Changing the Role User Experience Plays in Your Business — DUX 2007

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Changing the Role User Experience Plays in Your

Business

DUX 2007Chicago5 November 2007

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Richard Anderson

User Experience Practice, Management,and Organizational Strategy Consultant

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Richard I Anderson is a UX practice, management, and organizational strategy consultant with more than 20 years of experience.

He started and directed the Experience Center at Viant, as well as the User Research & Experience Strategy discipline at Sapient and Studio Archetype. For those and many other companies, he has extended the reach and effectiveness of multidisciplinary, "user-centered" design practices. Recent(ish) work has included co-developing and co-teaching a Managing User Experience Groups UC Extension course, and managing user experience personnel and facilitating product development process improvement at Yahoo!

Richard is Incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, and at CHI 2007, Richard received SIGCHI's Lifetime Service Award for extensively facilitating and spreading the development of the field via his leadership contributions to BayCHI and to other chapters of SIGCHI around the world.

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“The focused weekly sessions helped me to bring a structured approach to elevating the effectiveness of UE in my organization. I feel well-equipped to lead a UE team after having taken this course."

"The class was one of the bright spots of my year, with thought-provoking sessions and great insights. Thank you for that. I've been recommending it all around."

"Thank you very much for putting this class and the overwhelming and useful resources together and sharing it with us. This immensely helps me lead the good fight."

"The most valuable part of this course was really getting to know what the current thinking is in this new field from instructors and classmates. Not offered anywhere else yet. Real Bay Area practitioners. Two instructors great for two viewpoints. I thought there would be more about practices, but what I got was much more useful as (for) practices there are books to go to, so we used class time to discuss what can't be found elsewhere."

"The most valuable parts of this course: the provided course materials & exercises/assignments, exchanges with other students, learning that most organizations have similar problems (its like group therapy!)."

"The most valuable part of this course were the reading materials, case studies, and the enormous knowledge and experience of the instructors."

"This (final) assignment has a really good one which made me think about every single aspect of how the team could be set up. This was a good practice for me to really come up with a model/plan for a UED in the future when I get an opportunity to build and run the whole team."

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User Experience Managers & Executives SpeakFebruary - April 2008

"Richard Anderson teaches a remarkable user-centered design course which alighted me on the path I am today." -- Peter Merholz, President Adaptive Path

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“I live for the day one of my ideas goes into a product.”

interactions, Sept+Oct 2007

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Plan

• examples of what can impact the role UX plays in a company

• exercise to identify what is holding UX back where you work

• exercise to identify what has helped propel UX forward thus far where you work

• examples of strategies for changing the role UX plays in a company

• exercise/discussion about elements of strategies that might propel things forward further

• exercise/discussion regarding roles UX is playing and could/should be playing where you work

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What can impact the role user experience plays in a company?

your and others’ understanding & expectations regarding UX work

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Business


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…user experience is specifically native to digital interactions. That is what defines it: having to do with the holistic quality of digital interactions. …what characterizes user experience, what sets its boundaries as just one component of human experiences, is the fact that it has developed from and is centrally a measure of the digital.

Knemeyer, D. The State of User Experience, April 21, 2005

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Don Norman: I believe that what's really important to the people who use our products is much more than whether I can use something, whether I can actually click on the right icon, whether I can call up the right command... What's important is the entire experience, from when I first hear about the product to purchasing it, to opening the box, to getting it running, to getting service, to maintaining it, to upgrading it. Everything matters: industrial design, graphics design, instructional design, all the usability, the behavioral design... so, I coined the term "user experience” some time ago to try to capture all these aspects.

Organizational Limits to HCI: A Conversation with Don Norman & Janice Rohn (interactions, May+June 2000)

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User experience should not be just about interactive systems -- it's a quality that reflects the sum total of a person's experiences with any product, service, organization. When I walk into a store, I'm having a "user experience." When I call an airline to make a reservation, I'm having a "user experience." And innumerable elements contribute to affect that quality of experience.

Merholz, P. User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline, April 20, 2005

…the user experience is more than just the product design. User experience includes, but is not limited to, branding, messaging, positioning, "store" experience, user experience, and post sales experience. All too often, teams focus on one or two aspects at the expense of the others. Its a symphony and all of the instruments have to be in tune.

Larry Marine, experiencedesign yahoogroup, December 20, 2006

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Adaptive Path Blog, September 12, 2006

“When asked if respondents used the term ‘user experience’ within their organization, about 89% said yes.”

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The philosophy behind user-centered design is simply this: users know best. The people who will be using a product or service know what their needs, goals, and preferences are, and it is up to the designer to find out those things and design for them. One shouldn’t design a service for selling coffee without first talking to coffee drinkers.

Saffer, D. Designing for Interaction, New Riders, 2007, p. 31.

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You are welcome to join us at the Society of Technical Communication’s upcoming event: User-centric Design PracticesSeptember 19, 2006 at 7:00 pmYWCA in Downtown Vancouver User-centric design is all about observation. It's not what you think customers need or what they say they need; it's about closely watching real human beings solve problems, and understanding what will help them.

Richard Blitz of Intuit Canada will discuss user-centric design tools such as site visits, concept analysis, needs-based design, prototyping, and usability testing, and will describe how Intuit uses them and where information designers fit into the process.

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Rotman Magazine, Winter 2005

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Business


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interactions, September+October 2006

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Teague, R. C. & Whitney, H. X. What’s love got to do with it? Why emotions and aspirations matter in person-centered design. User Experience, Winter 2002.

…begin to think of and talk about our customers and users as people who have needs for status, esteem, a sense of belonging, love and, of course, usability. Users need to complete tasks. People need to feel needed. Approach what you do from a person-centered perspective. Replace user with person in your research and design vocabulary and you’ll be amazed at the change in your and your team’s thinking. Yes, it is just a change of a word, but it can have an immediate impact on your team and the groups they influence.

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Other "users" are people with substance abuse problems.

anthrodesign posting of December 30, 2005

…only in drug trafficking are there also "users" …

Designing for Interaction, 2007

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the word “user,” which was helpful in early engineering environments, is problematic in today’s broader context. … Computer users do not consider themselves “users.” … The term “user” retains and reinforces an engineering perspective. (And) the term “user” suggests that there exists a typical user or range of users.

Grudin, J. in Communications of the ACM, April 1993.

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Let me first say that I really dislike the word “user” intently, but, for the sake of being understood, I use it now.

In conversation with Adam Greenfield, DUX 2007 website

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usability

user experience research

design research

market researchcustomer insights

consumer research ?

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Customer experience managers should manage an economy of insights: Customer experience managers should act as facilitators for cultural and process changes that make organizations yield positive customer experiences more often. To do so, they should measure their success not by the intrinsic value of the customer insights and experiences they generate, but by the value of the insights that get used, adopted or implemented across their organizations. They should be good facilitators and know that their power does not come from their tenure or expertise, but that it comes from harnessing and sharing the voice of the customer.

Watson, S., The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned from Secil Watson, interactions magazine, January+February 2008.

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Gabrielli, S. & Zoels, J-C. Creating imaginable futures: Using human-centered design strategies as a foresight tool. DUX 2003.

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Knowledge Navigator

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the personnel involved in the UX work & the support provided to them


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Usability

Accessibility

Informationarchitecture

Human factors

Visual design

Interaction design

Technicalcommunication

Industrialdesign

Contentmanagement

Brand / productmanagement

Marketing

Softwaredevelopment

Projectmanagement

Businessanalysis

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Example: Complete and successful UCD team!

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2

3

4InformationArchitecture

InteractionDesign

Visual Design

Project Management

User LabResearch

User FieldResearch

UI Tools & Frameworks

Task Domains(Apps, Tools &Admin UI)

Rosenberg, D. & Innes, J., 2006

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March+April 2008

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The elements of user experience. March 30, 2000

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Expanding the approaches to user experience design. March 10, 2003.

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“be opportunistic; make adjustments based on skills, background, interests, …”

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“hire for motivational and thinking skills, rather than for whether they have done the same thing before”

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“hire ‘commercial’ designers, not artists”

“a good ‘aesthetic’ is not enough; need to marry creative thinking with analytical thinking”

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“needed are collaborative people -- people who are participatory, flexible, facilitative, consultative (i.e., can ask the right questions, create a dialogue, reflect back, etc.)”

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“needed are collaborative people -- people who are participatory, flexible, facilitative, consultative (i.e., can ask the right questions, create a dialogue, reflect back, etc.)”

“consider where you want to take your group, and hire people who will be able to do what you want them to do at that later point”

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Brown, T. Strategy by design. June 2005.

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“…you don’t necessarily want a team of all T-shaped people. The reality of the world is that you have T- and I- and bar-shaped people, and I suspect that the strongest teams are comprised of all three that work in concert. Me, I’m a bar-shaped person. I’m all about the connections between disciplines, and being able to articulate the power of that integration. Obviously, T-shaped people are important, too, people who can bridge that synthesis and go deep. But perhaps most important is that we no longer marginalize I-shaped people. It’s easy to dismiss I-shaped folks, people who simply want to focus on, geek out to, their particular passion. But these people can be amazing on teams, because once you give them a bit of a direction, they can do amazing work.”

Merholz, P. Beyond the “T” - Coordinating realistic design teams. August 14, 2007.

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User Experience Managers & Executives SpeakFebruary - April 2008

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Because your boss said so

To make your mother proud

To buy that new Maserati GranSport

To have less work to do (it’s rarely true)

To make people suffer in living hell forever

Common Bad Reasons for Becoming a Manager

Berkun, S. Advice for new managers, part 1. January 26, 2006

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You’re ready for more responsibility

You are interested in leading and teaching others

You’ve excelled at a specific role and want to help others do the same

You like setting people up to succeed

Good Reasons for Becoming a Manager

Advice for new managers, part 1. January 26, 2006

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- one who enables the vision to come out of the good people that one hires

- one who understands why they are there

- a good listener

- able to read people

Justin Miller, eBay, 2006

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the personnel involved in the UX work & the support provided to them

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organizational relationships, positioning, & culture


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engineering

The engineering team thinks it already understands user experience. After all, their previous customers were happy. The engineers themselves have no trouble with the product. Who are these new customers who need so much hand-holding? What’s the matter with them, anyway.

Norman, D. Want Human-Centered Development? Reorganize the Company, 1998.

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November 2005

May 2007

June 2007

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The marketing group thinks it already understands user experience. After all, marketing is in close touch with the customer: it knows first-hand what they want. Do they want ease of use? Sure, add it to the list of features. Do they want an attractive product, sure, hire a graphics designer to make it look pretty. Each item gets added to the list of things to be accomplished, as if the total user experience were a feature like “more speed” or “more memory” that can be


marketing

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If the user experience group is in the development organization, there is a natural tendency to be put them at tail end of the process in the execution rather than at the front-end of the process in defining the strategy and direction.

Miller, J. from Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?, CHI 2007.

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A designer will often be most successful when engaged … close to the means of production (engineering). By co-locating with the development team, a designer is better able to understand the historical and current design challenges. Working close to engineering also helps to remove the old “nice design, but it cannot be implemented” excuse.

Kowalski, L. A “Survivor”-like Designer Reality Show? interactions magazine, November+December 2007.

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"There should be a natural tension between Customer Experience (pulling to pure experience, facilitating completion of tasks, etc.) and Marketing (which is about selling and profitability and driving traffic etc.). Since we are positioned in Marketing, we share Marketing's goals, which can be challenging, since Marketing might go for short term gain, which results in long term loss."

Mark McCormick, VP Customer Experience Research & Design, Wells Fargo, 2005

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Merholz, P. The frozen middle, August 17, 2006.

“The people we worked with were deep within ‘interactive marketing.’ Their lives were the website. They didn’t really know the people who worked on the monthly statements or at the call center. And even if they did,they didn’t have the time to collaborate with them -- they had too much on their plates already. …our contacts understood the need for addressing the customer’s experience across multiple channels and media. But they couldn’t move on it.”

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Korman, J. Where Do Product Managers Fit?, 2004.

Berkun, S. The Magical Interdisciplinary View, 2005.


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“… there are two kinds of people in organizations -- there are peers, and there are resources. Resources are like usability consultants -- we go out, and we hire them. We’ll hire a consultant, or we’ll have a little section that does usability and think of it as a service organization. We call upon them when we need them to do their thing, and then we go off and do the important stuff. That’s very different than peers, where a peer is somebody I talk to and discuss my problems with, and who helps to decide upon the course of action. As you get higher and higher in the organization, this becomes more of an issue. The executive staff talks to the executive staff, and they have beneath them all this organization, which are their resources that they deploy. But the big decisions are being made among peers. And it’s really important, to advance in the world, to be thought of as peers.”

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"...product management doesn't build or design products: their job is to own product vision and strategy (naturally with the other stakeholders' input). Engineers own code development and code quality, with a wide range of specialties (architecture, code design, QA, and release management, to name a few). Product marketers take clear ownership of marketing communications and product campaigns, keeping the pulse of the marketplace, and trying to detect what it will buy. Therefore, it's only logical that human-computer interaction professionals take ownership of the user experience. We are, after all, user experience experts, despite the fact that we depend on other development participants to meet user and business needs."

Arnowitz, J. & Dykstra-Erickson, E., It’s mine…, May+June 2005

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Is design leadership an executive level position? Do you have a Chief Design Officer reporting to the president? My view is that if you do not, you are not serious about design or innovation. Furthermore, you are telegraphing this fact to all of your employees, along with a clear message that they need not be either. As a result, you might as well fire all of your creative people, since you are setting them up to fail anyhow.

Buxton, W. Innovation vs. invention, Fall 2005.

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interactions, July-August 2007

"Tuesday's offerings (of CHI 2007) included a panel organized by Richard Anderson titled, ’Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?’ Much to our surprise, the panelists all seemed to scoff at the idea Richard posed: the need for a chief design officer or chief user experience officer or an alternate C-level design presence. One commentator said, 'The last thing you want is the board dictating the colors or fonts or other designs.

The panelists here were completely off base. The chief design officer (CDO) concept is meant to avoid this very thing. A CDO should set the design strategy for the company and make sure it stays on course. Being a C-level officer, the CDO has enough clout to keep boardroom design from taking place."

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I mentioned earlier that I don't think having a Chief Experience Officer is the right direction, because you don't want to have all of your other organizations not focused on it. But where I think we generally get stuck -- and maybe this is true industry-wide -- but certainly at eBay, is that we think of the user experience of the site, or the user experience of whatever product. I think that is a very narrow view.

What we have got to be thinking about is the complete user experience, the holistic user experience, which includes the word of mouth they hear, the marketing they see, the experience they have on the site, the experience our customers have when they talk to customer support, ... All of that is part of the user experience, and I haven't seen very many companies tackle that issue. That is a place for a C-level user experience person -- someone who can be looking across the organizations, someone who is not directly responsible for the user experience on the site, but helping customer support, marketing, the product or website, etc. work together to create a holistic, collective, positive user experience that reflects the brand promise.


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Unfortunately, it's not as simple as hiring a chief design officer and declaring design as your top corporate priority. To generate meaningful benefits from design, corporations will have to change in fundamental ways... To get the benefit of design, companies have to embed design into -- not append it onto -- their business.

Martin, R. L., Creativity that goes deep, BusinessWeek, August 3, 2005.

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Companies place a high priority on improving customer experience -- and they cite a lack of organizational alignment as their top obstacle to making improvements. But our interviews with experts show that there is no single organizational structure that paves the way for delivering better customer experiences.

Cultural factors and internal processes matter far more than organization.

Forrester Research, Culture and Process Drive Better Customer Experiences, March 31, 2006.

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Martin, R. L., Design Thinking: The Next Competitive Advantage, CONNECTING ‘07, October 20, 2007.

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Why should any particular organization own it? The company should own it. ... I think a successful company is one where everybody owns the same mission. Out of necessity, we divide ourselves up into discipline groups. But the goal when you are actually doing the work is to somehow forget what discipline group you are in and come together. So in that sense, nobody should own user experience; everybody should own it.

October 2004

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Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function. Delivering great customer experiences isn’t something that a small group of people can do on their own -- everyone in the company needs to be fully engaged in the effort.

Forrester Research, Experience-Based Differentiation, January 2, 2007.

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In our Internet channel strategy team, ... we have different disciplines represented: UI design, IA, content strategy, UI development, customer communications, servicing experience, product management, strategic planning, market research, user research, syndicated research, metrics analysis, statistical modeling, process consulting and business and technical architecture.

Their collective goal is to create positive customer experiences, which we believe lead to long term customer value. We think that we can only arrive at positive customer experiences if we collaborate. None of the disciplines can arrive at the right solution in their silos, since they each have a limited vantage point.

Watson, S., Sr. VP Internet Channel Strategy, 2007, quoted in my Breaking Silos blog entry.

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Who owns user experience (UX)? This is the wrong question to ask. We don't believe any single group can own UX. What's the alternative?

In our view, a useful focus is collaboration, not ownership. The best successes come from collaboration. Whatever type of product, service, or document you are creating, whether it's a Web site, an application program, an MP3 player, or a financial form, user experience encompasses so many diverse aspects of your product that 'ownership' just isn't a useful perspective. UX is about providing value to your customer and the business serving that customer. The best user experience is the product of many different disciplines working together.

UXnet Board of Directors, May+June 2005 special issue of interactions entitled, "Whose profession is it anyway?")

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collaboration

White, N. Surfing the second wave of online collaboration, 2006.

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Anderson, R. et al. Improving the design of business and interactive system concepts…, June 2002.

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obstacles to collaboration• ego• not knowing that others are doing the same or related work elsewhere in the company• different interpretations of the same terms• language & time zone differences• hidden agendas• divergent interests (i.e., little interest in collaborating)• differing priorities• unclear work process• lack of time• "the more people involved, the less efficient..."• tendencies for people to engage in the same discussions over and over• inability to assess level of participants' understanding of UCD• discrimination (of many types)• lack of respect (sometimes justified)• conflicts of interest• territoriality• some feel threatened by UCD• environments in which collaboration is considered to be optional• prior negative experience with UX personnel

from “Managing User Experience Groups” students, 2/15/2006

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obstacles to collaboration - geography; time zones - unfamiliar or misunderstood terminology/vernacular - different world views / domains - different work processes - power relationships - individuals' defensiveness & desire for job security - poorly focused facilitation - excessive workloads - team spirit ups and downs - tyranny of the urgent vs. exploration and reflection - deadlines - unclear decision criteria - hidden agendas / politics - past poor experiences with attempts at collaborating - people not getting along with each other - distrust / disrespect - incentive systems promote individual contributions rather than team contributions - organizational silos - nature of the physical work environment - unclear goals - unclear roles and responsibilities - bad management/leadership - the cost (e.g., in time) of building new relationships is high - difficulties determining who to involve - difficulties converging on a solution when there are lots of ideas - "Microsoft did it that way, so we should as well"

from “Managing User Experience Groups” students, 11/1/2006

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“the big challenge is to work across disciplines fluently"

Moggridge, B. December 2006

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“the hard problems are social and political”

BayCHI, February 1993CHI 99, May 1999BayCHI/BayDUX, October 2004

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• Stage 1: A company can remain hostile toward usability for decades. Only when a design disaster hits will it be motivated to move ahead.• Stages 2-4: Companies often spend two to three years in each of these stages. Once it enters stage 2 (usability recognized, but derived from the design team's own opinions), a company typically takes about seven years to reach stage 5 (forming a usability group with a usability manager).• Stages 5-7: Progress in maturity is considerably slower at the higher levels. A company will often spend six to seven years each in stages 5 and 6, thus requiring about thirteen years to move from stage 5 to stage 7 (integrated user- centered design).• Stage 8: Few companies have reached this highest level of usability maturity, so it's premature to estimate how long it takes to move from stage 7 to stage 8 (user-driven corporation). In most cases, it's probably twenty years.

Nielsen, J. Corporate usability maturity: Stages 4-8. May 1, 2006.

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organizational relationships, positioning, & culture

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Business

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Role(s) UX Now PlayingWhere You Work

Role(s) UX Could/Should BePlaying Where You Work

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What is Holding User Experience Back Where You Work?

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strategies attempted for changing the role


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“usability” vs. “user experience research”

“web experience” “user experience”

“web experience” “customer experience”

“interaction designer” “experience designer”

“user experience research” “design research”

“design research” “customer insights”

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“the process needed to be shown and explained, to demonstrate that it has rigor akin to the rigor that business strategists’ work has”

Secil Watson, SVP Internet Channel StrategyWells Fargo

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For Blue Shield in particular, it was incredibly important to establish a visual (process) model, working with multiple teams, multiple disciplines, multiple business units, that they can refer to when they were struggling with or trying to understand when to engage the user experience team. ...

Shauna Sampson Eves, Director of User Experience, Blue Shield of California

I think that user experience teams spend a lot of time trying to justify themselves, and I wish they would spend the time and energy that they spend justifying themselves actually doing design work...

Jeremy Ashley, Vice President of Applications User Experience, Oracle

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Teams need to avoid the role of evangelist for user-centered design.

Bloomer, S. & Wolfe, S., in Building and managing a successful user experience team, July 2006.

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Do NOT evangelize.Tobias Herrmann & Manfred Tscheligi, MobileHCI’06, September 2006.

In particular in the beginning, it is very important to do some very fast, very efficient pilot projects so that people can see the effects and can see the return on quality, the return on process improvement, or whatever… At the beginning, the small steps are better than talking about the big steps. Manfred Tscheligi from Moving UX into a

Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?, CHI 2007.

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What did it take to impact change?

Our first initiative was a success: The first project that utilized our user centered design methodology, which was not formalized at the time, was the homepage redesign project. It was groundbreaking at the time, and very successful. I could explain to executives how listening to customers and analyzing their tasks had actually paid off. Presenting tangible results before presenting a new way of doing things was critical.


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changing labels, developing process descriptions, evangelizing

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making sure first project is a success, such as via small first steps

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a tailored ROI model was the key to successTobias Herrmann, Corporate UX -- Bringing value to the mobile industry, July+August 2006.

The UXD group seeks projects on which they anticipate a minimum revenue increase of $25 million in the first year.

Jim Nieters et al., The internal consultancy model for strategic UXD relevance, CHI 2007

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Our ROI model contained, among other things, the monitoring of user experience-specific key performance indicators (KPI), internal performance measurements, standardized product evaluations from a customer’s perspective, and, of course, exemplary case studies with high customer and revenue impacts.

Tobias Herrmann, Corporate UX -- Bringing value to the mobile industry, July+August 2006.

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Financial Impact Score

Demand Index

Prioritization scorecard – a simple system that takes frequency and importance of customer activities from the

task model and adds to each activity a financial impact score

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Recently, however, we looked at those calculations -- we looked at what everyone had been presenting over the past years. After someone would present their ROI estimates, they would come back a year later and say "here is how we did." We looked at the results and found that at least 90% of us came back and said, "we did great." But if we looked at the actual return that we should have got if every one of those projects actually delivered what they said they would, we would be 10 times the revenue of what we are today. We realized that looking at ROI on a project by project basis was not the right approach, whether it was the user experience or otherwise. We needed to be looking at the user experience and other things at a higher level.


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So, now we are focused on the initiatives. We are not focused on the individual projects. What are we trying to go after? We are, for example, trying to increase conversion rate, so when a buyer looks at a listing when they come to a site, what percentage actually bid on an item? That is the kind of thing we are looking at -- at whether we able to move those metrics, not at whether a particular project moved the needle by some percentage. And that has had a huge impact and changed the morale of employees, focusing less on the details and the tactics, and focusing more on the big picture, because you can really understand that if you can generate a change at the high level, that has a big impact.


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Our field has been overly preoccupied with ROI as the basis for making the business case for user centered design (UCD). However, experience has shown that the most brilliant ROI analysis may often not win the day in the real world of business. Cost justification and ROI is often not persuasive, especially when we are talking to strategic level decision makers. At a certain point in the evolution of UCD, ROI arguments may have helped us gain credibility and get “a foot in the door.” However, excessive dependence on ROI arguments can have some destructive effects. ... It can work against our field’s efforts to get involved earlier in the product planning process where we can have a more decisive impact and potentially contribute to strategic risk reduction.

Siegel, D. Making the business case for user-centered design strategically, CHIFOO, February 7, 2007

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Our field has been overly preoccupied with ROI as the basis for making the business case for user centered design (UCD). However, experience has shown that the most brilliant ROI analysis may often not win the day in the real world of business. Cost justification and ROI is often not persuasive, especially when we are talking to strategic level decision makers. At a certain point in the evolution of UCD, ROI arguments may have helped us gain credibility and get “a foot in the door.” However, excessive dependence on ROI arguments can have some destructive effects. ... It can work against our field’s efforts to get involved earlier in the product planning process where we can have a more decisive impact and potentially contribute to strategic risk reduction.

Siegel, D. Making the business case for user-centered design strategically, CHIFOO, February 7, 2007

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If your company is still in the position of asking for ROI, or if you feel you need to do it, your company just doesn't get it. If they don't get the value of design, I'd move to another company.

Jeremy Ashley, Vice President of Applications User Experience, Oracle

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estimating ROI

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…it’s essential for user experience groups to be able to say, “No.” If we want to be considered for a seat at the strategy and planning table, if we want to be taken seriously as instrumental contributors to the companies we work for, we need to make sure that we only work on that which satisfies a true strategic direction of our organization. If we’re willing to work on any old thing, then we’re also easy targets for “headcount reduction” when times get tough.

Merholz, P. Is your user experience team too big?, Adaptive Path blog, September 24, 2007

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About, With & For, 2005

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The RECoRD MethodRapid

Ethnographic

Collaborative

Research &

Design

… research applied to product strategy and design in RECoRD time

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When Microsoft hired me eight years ago as the first official anthropologist, they weren’t sure what to do with me, so they had me design my own job. I soon realised that Microsoft had until then the tendency to come up with feature and product designs within the confines of its own walls. … What went on in the minds of Microsoft’s brilliant software engineers and of people outside the walls of Microsoft, was not always very congruent. So I created the Real People Real Data (RPRD) programme...

My work on the RPRD programme was in fact the start of a revolution within Microsoft, and (is helping) the company change from techno-driven to people-driven design. Experientia interviews Anne Kirah,

October 2006

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...a transition from a product- to a more customer-centric culture. This shift was becoming crucial as disconnects in customer experience increasingly arose not within the boundaries of the product and service platforms but in the transition and integration points between different areas...

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“we created an online customer panel including more than 4,000 (non)customers that ‘revolutionized’ our everyday work”

Tobias Herrmann, Corporate UX -- Bringing value to the mobile industry, July+August 2006.

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working middle out

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prioritizing

perturbing the ecosystem

clever cross-disciplinary collaboration

ethnographic research

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Sato & Patton, DUX 2003

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• Formalize communications• Manage expectations• Facilitate• Respect cultural differences• Identify common goals

• Deliver quality• Be proactive• Be resilient

• etc. interactions, May+June 2005

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Chris Rodgers, Informal Coalitions: Mastering the Hidden Dynamics of Organizational Change, 2006.

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“You have to know how to influence your own organization, because that is what is going to make you successful. And that is going to be different from organization to organization, and within the same organization, it is going to vary over time. So, you've got to be plugged into how to change and influence things where you work, ... and you've got to be sure that you have the right capability (to do that)."

Justin Miller

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How to get upstream

“I'm a usability engineer - I run lab studies, heuristics, site visits, the whole 9 yards. Problem is 95% of the time I'm asked to do verification type things. I get downstream designs that are mostly baked and they want me to put the usability stamp of approval on it (or confirm that the stupid things in the design are as stupid as they thought). This was fun for awhile, but after a year I see how much value I can have if I were involved upstream: at the early prototyping, experimenting and exploring stages.

How do I get from here to there? What do I need to do to get people out of the ‘usability as a verification test’ mindset and into "usability as an exploration tool" one? And how do I do more lightweight studies without violating their view of me as a ‘scientist’ or ‘data queen’?”

Scott Berkun’s uxclinic, February 20, 2006

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How to get upstream

“When salmon try to go upstream, they don't worry much about method. They jump, strafe, slide, struggle and fight their way. To get upstream means adapting to the conditions of the stream - and you won't get far until you stop binding yourself to the classical bounds of "researcher" or data queen. I can't count the number of times I've see people stick to their researcher guns, talking about protocol, sample sizes, or confidence intervals, not realizing that everyone upstream is immune to those guns (and the people wielding them).”

Scott Berkun, uxclinic, March 1, 2006

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How to get upstream

“Upstream work is organic and chaotic - changes are frequent and sizable. If you want to work upstream you have to have the tools and attitude that fit - the tough love truth is that many usability engineers think they want to work upstream until they get a taste for what upstream is like: it's the opposite of what they were trained (as psych majors) to handle. It's all about speed and instinct, not about method and certainty.”

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How to get upstream

“Specific tactics: Who's influential upstream? What questions are they trying to answer (and when do they need answers)? What upstream assignments can you sign yourself up for? Ask yourself how your toolbox can be of use and sell those tools as answers to those questions, or as the means to achieve the desired ends. If your toolbox proves useless, find (make) new tools borrowing from whatever discipline or person you can find. Don't get hung up on protocol or precision: you're not writing papers or publishing research - instead your job, as is anyone working upstream, is to make good decisions happen. Not much else matters.”

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What has Propelled User Experience Forward Where You Work?

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part 1

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part 2

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part 3

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Components of StrategiesThat Might Propel Things

Forward FurtherRationale

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thank you

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Chris Rodgers, Informal Coalitions: Mastering the Hidden Dynamics of Organizational Change, 2006.