Jérôme Wallut: “UX Is the Mindset of Digital Transformation”

Digital transformation has spawned a whole vocabulary, and the expressions keep coming. People talk about disruption, collaboration, internal transformation and innovation. But let us not forget the two little letters that come at the end of the dictionary: UX. What if user experience were, in the end, the mindset of digital transformation? That is what Jérôme Wallut, author of Patron, n’ayez pas peur !, suggests. Here are the highlights of a fascinating conversation with the man who co-founded Connectworld in 1997, set up the opinion-monitoring agency Human to Human, led Havas’s Wcie agency for seven years, and then joined ICP Consulting to help companies reconnect with their customers’ new behaviours.

UX is best known as website design. But for you, it is more than that?

Jérôme Wallut: The user experience is what comes on top of use, it is the way use is lived. It is far broader than the experience of a website! What we see today is that audiences have taken power, first through their conversations, then through mobility and apps, in short through their usage.

The question is: why do some uses work and others not? Through the quality of the user experience, in other words that fluidity and comfort that make the experience pleasant, simple and intuitive. Nothing is more unbearable today than an app that does not work, or that is hard to understand. Innovation and creativity therefore lie more in the quality of the use than in the use itself. Take the example of Voyage SNCF. The strength of its platform is that it drew inspiration from usage by offering an interface modelled on Airbnb. The company did not invent a new behaviour, it invented a user experience for booking travel.

How does the experience of usage affect companies?

J.W.: It seems essential to me that companies understand that it is behaviours that drive business. It is no longer about finding customers for products you already know how to make, they already know how to do that. The challenge is to offer a truly magical usage experience.

Today, SNCF is no longer a station-to-station operator but a door-to-door one. The company positioned itself as an expert in hyper-mobility. It reacted to digital transformation and expanded its scope, recognising that its competencies go far beyond running trains on rails. In fact, UX is a mindset, the mindset of digital transformation. That is what enables a company to align with the needs, desires, and expectations of its audiences.

In practical terms, how do you bring UX into your business?

J.W.: It is a question of methodology. If there is one thing startups have understood, it is that you have to work differently. A company that transforms is one that re-synchronises all its business processes in line with its audiences’ behaviours. So, with UX, you frame, prototype, and test.

And above all, when user experience is at the heart of the company’s strategy, the bet is no longer on products but on experts, that is, on competencies. Job-description management is dead. The idea is to bring together, in agile mode, skills that will work on a user experience. In this context, new roles are emerging: UX manager, UX designer, Voice Member Coordinator, and Community Manager. These are people whose job is to understand, listen to, and facilitate a user experience.

Agility, design thinking, UX… is it not all much the same thing?

J.W.: What bothers me about “design thinking” is that it contains the word “design”, which means to make, to build. With UX, we go further than prototyping. At ICP Consulting, for example, most of our people are UX managers. They are the guarantors of the quality of the user experience. They are the ones who know the personas, the journeys, the pain points and the drop-off points that make a user leave the journey. We also have UX designers: their role is very precise, they are the ones who propose, in prototyping workshops, the solutions that resolve those pain points.

In a UX methodology, there is of course agility, but above all speed of execution. The principle is to prototype and test. Within days we can produce a prototype, see if it works or not, iterate, and move forward. We are in a logic of continuous improvement. Here, lean is the watchword. In fact, UX encompasses agility, lean, and design thinking. It is the great unifier.

What advice would you give to a company undergoing transformation?

J.W.: First of all, companies do not come to us because they want to transform. They come because they have a pain point. What I like to tell them is this: “you have to try, you have to get it wrong, you have to get it wrong fast, you have to get it wrong better and better.” You cannot carry on with the same way of working. You have to take up the subject and get support from people well versed in these UX methodologies. Because the difficult part in all this is that, while the work is going on, sales continue. So you have to transform while still doing the work you are used to doing and which, for the time being, is still working. For a long time companies saw digital as communications, as one more channel, a nice website and that was that. They did not immediately grasp the business stakes. That is why they are behind.

Are executives not afraid of the term UX?

J.W.: UX is a word that is not always well understood. People tend to confuse it with “customer-centric”, telling themselves that yes, the work is done, the marketers are doing their job. Well, yes and no. Because marketing aims to sell products you have created, whereas the point is not to sell products but to ask which experiences we are legitimate in offering. When Darty invented the Darty button, for instance, the brand was not selling a product, it was delighting a user experience, guaranteeing the quality of that experience. UX is therefore more than a methodology, it is the company’s centre of gravity.

When you talk about user experience, are you also talking about employee experience?

J.W.: Audiences are the four Cs: the citizen, the customer, the consumer, the colleague. The power of the digital revolution and of all its tools is that it has broken down the walls between these audiences. We no longer address a citizen on one side and an employee on the other. We speak to everyone at once, according to their interests. We need to accept that the four Cs have an incredible maturity when it comes to digital transformation. They have taken up the subject. They have discovered that they can do without advertising, that they hold the power of their usage, and that they can switch to something else if it does not work. Digital transformation is therefore also the company’s internal transformation and the usage experience it offers its employees.

Who is Jérôme Wallut?

After founding Connectworld and then the Human to Human agency, now part of Public System, and leading the Havas group’s Wcie agency, Jérôme Wallut joined ICP Consulting, a strategy consultancy working to reconcile established companies with the new behaviours of their audiences. He has just written Patron, n’ayez pas peur !, a book aimed at companies, urging them to tackle transformation head-on. He teaches these new languages at Sciences Po, within the school of management and innovation (formerly the “Ecole de la com”).