building up your muscle of generating and communicating and suggesting. And of course it goes without saying if you hear crickets every time you have an idea in your company you should just change the company. But if you have a good environment and receipting environment where you can voice your ideas thats a great place to be.

Marko And so what happened is that once you build up your credit and you look like someone who cares not necessarily about the company and I dont want to fool myself thinking that people want to stay here forever but caring about the quality of work caring about your teammates caring about leaving some kind of impact after you leave. And theres another topic that we can also talk about. What do you do when you decide to leave the company So are you that type of person who thinks about these moments

Marko And so once you have that then salary negotiations are just straightforward because you opened up the communications channels and then you can just come and sit and say Hey what about the raise And then we can talk about that. But if your communication is completely blocked and youre just doing whatever youre told and youre checking out the tickets then that conversation about the salary is just difficult because you didnt really create an environment where you have this dialogue anyway in the first place.

Marko So I think practicing talking to your boss good times or bad times and just not necessarily sharing everything thats happening in your life but just having this more proactive I guess communication. When nothings really happening you can just drop by and say Hey this is what Im working on. Its nothing special but here it is. And then maybe having this regular cadence.

Marko And if you dont have one-on-ones and by the way which is something that you should have with your boss because that cadence in one-on-ones really allows you the space at some point to say Hey I would like to work on something else. Or I would like to have a better impact. Or I would like to have a better salary. Or Hey Im actually looking for a new job. Can you support me while Im looking for something else Just being fair I guess to the people that youre working with. So that would be my advice about negotiating salary and these types of things.

Vitaly Yeah. I think that many people are struggling with finding themselves in companies where there is just no culture for this kind of feedback. I mean in some good companies you will likely have maybe 360-degree feedback or 360-view feedback whatever it is called where you get feedback from everyone. And then you would have a dedicated time to bring up any issues with your manager once every three months four months two months six months I dont know

Vitaly But this is probably an important part to have or an important asset I guess to have at least. I think that many people just are afraid maybe a little bit to ask these questions to bring this up because I think that it might create a wrong attitude around them and that theyre there in the company for the money alone. But I mean looking at inflation rates happening right now around the world its probably important to have that conversation later or earlier. Right

Vitaly So maybe also building up on top of that therere quite a few conversations happening in Europe at least around salaries. And of course everybodys looking at salaries in San Francisco thinking about Wow Those salaries. This is incredible compared to the pay you get in Europe. Even if youre living in London or in Berlin its just much much much higher in San Francisco.

Vitaly You happen to be in Sacramento in California and you happen to have moved from Croatia to the US and shared the story about how you did that. So now being there can you tell us maybe a little bit more about how different everything is for you So do you feel like the culture the way companies are run the way people are working together that its influenced you in some way surprised you in some way disappointed you in some way What was your experience overall in these five years

Marko Thats a good question. I think looking back what really was new for me is how people over here are really focused. Organizations not necessarily individuals really focus on processes and repeatability of the process. So if you have certain steps we can talk about the process In design we have double-diamond or triple-I or 5-Ds or design sprint or design thinking.

Marko And the reason for all of that which is not very common in Europe In Europe we have a problem and solution. These are two steps that we have in Europe or have had in Europe. But here it has to be detailed a little more with applicable tools and a decision-making diagram. So this is different over here. When it comes to San Francisco or Sacramento I think in Sacramento what happens is that we have a government here so Im not in a position to compare our environment in the projects to maybe the Bay Area where theres a lot of just private companies and startups.

Marko And theres a start difference even here. A two-hour drive from San Francisco. So I would even think and this is completely my personal opinion that Sacramento is closer just to the rest of the US than to San Francisco compared to Europe. But another thing thats really different here is that the whole communication piece is just much more intentional because a lot of people are landing in California specifically from all over the world and then you have a mix of cultures. And this is something that I definitely didnt think about when I was working in Europe however internationally but still Europe which is super tiny by the way as a piece of land.

Marko And then we didnt have so many differences in the sense of just different cultural backgrounds different educational backgrounds how people have just different school systems in the first place. And so all of these people come over here theyre talented they have certain talents otherwise they couldnt make it here. But then you have these different communication styles and you have cultures that are just very generally speaking

Marko Far Eastern countries have high context conversations. And then you go more to the west you have low context which means that you have to always reiterate what the last conversation was. While in some cultures its implied. Everybody knows what we were talking about in the last meeting. So just these types of I guess communications skills that we develop now are really that was really eye-opening.

Marko I think especially Croatia for that matter compared to California is super monocultural. Its just unbelievable That contrast is just super visible for me now mowing from one to another.

Vitaly Right. So having moved to the US now do you feel like at any point you could consider moving back

Marko I think so yeah. Thats not off the table. I think what we like here my family and me and this was really a more collective move not just necessarily for projects or work is the access to nature here is just incredible. The way you can consume nature in California specifically is just unbelievable. Its just geared towards families. And over here everybodys outside all the time which is our family style anyway. So these are some of the fun things over here.

Marko The good thing about Europe is that everything is very close. The furthest away is I dont know Spain from Croatia which is a two to three-hour airplane flight. And of course I can fly to LA to visit Disney Land or something like that but its a drag to even think about the distances over here. So these are some of the differences that we notice. But again I wouldnt say its different or better its just I guess down to every persons personal preferences.

Vitaly Right. Okay. Well now if you actually could recommend something to yourself when you were breeding dogs back what 20 25-ish 22 years ago when you were just starting out with UX and all of that well frontend and all that what would you recommend to yourself

Marko I guess I would enjoy it more. I would joy the ride more. I was lucky enough to meet really really great people along the way. I mean such as yourself included.

Marko Yeah. But also coworkers and other speakers and just professionals. I think at certain points I could have enjoyed it more I guess. Just being more relaxed and having more faith in the future that things will work out the way they actually eventually did. So I guess just more patience.

Vitaly Okay. That sounds good. So weve been learning about UX in this episode of Smashing Podcast. So what have you been learning about lately Marko Any podcasts books TV shows anything that drew your attention

Marko Well yeah thats a good point. And you know me Im all over the place. Right So I think lately-

Marko lately Im really into mental health and just on all levels. So personal level family level organizational level. Just thinking about all the consequences of COVID and just remote versus in-person. This is something that Im really thinking about not necessarily as something that we have to deal with right now but what will be the outcomes in the years to come So just getting ready for that I guess.

Vitaly All right. Well Im very much excited to actually meet you in person after all these years. In four days were going to meet in San Francisco for SmashingConf San Francisco. This is going to be very exciting. Quality time family quality time isnt it

Vitaly Thats kind. If you dear listener would like to hear more from Marko you can find him on Twitter where hes Markodugonjic. And you can also check on Typetester which is still kicking and still around on typetester.org. Well thanks so much for joining us today Marko. Do you have any parting words of wisdom that will be staying with people listening to this I dont know decades from now

Marko No. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. And I think the best advice that I can have is to keep reading Smashing Magazine.