Riander Blog

Community manager -- hmm, that role sounds kinda familiar...

2012-01-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

Having seen more and more references to a role called "community manager" in recent months, I decided to find out what people in that role do. In doing so, I found out that I had been a community manager -- a very good community manager -- in different contexts for years.

Wikipedia refers to this role as the "online community manager," and the role is sometimes confused with that of the social media manager. Some have tried to clarify how these two roles are distinct, but UserVoice's Evan Hamilton is one of probably many community managers who find themselves performing the social media manager role in addition to others.

Indeed, community managers often play a wide variety of roles, as revealed at a recent community manager breakfast hosted by Evan. Roles played by one or more of the community managers in attendance include:

helping customers (i.e., the community members) have a great experience;
trying to get customers to stay customers;
finding product bugs;
giving feedback to product managers;
being a gatekeeper for all customer communications;
figuring out the right kind of metrics to use to measure their own effectiveness;
managing social media activity;
driving the brand voice;
advocating for users;
organizing events/contests/...

Attendees reported that they work in businesses of a wide variety of sizes and find themselves positioned organizationally in a wide variety of departments, including marketing, engineering, product, customer service, and sales support. Views varied as to which department community managers should report to, but all thought it best that the role evolve to be a "horizontal, strategic role" touching all parts of the company and that it should eventually include a C-level role known, perhaps, as the Chief Happiness Officer.

All these topics and many more were discussed by ~200 community managers nearly a week ago at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) West 2012 held at eBay Town Hall in San Jose, CA. CLS West was an unconference with a packed agenda of 40 different sessions, and all attendees were enthusiastic participants.

Why so much attention to the role of community manager? A John Hagel and John Seely Brown blog posting from earlier this week provides one answer:

Building an effective virtual community is no simple task. Most importantly, it requires a deep understanding of the unmet needs of potential community members rather than simply approaching it as a marketing opportunity for the company. It is no wonder that so many have tried to create these communities and yet so few have succeeded.

However, what is most interesting to me about all this is the similarity of some of the community manager roles and challenges and aspirations to some of the roles and challenges and aspirations of user/customer experience personnel: advocating for users; understanding their unmet needs; helping customers have a great experience; providing input to product managers; figuring out the best location in the organizational structure; evolving into strategic roles; the Chief Experience or Customer Officer; ...

Also of interest to me is how many of these roles and challenges and aspirations are among those which I dealt with in my past roles as a community manager (though I never had that specific title). Having had extensive experience with the world's first online community -- PLATO -- while in graduate school, I developed and oversaw the use of social media tools modeled on PLATO's tools to employees working at Pacific Bell, then became much more of a community manager during the founding and early years of BayCHI. After years of serving the BayCHI community, I became a manager of an international community of community managers in the role of SIGCHI's Local Chapters Chair. In this role, I provided support to (potential) local community leaders in multiple forms, including workshops and articles, some of which remain of relevance to community managers of today. Two examples:

The Social Design of a Local SIG: this discussion of the key elements of the design of cutting-edge virtual communities is as fitting today as it was in 1997;
Challenges Facing CHI Local SIGs: (potential) community managers of today can benefit from being aware of these lists of challenges identified by a large international group of CHI local chapter leaders in 1998.

As suggested earlier, user/customer experience personnel also have (had) experiences that should be of interest to community managers. I'd like to someday see a large-scale meeting (of the minds) of UX/CX personnel and community managers to the probable benefit of both communities.

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Note that I've played the role of community manager in another context as well (Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine), and it is possible that I will be playing the role again in yet another context in the future. Will the label of "community manager" finally be appropriate for me then? We shall see.

Out with the Old, In with the New: A Conversation with Don Norman & Jon Kolko

2011-11-14T05:27:00.000-08:00

I've interviewed many people -- individuals and pairs -- on stage, including Doug Engelbart (with Tim Lenoir), Alan Kay, Bill Buxton (once with Cliff Nass, once with Mitch Kapor), Sara Little Turnbull (three times, once with Stephanie Yost Cameron), Clement Mok & Jakob Nielsen, Joy Mountford, Paul Saffo & Jaron Lanier, Alan Cooper, Don Norman (four times, once with Janice Rohn), Bill Gaver & Wayne Gray, and Bill Moggridge. (Transcripts of the only three interviews that were recorded have been published in interactions magazine.) I've also moderated several panels of three or more people.

However, the best of these, for multiple reasons (some very personal), might have been the most recent: a "conversation" with Don Norman and Jon Kolko, which took place at the Academy of Art University (AAU) in San Francisco the evening of September 30, 2011. The ~2-hour exchange with and between Don and Jon and the audience (comprised mostly of AAU students) was particularly engaging, thoughtful, rich, and delightful.

The title I gave to the event was, "Out with the Old, In with the New: A Conversation with Don Norman and Jon Kolko on Trends in the Overlap between Art, Business, and Design."

Topics addressed included the nature of and the difference between art and design, whether design should be taught in art schools (such as AAU), Abraham Maslow, usability, what design (or all) education should be like, the problem with "design thinking" courses, the destiny of printed magazines and printed books, aging and ageism, the relationship between HCI and interaction design, Arduino, simplicity, social media, Google, privacy, design research, the context in which design occurs, the Austin Center for Design, solving wicked problems, whether designers make good entreprenuers, politics, Herb Simon & cybernetics, the strengths & weaknesses of interconnected systems, and how designers should position themselves.

The video of this event appears at bottom of this posting. I encourage you grab a cup of coffee (or a beer), start the video, sit back, and enjoy. For those interested in reading some of what Don and Jon said, here are just a few of the highlights (not necessarily in the sequence in which they occurred during the session):

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Regarding the user experience:

Jon:

"Most people attach the experience in which they have received a thing to the thing, which makes it much more important."

"...enjoyable and pleasurable ... and magical and sexual and sensual and poetic -- these are the words I use; ... if you can encourage the more ethereal and fleeting qualities, the rest comes with it."

"Design that is discursive and has a personality -- that is intended to evoke reflection of an end user -- that is the stuff that is succeeding in the market right now, and it doesn't even have to be well-done. That is what consumers are responding to."

Don:

"Usability is important, but it is not the most important thing. There are lots of parts of (the iPhone) that are completely unusable, and you know what? It doesn't matter."

"You can have negative components, and you can have things that are difficult or aren't yet well-finished or well-developed. As long as the total experience is wonderful and your memory is wonderful -- that is what matters."

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Regarding the "design thinking unicorn" (as Jon called it):

Don:

"Engineers and MBAs are fantastic at solving problems, but they aren't any good at making sure it is the right problem... The difference between that and designers:" (designers explore and learn and watch people and try things, Don said, via a detailed example regarding the task of designing an automobile)

Jon:

"Now, if you get an MBA, you might take a class called "design thinking," where you will learn a bunch of design methods. You'll learn a method called, "empathy." For 4 days, you learn about empathy, and then you are now certified to be empathetic. Clearly, it can't be that reductive. The problem is not that it is being taught that way; the problem is that the MBA comes out armed with this knowledge and is managing YOU, and making more money than YOU, is YOUR boss, and is telling YOU how to do your job when they don't know how to do it themselves. I've seen that happen a lot."

Don:

"If you really want to be in control of your own destiny, go get an MBA in addition to your design (degree)."

Jon:

"Something that might make more sense is getting a public policy degree, particularly if you want to cash in on whatever this design thinking thing is and applying it in a way that is really impactful."

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On Google:

Don:

"Google doesn't understand people -- doesn't understand consumer products; they're all about technologies... They believe in algorithms. They don't care about people. Larry and Serge are brilliant technologists, and they believe they can solve everything with an algorithm... They don't believe in designers -- they believe in testing: we'll see what people like best. What that does is give you design by committee. What is Google's product? The product is not search; the product is not advertising. The product is you. ... They are selling you to their advertisers. Their customers are the advertisers, and their product is you. So they don't care if their products work very well."

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On design research, the context in which design operates, and solving wicked problems:

Don:

"You have to figure out what it is that people need, how people function, how do I put this technology so that it effortlessly fits their needs and functions well, and ideally is also really pleasurable and enjoyable."

"The problem I've discovered -- even though it makes great logical sense: how can you build something unless you really understand the population you are building it for and what people are doing and their needs? -- is there is never time. ...in thinking about that, I decided it was a bad idea to teach people to do design research first, because in reality, you never were allowed to do it."

Jon:

"A couple of things have changed or represent an alternative point of view. I worked at frog for about 4 1/2 years, and when I started, we had a design research practice that was small. When I left, companies were hiring us to do design research engagements -- 4 or 5 hundred thousand dollar engagements -- where all we did was do design research. ...what changed was the relationship between empathizing with end users and building something which resonates on the market, which is different than understanding the problem you are trying to solve. I think there is a subtlety there of 'I conduct design research to understand how a coffee maker works' versus 'I conduct design research to understand what it means for this person to brew coffee,' one of which is more touchy-feely, fuzzy, subjective, and interpretive. ...all of the concerns shared by Don are true, and the anecdote of the product manager saying, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, next time you can do your great process; this time... you know what to build, just go build it' embraces the corporate structure of quarterly profits, time to market, the artificial race to get product out, build it and iterate on it, fail fast and fail frequently, ... Increasingly, I think those are all wrong, and I think they are really wrong and harmful as well, because you can take design out of the context of business and stick it in other contexts ...such as public policy and social problems... You can stick it in a lot of contexts, because it is a discipline. It is artificially embedded in the context of business, and when it is, you have to embrace the rules of business... You don't have to buy into that, though. And what I've seen is that most of the students that I run into ... don't want anything to do with that, but they don't know any other route. They are told to go corporate or go consultancy, (as if) there is no other choice. But there are a lot of other choices. All those things (Don said) are true, and that is usually the reason the right process is cut. But you don't have to buy that."

"Not all problems are equally worth solving. It seems like we've taken it for granted that every activity within the context of design is worth doing, whether it is a drinking bottle or a microphone or a website for your band. I don't know if that is true, and I'd like to challenge it and would like more people to challenge it more regularly. That is the focus of the Austin Center for Design: problems that are socially worth doing, and broadly speaking, that means dealing with issues of poverty, nuitrition, access to clean drinking water, the quality of education, ... These are big, gnarly problems, sometimes called 'wicked' problems, and it seems incredibly idealistic to think that designers can solve them -- I agree, I don't think designers can solve them. In fact, I'm not sure anyone can solve them, but I think designers can play a role in mitigating them -- a really important role because of all of the design thinking stuff that we've already talked about: the power of that can drive innovations that are making millions of dollars for companies; it seems that that same power can be directed in other ways."

Don:

"I've seen too many designers who think they know the answers to the problems of education or the problems of health or poverty or drinking water in Africa -- it is amazing how many times design students in America are solving the problems of Africa or southern Asia as opposed to the real problems we have in the United States. If you a trying to solve problems in far-away places, you are fooling yourselves if you think you understand the problems."

Jon:

"That is the easy part. The hard part is that you are exporting your value structure, and people don't want it or understand it. We talk about empathy and how it can't be taught in 40 minutes -- empathy is a long-term thing... Right now, I'm on a tear against project-based learning, because every time you have a project, the project ends, and then you go to the next one. That is true in a consultancy, too. But that can't be true if you are talking about affecting the homeless population in San Francisco, because once you form a repoire with someone, if the project ends, you still have that repoire with someone, because they are a real person."

Don:

"My favorite quote is from (H. L.) Mencken, a journalist from the 1930s: 'Every complex problem has a simple answer, and it is wrong.'"

And related:

Jon:

"The research that is done in the (HCI) academic world is focused on appropriating technology in new ways, in clever ways, in new wild and fancy ways... There's a lot of masturbation, for lack of a better word -- gratuitous use of technology just for technology's sake. If you could reign in that intellectual powerhouse, it could actually solve some problems that are worth solving -- it would be pretty incredible."

-------

More advice for designers and design students:

Don:

"You have to be true to yourself. Whether you are working as a lone designer designing chairs, or whether you're working as one of several hundred people on a team trying to (solve) some complex sustainability problem..., you have to be true to yourself. Even if you're one voice of many. If everyone had this view, your one voice gets amplified."

Jon:

"It is the best time in history to be a (good) designer, by any metric..."

Don:

"It is a great time to be a designer, because the technology world is changing rapidly in exciting ways which gives all sorts of wonderful potential. ...it is quite often that when there are economic difficulties, the exciting ideas get started."

"Don't try to be the great name designer. The total number of great name designers will always be just a handful. We need a great many designers; we don't need star designers. A star designer is a nuisance rather than a virtue."

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The full ~2-hour video:

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Thanks much to Kathleen Watson, Associate Online Director of AAU's School of Web Design & New Media, who asked me to put together a session of this nature for AAU, and to Lourdes Livingston, Graduate Director of the same school. Thanks also to Susan Wolfe for the first photo appearing in this blog entry; all other still images were taken from the video.

We are planning to do more sessions of this nature at AAU during 2012. To learn of these sessions, follow me on Twitter.

Impact of the role of the Chief Customer Officer

2011-03-10T05:52:00.000-08:00

Back in May of 2005, I wrote about the role of the Chief Experience Officer, beginning with Challis Hodge's 2001 description of the role (as first held by Marc Rettig) and culminating in Jeffrey Rapport's 2005 advocation of the creation of the role in modern companies. In mid-2007, I updated the story, describing additional advocations of the creation of the role, a conference panel discussion I led of the pros and cons of the role, and the 2007 highly-publicized hiring of a Chief Experience Officer by Cleveland Clinic.

Forrester Research's initial advocation of the creation of the role in 2006 referred to it as a CC/EO -- a Chief Customer/Experience Officer. Subsequently, the word "Experience" in the title lost favor, and creation of the role of the Chief Customer Officer has taken off. There is even a (somewhat dated) book available about the role and a member-led advisory network of CCO peers.

Who is filling these roles? According to Forrester's Paul Hagan:

"The majority are internal hires who have a significant history at their companies: median time at their firms among those we studied is nearly eight years. A third of the CCOs previously held division president or general manager roles, and almost as many worked in a marketing and/or sales position. On the flip side, about one-fourth of these CCOs formerly held operations positions."

As noted by Samantha Starmer in UX Magazine, UX people are not the ones getting these newly created C-level positions. Plus, all sorts of departments are expected to be scrambling to play a major role in customer experience (CX) moving forward. This has prompted Samantha to warn:

"Given the current power of CX at the C-level, UX practitioners must step up our game, otherwise we will lose progress we have made to be more deeply involved in strategy beyond just performing usability services. We need to act now to be part of the broader CX solution. If we don't proactively collaborate across divisions and organizational structures, we will be stuck playing in the corner by ourselves. If we don't figure out how to manage partnerships with other departments in a collaborative, creative, customer focused way, the discipline of UX as we know it is at risk. CX management will take over."

In her article, Samantha emphasizes the need for UX to partner with marketing, an entity with which UX has had a strained history. Such partnerships have the potential to work wonderfully well, as suggested by the successful merger of user experience research and market research to form a Customer Insights organization a few years ago at Yahoo! (see "User (experience) research, design research, usability research, market research, ..." and "Why Designers Sometimes Make Me Cringe").

Partnership with organizations other than marketing is also important. Successful examples, led by UX, include those described by Secil Watson in "The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned at Wells Fargo" and me (and others) in "Improving the Design of Business and Interactive System Concepts in a Digital Business Consultancy" and "Perturbing the ecosystem via intensive, rapid, cross-disciplinary collaboration."

How do you partner successfully? Genuine collaboration is a key, and the keys to collaboration are many, as I've addressed in past blog entries. See, for example:

"'Check your disciplines at the door' when beneficial" (also in UX Magazine);
"Soft skills" & "The need for good facilitation";
"Breaking silos" & "What to do about those organizational obstacles";
"Work space" & "Walls";
"'The three-legged stool of collaboration'";
"Effective collaboration and fun";
& "Collaboration sessions."

Learning about other organizations' needs, goals, ways of working, etc. is also key. Take a look at what Misha Vaughn did to enable UX to impact and be appreciated by Oracle's sales force.

All of this and more -- e.g., getting UX moved from a cost center to an investment center (Brandon Schauer, MX 2011) -- may be essential to ensuring UX plays a vital role in the ballooning world of CX and CX management and to getting UX management personnel recognized as among the stronger candidates to fill the CCO role.

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For more, see "Audio and slides for 'Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?'", "Ownership of the user-customer experience," and "Where should 'User Experience' be positioned in your company?".

Interactions and relationships

2009-10-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

For the Mx (Managing Experience) 2008 conference, I was asked to do a session that addressed the everyday reality that managers of user experience live in, to reflect on that reality, and to share some approaches and ideas for that reality. I decided to focus largely on some of the interactions and relationships that comprise that everyday reality, but particularly those by managers intent on enabling experience research and design to play a strategic role in their companies. I entitled, the presentation, "Interactions and Relationships."

A description of this presentation can be found in my April 2008 posting entitled, "Realities, dilemmas, framings, ..." Here I provide the slides I used, which are rich with provocative insights. Since I've been asked for these slides a lot...

View more presentations from Richard Anderson.

The first 9 slides accompanied introductory remarks that set the context for the presentation. A particularly important slide includes a collage of photos of the managers and executives who made guest appearances at a multi-week course I taught just prior to Mx '08 entitled, "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak." The course was wonderful, as reflected in the glowing course evaluations, and I decided to provide some of my guest speakers with a bigger stage via my Mx '08 presentation.

Slides 10 through 32 were borrowed from my presentation at a little conference in Rome called, "HCI Educators 2008." These slides address challenges experienced by management and non-management experience design practitioners, and you'll find several slides present words of relevance to these challenges from the guest speakers of my course.

The final 33 slides present even more words from the guest speakers -- words of relevance to examples of the ways these managers and executives have framed such challenges in order to address them. Attendees were asked to consider whether such framings would be beneficial in the companies for which they worked.

Enjoy the slides. And my hearty thanks to the managers/executives who "joined me on stage" both during Mx 08 and my course: Jeremy Ashley, Lisa Anderson, Klaus Kaasgaard, Jim Nieters, John Armitage, Christi Zuber, and Jeff Herman.

P.S. The slides AND AUDIO are once again accessible for a related conference session: "Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?"

Organizational and market maturity

2009-10-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Jon Kolko and I have been discussing whether the pace of corporate adoption and acceptance of comprehensive and strategic designer participation in business has been increasing. Look for a portion of that discussion in a piece we'll be calling something like "On designers as catalytic agents..." to appear in interactions cafe, our conclusion to the January+February 2010 issue of interactions magazine.

While we were having that discussion, Charles Kreitzberg kicked off a short discussion in IxDA's discussion list on what you need to say to a CEO to convince him or her of the need for "user experience design" in a company. As if all it takes is the right collection of words...

A response to Charles suggested that the maturity of the market the company is in is likely to impact the effectiveness of such a collection of words. And though Jon and I were talking about designer participation in a broader sense -- i.e., beyond user experience design, we discussed the concept of market maturity as well as corporate maturity, both of which have been addressed in numerous discussions over the years and for which numerous scales have been delineated. Since many may not be familiar with those scales, I thought I'd point to a few here.

Actually, I've pointed to a couple already in this blog. In "Developing user-centered tools for strategic business planning," I pointed to Jess McMullin's 2005 "design maturity continuum." Jess updated it a tad in December of 2008 and published the image of this version that appears nearby (click to enlarge). In his December 2008 post, Jess points out that his design maturity continuum is actually additive -- each higher level represents the addition of greater responsibility and scope for design.

Most other corporate scales I've seen are not additive but instead describe different stages organizations (or parts thereof) pass through. The first scales of this nature that I ever saw came from IBM Consulting in the early- to mid-90s and were used to rate the "usability management maturity" of their clients. Two of IBM's several scales, which appeared in little blue books they'd give to their clients, appear below:

HCI Resources

Little or no investment in qualified people, prototype/simulation tools, equipment, and/or usability evaluation facilities.
Some qualified people are available. There is limited availability of tools and equipment. A usability evaluation facility is available.
Sufficient investment made in qualified people/tools. Budget for user involvement exists.
Resources are applied effectively at proper stages and levels of the development process.
HCI resources are fundamental to the development process and considered essential in planning product costs.

Integrated Design

Various aspects of the design (panels, helps, pubs, installation, etc.) are designed separately or added late in the cycle.
The need for interdisciplinary design teams is recognized, but efforts are uncoordinated.
Plans for integrated design exist and are executed on a selective basis.
Integrated design teams are normally established. Teams are effective in improving overall usability.
All aspects of design evolve equally and in parallel. Designs provide users with solutions to needs.

In a 1994 book chapter, Kate Ehrlich and Janice Rohn delineated four stages of organizational acceptance of user-centered design. They are described in the table below (click to enlarge) which I took from Timo Jokela's 2001 dissertation.

Variations and extensions of this have appeared in a couple of international "standards," including the 1998 "ISO/DIS 13407 Human Centred Design for Interactive Systems":

0. Need unrecognized
1. Need recognized
2. Considered & encouraged
3. Implemented
4. Integrated
5. Institutionalized

Jakob Nielsen's 2006 version of such a scale -- which I've discussed in two earlier blog entries, including "Changing the pace or course of a large ship" -- combines elements found in all the above scales:

Stage 1: Hostility toward usability
Stage 2: Developer-centered usability
Stage 3: Skunkworks usability
Stage 4: Dedicated usability budget
Stage 5: Managed usability
Stage 6: Systematic usability process
Stage 7: Integrated user-centered design
Stage 8: User-driven corporation

(See "Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4 and Stages 5-8.")

Other such scales -- older and newer -- exist, but they look a lot alike though they tend to not be accompanied by references to any of the others. One of the more recent examples of these is Forrester's five levels of customer experience maturity, shown nearby via an image from a Bruce Temkin July 2009 blog posting.

Have you found any of these types of scales to be of help to you in places at which you have worked? Have you observed any corporate progressions not addressed in the scales described here that you think should be captured in a scale? (I can think of a couple.)

As for market maturity, the example referenced in the IxDA list discussion should suffice -- the four stages delineated by Jared Spool earlier this year (see "Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity: Part 1 and Part 2"):

The Technology is Worth the Pain (such as "when a new product category emerges," there are "no competitors or the users have no choice")
Building Out the Features (which usually happens "once a competitor joins you in a category" in order to catch up)
Focus on the Experience (when "customers stop focusing on new features and start asking for simplicity")
Supporting a Commodity (when "the things we're designing are embedded into bigger experiences")

Do such stages of market maturity trump the delineated stages of organizational maturity? Not at all, but they intersect. Consider both when trying to figure out what needs to be done for designers to be more effective and/or to expand their role in a company.

Want to increase the strategic relevance of User Experience within your company?

2009-02-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

Would you like guidance from a panel of industry experts on how to increase the strategic relevance of User Experience within your company?

Please tell us about the situation where you work and how we can help via responding to a short questionnaire.

With your permission, we might discuss it during our panel session at CHI 2009 in Boston (see "Figuring out the 'one thing' that will move UX into a position of strategic relevance" for more info).

User (experience) research, design research, usability research, market research, ...

2009-02-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

I rather miss heading up a user research practice and managing and supporting user research personnel. Recently, I nearly accepted a position heading up a highly-respected user research consultancy looking to take things to the next level.

But should such a practice or offering be referred to as "user research" these days. The term is still in use (though the word "experience" often lies in the middle), but the word "user" can imply a much narrower conception of the practice than often intended. As I described in a much earlier blog entry, that was true when I was Director of User Research at Studio Archetype and Sapient; there, the label did not always communicate that we did more than only research of "users" and "use." And a recent conversation I had with an ethnographer who wanted to better understand "user research," something she said she did not do, revealed such preconceptions still exist even within the applied research community. (Use of ethnographic research methods was a big part of the "user research" we did at Studio Archetype and Sapient.)

In short, it is not always clear what label is best to apply to such a practice or consultancy. It is also not always clear what its ideal scope or focus should be or should become.

Lots of people conduct "usability research" these days, but the methods and approaches often used have lagged behind major changes that have occurred in the world of computing. In "Is usability obsolete?" -- an article we will be publishing in the May+June 2009 issue of interactions magazine, Katie Minardo Scott argues:

"Current usability work is a relic of the 1990’s: an artifact of an earlier computer ecosystem, out of step with contemporary computing realities. Usability can no longer keep up with computing: the products are too complex, too pervasive, and too easy to build. And in our absence, users and engineers are beginning to take over the design process. These trends demonstrate the growing gap between usability theory and commercial practice – the “new realities” of computing haven’t been truly embraced by the usability community. The trends are, at a minimum, making traditional usability more difficult, if not irrelevant in the new paradigm."

The label "design research" is used more and more these days. But when Yahoo! abandoned the label "user experience research" for "design research" two or three years ago, previous efforts -- some of which had been mine when I was in a management role at Yahoo! -- to involve user experience research in the early stages of product and service ideation and conception were undercut. As described by Yahoo!'s Klaus Kaasgaard, guest speaker during a user experience management course I taught last spring, the new label made people think that the research was only relevant to the later "design" phase of the product development process.

The narrow interpretations of the label "user research" at Studio Archetype and Sapient prompted us to extend the label to "user research and experience strategy." The narrow interpretations of the label "design research" at Yahoo! led Klaus to change the label back to "user experience research." But a much more significant change was made at Yahoo! more recently: a merger of the user experience research group and the market research group, yielding an organization named, "Customer Insights."

When I was in a management role at Yahoo!, we discovered that market researchers were encountering some of the same obstacles as our user experience researchers -- obstacles to being appropriately involved upstream in the process so to have a more beneficial impact on the company. So, we began to partner with market research in an effort to attain that involvement. During his guest appearance at my "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" course, Klaus, now VP of Customer Insights at Yahoo!, spoke at length about the similarities and differences among goals and challenges faced by market researchers and user experience researchers, and about how important the merger has been to achieving such a strategic role. In an excellent article in UX magazine (Volume 7, Issue 2, 2008), Robin Beers paints a similar portrait regarding bringing together the market research and user research teams under the umbrella of Customer Experience Research & Design at Wells Fargo.

Is such a "coming together" of these two disciplines appropriate for every company? No, as implied by eBay's decision to split them up after they attempted to bring them together. There are multiple factors to consider when determining what is best for a particular company. But it is important to understand that great benefit can be achieved when the two work together.

In an October 2008 contribution to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, Christian Rohrer provides a mapping of a wide range of research methods, some typically thought of as "market research" methods, that can help you to better understand their similarities and differences.

In the November+December 2008 issue of interactions magazine, Liz Sanders provides different insight via her map of "design research" (see the map below right), which you can click to enlarge). Here is how Liz describes the map's organization:

The design research map is defined and described by two intersecting dimensions. One is defined by approach and the other is defined by mind-set. Approaches to design research have come from a research-led perspective (shown at the bottom of the map) and from a design-led perspective (shown at the top of the map). The research-led perspective has the longest history and has been driven by applied psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and engineers. The design-led perspective, on the other hand, has come into view more recently.

There are two opposing mindsets evident in the practice of design research today. The left side of the map describes a culture characterized by an expert mind-set. Design researchers here are involved with designing FOR people. These design researchers consider themselves to be the experts and they see and refer to people as “subjects”, users”, “consumers”, etc. The right side of the map describes a culture characterized by a participatory mind-set. Design researchers on this side design WITH people. They see the people as the true experts in domains of experience such as living, learning, working, etc. Design researchers who have a participatory mind-set value people as co-creators in the design process. It is difficult for many people to move from the left to the right side of the map (or vice versa) as this shift entails a significant cultural change."

Yet another map of methods was developed during the Netherlands Design Institute's Presence project during the late '90s. The image to the left (click to enlarge) shows the map, which requires a legend in order to identify which method lies where. In this image, the location of "rapid ethnography" is revealed, along with helpful information about the method regarding required expertise, time, staffing, and cost. (This "methods lab" used to be online, but I am now able to find it only in the 1999 book, "PRESENCE: New Media for Older People.")

The ratings in the above image remind me of ratings developed by Luke Hohmann for individual "innovation games" -- a variety of research methods employing collaborative play. (See image at right for his ratings for a game called Speed Boat, and see "What is holding User Experience back or propelling User Experience forward where you work?" for a sense of what that game is about.)

Figuring out the “one thing” that will move UX into a position of strategic relevance

2009-01-06T01:33:00.000-08:00

A common question asked of successful User eXperience (UX) leaders is what “one thing” they needed to do in order to move their organizations into a position of strategic relevance. However, the answers often vary (if they believe they've achieved such relevance), posing a challenge to those struggling to figure out how to achieve the same goal where they work.

For CHI 2007, I put together a session entitled, "Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?" during which six panelists -- all senior management folks from six very different companies -- argued in support of or against different combinations of five pieces of advice, each of which has been claimed by various people to have been the "one thing" most important to achieving strategic influence. Might one of those "one things" be the "one thing" you should attend to where you work? Might something else be that "one thing"? What is key to figuring that out?

At CHI 2009 in Boston, several panelists will each describe the "one thing" that they think can make all the difference. They will then analyze a variety of scenarios from a variety of companies one by one to attempt to predict the "one thing" needed in each case. And all participants will attempt to elucidate key aspects of the scenarios and the process of analysis to help audience members figure out how to figure out what "one thing" is likely to work in their own situations.

Are you trying to figure out what one thing you need to attend to in order for UX to gain a seat at the strategy table with business and engineering? If so, let us know -- tell us about your work situation, and we'll look into including it among the scenarios to be analyzed by the panelists.

___
Note that we'll also be addressing a mix of related questions such as what makes a good "one thing," can there really be only "one thing," and just how adequate analyses akin to those to be attempted during the session can be. It promises to be an interesting session.

Beneficial, ubiquitous interactivity

2008-12-21T18:10:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, I dropped by an exhibition of masters student projects from the "Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces" course at UC Berkeley. While waiting for the exhibition to open, Liz Goodman, teaching assistant for the course (that is her to the right side of instructor Kimiko Ryokai in a photo from the San Franciso Chronicle) told me about students' desire in this kind of course to take on projects of great importance, though such projects are often very difficult to figure out. Liz's words reminded me of some of Jon Kolko's words from our September+October 2008 edition of interactions cafe (in interactions magazine) entitled, "On Addressing Wicked Problems...":

"When I used to teach, my students would become enamored with the possibilities of design, and would make grandiose, and unintentionally trivializing statements like 'World hunger? It's just a design problem; we could solve it, if only we had the right model...'"

According to Liz, the challenging project of greatest popularity this year involved monitoring home energy use. However, only one group of students stuck with such a project, creating a demo of an energy monitoring system interface via which residents of an apartment building could see how much energy is being used in different apartments. The visual display showing energy use by apartment -- to be placed in a common space of an apartment building -- did not reveal the identity of any apartment unless an apartment resident approached with a device which enabled the display to identify only his or her own apartment. The student designers wondered whether multiple residents would take the opportunity to approach the interface simultaneously to discuss their relative energy use and what might be done to lower it and that of others.

(Two energy monitors for use inside a home were among products already on the market reviewed by James Pierce and David Roedl in "Changing Energy Use Through Design," the cover story of our July+August 2008 issue of interactions magazine. One of them is the Wattson home energy monitor pictured at left, which, among other things, enables people to be peripherally aware of their energy usage via the color and pulse of its mood light. "The novelty of this ambient energy awareness may stimulate reflection, behavioral change, and conversation.")

The foci of the other UC Berkeley student projects were very different, ranging from digital shadows of personal information that follow people around to cafe table surfaces that remember and remind you of how you make use of them. A mockup of a system via which students can unobtrusively communicate their views of the appropriateness of the pace of a class to its instructor reminded me of a system developed by Eric Paulos via which conference attendees can use their cell phones to communicate their presence or absence in the conference hall, how they are feeling, or their vote on an issue raised by a speaker; for both systems, the individual communications impact a display visible to all attendees, such as the display of attendees pictured at the right.

Eric's system was used during the Interactive City Summit held in San Francisco during 2006, an event that critically examined the rhetoric comprising "a future vision filled with beautiful, delicious urban technologies that will sooth the souls of our communities, generate playful neo-geo-landscapes, and celebrate our omni-connected harmony." The summit immediately preceded "a global festival of art on the edge" a few miles south of San Francisco in San Jose, where just a week and a half ago was unveiled a large piece of art consisting of thousands of LED lights that change color and pulse and pattern in response to codes communicated via the phone of anyone who chooses to call. The artwork, called "Show your Stripes," occupies the surface of the outside of a high-rise building.

Will "Show your Stripes" sooth the souls of the San Jose community?

An interactive light installation in the U.K. perhaps achieved this type of goal and other important goals much more. From "Dancing in the Streets" (interactions, May+June 2008):

"How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public's fears over safety and security at night?

This challenge was set by York City Council’s ‘Renaissance Project: Illuminating York’, and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestirans to engage with our interactive light installation, and to get them dancing without even realizing it.

People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly-colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a ‘cat’s cradle’ of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the streets!"

A video of this dancing is available on the interactions website. And you can read more and watch a video about some of the UC Berkeley student projects in an online San Francisco Chronicle story entitled, "Tangible fun at UC Berkeley's virtual projects."

(Note that according to Liz, one of guest speakers during the UC Berkeley course was her husband, Mike Kuniavsky, whose presentation in class was based on an article of his entitled, "User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing" from the November+December 2008 issue of -- you guessed it -- interactions magazine.)

Applying "design thinking" to, um, design

2008-12-11T13:24:00.000-08:00

"The Omnibox is really great; thanks for coming up with that" said my friend Pam from Tuesday evening's BayCHI audience. "But what's up with the tabs? I've watched numerous people be confused by and just ignore them. Do people really use them?"

Pam, unknowingly sitting immediately behind the Firefox design team (Firefox also uses the tabs metaphor), was asking this of Google's Glen Murphy, who had just described the process of designing Google Chrome -- Google's new browser -- to a near capacity audience at PARC. Much of his description had been focused on the meticulous process of designing Chrome's tabs. But why tabs? Glen had said that the team had settled on use of the tab metaphor very quickly, emphasizing that it just seemed right to everybody. What other options were explored and considered?

Glen had repeatedly stressed the value of user research during the design process, saying that he couldn't overstate the importance of the many "cognitive walkthroughs, lab usability tests, and longitudinal studies" that were conducted. But did the team generate and seriously explore and test many concepts other than tabs?

Doing so is often an important part of a good design process, certainly one of relevance to the design of Google Chrome. Indeed, it reflects an application of "design thinking," something I've written about in previous posts (e.g., "Crummy innovation") and in interactions magazine (e.g., "On Addressing Wicked Problems..."). Business professionals are hearing lots these days about the importance of applying design thinking to business decision making -- a process typically dominated by analytical thinking.

But another good time to apply design thinking is, um, during product design.

Note that I'm certainly NOT claiming that it wasn't applied during the design of Google Chrome. For all I know, lots of concepts other than tabs were generated and explored. I should have asked. But I do know that the generation and exploration of multiple design concepts happens much too little in many engineering-centric companies.

I did ask a question of Glen. However, my question focused on the role product management played during this project. Glen had stated that the Chrome team was comprised of people from engineering, user experience, and product management (though he was not permitted to reveal how many from each). Glen had also stressed the importance of the close relationship that was maintained among engineers, designers, and users throughout the project (see his slide to the right); for example, the engineers observed every user study conducted by user research personnel -- something which is, indeed, probably still far from the norm. I wanted to know what product management was doing during the project, since it didn't appear to be represented in that important slide (though I would tend to want to see it there).

Glen had also emphasized the importance of the interchangeability of roles at Google, saying this was his first project in the role of designer at Google, having been in the role of engineer on previous projects. According to Glen, this interchangeability facilitated the important closeness of the relationship between designers and engineers.

But one can be in the role of designer without extensively applying "design thinking," which, again, I say WITHOUT implying that was true in this case. But when it is true or is likely to be true, there are things that can be done to increase its application.

At the recent CanUX workshop (which I didn't attend), Jerome Ryckborst presented an approach he developed for use in the company at which he works. Here is what Jerome said about this on the Vancouver User Experience discussion list in September:

"Over a year ago, our CTO decided we would not hire a designer to support our 100 software developers, and declared that the UI was ultimately the responsibility of developers. The problem I saw with this: developers untrained in design believe they're designing their software, but they actually aren't doing things that designers would recognise as design activities. I took this as a challenge because I didn't want Usability to be the mop-and-bucket brigade at the end of the development process. I set out to improve the outcomes of our developers' design efforts. ... With the help of my colleagues and the ideas of various experts, we assembled, tested, and refined an ideation-design process specifically for software developers.

You, too, can learn and use this process."

Jerome's CanUX 2008 slides, which describe his process quite nicely, are presently accessible on the CanUX 2008 homepage. Labeled "Five-Sketches-or-Else," the process consists of a series of activities (some of which are iterated) which facilitate the generation and exploration of design concepts, preventing settling on a single concept much too quickly.

Also at CanUX 2008, Brandon Shauer talked about the sketchboarding technique I referenced recently in "Prototyping for tiny fingers." It, too, facilitates the generation and exploration of design concepts.

And there are other approaches that can be taken, some of which I've described in previous blog entries and where the best choice of an approach can depend on a variety of factors. But common to these approaches is facilitation of the approaches by "UX" personnel. As I've argued often (see, for example, "Soft skills"), UX personnel need to be able to play the role of facilitator of a good research and design process involving non-UX personnel as much as if not more so than doing the research and/or design themselves.

Is "design thinking" being applied during the product (or service) design process where you work? If you need some help with this, give me a holler.

Prototyping for tiny fingers

2008-11-19T21:28:00.000-08:00

Knowing I will never again use any of the papers, books, magazines, etc. that sit in several boxes I have stored in the basement, I decided that the time had come to get rid of them all.

However, I made the mistake of looking inside the boxes.

Ah, a couple dozen unused Group Embedded Figures Tests. Ooh -- those are cool. Hmm... you never know when I'll need to find out the relative field dependence-independence of a group of guests. It might provide critical guidance regarding how to set the dinner table and seat people around it.

Just before dinner, those guests -- or just the field dependent among them -- might want to leaf through the dozens of old Gourmet magazines I have, if I were to dust them all off a bit. The field independent guests might prefer that Theory of Matrices textbook from my undergraduate days, or perhaps Introduction to Computer Organization and Data Structures: PDP-11 Edition.

During dinner, I might want to do a reading from the article I co-authored that appeared in Journal of Educational Measurement many years ago. All those reprints in the basement, which I'd be happy to sign, could make unforgettable thank-you gifts.

That proposal for additional design and evaluation work for LAWS (a Legal Agreement Writing System) that I worked on for Pacific Bell during the 80s might be just what I need to take a look at again someday. And the code for that PLATO-based "confidence testing" system that I redesigned even earlier during my career... -- well, I'm sure I would think of a good use for that right after I discarded it.

But what is this? Ugh -- a box of old issues of Communications of the ACM. Finally something I should be able to discard; nothing could be in them that I'd ever be interested in reading again (or, more likely, for the first time). But wait -- post-its protrude from the top of a few of them. Might there actually be something of remaining value in some of them, such as in this issue dated April 1994? Sure enough, the answer: "yes" (though a far more genuine "yes" than applicable to any of the items mentioned above).

The marked article: "Prototyping for Tiny Fingers," an article about the value of low-fidelity (paper) prototypes, and how to build and test them. Though published in 1994, this is still an excellent article, and is among the articles on paper prototyping that I provided to user experience personnel who worked for me at Yahoo! as recently as 4 years ago. They adopted and adapted the approach to great benefit, generating good, new designs much more quickly (though much more intensely) and resolving old design problems that had long haunted them.

The article was written by my friend Marc Rettig, who was perhaps the first Chief Experience Officer in the world (though years after he wrote this article). Yesterday, I decided to check in with Marc about the article. Here is what he had to say:

"It has been really surprising to see how long that piece has remained useful to people. I've often thought of it as a sort of indicator of just how much people want short, clear, egoless descriptions of ways of working that have power to make things better.

What would I change about it today? Hmmm.... Remember that it was written before the web. About '93 or so, I think. At the time, the new news in that column wasn't just using paper to make prototypes, it was the idea of prototyping at all. Of course people had been making prototypes since forever, but in the software world, it wasn't *really* happening very often. When it did, the prototype itself was usually an expensive piece of code.

So the industry was having a conversation about a shift from waterfall processes, from 'first specify, then build,' to a recognition that iteration is *necessary* for discovering the specifications. That you can NOT write complete specs without using attempts-to-build as a way to better understand both the problem and the solution, and the faster you do this the better. Damn cheeky claims back then.

I don't think that conversation is over, by the way. I think design and construction are still typically too separated. And our tools make it difficult to continue design into the construction effort. Once you see and experience the software or product, once you see it in use, you can usually see how to improve it. People are slapping themselves on the forehead in usability observation rooms around the world. 'Why didn't we see that before?!'

When you make paper prototypes, design and construction are mingled in a lovely useful way. And it's an activity that easily affords collaboration. Still the two strong points in its favor, IMHO."

I never understood Marc's title for this article, so I asked him to explain it:

"Why 'tiny fingers?' You know, I thought a lot more people would understand that reference. Maybe it says something about my childhood. To me, 'tiny fingers' is a cultural reference to books about "adult" topics made accessible for children. And if "tiny fingers" is in the title, chances are you're going to be doing some kind of activity. You're going to get out the scissors and paste. I thought I was writing a title that packaged two things that usually don't go together: a 'serious' topic like prototyping, and an invitation to playful craft as a way of working. Plus I can't bring myself to make titles (or even articles) that take themselves too seriously. There's way too much over-inflation in our literature, and remember this was CACM. I wish I could have called it, 'None of us really know what we are doing.'

I asked amazon and google about this, and see it's still happening a little:
Easy puzzles for tiny fingers
Kitten on the keys: Descriptive solo for tiny fingers (!)
Dude, you have tiny fingers
Okay, I made up that last one."

But, surely no one is doing much paper prototyping any longer, right? Not according to Nathan Moody and Darren David of Stimulant who design cutting edge, multi-touch natural user interfaces. At their IxDA-SF presentation last month ("Multi-Everything: Multi-touch and the NUI Paradigm"), both claimed they paper prototype extensively and have never found anyone who can iterate faster digitally.

Marc "tipped his hat" to Bill Buxton, who wrote the fabulous and recently-published book, "Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design." However, Bill distinguishes between sketches and prototypes, arguing that they serve different purposes and are used most at different stages of the design process -- the former for ideation, the latter for increasing usability. Regardless, paper is among the tools he advocates for both.

I encourage you to also take a look at Mark Baskinger's excellent cover story in the March+April 2008 issue of interactions magazine. The title: "Pencils Before Pixels: A Primer in Hand-Generated Sketching." You can download Mark's worksheets from the interactions magazine website.

And other lo-fi techniques have received recent attention, including Brandon Shauer's sketchboards for exploring and evaluating interaction concepts quickly.

Over the years, lo-fi prototyping has had more than its share of detractors. But, clearly, it lives on -- as it should.

However, it looks like it is going to be very hard to get rid of any of those boxes in my basement.

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Years ago, Marc Rettig served as Features Editor for interactions magazine, though he tells me the opportunity he was given to play that role was less than minimal. Jon Kolko and I are giving him another opportunity, as we have recently added Marc and others to our team of contributing editors. More info on those additions and other changes will appear in interactions magazine and on the interactions website.

Crummy innovation

2008-11-04T12:18:00.000-08:00

What is innovation that doesn't happen? "Crummy innovation," according to Roger Martin (at right in the photo), Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Roger said this last evening during an on-stage conversation with Cheskin's Darrel Rhea (at left in the photo, sitting to Roger's right) hosted by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Darrel had just said that the greatest innovations he had worked on during his career were never implemented, because the organizations that needed to implement them were too resistant to change. However, according to Roger, great innovations happen, because if they don't, you will never know whether they would have been great. "No new idea can be proven in advance," argued Roger. "Only the passage of time will prove whether an idea -- an innovation -- is great."

Hence, Roger argues that companies need to ban the use of two words when it comes to innovation: "prove it." If you can prove something in advance, it is not an innovation.

Additionally, Roger argues that a critical part of the innovation process that is often overlooked is the decision making process that determines whether an innovation will be implemented. It, too, must be designed.

Both pose great challenges.

In our most recent issue -- the November+December 2008 issue -- of interactions magazine, Nathan Shedroff (one of Darrel's co-authors of the book, Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences) describes several reasons why most organizations cannot innovate effectively (see "Design: A Better Path to Innovation"). Roger Martin has addressed this, also. For example, in my blog entry, "Preconceived notions," I wrote about Roger's presentation at the CONNECTING 07 World Design Congress:

"Roger Martin, whom I referenced extensively in 'Designing in hostile territory,' explained how the common notion that risk needs to be minimized for a business to be successful is a hindrance to innovation and development of competitive advantage."

Last evening, Roger touched on the importance of applying "design thinking" -- involving the use of abductive logic -- to the business decision making process, which is typically analytical involving the application of only deductive and inductive logic. And according to Roger, helping designers and MBAs understand the differences in the logic they have been taught to apply, and the value and role of all three, can increase the chances that innovation will not end up being "crummy."

There is much more that can be done, as I've described in past blog entries and addressed in courses, presentations, and consulting gigs. What needs to be done where you work so that your innovations don't end up being "crummy"? Do you need some help figuring this out?

And how should you approach the innovation process to increase the chances that it is not best for an innovation to end up being "crummy"? (The title of Nathan's article should suggest a good answer.)

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Innovation receives a lot of attention in the November+December 2008 issue of interactions magazine. Nathan's excellent article appears in a section entitled, "Reflections on Innovation," which includes Steve Portigal's "Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff," Elizabeth Churchill's "Of Candied Herbs and Happy Babies: Seeking and Searching on Your Own Terms," Bill Tomlinson's "A Call for Pro-Environmental Conspicuous Consumption in the Online World," and Richard Pew's "An Exciting Interface Foray into Early Digital Music: The Kurzweil 250." Other articles also address innovation, particularly, and not surprisingly, those in a section entitled, "Emerging Approaches to Research and Design Practice." For example, Sus Lundgren describes tools via which to design innovative games in "Designing Games: Why and How," and Liz Sanders' "An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research" makes reference to the most recent additions to that map.

We've addressed innovation in each of our previous issues of interactions magazine (the preceding 5 issues of 2008), and we'll no doubt do so in each upcoming issue. Indeed, look for an article from Roger Martin in an upcoming issue.

Some of the blog entries in which I address innovation can be accessed here.

On facilitating a jury's deliberations, and more

2008-10-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

As I've described in past blog posts, I love to facilitate group sessions of all sorts of types. Earlier this week, I found myself in the unusual position of facilitating a very important group session in a building designed by none other than Frank Lloyd Wright and in the role of jury foreman.

I've served on a jury before, but never as a jury foreman. And I hesitated a little bit when my fellow jurors quickly asked me to be their foreman (or presiding juror, as they are sometimes called here in the U.S.), because the task before us -- placing monetary value on the plaintiff's past and future medical expenses, past and future loss of income, and past and future "pain and suffering" was going to be challenging, even more challenging than we all knew at the time of making this initial decision. But it was because it was going to be challenging, and because I knew of the importance of a good facilitator to this process, that I agreed to take on the role. And I'm glad I did so. Our work was intense, with lots of differing viewpoints among the jurors, but we finished our job in a single day, much to the surprise of us all.

I learned a lot during this trial, particularly about the spine and spinal surgery and various approaches to pain management. My university human anatomy and physiology instructors of years ago were pitiful in comparison to the lawyers and surgeons and other medical experts we heard from over a two week period.

But there were things that happened during the trial that were very dumb. Perhaps I should say that there were things that should have happened during the trial that didn't, and possibly never would in this type of judicial system.

One of the problems was that we, the jurors, were not permitted to ask questions of the witnesses. Of course, we didn't expect to be able to ask questions of the witnesses. But most of us wanted to be able to do so, as there were questions that needed to be asked that weren't, and questions that were answered in ways that were less than clear. Could a means be devised via which jurors could ask questions in a way that wouldn't create a big mess? I think so, but I won't dwell on this issue, since it is minor compared to others.

A bigger problem was that none of the reports prepared by the medical experts, the economists, and others documenting the process and results of medical exams, extensive and rather complicated present-day-value calculations, and more were made available to us during our deliberations. Those reports contained critical information on which we should have been basing some of our decisions, but our access to them was denied.

We watched as all of the reports were tagged as official exhibits during the trial. This led all of us to believe that we would have full access to these reports during our deliberations. However, as we learned at the start of those deliberations, none of the reports had been submitted as official evidence, and only official evidence was available to us in the jury room.

Now that would have been OK -- well, somewhat OK -- had we known this during the trial. Why did they not tell us this? We all would then have been much more diligent about writing down the contents of those reports, much of which had been fully displayed to us on a large screen or on large boards during the testimony of those who prepared the reports (not that we were given enough time to write down everything of importance, but...).

Some of the contents of those reports -- contents that were read aloud by witnesses -- were indirectly available to us in the jury room. Access to those contents required asking the judge to have a court reporter join us to read aloud from the court transcript as we listened in silence. But we were told that our requests had to be very precise; if a requested portion wasn't what we were looking for, we'd need to submit further requests to the judge, as we were not to be permitted to interact with the court reporter in order to help him or her find the information we saught. Plus, we observed witnesses misstating report contents on some occasions; would we remember when this happened and have access to the accurate information via a juror's notes?

An even bigger problem lied in the inability of certain witnesses to interact about the case either prior to or during the trial. For example, the surgeon testifying for the defense was not permitted to interact with the surgeons testifying for the plaintiff. In my opinion, they were all highly competent and well-intentioned doctors. Interaction among them would have enabled them to discuss some very critical uncertainties that could have clarified the picture considerably; indeed, I would have loved to have facilitated that discussion! Instead, it was argued that we should make our judgments about what kinds and numbers of surgery, pain injections, therapy sessions, and more would be needed by the plaintiff over the course of her life by deciding which doctor's credentials appeared to be superior, or how likely it would be that a doctor brought into the process late in the game could really know enough or be telling the truth, or some other equally poor basis.

And then it was all handed over to be decided by a jury of twelve -- all equally well-intentioned, but probably none of whom really wanted to be there, none of whom was adequately paid for being there (only $15/day plus mileage, compared to, for example, the $9000 one witness was paid for half a day), and none of whom had enough of the expertise that really should have been applied to making these decisions. I'm very proud of what the jury did, the process we used, etc. But might there be a better way?

What might that better way involve? Oh, how about working together more, avoiding hand-offs, enabling decision makers to participate (effectively) in the process, providing access to needed data and rationale, etc. -- all things I would recommend and have recommended to be a part of most companies' "user experience" practice, management, and organizational strategy. Are they no less applicable in the U.S. judicial system?

A major theme reflected in contents of our upcoming January+February 2009 issue of interactions magazine is the need for companies to change their ways. As we grow very close to electing a president of the United States seemingly intent on making fundamental changes to the ways things are done in Washington, D.C., perhaps it is appropriate to consider extending that intent outward to the ways things are done in our courtrooms, by insurance companies, by legal teams, and by those whose lives are changed forever negatively, but unintentionally, by others.

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A couple of additional notes...

I was intrigued by differences between the two lawyers' use of "technology" during the trial. The defendant's lawyer kept it simple, sticking only with writing on flipchart paper and showing us tables from reports (yes, those reports we were not later permitted to see) printed onto large sheets of foamcore (though still often printed too small to be easily readable by the jury). The plaintiff's lawyer, on the other hand, projected computer displays onto a large screen. He zoomed, and he animated, usually quite effectively (though sometimes he could not get the zoom function to work as he wanted). For awhile, he even got away with displaying claims during witness testimony that were not being made by the witness (I was surprised at how long it took for the defendant's attorney to voice an objection, which the judge quickly sustained).

I was also struck by the extent to which practice and "academic" research appear to be intertwined in the medical profession, at least at the level of those who testified during the trial. Sadly, in the world of "user experience" and HCI, we have a situation where many practitioners belittle "academic" research and researchers, and many "academic" researchers belittle practice and practitioners.

Lastly, on Facebook, Matt Jones said that people would be put in the gaol in the U.K. for blogging about their experiences on a jury. Here, jurors are permitted to say as much or as little as they want to anyone about this stuff. Indeed, the lawyers were anxious to take advantage of this immediately after we were all dismissed. They even asked the judge to tell us they wanted to speak with us all, and they stood out in the hallway via which we would exit to intercept us before we could depart. I told them to look for my blog posting.

To what extent does where we come from impact where we (can) go?

2008-09-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

This past spring, Jim Leftwich, Chief Experience Officer at SeeqPod, was a guest speaker at my "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" course, where he described the evolution of his career, beginning with his childhood encounter with a tractor throttle (see photo). What was striking was the extent to which Jim's approach and way of working was influenced by that encounter and has continued to reflect his experiences growing up on an Iowa farm.

According to Jim, his Dad was a businessman, a veternarian, a carpenter, an engineer, ... -- a little bit of everything. Well, Jim's approach has usually been one of doing most everything himself, and in college, he studied a little bit of everything, including engineering, economics, business, fine arts, photography, psychology, graphics, typology, and industrial design, all of which he continues to apply in his work. Jim told of how his Dad would say, "Let me know what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it," a philosophy -- an approach -- reflected in Jim's work throughout his careeer.

To what extent does our work, our approach, our thinking, ... continue to reflect our early experiences?

During the recent IDSA 2008 conference, a surprising number of speakers began their presentations by describing their early experiences and how those early experiences are reflected in their thinking and work today.

During BayCHI's program two weeks ago, Bill Verplank sketched numerous metaphors, including his definition of "interaction design," a term Bill is credited for having co-coined. Bill has made and presented this sketch before; indeed, you can watch him do so in a video that is available on the webpage corresponding to an interview of Bill that appeared in the book, "Designing Interactions." What was new this time was Bill's statement that he only recently realized his definition of "interaction design" reflected his early days as a controls engineer. And though his definition includes attending to how users feel, Bill stated that the focus of his work has never really moved on to "user experience," which includes an emotional component that was never the focus of his early work.

In the delightful book "Eat Pray Love," Elizabeth Gilbert writes:

"When you are walking down the road in Bali and you pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is, "Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better."

In a more abstract sense than intended by Elizabeth, is the first question even necessary once you learn the answer to the second? The above stories about Jim, Bill, and several IDSA conference speakers suggest that the answer might be, "no." And it seems to me that most people think the answer is, "no." That is certainly the case of the historical analyst interviewed on National Public Radio recently who argued that the early experiences of the two major U.S. presidential candidates reveal exactly what kind of presidents they would be.

Why am I thinking and writing about this? Well, it was my birthday recently, and as I told a couple of friends, the occurrence of my birthday had led me to become excessively introspective. "Watch out," they wisely responded!

But I think I've long been a bit disturbed by the extent to which people get defined by "where they are coming from" -- that once people reveal that kind of information (whether it is about the geographic area in which they grew up or the profession or professional association in which they "grew up" or the "era" in which they grew up or...), others' preconceived notions of what it means about who they are and "where they are going" or where they can go kick in. Such "preconceived notions," as I described in a blog entry of that title, are very hard to change.

Yet, many of those preconceived notions may have been shaped by early experiences, perhaps explaining their resistance to change.

The relevance of all of this to this blog? Well, this blog is largely about achieving change, as I am certainly in the "change business," helping individuals and organizations change their work practice, management, and organizational strategy via my consulting, teaching, and co-chief-editorship of interactions magazine.

And many have argued that anyone working in this field is or should be in the same change business. For example, in an earlier blog entry about this, I quoted Secil Watson:

"Think of yourselves as change agents. If you like that role, then look at of yourselves as the people who can really change the culture of the organization you are a part of."

Mark Hurst has been arguing for years that changing the organization "is the most important part of user experience work." But he also argues that changing the organization is "the most difficult" part of user experience work.

Indeed, as you probably know, it is usually VERY difficult, which is why there are people like me available to provide guidance.

The huge response to "Eat Pray Love" reveals that Elizabeth Gilbert is in the "change business" as well. Though her "change business" is rather different from mine and yours, perhaps the end of the above quote from her book offers partial guidance regarding how to respond if you haven't yet formulated a good change strategy. In short, "pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better."

But then get to work on developing a good change strategy.

On innovation, appropriateness, intervention design, logic, research, the experience ecosystem, marketing, sustainability, wicked problems, and more

2008-08-30T15:39:00.000-07:00

Jon Kolko and I -- Co-Editors-in-Chief of interactions magazine -- end each issue of the magazine with a "cafe" conversation on topics of relevance to the magazine's content. Jon always kicks off these conversations in a provocative but insightful way.

Here are the openings of, and pointers to, our first five "interactions cafe"s:

On Innovation, Appropriateness, Intervention Design, ... (January+February 2008)

Jon: I’m concerned with the overabundance of the word “innovation” in our professional discipline. At CONNECTING ‘07, the theme was neither subtle nor convincing: nearly every speaker talked about innovation (some better than others), yet no one over the course of four days managed to define the term. Apparently, if a business isn’t focused entirely on innovation right now, their business is completely ruined and they won’t be around in a hundred years.

But I’ve recently done a mental inventory of the products, software and services that I use and that I cherish. The items I hold dear to my heart are either one-offs (craft oriented and thus not in the realm of the innovation discussion) or refined and subtle: they are appropriate more than they are innovative. As we see a trend in society towards “slow” design [clearly juxtaposed with fast food culture], the bloat of features and functionality that seem to go hand in hand with being new and different seem dramatically misplaced.

On top of this, the majority of the companies that are clamoring for increased innovation haven’t proven that they can solve the older problem of quality: I don’t need more ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ features in Windows; I just need the bloody thing to work without crashing.

You do a lot of coaching and teaching companies to be more innovative. Why don’t you get them to be more appropriate, or refined, or polished, instead?

Richard: Actually, my coaching and teaching focus on moving “user experience” into a position of greater corporate attention and influence — on helping to enable companies to do the kinds of things Secil Watson describes in her article in our first issue of interactions. Roger Martin referred to this as “intervention design” in his conference plenary on “Design Thinking: The Next Competitive Advantage,” and I’m sure we’ll offer (more) articles on this in future issues.

Sometimes such interventions mean helping companies organize and do things in such a way that more appropriate, refined, or polished user experiences will result. But they do sometimes mean helping companies do things so that they can be more innovative. However, innovation can be an important part of making user experiences more appropriate, refined, or polished. I think Hugh Dubberly’s model of innovation in our first issue captures that.

Hugh’s model also addresses the insight required of all of this, stating that “immersion within the context is almost always essential” to achieve such insight. I often coach and advise companies on how to achieve such immersion effectively, and the article by Stefana Broadbent and Valerie Bauwens contributes guidance as well. That article also reveals ethnographic research findings that advise against certain types of innovation since they are likely to yield user experiences that are inappropriate.

Clearly, ethnographic research...

(continue reading "On Innovation, Appropriateness, Intervention Design, ...")

On Logic, Research, Design Synthesis, ... (March+April 2008)

Jon: A core theme of this issue of interactions has been the relationship between Interaction Design and education: how to teach it, how to learn it, and how to live it. As a Designer, I’m obviously biased towards Design Education, as I see Design as a core tenant of life (consider it akin to reading and writing: design has often been characterized as “dreaming” or “problem solving”, both of which I consider underpinnings of human life). At the same time, I see the value in logic and pragmatism, and I’m often challenged professionally to “prove it” or “back it up with a sound, logical argument”. Do you think future generations of professionals in the interaction world will have to walk the line between Art (emotion) and Science (logic), or will Design with a capital D finally have its time to shine?

Richard: Can design truly shine without addressing both emotion and logic? Was a need to walk the line between art and science responsible for all the messes described in the first section of this issue (entitled "The Mess We've Gotten Ourselves Into"), or is the culprit better described as an improper balance?

Roger Martin, whom we referenced in our first “interactions cafe” discussion, has written about how the predominant thinking in business — analytical thinking — is hostile to design, and how that needs to change. But he doesn’t argue that analytical thinking has no place.

Perhaps you can’t “prove it.” Perhaps you shouldn’t be expected to “prove it.” But is it wrong to expect you to develop and use and provide rationale that can be subjected to some form of critique throughout and after the design process?

Is Tracy Fullerton wrong in teaching and emphasizing the importance of playtesting in her Interactive Entertainment program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts? Was Mark Baskinger wrong to observe the elderly and kids in his inclusive design projects? Doesn’t such research contribute to a kind of “logical argument” that is essential?

Jon: I wonder if the word “rationale” should even be part of the designer’s language. ...

(continue reading "On Logic, Research, Design Synthesis, ...")

On the Experience Ecosystem, Drama, Choreography, ... (May+June 2008)

Jon: This issue clearly demonstrates a shift in thinking for practicing designers. Creators of physical, digital, and systematic products are moving away from the development of single, static things and are now considering the larger ecosystem of the experience in which these things are used. This experience lifecycle has even touched on children’s toys, as described by Allison Druin; it is no longer enough to offer products with a narrow focus. Instead, practitioners must “design” the physical artifact, the digital artifact, the system of integration, the unboxing experience and must even consider the urban fabric and culture in which the design is used.

It seems like few, if any, large corporations are organized in a way that supports this tremendous undertaking; the actual experience offering from these corporations is so watered down by the time it makes it to market that all indications of cohesion are lost.

Richard: Years ago I had the good fortune of working at Studio Archetype and Viant, where the focus was on helping clients figure out what to do as much as designing how to do something. Indeed, the Studio’s founder, Clement Mok, wrote a book entitled "Designing Business" back then, and Viant’s primary focus was on developing digital business strategy.

So, the approach to user research that I developed for both companies somewhat naturally looked at the larger ecosystem of the user experience, since that increased our contribution to figuring out what a business should do and facilitated designers’ contribution to the same.

Companies that involve user experience research and design in their business in such ways have a better chance of effectively considering and addressing that bigger picture. Secil Watson wrote of taking such an approach at Wells Fargo in our January+February 2008 issue. But it is hard to pull that off.

You attended Interaction 08 in...

(continue reading "On the Experience Ecosystem, Drama, Choreography, ...")

On Marketing, Sustainability, Pessimism, ... (July+August 2008)

Jon: I’m tired of advertising, and to be completely frank, I’m tired of marketing. The entire infrastructure for corporate marketing has arisen from a desire to convince the public that they need more, faster, better, now. We keep talking about sustainability, but we - and I include myself in this, as I work at a consultancy that makes *things* - keep producing more stuff, and keep thinking about ways to sell versions two and three and four of the stuff to people that don’t really need it in the first place.

What are we doing?

Richard: Change of such great magnitude doesn’t happen overnight. Some of the marketing you are tired of — that which describes what companies are doing to address sustainability — might suggest otherwise, but…

Of course, making “things” won’t go away, but the nature of those things can promote sustainability, as reflected in our cover story. And the way the consultancy you work at responds to clients who want you to make things for them can increase sustainability, as reflected in the Designers Accord described in our May+June issue; indeed, I think you can be proud that that accord was born where you work — frog design.

The Designers Accord is a very important effort, and I...

(continue reading "On Marketing, Sustainability, Pessimism, ...")

On Addressing Wicked Problems... (September+October 2008)

Jon: A lot of the discourse that surrounds interaction design speaks to the large, cultural change it can afford. When I used to teach, my students would become enamored with the possibilities of design, and would make grandiose, and unintentionally trivializing statements like "World hunger? It's just a design problem; we could solve it, if only we had the right model..." This issue of interactions presents a number of these types of problems: homelessness, sustainability, and memory impairment. Do you feel that we actually can solve these wicked, cultural problems through design?

Richard: Design can play an important role. As we suggest in our introduction to this issue, design is changing in ways that should increase the role it can play. And increased adoption of "design thinking" by others -- as we've referenced in previous interactions cafes -- will help as well.

But let's take care to not treat design as if it were a religion or a savior. Agile development methodologies, with more than a few fanatical followers, are, in some cases, justifiably decried as little more than an excuse to not document code. The OLPC hasn't had, and is unlikely to have, much of an impact on children's education in developing nations.

Jon: The two examples you give share an interesting commonality. ...

(continue reading "On Addressing Wicked Problems...")

Coming in the November+December 2008 issue: On Mobile Communication, Cultural Norms, ...

Eliminating noise and confusion

2008-08-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

With lots to do -- often much too much to do and not always what would be most beneficial for them to do (as referenced in prior blog entries, including "Realities, dilemmas, framings, ..."), user experience personnel aren't always able to do their best work, which can make them and those with or for whom they are doing the work less than fully satisfied. Past blog entries have referred to some of the ways of dealing with this; recent blog entry suggestions include saying "no," improving soft skills, and offloading certain types or parts of the work to others.

But there are additional possibilities.

One of them -- which can come in all sorts of variations -- was described by Craig Peters during the User Experience Managers and Executives Speak course I offered this past spring. Craig founded and oversees the work at Awasu Design and was co-founder of Bolt | Peters.

Craig has discovered that even some of the best user experience organizations and personnel, and the organizations and personnel with or for whom they work, are continually experiencing a considerable amount of noise and confusion, which gets in the way of doing the best or most appropriate work.

User experience personnel have long expressed frustration with others' lack of understanding of and appreciation for them and their work, (potential) users, and/or the impact user experience can have on business success. This has prompted many to develop materials to be used as part of ongoing "evangelizing" efforts.

However, such efforts, while important, are usually not all that is needed. Noise and confusion often persist, in part because there are additional sources of noise and confusion, many of which are experienced by user experience personnel themselves.

Among these additional sources of noise and confusion:

an inadequate understanding of the organizations for or with which you do your work;
an inadequate understanding of the organization you are in;
an inadequate understanding of the processes used by the organizations for or with which you do your work;
lack of certainty regarding who is responsible for what;
and lack of certainty regarding how to negotiate with and explain the work you'll be doing to those for or with whom you'll be working.

As explained by Craig, such noise and confusion leads to all sorts of problems, including:

others' inconsistent experiences of user experience personnel and their work from project to project;
work activity selections that are not the best for the situation;
things falling through the cracks;
scheduling and timing difficulties;
unwanted creeping project scope;
management needing to step in much too frequently to solve problems;
designs that are not as good as they could be;
and missed opportunities to do work that is particularly needed or particularly strategic.

All of these kinds of problems hinder critical working relationships and leave personnel feeling overwhelmed and unhappy.

Craig described the process followed to discover the nature and characteristics of such problems and to design their solutions in work done for Wells Fargo. And he described the nature of part of the solution developed for and with Wells Fargo personnel. At Wells Fargo, the core of the solution was a Customer Experience Lead program, complete with a guide and a collection of materials and tools to be used by whomever plays the role of Customer Experience Lead on a project. (Those materials and tools included organizational explanations, forms for a customer experience brief, numerous checklists, and numerous one-page explanations of customer experience work activities.) Additionally, a new stage was added to their user-centered design process, training was developed for Customer Experience Leads, and various personnel were designated owners of different components of the program, providing a mechanism for making improvements to the program going forward.

The program developed for Wells Fargo is receiving rave reviews. Wells Fargo's Secil Watson, SVP of Channel Strategy -- the organization which includes the Customer Experience group -- even recommended Craig and this type of work during her presentation at MX (Managing Experience) 2008.

What I think makes this kind of effort especially valuable is that it puts organizations in a much stronger position to address many other critical issues (see past blog entries for discussions of many examples of these) that the noise and confusion can cloud. And if done correctly, the process for identifying the nature and characteristics of such noise and confusion will begin to reveal the nature and characteristics of other critical issues, providing guidance for subsequent improvement efforts.

It is important to emphasize that the program developed for Wells Fargo will not be the solution for noise and confusion experienced elsewhere, whether involving an "internal" organization (akin to the organization in Wells Fargo) or an "external" agency. Certain components might be similar, but the program developed for Wells Fargo is working because it fits the way things work at Wells Fargo and addresses their specific needs. Things work very differently in different companies.

It is also important to emphasize the high quality of the customer experience (and related) personnel at Wells Fargo. For example, I've referenced and quoted Secil Watson repeatedly in this blog (see, for example, "Breaking silos"), and I invited her to write an article for my first issue of interactions magazine as Co-Editor-in-Chief (which she did -- see "The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned at Wells Fargo"), because I think so highly of her approach. I've also referenced the excellent work done by other Wells Fargo management personnel in this blog (see, for example, "Developing user-centered tools for strategic business planning"). Highly capable and successful personnel are not immune from such noise and confusion or from the benefits of outside assistance regarding it or other important issues. And they recognize that.

Craig and I are now teaming up to offer such assistance. Give us a holler to learn more.

Bridging communities via interactions

2008-06-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

The title of this blog entry is intended to have a double meaning. First, it references how interactions are essential to bridging communities -- something essential for "user experience" to play the role it should be playing in business. Second, it references how interactions magazine will increasingly reflect and attempt to facilitate this process.

Jon Kolko and I -- Co-Editors-in-Chief of interactions magazine -- have talked about the latter in the magazine, particularly in the introduction to our second issue. We elaborated on this and described other aspects of our goals and vision during a session we put together about the magazine for CHI 2008 in Florence. Here are the slides we used during that session:

| View | Upload your own

interactions magazine has been around for awhile -- since January 1994 to be exact. During the CHI conference session, Timelines editor Jonathan Grudin and Advisory Board member Shelley Evanson described what it took to get ACM to begin publication.

We also "performed" the magazine to give attendees a rich sense of what the magazine is now about and of who its regular contributors are. (Thanks to Allison Druin, Fred Sampson, Eli Blevis, Jonathan Grudin, and Elizabeth Churchill who, along with Jon and myself, contributed readings during this part of the session.)

Additionally, Jon facilitated an important discussion between Elizabeth and special guest Mark Vanderbeeken about the concept of open access to intellectual content and its relevance to interactions magazine. (Sorry that Mark's head is largely obscured by Elizabeth's in the nearby photo.) One might argue that open -- i.e., free -- online access to interactions magazine content would in and of itself help to bridge the communities for which interactions magazine is of relevance. However... (Portions of and extensions to the CHI 2008 discussion will appear in Elizabeth's column and in "interactions cafe" in the September+October issue; both of those articles will be made available via the interactions website to all, facilitating everyone's opportunity to respond and share his or her perspective.)

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Note that you can hear me talk a bit about interactions magazine via a podcast created during the Mx 2008 conference for Boxes and Arrows. See "Leading Designers to New Frontiers: Podcasts from MX San Francisco."

Black and white photo above by Eli Blevis.

Soft skills

2008-06-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

Early last month, I spent a long weekend in a facilitation skills class. I've taken facilitation classes before, I do and have done a lot of facilitation in my work, and I'm considered to be very good at it. However, I was delighted to have the opportunity to reexamine some of the basics, work on some of the things that can be rather challenging, and receive (and give) feedback from (and to) others doing the same.

Facilitation skills are among those so-called "soft skills" that many argue are critical to the success of experience management and non-management personnel who more often than not find themselves working in "hostile territory."

As Lisa Anderson, Director of User Experience at Autodesk, argued during her appearance as a guest speaker in my recent User Experience Managers and Executives Speak course: "We're the glue that binds -- that brings different people and thinking together." Hence, "the soft skills, too often neglected by user experience managers, are critical. Develop these in yourself and your team."

Jim Nieters, Director of User Experience at Yahoo! and another of my guest speakers, has stressed that user experience practitioners need strong teamwork, communication, and advocacy skills just to get product teams to want to work with them. And another guest speaker, Klaus Kaasgaard, Yahoo!'s VP of Customer Insights, addressed this from the perspective of the researchers whose work he oversees:

"It is all about getting people on your side. Researchers won't get an SVP of business to act just by presenting their insights. One needs to build momentum to get people behind you in order to convince them, which is a long process. You have to wear 2 hats -- your scientist hat and your strategy and business hat, which is like becoming a different person. This is difficult for all of us to learn."

During presentations at HCIEd08 and Mx 2008, I included the need for experience management and non-management personnel to develop soft skills among several of the key challenges that need to be better addressed (see "Realities, dilemmas, framings, ..."). And since then, it has been great to see soft skills given center stage at an IxDA-SF presentation entitled, "Herding Cats and Taming Lions: Using Facilitation Skills to Create Better Design," and at a Slideshare event entitled, "An Evening of Presentation Zen."

Look for and take advantage of opportunities to further develop your "soft skills." (And don't overlook your local improv classes.)

Roles and Relationships

2008-06-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

In two of my most recent three blog entries, I argued that too much of the work done by user experience professionals ends up not being beneficial.

A good example of this was described last evening by TiVo's Margret Schmidt (VP of User Experience Design and Research, and pictured nearby) and Elissa Lee (Sr. Director of Research) during a presentation entitled, "Bringing the Spirit of the DVR to the Web: TiVo Launches a New tivo.com."

The abstract of that presentation:

"TiVo is often noted for its friendly TV experience. We recently launched a new version of tivo.com designed to bring that same simplicity and ease-of-use to our web presence. It took a close partnership between User Experience and Marketing, the right balance of internal and external design leadership, and a strong internal research team dedicated to continuous feedback in order to make the design a success. We'll discuss how we structured the project, the research techniques we used, and what we learned along the way."

The third sentence of that abstract -- italics added by me -- stands in sharp contrast to what happened during a redesign of tivo.com a year earlier -- a redesign that, even though built, was never launched. The slide to the left outlines some of the key reasons for that failure. In short, roles and relationships were all messed up, and TiVo executives, helped by results of post-design usability testing conducted by the internal research team, recognized that a launch of the redesigned site would be highly inadvisable.

Frustrated by this and related experiences, Margret went to Marketing and asked what she could do so that this kind of thing would not happen again. To her delight (and probable surprise), she was asked to lead the next attempt. More of what was new about the next attempt is outlined in the slide to the right. The timelines were still unrealistic, resulting in long hours locked away in a "war room" to get things done -- see those same two recent blog entries of mine about how user experience professionals are too often overwhelmed with work. And the nature of the involvement of and relationship with the external agency was still not ideal -- a problem so many companies experience. But this time, everyone bought into the vision and the approach, and the redesign was not a waste of time and effort.

One can argue that the failure of last year was necessary to enable the success of this year. Indeed, failures of such magnitude often create golden opportunities to make needed adjustments to roles and responsibilities (and process and ...). However, though often hard if not impossible (see, for example, "'There is only so much air in the room'"), do whatever you can to get the roles and relationships right from the start.

Offloading work to others

2008-06-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog entry, I claimed that many experience management and non-management personnel are overwhelmed with work, too much of which is often not that beneficial to a company, because of, among other reasons, the inadequate involvement of user experience personnel in determining what that work should be.

Another reason was described by Jeremy Ashley, VP Applications User Experience at Oracle, when he appeared as a guest speaker during my "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" course earlier this year:

"Designers are expected to do too much -- to be project managers, liaise with PMs, liaise with marketing, liaise with development, liaise with executives, write technical specifications, and more, and while doing all these other things, they are expected to design the product. This is an impossible task. Designers are almost set up to fail at the start, because expectations are unrealistic."

According to Jeremy, at one time, Oracle designers were able to design only 20% of the time. So, among other things, he offloaded a lot of those non-design tasks onto other personnel. For example, he hired and now has a staff of user experience program managers who have taken over responsibility for lots of the liaising with others in the company.

Responsibilities of this role, outlined by Oracle's E. Killian Evers in the November 2007 AIS SIGHCI Newsletter, have included integrating, and continually improving the integration of, human-centered design into Oracle's system development lifecycle, and figuring out the most advisable projects to which Oracle's user experience resources should be assigned. Furthermore...

"Program managers are tasked to think beyond the usability organization to include partners in other parts of the larger organization. Effective partners can be found in program management, product management, strategy, development, quality assurance, technology writers, as well as in the sales and support divisions within the company. Program managers' responsibilities include leveraging resources from any of these organizations as needed to assist on projects."

Other companies have created related roles. For example, while at Microsoft, Kumi Akiyoshi served as a UX liaison responsible for building relationships with marketing, advertising, and branding.

Years ago, E-Lab assigned responsibilties for doing the work necessary to effectively communicate experience research findings to specially trained visual communicators, rather than being left (solely) to the researchers. Similarly, interaction designers at Cooper partner with design communicators who "lead teams in communicating research, requirements, and design solutions the right way to the right audience at the right time."

Some companies have created roles to facilitate the development of user experience methodology and/or a corporate culture that embraces design and design thinking. For example, Microsoft has a Design and Usability Training Manager (Surya Vanka), P&G a VP of Design Innovation & Strategy (Claudia Kotchka, whom I've referenced in three past blog entries), and SAP a Sr. Director of User Experience, Methods (Carola Thompson, former student of mine and another guest speaker at my "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" course earlier this year -- see photo nearby).

Should you consider offloading some of the work of your user experience personnel to others, some of whom would occupy new user experience roles?

"There is only so much air in the room"

2008-05-09T17:43:00.000-07:00

Listening to the great Bill Moyers tell Charlie Rose that "too many powerful interests have a stake in the dysfunction of government that they don't want to fix what is the fundamental structural problem" reminded me of some of the things John Armitage, Director of User Experience at Business Objects, emphasized when he appeared as a guest speaker during my "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" course earlier this year.

"There is only so much air in the room -- only so much budget, head-count, attention, and future potential in an organization. And people within the organization are struggling to acquire it -- struggling for power, influence, promotion, etc. whether because of ego or as a competitive move against threats of rivals. People will turn a blind eye to good ideas if they don't support their career and personal objectives. Hence, if user experience is perceived as a threat, and if they think they can stop it, they will, even if it hurts the company."

Stating that it is management's responsibility to prevent this from happening, John cautioned that it is hard to build incentives and checks and balances to get organizations to "let user experience in," particularly where user experience is the new kid on the block (as it is in most companies). To get organizations to let user experience in, "you have to take power away from people who have it now."

John argued that you ultimately need to pose the following question to those who have the power now: "Is it better to have a small part of a bigger thing or a big part of a small thing?” Hence, in an engineering-dominated company, it is engineering that needs to be convinced that by giving up some headcount and influence to user experience personnel, the company will grow bigger than it otherwise would, and all will benefit.

John referred to a common obstacle to this: given that the importance of user experience isn’t a secret anymore, everyone -- engineering, marketing, even the president of the company -- might claim to be a user experience expert.

Does this describe how things are where you work? Are those in power unwilling to give up as much of their power as would be most beneficial to your company? What do you need to do in order to convince them to do so?

Realities, dilemmas, framings, ...

2008-04-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

"Thanks for your presentation. You're the only presenter to have spoken about the dilemmas we face. Most of the other speakers have been providing their 3- or 4-part prescriptions for success almost as if we will confront no challenges to following them!"

Describing aspects of the everyday reality that managers of user experience often live in was what I had been asked to do as part of my presentation at Mx 2008 last week in San Francisco, which is where I received the above feedback. And I described the same in a very different context early in the month as part of a presentation at HCIEd08 in Rome.

My focus in both cases was (a subset of) the difficulties, the challenges, the dilemmas, ... which such personnel need to address to be able to play a strategic role in the companies in which they work.

What claims did I make about that everyday reality? A slide summarizing the claims appears nearby. (You can click on it to enlarge it.)

As an example, here is something akin to what I said about claim #1:

"'Experience management and non-management personnel are often overwhelmed with work.' In a sense, this is good, as it reveals that the demand for services is now high, which has not always been the case. But this is actually not so good, because it often hurts the quality of the work they do, and it often means that people are working on things that are not that important, that are not that impactful. Hence, the solution isn't necessarily one of adding more personnel or hiring contractors; that often isn't even an option. But there are solutions, solutions which will actually enable one to secure the budget to add more personnel more quickly. But because the experience personnel are so overwhelmed, they often don't have the time or mental space to step back, assess the situation, and figure out what those solutions are. So they are often stuck, and they are often stuck doing work that is not important and often a waste of their time and effort and a waste of their company's time and resources."

In Rome, I followed my description of the challenges with an assortment of ideas about how the challenges might be met via new or modified or extended "educational experiences" for management personnel, and I encouraged attendees -- note that HCIEd08 was a conference for educators -- to generate additional ideas.

In San Francisco, I followed the description with examples of the ways successful experience managers and executives have framed such challenges in order to address them. For example, I described how Jeremy Ashley, VP Applications Experience at Oracle, argues the importance of seeing design not as a service, but as a driver and differentiator of the process. I told of how Lisa Anderson, Director User Experience at Autodesk, similarly argues the importance of prioritizing and focusing -- of not taking on all requests so to not be treated like a service organization -- of how it is better to change one feature by 70% than to change several by 10%. I told of how Klaus Kaasgaard, VP Customer Insights at Yahoo!, argues that too much research being done is tactically focused because researchers have not been good at saying "no" -- that it had been the case at Yahoo! that success was measured by the number of projects done and how few they said "no" to: "We would then get a bonus for executing on all requests, though doing so had limited our impact on the business." And I reminded attendees that in a presentation earlier that day at the Mx conference, Cordell Ratzlaff, Director User-Centered Design at Cisco, had also argued the importance of saying "no."

Then I asked: "Do you say 'no' where you work? Dare you? Would you remain in your job if you did? Or would you find that people would be happy if you were to start saying 'no'? What might need to be true before you consider using that strategy?" (Note that not all successful experience managers and executives have taken such an approach.)

In a workshop, I would have asked attendees to answer such questions and to discuss the pros and cons of that particular framing and approach as well as of many others to help them figure out which framing and approach or what combination of framings and approaches or what variation of a framing and approach is something they should consider attempting in their workplace.

I'll be sharing more framings and approaches in upcoming blog entries.

---
Jeremy, Lisa, and Klaus were among the wonderful user experience managers and executives who appeared as guest speakers during my recently concluded, "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" course.

Audio and slides for "Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?"

2008-03-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

Here are the slides from and the audio of my CHI 2007 conference session entitled, "Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?" Start the audio, then flip through the slides. (This is not ideal, but the SlideShare's synchronization tool defeated my attempt at synchronizing the audio with the slides).

For a sense of how the members of the panel repositioned themselves on stage during the session (which you'll be able to hear but not see), read "So, whose advice really works?"

View more presentations from Richard Anderson.

Participants (other than me):

Jeremy Ashley, Vice President of Applications User Experience, Oracle
Secil Tabli Watson, Senior Vice President Internet Channel Strategy, Wells Fargo
Manfred Tscheligi, Director of the Center for Usability Research & Engineering, Wein Austria (representing Tobias Herrmann, Head of Team User Experience, mobilkom austria)
Shauna Sampson Eves, Director of User Experience, Blue Shield of California
Jim Nieters, Senior Manager User Experience Design, Cisco
Justin Miller, Senior Director of Product for Europe, eBay
a large audience in a large, spacious auditorium

---
Photo by Pabini Gabriel-Petit.

On the importance of alignment, trust, loyalty, ...

2008-02-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

Does it matter where user experience personnel are positioned in the organizational structure of your company, and how their work is funded?

"Yes," according to Jim Nieters, a Director of User Experience & Design at Yahoo! and former Senior Manager of User Experience Design at Cisco. As guest speaker at the first meeting of my "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" offering, Jim compared characteristics of a variety of organizational and funding models -- centrally-funded, client-funded, distributed, consultancy, and hybrid -- and shared stories of his experiences with each.

Though many claim that there is one best model for user experience, Jim argues that there is a right model in every company, but that that right model is not the same in every company.

Jim reviewed several of the factors to consider when evaluating different models, but the criterion on which he placed the greatest emphasis is the extent to which the model supports alignment between the goals of user experience personnel and the goals of the business.

Building trust with senior executives is critical, Jim argues. If they like you and believe you are loyal to them, they will fight for you. If they think you might have another agenda, beware.

"You want to work for an executive who buys-in to what you do. If that executive is in marketing, then that is where you should be positioned. If that executive is in engineering, then that is where you should be positioned. Specifically where you sit matters less than finding the executive who supports you the most. If the executive you work for has reservations about what you do and wants proof of its value, that is a sign that you might be working for the wrong person."

Look for signs that your organizational and funding model are impeding your impact and alignment. If those signs are strong, suggest a change to the model. Jim calls this being strategically flexible, and claims that suggesting such a change will reveal that you really care about the business. Hence, focus on building strong relationships with lots of executives. Circumstances can arise in which you may need to find a good, new home for your personnel quickly.

---
Related discussions in this blog include:

"User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" update

2008-01-30T23:34:00.000-08:00

I've been lining up some of the best San Francisco Bay Area managers and executives -- approximately 14 in total -- to appear during the unique course I'll soon be offering entitled, "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak." The course is being offered in Silicon Valley and will meet 7 consecutive Wednesday evenings from 13 February -- two weeks from today -- through 26 March, 2008.

Want to compare your challenges and approaches with those of managers and executives from a diverse collection of companies including well-known companies such as Google, Wells Fargo, Yahoo!, SAP, Autodesk, Kaiser Permanente, eBay, and Oracle, and several smaller and/or younger and/or less-known companies?

Come hear from and ask your questions of people such as:

Secil Watson, SVP Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo and author of a fabulous article in the January+February 2008 issue of interactions magazine entitled, "The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons Learned at Wells Fargo" (see also several of my blog entries, including "Breaking silos")

Irene Au, Director User Experience at Google and former VP User Experience and Design at Yahoo!

Christi Zuber, Director Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente's Sidney R. Garfield Healthcare Innovation Center

Jeff Herman, Senior Director User Experience Design at eBay, author of "A Process for Creating the Business Case for User Experience Projects" and "Creating a System to Share User Experience Best Practices," and former designer at Apple

...and many others.

And share your own challenges and approaches as well.

Can you bypass such an opportunity?

The enrollment fee goes up tomorrow: $495 through January 30, but only $550 after that date.

More information, including a link to the registration site, is available on my website.

User Experience Managers and Executives Speak

2008-01-18T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'll soon be offering a unique and exciting course via UCSC Extension in Silicon Valley entitled, "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak." The course is scheduled to meet 7 consecutive Wednesday evenings from 13 February through 26 March, 2008.

From the course description:

"How do user-experience managers and executives achieve success? What are their strategies? How do they approach the multitude of organizational challenges they face? What approaches do they recommend or avoid?

Receive answers to these questions from a wide range of user experience managers and executives from fields such as financial services, consumer electronics, health services, internet services, enterprise software, telecommunications, design services, and insurance, and who are or have been in such roles in companies of a wide range of sizes and at different stages of "user experience maturity." Ask your own questions of the weekly special guests (usually two guests each evening), share your answers, and begin to formulate or make adjustments to your own strategies and approaches.

Among the many guests slated to appear:
Irene Au, Director User Experience at Google;
Secil Watson, SVP Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo;
Klaus Kaasguard, VP Customer Insights at Yahoo!;
Jeremy Ashley, VP Applications User Experience at Oracle;
Jim Leftwich, Chief Experience Officer at SeeqPod;
Mark Plakias, VP Strategy & Design at France Telecom Orange Labs.
This course is intended for those who presently are, or may in the future become, a user experience manager or executive. The course is also intended for other types of managers and executives who (will) work with user experience managers and executives and/or can impact how user experience is addressed and positioned in their companies.

After completing this course, participants will be able to more effectively:
position user experience in their own companies;
address their own organizational challenges;
increase the influence user experience has in their companies;
lead their own user experience groups or organizations, or work with such groups or organizations led by others."

Please pass on this information to any of your friends, colleagues, bosses, ... in the San Francisco Bay Area who you think might want to take advantage of this special offering.

The enrollment fee is only $495 through January 30; $550 after that date. You can register via the UCSC Extension website.

I'll be providing updates on the course in this blog as the course nears.

interactions magazine comes alive

2008-01-11T09:29:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to announce that the January+February 2008 issue of interactions magazine -- the first issue for which Jon Kolko and I are responsible as Editors-in-Chief -- has finally emerged from the printer and should be appearing in subscribers' mailboxes soon.

As subscribers will see, the magazine now has a very different look and feel, and content that reflects a new vision.

And interactions finally has a website, one via which people can access interactions articles (from the current issue as well as past issues), access content not available in the print magazine, and interact about the magazine's contents.

Advance press has been very positive. For example, Mark Vanderbeekun has written:

"Interactions Magazine seems to be heading into an exciting direction under its new editors-in-chief Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko. The new byline ('experience - people - technology') is already a mission statement in itself, especially since the magazine is published by ACM, which stands for 'Association for Computing Machinery'."

And in "Interactions Magazine Relaunched," he wrote:

"The content looks very exciting indeed and the editors-in-chief have done a great job at getting some of the best people in the field to contribute."

However, as Mark references, work remains to get ACM to make full articles accessible to more people online. (Note that the contents of this issue are in the process of being added to ACM's digital library and will become accessible via the interactions website in the next few days.)

Should you be interested in subscribing to the magazine, writing for it, advertising in it, learning about our vision for it, learning about the regular contributors to it, etc., you'll find information of relevance on the new website.

Preconceived notions

2008-01-02T16:03:00.000-08:00

During his CONNECTING 07 World Design Congress plenary presentation, Richard Seymour (pictured at right) argued that the primary obstacle design and designers face is NOT ignorance regarding what design is and what designers do, but is instead "preconceived notions" regarding the same. As Richard put it, ignorance is easier to deal with; dealing with preconceived notions is very hard.

It was interesting to see how often some variation of this message was echoed throughout the conference.

Some examples...

Futurist Paul Saffo spoke of the great extent to which the future will be about "personal media," but he argued that even those in attendance at the conference couldn't really understand what he meant by that, because we all think we already know what it means.

Janine Benyus spoke of how carbon dioxide is viewed by most these days as a major problem in need of a solution, though in nature, carbon dioxide is often "a solution" (e.g., it is a building material for plants and for mollusks). As described by Janine, the world's focus is largely stuck on exploring and developing solution options that view carbon dioxide only as a problem, whereas biomimicry -- "the conscious emulation of nature's elegant, energy-sipping, non-toxic designs" -- offers very different, often superior options.

On the lighter side, Sir Ken Robinson polled the audience regarding the number of senses humans have. Most responded that humans have five senses, or five plus a spooky sixth sense. How many senses do humans actually have? According to Ken, scientists presently believe we have seventeen.

And Roger Martin, whom I referenced extensively in "'Designing in hostile territory'," explained how the common notion that risk needs to be minimized for a business to be successful is a hindrance to innovation and development of competitive advantage.

In my workshops and presentations, I often talk about how preconceived notions of the meaning of a lot of the terminology used by user experience personnel -- sometimes including the terms "user" and "user experience" -- can get in the way of the success of user experience personnel and the amount of influence they have in business. I've written a bit about this in past blog entries, including "Is 'user' the best word?" and "Words (and definitions) matter; however..."

I've often run into preconceived notions of multidisciplinary collaboration among user experience personnel. Reactions of "we already collaborate extensively" and "we've been doing that for years" have signalled that achieving change will be challenging.

I also often ask workshop or course participants what is "holding user experience back" where they work. The source of many of the answers? Constraining, preconceived notions of what "user experience" is and what user experience personnel do.

In our first issue of interactions magazine, Secil Watson, Senior VP Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo, writes:

"Five years ago, when I told people I managed customer experience, they thought I ran a call center, as 'experience' was synonymous with servicing. ... When I told people I designed the website, they thought I was a graphic artist."

Secil and others have been doing a great job of changing those preconceived notions at Wells Fargo during the past five years, but many still encounter similar or related notions.

One of the tools used by Secil and her staff to change such notions was repeated presentations within the company about what her customer experience team does and why. Stephen Anderson has posted a delightful presentation of this nature, and such presentations are important.

But they only go so far.

John Seely Brown has explained part of why this is the case, in a presentation about "learning to unlearn."

"...a lot of us who are struggling in large corporations know first hand that the hardest task is to get the corporate mind to start to unlearn... It turns out that this learning to unlearn may be a lot trickier than a lot of us at first think."

John attributes this to the fact that so much of what we know is tacit knowledge, which is not as readily changed via such presentations.

In short, more is needed. And Secil and others have done much more at Wells Fargo, as she describes in her article.

What more is needed? Words attributed to Confucious and quoted by Bill Buxton in his 2007 book, "Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design," provide both a partial summary of this posting and a hint at the answer to that question:

"Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand."

---

Look for an article from Richard Seymour in our third issue of interactions magazine -- the May+June 2008 issue.

"Designing in hostile territory"

2007-12-11T00:45:00.001-08:00

In this blog, I've repeatedly referenced the frustrations user experience personnel often experience in their workplaces (see, for example, "Borrowing from the field of child development").

The title of a BusinessWeek article by Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, nicely describes what this can feel like: "Designing in Hostile Territory."

In that article and in other articles, Roger does a great job of explaining why business is so hostile to design, and why that needs to change.

Roger spoke about aspects of this at the recent CONNECTING 07 World Design Congress in San Francisco. Jon Kolko and I refer to some of what he said at that conference in "interactions cafe," an article to appear next month that presents some of our thoughts about the relationship between that conference (which we both attended) and contents of our first issue of interactions magazine. Here I extend that reflection, with a focus on Roger and his articles, on just one of the authors of content to appear in the January+February 2008 issue of interactions, and on a reference to some important related work.

As reflected in the nearby blurry image of a slide from Roger's plenary presentation, there is little overlap between the kind of thinking that comprises design -- involving "consideration of a wide array of relevant variables, most of which are qualitative, to produce meaningful, valid solutions" -- and the kind of thinking that is dominant in business -- involving "reducing the number of variables considered to mostly quantitative measures in order to achieve consistency and predictability." To analytical thinkers, the activities and language of design thinking "connote danger, uncertainty, and guesswork." Little surprise that user experience personnel experience frustration in their workplaces.

"Both (design thinking and analytical thinking) have their place, but as organizations grow, analytical thinking -- which focuses on exploitation and refinement of the current state of knowledge -- often crowds out design thinking -- which pushes knowledge forward and creates new possibilities. As a consequence, as businesses grow and tilt towards analytical thinking, they leave themselves exposed to competitors -- often smaller ones -- that use design thinking to outflank them."

Compare those words from Roger with what Secil Watson, Senior VP Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo, says about customer experience in our first issue of interactions magazine:

"It is really hard for established companies and industry leaders to change their practices and business models to focus steadfastly on better customer experiences. They have so much invested in their current infrastructure that dramatic changes are very complex and time consuming in nature. But unless they change, this will create opportunities for new entrants that will develop their business models and infrastructure from scratch around a strategy that focuses on customer experience as an essential way to attain long-term customer value, as opposed to strategies that focus on marketing prowess, sales effectiveness, market share, distribution network, high switching costs, or cost efficiency."

As Roger Martin argues, it is essential to create a business environment in which design thinking can flourish. However, as he states in "At the Crossroads of Design and Business":

"...if Design Thinking is critical, maybe restricting it to designers and protecting them from business people is not actually the most productive avenue to pursue. Perhaps eliminating the need for protection by turning business people into Design Thinkers would be more effective.

To create a Design Thinking organization, a company must create a corporate environment in which it is the job of all managers to understand customer needs at a deep and sophisticated level and to understand what the firm's product means to the customer at not only a functional level, but also an emotional and psychological level. It must also create a culture in which line managers are not satisfied with merely serving customers, but insist on delighting them and making them feel the company is their partner, friend, and confidante."

And user experience personnel can play a critical role in creating this environment. Consider more words from Secil's interactions article on what it has taken to affect such change at Wells Fargo:

"We championed customer experience broadly. We knew that product managers, engineers, and servicing staff were equally important partners in the success of each of our customer-experience efforts. Instead of owning and controlling the goal of creating positive customer experience, we shared our vision and our methods across the group. This was a grassroots effort that took a long time. We didn’t do formal training across the group, nor did we mandate a new process. Instead, we created converts in every project we touched using our UCD methods. Having a flexible set of well-designed, easy-to-use UCD tools such as those mentioned (in this article) made the experience teams more credible and put us in the position of guiding the process of concept definition and design for our business partners."

Claudia Kotchka, VP of Design Innovation & Strategy, has been responsible for achieving change of this nature at P&G. During a presentation at Stanford University this past spring, she described the P&G journey to achieve such change as progressing through three phases. Phase 1, "Discipline of Design," was a phase during which design was focused largely on aesthetics as other disciplines tried to figure out what to do with designers that were added to the organization. Phase 2, "Practice of Design," was a phase during which designers realized they couldn't achieve success effectively alone and needed to collaborate with people in other disciplines; among steps taken to help achieve this collaboration: a "mentoring up program" to enable managers to "see what designers see," and an effort to teach designers the language of business. Phase 3, "Design Strategy," moved on to infusing design innovation into business strategy via, in part, teaching design thinking to business leaders.

Neither Claudia nor Secil would claim that their work is done. But both have made great strides in changing the cultures of their workplaces.

Which phase is your company in? What kind of thinking dominates where you work? What roles are your user experience personnel playing? Are they still just "designing in hostile territory"?

---
Take the time to read some of Roger Martin's many terrific articles. Others I recommend include, "Reliability vs. Validity," "Scientific Management is Past it's Peak," and "Why Decisions Need Design."

In several past blog entries of mine, you can read more from Secil Watson and about the work she has been spearheading at Wells Fargo. See, for example, "Breaking silos," "Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?", and "Developing user-centered tools for strategic business planning."

"interactions cafe" will appear at the end of each issue of interactions magazine beginning with the January+February 2008 issue.

"Management is where the real problem is"

2007-11-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, Jeff Johnson appeared on the BayCHI program to speak about the updated version of his GUI Bloopers book.

As Jeff put it, he ran through examples of all but the last of his categories of bloopers very quickly, because the last category -- management bloopers -- "is where the real problem is, since so many bloopers continue to be made."

Here is Jeff's list of management bloopers:

As described by Jeff, development typically occurs with no UI design, no UI standards or guidelines, and no oversight.

Why is this still true?

---
Note that a list of all of the bloopers and blooper categories is presented on the book's website.

Note also that Jeff said that when writing the first edition of the book (published March 2000), it was hard to find any bloopers in Apple products. However, "that is no longer the case."

Another short-notice workshop, this time in Chicago November 5

2007-10-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'll be running another short notice workshop -- added late to the DUX 2007 pre-conference tutorial lineup -- this coming Monday, November 5 at the Intercontinental Hotel on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Workshop title: "Changing the Role User Experience Plays in Your Business." This will be a modified version of the well-received September workshop entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Greater Corporate Influence" offered in New York City.

If you or someone you know might like to attend this workshop but cannot attend DUX 2007, let me know; I'll see what I can do to get you or the "someone you know" in. If you plan to attend DUX 2007 and have not yet signed up for a tutorial, consider modifying your registration in order to join us.

Evaluations of past offerings of a related nature suggest you'll learn alot and will have a good time:

"I really enjoyed last weekend's workshop. You're a gifted teacher and I think I learned as much from your way of relating to us and the material as I did from the material itself. Your manner and approach really inspired me." -- Participant in September's "Moving User Experience into a Position of Greater Corporate Influence" workshop

"Richard is an excellent instructor and employs an effective Socratic teaching style." -- Jaime Guerrero, student of "Managing User Experience Groups" (additional evaluations of that course)

"There is no more skilled panel moderator than Richard Anderson, so I was eager to attend this interactive session. I was not disappointed." -- Pabini Gabriel-Petit, UXmatters on the "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?" session at CHI 2007

"the best managed workshop I've seen...; brilliant process in the workshop (Richard) organized" -- Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research

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

"The sign of an excellent teacher, I feel, is the ability to make even the most stubborn among us (me) question our assumptions. Richard is just such a teacher, and I feel privileged to have taken his class." -- Student of "User-Centered Design / Usability Engineering" (additional evaluations of that course)

Convincing executives and other management personnel of the value of ethnography

2007-10-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

Need some help understanding the value of ethnographic research methods or convincing others of that value?

If you do, you are not alone. According to Bain & Company's Management Tools & Trends 2007 survey of 1221 international executives, "consumer ethnography" is one of the least-valued of 25 of the most popular management tools and techniques. Ratings of use and satisfaction were both among the lowest. (Not that ethnography is or should be viewed as only a "management" tool, but if it is to have the greatest possible impact in a business...)

In a discussion about this in the anthrodesign yahoogroup, Martha Cotton stated:

"while ethnography has moved from a niche approach to slightly more mainstream..., (executives) still don't really know what they're buying or why they should value ethnography as an approach."

And what to do about this apparently received considerable attention at last week's Ethnography Praxis in Industry conference (EPIC 2007), as revealed in a blog posting by Jeffrey Bardzell:

"A... major issue is one of legitimation. How can ethnographers convince managers and marketing leaders to take them seriously? How do they justify their work both intellectually (methods, data, etc.) and also from a business perspective (actually leads to better business processes or products)?"

Having good stories to share about ethnographic research findings with significant business implications, or about the important role ethnographic research has played in other businesses can help. I've referenced several such stories in past blog entries (see "Conducting 'ethnographic' research" for a partial list). And Jon Kolko and I will be including a couple of excellent stories, one by Stefana Broadbent and Valerie Bauwens of Swisscom Innovations, in the January+February 2008 issue of interactions magazine.

David Gilmore offered additional advice in his excellent May+June 2002 article, "Understanding and Overcoming Resistance to Ethnographic Research." As David argues, the most persuasive technique might be to give those who resist conducting ethnographic research the experience of an ethnographic approach.

Both techniques have been part of the strategy I have followed for many years, and I encourage you to consider including both in your strategy. But there is more that can be done, and I'll try to address those things (further) in future blog entries.

---
Note that ethnographic research receives the attention of several contributions to our January+February 2008 issue of interactions magazine. One of them -- from Don Norman -- urges caution:

"Many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs. You know what? Most are far better off if they stay unmet."

(A tip of the hat to Mark Vanderbeeken for pointing me to the blog entry about EPIC 2007 via his terrific blog, "Putting People First.")

Work space

2007-09-27T10:13:00.001-07:00

I love to visit artist's work spaces, and the San Francisco Bay Area provides several opportunities throughout the year to do just that -- when multiple artists open their studios to the public for a weekend.

I particularly look forward to San Francisco's Mission Open Studios, which largely features artists in old industrial buildings that have been converted into multiple floors of spacious artist studios, most with lots of wall space and configurable as needed for different activities, both solo and involving several people.

Two years ago, I wrote about the value of ample wall space and of open, reconfigurable work spaces in a blog posting about the impact of "walls" on working "in the world of user experience." Some of that value is captured very nicely in a 1998 quote I included in that blog posting -- words from Judy Olson and collegues:

"Collocation of cognitive artifacts and team members offers the broadest bandwidth for cooperative work. Team members developed shared documents together, making the work tangible. Artifacts helped coordination and motivation as well. The key feature was that they were persistent, allowing easy access (by a glance, not a file retrieval) and large enough to allow cross connections to be perceived. The presence of one's co-workers helped with coordination, implicit learning, easy transitions from one phase of work to another, and social facilitation."

Bill Buxton says much the same in his terrific 2007 book, "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design," and cautions:

"simply plunking a bunch of corkboards or foamboards around your work space does not magically turn it into a design studio. These are artifacts with certain affordances, but their effective use requires as much attention to the cultivation of the culture of the studio as to the detailing of the architectural space."

Such cultures and work spaces are far from the norm in companies where user experience needs to play a much larger role, but they are appearing here and there as special areas designated for special "innovation" activities. Kaiser Permanente's impressive Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, occupying a huge warehouse, is one example; P&G's Clay Street Project, occupying "a brick-walled loft in a gritty Cincinatti neighborhood," is another.

Recently, I visited Adobe in San Jose California for a tour of a work space of a similar nature, except that it is used ongoing (i.e., not just for special projects) by user experience personnel (and those that join them to collaborate) and wasn't constructed apart in some funky location. Until this past spring, the work area looked like that in the photo at left of a hallway lined by small offices with doors, still the norm in the building. But now, a large part of one floor is as depicted in the composite photo -- an open, multi-use work space, with whiteboards and "foamboards" on long spacious walls, on walls on wheels, and even on horizontal work surfaces.

At Stanford University this past spring, Claudia Kotchka, VP of Design Innovation & Strategy at P&G (where they have the Clay Street Project) , spoke of attempts at convincing her company to replace existing seas of cubicles with such work spaces, but has found that the mindset regarding appropriate, corporate office space is not easy to change.

Years ago, Karen Holtzblatt argued, "If you want your team to be creative, give them a room." But a conventional conference room, even when used as thoroughly as the one shown in the image from Karen, is often not enough.

---
My thanks to Julie Baher, Experience Design Manager, for the tour of the Adobe work space. Thanks also to Claudia Brenner, Implementation Manager, for a tour of the Garfield Innovation Center.

Who should you hire?

2007-09-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been reading resumés and interviewing potential candidates to help a client make some hiring decisions.

I've always enjoyed the process of interviewing and considering candidates, and of ultimately hiring people as I've done in past management roles. And in most of my experiences, the process has gone very smoothly. However, there have been a couple of interesting exceptions.

One of those exceptions was when most of the members of a particular user experience functional group were not necessarily convinced a particular candidate was right for the group. Additionally, the director of the group, to whom I reported as a consulting manager, was thoroughly convinced this candidate was not a good fit. Well, guess what? I thought this candidate was essential for the group.

The director and group members were concerned that the candidate did not have enough experience with and, hence, would be less competent at doing the kind of work that the group members were doing most of the time. I was confident the candidate could do that kind of work adequately, but I was most excited that the candidate was better prepared to do the kind of work that others in the group needed to be doing more so that the group would become more effective -- more impactful in the business.

It took some time, and, because of that, the candidate had made arrangements to enter another job in the company for which he already worked, but I convinced the director and the group of the benefits of hiring this candidate, and hire him I did.

Adding this person to the group was an important part of a process of changing the nature of some of the work the group did. And by example and other means, this person's subsequent work in the group did exactly that, and, indeed, enabled the group to become more impactful in the business.

What all to look for in potential hires has been the subject of many discussions and debates. One which occurred late last month on the IxDA discussion list focused mostly on the importance (or lack thereof) of a candidate's field of study in school and of the candidate's portfolio. Around the edges of this debate was advocation of the importance of a candidate's personality, particularly of whether it is the right personality to work with the team the candidate would be joining.

IDEO has long advocated the importance of working in teams in which people can "check their disciplines at the door" when beneficial, and to facilitate that, they have advocated hiring "T-shaped people":

"Regardless of whether your goal is to innovate around a product, service, or business opportunity, you get good insights by having an observant and empathetic view of the world. You can't just stand in your own shoes; you've got to be able to stand in the shoes of others. Empathy allows you to have original insights about the world. It also enables you to build better teams.

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them 'T-shaped people.' They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That's what you're after at this point -- patterns that yield ideas."

However, last month, Peter Merholz challenged that recommendation to some extent:

"…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."

Other people have suggested that you should look for yet other "shapes" of people, including "pi," "sun," and "kidney" (see comment #9). However, others have argued the advisability of looking beyond any of these types of classifications of people.

Here is a random collection of recommendations from some of the many user experience managers, directors, and executives with whom I've discussed the topic of who to hire:

“be opportunistic; make adjustments to what you are looking for based on the skills, background, interests, etc. of those who apply”

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

“hire ‘commercial’ designers, not artists”

“a good ‘aesthetic’ is not enough; creative thinking needs to be married with analytical thinking”

“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”

I remember smiling to myself when hearing that final piece of advice, in part because that was pretty much the argument I was making in support of hiring the candidate I referenced in the story I told at the beginning of this blog posting. What made me smile most, however, was the fact that this piece of advice came from the director I referenced in that story -- the one who almost nixed the hire I believed was essential to moving the group forward and making it more impactful. (The advice was being given a couple years later.)

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My thanks to Mary Quandt for bringing the concept of "pi-shaped people" to my attention.

Special workshop in NYC September 8

2007-08-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

I'll be running a special, short notice workshop -- with special, short notice pricing -- on Saturday, September 8 on the edge of the East Village in New York City.

Workshop title: Moving User Experience into a Position of Greater Corporate Influence.

Workshop description:

Why is it that at a time when user experience (UX) expertise is in high demand, countless UX professionals continue to feel misunderstood, undervalued, and unable to contribute to the success of the businesses for which they work in the ways and to the extent they can and often should?

Why is it that at a time when UX is becoming a critical marketplace differentiator, countless companies continue to not utilize or position user experience professionals in such a way as to enable them to effectively contribute to the formulation of business strategy?

What can be done to change this? What can YOU do to move UX into a position of greater influence where YOU work?

Explore and formulate answers to these questions in a special workshop led by Richard Anderson, UX practice, management, and organizational strategy consultant and incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine.

This highly interactive and participatory workshop will borrow elements from the very successful multi-session “Managing User Experience Groups” course Richard has co-taught in Silicon Valley, from the highly praised “Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?” interactive session from CHI 2007, from related workshops Richard has led within various companies, and from a multi-session “User Experience Managers and Executives Speak” course Richard will be offering in Silicon Valley next spring.

(This workshop is intended for all who want to and can impact how user experience is addressed in their places of work, but might be particularly valuable for people in management roles.)

If you'll be in the NYC area on September 8, I hope you'll consider joining us.

For more information and to register, see Victor Lombardi's Smart Experience website. Readers of my blog can use the code "FOSE" for a 10% discount off of the special short notice registration fee.

On the advisibility of estimating ROI

2007-08-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

Much has been written about analyzing return on investment (ROI) in order for user experience to have influence in a corporate context. And as I detailed in "Calculating return on investment," some have argued that such analyses are and have been essential, while others have argued that dependence on ROI calculations can be and has been excessive and detrimental.

One of the examples I referenced in that blog entry was the major role estimating ROI had played at eBay for several years. Their process for creating the business case for user experience projects was described by Jeff Herman in a paper presented at CHI 2004 and again by Christian Rohrer in a presentation made in January 2007.

However, things have been changing at eBay.

You might have seen some hint of this in how President and CEO Meg Whitman recently described user experience as one of eBay's main strategic priorities.

What has been happening behind the scenes?

One of the changes made has been to how they address ROI.

eBay's Justin Miller talked about this during the session I led at CHI 2007 entitled, "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?":

"At eBay, as Richard mentioned, we have changed significantly, but (not only regarding) user experience. As a company, we had much more demand than we had supply in terms of executing on projects, so we developed ROI calculations for every project that we wanted to do, whether it was user experience related or some other thing. We discussed not doing it for the user experience pieces, but we would have been the only ones not doing it and trying to make the case that we shouldn't need to do it. The fact is, the reason we are at the company -- the reason we've been hired and have grown our group significantly is to drive ROI -- to drive revenue, to drive value. So, we should be able to show that. We've had a lot of success, and we've presented and talked about it. I don't hold it against my company for saying you guys need to do it, because we were doing that for everyone.

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 when we looked at the return that we should have gotten if every one of those projects actually delivered what they predicted, we learned that we would have 10 times the revenue of what we have 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.

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."

Hence, is estimating ROI advisable? Again, many respond with a blanket, "yes."

However...

On "green design"

2007-07-31T17:05:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday, I attended two presentations on "green design." Late in the afternoon, Terry Swack, Founder & CEO of Clean Culture and pictured at right, spoke at PARC on "Sustainable Product Design." Then, during the evening, frogdesign hosted a panel in San Francisco entitled, "The Many Shades of Green."

As reflected in both of those presentations and their content, green design is big these days, and for very good reasons. Burning Man has even gone green this year (in a manner of speaking)!

But as Terry put it:

"Many companies are beginning to understand what they need to do, but they just don't know what's most important and where or how to begin."

Hence, to borrow Terry's quote from Joel Makower's blog:

"...the pace of change seems oh-so slow" (October 2006)

It is interesting that both of the above quotes are akin to what many still say in reference to experience design rather than sustainable design. Indeed, there is lots of overlap in the nature and flavor of both conversations.

Consider these additional quotes from Terry's presentation, which are also akin to what is often said about user experience:

"...(corporate social responsibility) can be much more than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed—it can be a source of opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage.” (from "Strategy and Society: The Link Between competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility," December 2006)

"For change to occur, life cycle mindsets (must be) adopted and incorporated during conceptual product design stages."

Hence, those focused on moving user experience into a position of greater corporate influence might have something to learn from those focused on moving sustainable design into a position of greater corporate influence, and vice versa.

For example, an interesting strategy initiated by frogdesign is what they call the Kyoto Treaty of design (see Valerie Casey's "The Designer's Dilemma," Summer 2007). Outlining basic tenets of "a call to arms for the creative community around environmental stewardship," this treaty has, according to Valerie, been signed by every consultancy frogdesign has approached, thus increasing the chances the principles will be followed by any consultancy a company might take their business to. This is reminiscent of Clare-Marie Karat's efforts back in 1998 at getting companies to endorse a Computer User's Bill of Rights. Might there be other applications of such a strategy?

And what about green design of user experience?

In a paper that received the Best Paper Award at CHI 2007, Eli Blevis (pictured at right) "presents the perspective that sustainability can and should be a central focus of interaction design."

Jon Kolko and I, the incoming Editors-in-Chief of interactions magazine, are delighted that Eli will be contributing editor for an article on sustainable design for all issues of interactions magazine beginning in January 2008.

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The Venn diagram is from Adam Richardson's "Tragedy of the Commons," Summer 2007.

Secret agent (wo)man?

2007-07-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

At last week's BayCHI Usability Engineering Birds-of-a-Feather meeting, Anita Salem and Cynthia King presented the results of a highly-rated workshop conducted at UPA 2007. "In the workshop, experienced practitioners came together to look at how a richer understanding of change can help usability professionals create more sustainable user-centric organizations." The title of the workshop: "Beyond ROI: UCD as a Catalyst for Organizational Change."

The focus of much of the evening was John Kotter's eight stages of change and the actions that could be taken to achieve each stage as brainstormed by the workshop participants.

The eight stages:

Create a sense of urgency
Create a guiding coalition
Create a vision and strategy
Communicate the change vision
Empower broad-based action
Generate short-term wins
Consolidate and produce more change
Anchor new approaches in the culture

In a paper presented at DUX 2003 entitled, "Using a Change-Management Approach to Promote Customer-Centered Design," Stephen Sato and Andrew Panton described how Kotter's eight stages of change had helped them to institutionalize a customer-centered design approach within the product development organization of a division of Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, UK.

"Introducing the customer-centered design approach at the appropriate phase in the change-management process was crucial to its adoption.

... In order for the customer-centered approach to become institutionalized, the authors recognized that they needed to go beyond just changing practices in product design, and needed to affect changes to the organization structure, processes, and culture."

The advisability of considering the larger framework of organizational and cultural change has been recognized by others as well. For example, Don Fotsch, VP User Experience | Design & Product Planning at PayPal, keeps a handout at his desk which he received during a change management course he took when getting his MBA. The handout -- "Diagnosis for Organizational Design" by Robert Duncan -- describes a seven component design framework to help explain why an organization functions in the way it does, and provides guidance for analyzing how the seven components reinforce each other.

"When considering change, all seven components must be considered, and if one is changed it is most likely that the other components will have to be changed to be consistent with each other."

In an article entitled, "Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner as Change Agent," Paul Sherman wrote:

"As UX professionals, we have many tools and techniques available to us, and we contribute to our product teams in many ways. However, while having good UX skills is necessary, it is not alone sufficient. No matter the size of our organizations or the domains we work within, our most valuable contributions are not our design or user research efforts. Rather, our most valuable contributions occur when we function as change agents."

And during the session I led at CHI 2007 entitled, "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?", Secil Watson's concluding remarks included:

"Think of yourselves as change agents. If you like that role, then look at of yourselves as the people who can really change the culture of the organization you are a part of."

(Secil is Senior VP of Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo.)

However, I recently read an entry in someone's blog -- which, unfortunately, I'm unable to locate again -- which argued that user experience professionals should NOT reveal their intent to change an organization's culture, since doing so will increase the resistance they are likely to face. This argument reminded me of a 1995 article in Communications of the ACM entitled, "Succeeding as a Clandestine Change Agent," in which C. Dennis Allen wrote:

"This was my challenge: to change a development organization of hundreds of software engineers without letting them know it. The goal is the success of the organization, not necessarily to receive credit for your own contributions. ... Since talking directly to upper management had failed in my previous situation, I decided I would try a longer term, grass-roots strategy. ... I wanted to avoid the risks of cross-organizational antagonism that often leads to failure when one group is trying to 'fix' another group in the company."

However, in today's world, I'm not sure it remains as advisable to be clandestine and to not talk directly with upper management. Today, openness and enlisting everyone's support as well as their participation has a greater chance of success and might very well speed up a process which in many organizations has taken many years to achieve, some of which your company might not be able to wait.

Hail to the Chief!

2007-06-30T20:37:00.000-07:00

From a press release of last week:

"Cleveland Clinic has named M. Bridget Duffy, M.D., Chief Experience Officer, a newly created role designed to ensure all aspects of the patient experience at Cleveland Clinic meet the highest standards.

'We recognize that delivering World Class healthcare requires a lot more than providing patients with access to leading-edge treatments and technologies,' said Delos M. 'Toby' Cosgrove, M.D., CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic. 'As a leading healthcare provider, we must exceed the expectations of those we serve, offering compassion, showing empathy and providing patients with the responsiveness they deserve. With her passion for patient-centered initiatives, Dr. Duffy is the ideal person to oversee the Clinic’s efforts to provide a world-class patient experience.'

As Chief Experience Officer, Dr. Duffy will advance Cleveland Clinic’s Patient First Initiative by creating a culture that addresses the emotional and physical experience for the patient, restores empathy as a core value and recognizes the central role that employees play in delivering an exceptional patient experience."

During May of 2005, I posted an article entitled "The Chief Experience Officer" in my blog, refering to Challis Hodge's 2001 description of the role ("...should ensure that an organization delivers the appropriate experience at every point of contact it makes with the public") and to Jeffrey Rayport's March 2005 related description and his recommendation that companies create the position:

"To ensure desirable customer experiences, companies must appoint dedicated chief experience officers. Call this individual the 'other' CEO—or, as we prefer, the CXO (not to be confused with the commonly used term that refers to any C-level executive)."

In an article published later that year, Bill Buxton argued for the need for a CDO:

"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."

During 2006, James Gilmore and Joseph Pine of "The Experience Economy" fame chimed in with an article entitled, "Wanted: Chief eXperience Officers," and Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research began to advocate for a CC/EO -- a Chief Customer/Experience Officer. This year, additional advocates have surfaced (e.g., see "The New CEO -- Chief Experience Officer").

However, in the upcoming issue of interactions magazine, Jonathan Arnowitz writes:

"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.'"

Jonathan did not agree:

"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."

Why did my panelists not like the idea?

Panelist Secil Watson, Sr. VP of Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo, said:

"My one worry is that there are only so many things you can divide up in terms of accountability, so if you say you are the Chief Experience Officer, there is not much that you are accountable for yourself. ...that accountability truly lies across the organization."

Blogger Eric Mattson appears to agree with Secil, as suggested by his words of earlier in the year:

"Experiences are core to a multitude of management roles already in existence. The last thing you want to do is seperate responsibility for great experiences from marketing, customer service, sales, training and product development.

It's like hiring a chief ethics officer to make sure your organization is honest."

Two panelists argued that the role of the CXO (or CDO or CC/EO) should be played by the CEO (i.e., the Chief Executive Officer). Indeed, Jonathan Arnowitz and others claim that the CXO and CEO are one and the same at Apple. But few CEOs can do what Steve Jobs does when it comes to design and user experience. (Plus, it is not necessarily the case that a successful CXO need be as "hands-on" as Steve Jobs.)

Panelist Jim Nieters, Sr. Manager of User Experience Design at Cisco, argued that it would be difficult for anyone in such a role to have anything but symbolic value at Cisco:

"There is a Senior VP in charge of our security products -- that person defines strategy. Our Chief Security Officer is more of a visible function -- more of a political function. That person goes and talks with people out in Washington and that kind of thing. So, I'm not sure that a Chief Experience Officer would be able to make an impact in the company, because we are very stove-piped as a company -- we have business units and technology groups -- it is like a kingdom -- every business unit is its own profit and loss center, and each of the executives owns everything..."

Panelist Jeremy Ashley, VP of Applications User Experience at Oracle, was the panelist who expressed concern about "the board dictating the colors or fonts or other designs." However, he also said "it would be very good to have an advocate at that level, especially because then that advocate also controls budget, and we all know that budget is king."

And panelist Justin Miller, Sr. Director of Product at eBay for Europe, had this to say:

"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."

However, Justin's interpretation of the role might not be equivalent to Jonathan's. Lou Carbone has expressed concern about multiple interpretations, writing that the "definition and interpretation of the role and function of a Chief Experience Officer tends to be all over the board..."

Consider, for example, what Gilmore and Pine identify as the CXO's primary responsibility: to "develop, launch, manage and refresh a rich portfolio of paid-for experiences...created specifically to generate new sources of revenue and profits in an increasingly commoditized world."

Hmm... That definition and interpretation appears to be far different from that intended by the people at Cleveland Clinic or by most others referenced in this article.

Carbone's words of caution continue: "in far too many instances, both the people appointing the chief experience officer and the individual that’s appointed, don’t have the foggiest notion of what that role and function entail."

Challis Hodge, Jeffrey Rayport, Jonathan Arnowitz, Bill Buxton, Bruce Temkin, and Justin Miller are among those who have some pretty clear notions which, while not necessarily equivalent, would benefit lots of companies.

Quoting Jeffrey Rayport:

"The new executive must relentlessly focus on unifying the disparate functions of human resources, marketing, operations, sales, service, and technology. For most companies, such integration suggests an unholy alliance of warring fiefdoms and silos, and that's precisely why the C-suite needs an individual with the power and authority to deliver integrated experiences for customers."

As Jonathan entitled his upcoming interactions magazine article, "Enter the Chief Design Officer! Hail to the Chief!"

Already at work as Incoming Editors-in-Chief of "interactions" magazine

2007-06-21T00:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, Jon Kolko and I were appointed the next Editors-in-Chief of interactions magazine. (That is Jon at right on the cover of his recently published book.)

Though our first issue will not appear until January 2008, we have been working on fleshing out our vision for the publication, reconceptualizing the editorial board and structure, extending invitations of participation, meeting editorial and design staff, developing a strategy for a web presence, and much more.

Last month, I asked "How would you change 'interactions' magazine? What is missing? How could it be improved? How could it become more valuable to you?"

I've received responses from many, but I look forward to also receiving a response from you.

---
Many thanks to Ken Korman, Denise Doig, Mark Mandelbaum, Brooke Hardy, Andrij Borys, Alicia Kubista, and others for helping to make our interactions meetings in New York City both highly productive and enjoyable.

Breaking silos

2007-06-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

In an April blog posting entitled, "Breaking silos," David Armano described the value of shared project ownership among multiple Flash/Ajax developers in his place of work.

"Each touches a part of the project... Sometimes it's at the same time. Other times it's not. No one has clear ownership... Territories don't exist... It's a shared goal -- a purpose. ... It's organic. It's collaborative. It works."

And he suggests that others can benefit similarly:

"Tip for all the executives out there. ... If you find yourself working in silos -- ask yourself why this is. If our people in the trenches can work this way -- so can we."

However, is sharing ownership across disciplines or functions or business units like sharing ownership among multiple Flash/Ajax developers?

In the world of user experience, one of the challenges to shared ownership across disciplines is the lack of respect some disciplines have for others. Bill Buxton and Cliff Nass discussed the difficulty some people have trusting the expertise of others during my interview of the two of them on stage at CHI 99. Some of Cliff's words on this matter:

"There's been this idea that somehow design is this richy democratic process where we all listen to each other, we're all expert, we all take each other seriously. I don't think that is fully true. I think a better model is that we figure out who knows the most about an area and listen to them most closely. The artist should listen to the social scientists about social science and to the technologists about technology...be informed about the true constraints and the opportunities. But the artists have to be trusted to do art; social scientists and technologists shouldn't be doing art. Nor should artists be doing technology. Since it's really hard to be good at one of these things...let alone two or even three...I think that division of labor makes sense. This idea of participatory design is a good one, but not when it means the abdication of expertise.

I was once teaching a class at Stanford, which often has these democratic impulses, and I said, 'I can't remember who said this particular quotation: A or B.' One of the students raised their hand and said, 'Well, let's take a vote on it!' That idea about voting about facts...about voting about what's true, while it is charming and feels good, doesn't result in the best designs."

Some of Bill's words:

"I want to find out how to have the skill of user interface design understood so that people will respect it in the same way that they respect the skill of hacking an operating system or designing a microprocessor. Since the skill of design is not well understood, everybody is an expert, and they all have an equal vote. There's no other discipline that I'm aware of where everybody has an equal vote regardless of their skill or expertise."

Bill said similar things during a presentation at Stanford University earlier this month, telling a story about how the CFO and Head of HR had all sorts of input to product design at Alias | Wavefront (where Bill was Chief Scientist for many years), yet Bill was permitted no input into how corporate finances were handled.

Also earlier this month, the VP of a large user experience organization told me about having earlier in the day cut off a marketing manager who, during a design review, was about to recommend changes to some wording on a redesigned webpage. He explained to the marketing manager that the content personnel had that part of the design covered, and he told me of how his organization's content managers were just starting to get their feet under them again after having had their work messed up for a very long time by product managers. (See "Borrowing from the field of child development..." for references to more stories of this nature.)

However, in a blog entry I posted in March (a posting recently republished in UX Magazine), I referenced situations in which "checking your disciplines at the door" can be beneficial.

And as Claudia Kotchka, VP of Design Innovation & Strategy at P&G, argued during her recent presentation at Stanford, "turf wars are unproductive and never lead to design succeeding."

The issue of ownership of the user experience was among several issues addressed during a CHI conference session I led last month, and session participants had differing perspectives on this issue. One participant advocating shared ownership was Secil Watson, Senior VP of Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo. In my view, Secil's perspective is particularly insightful, as reflected in her words below which come from communication with me prior to the conference session:

"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 modelling, 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.

The (nearby) 'clover diagram' shows the key questions we all ask, regardless of our competencies. It also shows how achieving positive customer experiences presents an optimization problem. It's not about 'putting the customer at the center'. It's about finding a solution that meets multiple objectives. Finding the solutions require three things: 1. asking the right questions 2. Knowing who to go to to get the right answers 3. Having a culture that supports cross group collaboration (facilitating giving and receiving of help).

Collaboration and integrated work practices are critical. No one discipline can come up with the right answer - they would all only be able to 'locally optimize' their solutions. But putting everyone in the same organization, under the same roof, in the same room are also impractical solutions.

The change has to occur over time and be culturally encouraged: Individuals from different disciplines should know when to ask for another discipline's help, tools and opinions. To facilitate this information sharing, it's also critical that disciplines are open to sharing their tools and findings with other groups.

Asking for and offering help, tools and advice creates an economy of insight. And good insights drive organizations towards a culture that starts asking the right questions more often. At the same time, individuals become better able to connect to the right groups to get the answers to their questions.

My definition of a 'customer centric' culture is where people are asking the right questions to the right people, who are able and willing to collaborate to provide their insights. In such a culture, over time, individuals ask the right questions more often and get the right answers more often. This is a reinforcing feedback loop. As this culture takes hold, more and more of the solutions coming out of the group would yield positive customer experiences. Eventually, the center of the clover would grow...

So, a KPI for 'how customer centric is your organization' would measure how many of the "solutions" an organization creates do fall into the center of the clover as opposed to on one or two of the petals or even worse, outside of the clover."

For more on Secil's approach at Wells Fargo, see "Developing user-centered tools for business planning."

Riander Blog receiving growing attention worldwide

2007-05-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted that lots of people and companies are finding value in my blog.

People around the world have contacted me about it, and blogs around the world have referenced it.

One of the most notable references appeared in Putting People First, a blog by Mark Vanderbeeken in Italy that is read by approximately 2500 people every day.

Recently, UX Magazine -- a 2007 Webby Awards nominee for Best Business Blog, posted an entry from my blog and added another blog entry to their article editing queue.

And others, including Viaspire -- a 2007 blogger's choice awards nominee for Best Marketing Blog, have posted compliments.

I hope you'll find future Riander Blog postings warrant your attention and others' attention worldwide.

Metaphors for understanding organizational and process issues

2007-05-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

Metaphors come in handy for communicating about and even identifying organizational issues of relevance to user experience. For example, in "Changing the course or pace of a large ship," I wrote about a couple of commonly used boat metaphors:

"... the head of a now large and quite successful corporate user experience organization recently told me, early on (i.e., ~5 years ago when he joined the company as manager of a very small UI group), he felt like he was rowing a small boat to try to change the course of the large ship to which it is attached via a rope.

Interestingly, a director in another very large corporate user experience organization recently invoked a similar metaphor, describing the pace of change he was able to achieve as akin to the pace of an oil tanker rather than a speed boat. However, he was talking about the situation now, not years ago when the organization was in its infancy."

The speed boat metaphor appeared again in "What is holding User Experience back or propelling User Experience forward where you work?", answers to which were solicited from working professionals via collaborative "Speed Boat exercises":

"For one exercise, I drew a speed boat and several anchors hanging from it on the whiteboard, and asked everyone to write onto post-its whatever has been holding User Experience back where they work and then place those post-its on the several anchors.

... To learn what the students believe has been key to propelling User Experience forward where they work (to the extent that it has been propelled or is being propelled forward), I shifted the focus of the Speed Boat exercise from the anchors to -- you guessed it -- the engine propellers (see nearby photo). Interestingly, in several cases, "propelling forward" encompassed "moving upstream," to use yet another metaphor which, at least on the surface, is moving in the opposite direction!

... Why bother with the speed boats and the anchors and the propellers? There are several reasons, but one of the most interesting, in my view, is how they appear to help tap what participants actually 'experience' in their workplace."

And I've referenced other metaphors, including a couple of "three-legged stools" (e.g., of collaboration) that will fall over if any leg is missing.

Recently, I stumbled upon a couple of clever and more complex metaphors of a related nature.

In Thoughts on Microsoft Spark UX Summit, Adam Richardson wrote:

"...I had kind of a funny thought about UX while sipping from a plastic bottle of Ritz Carlton water. I noticed the nutrition label on the water, where everything was 0%. Now if you knew nothing about water and its importance to life you would think it was a completely useless and trivial liquid. It’s all around you and thus taken for granted, and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but exactly why some is good and some is bad you can’t really explain. It suddenly hit me that user experience is treated like water: on conventional business metrics it shows up as a 0 all across the board. However, user experience is something companies deliver whether they mean to or not, but they lack the means to see it or understand how to quantify what makes it good or bad. And increasingly UX needs to be treated as the life-sustaining element that keeps them alive by separating them from the competition. Achieving this requires addition of new metrics that actually reflect it."

And in a paper submitted to CHI 2007's alt.chi venue -- an experimental venue for "unusual, challenging, and thought-provoking work that might not otherwise be seen at the conference," Anna Swartling and colleagues described how a football metaphor can help one visualize organizational responsibility (or lack thereof) for usability.

"In our study of a procurer organization, we saw that even though both procurer and developer were positive towards usability, no one in particular took responsibility for it. Rather, for some, usability was perceived as omnipresent in many processes, and for others, if it wasn't included in the requirements specification, it was more or less absent. Usability was always someone else's problem or responsibility. We came to think of usability being "kicked" around, within the organization as well as during development. This transformed into sports and for us, closest to mind was football."

Anna and her colleagues developed this metaphor extensively, associating various systems development project roles with goal keepers, team captains, the referee, the audience in the stands, the home and visiting teams, and others. And by doing so, they were able to better understand why usability gets "kicked around" as it often does.

As the authors state:

"The advantage of a metaphor is that it enables the possibility to see things from a new perspective."

What metaphors have enabled you or others to better understand organizational and process issues of relevance to user experience?

---
Metaphor is critical to human thinking, particularly when dealing with abstract concepts as so well documented by George Lakoff. Check out the classic Metaphors We Live By for more information.

A user experience metaphor of a different nature that I stumbled upon recently: Mike Kuniavsky's use of magic as a metaphor for the design of ubiquitous computing devices. Those interested in exploring the benefits of this design metaphor should look back in the archives for Bruce Tognazzini's description of the insightful relationship between "Magic and Software Design."

So, whose advice really works?

2007-05-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, I led a session during the CHI 2007 conference entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?"

As I described in a preview, a major focus of the session was five means of -- according to many -- moving user experience into a position of corporate influence: documenting and evangelizing user experience work, owning the user experience, proper organizational positioning, calculating return on investment, and conducting "ethnographic" research. Indeed, according to many, each of these five means is critical to moving user experience into a position of corporate influence. However, one can find arguments against the use or importance of each means. Hence, of interest was which means played critical roles in moving user experience into a position of influence in the diverse mix of workplaces of six panelists, all in or having been in senior management positions via which they have moved user experience into a position of corporate influence.

During the session, I introduced each means, referencing arguments and evidence in support of the means, and referencing arguments and evidence to the contrary. Then, after the audience members proclaimed whether or not they believed that particular means was critical to moving user experience into a position of corporate influence, the six panelists moved to a location on stage reflecting whether or not the means played a critical role in their workplaces (see sample slide).

Note the dissimilarity of the configuration of the panelists in the two nearby photos showing their configuration for two of the five means. Indeed, there was a lot of movement on stage during the session. All six panelists were never together behind the same table, and different combinations of panelists were behind different tables (or "sitting on the fence" in the center) for all five means.

After moving into position for a means, panelists addressed how and/or why the means played or didn't play a critical role where they work.

So, what did the panelists say? Why is it that important words of advice regarding moving user experience into a position of corporate influence should be followed in some cases but not necessarily in all? When should one follow what advice?

The session, which received rave reviews, was recorded for addition to ACM's Digital Library, so you'll all have an opportunity to learn answers to those questions as provided by the panelists via that recording. I'll let you know when the recording becomes available.

However, you can find partial answers to these questions in previous entries in my blog, and I'll address the panelists' answers and the session further in upcoming entries. (I hear that a couple of other people might also be preparing online reports about the session.)

Justin Miller's final words during the panel provide some good overarching guidance. After referring to Jakob Nielsen's stages of corporate usability maturity as providing some good guidance regarding when to do what, Justin said:

"But the really important thing is referenced in the very last sentence of Jakob's article: 'Once you learn how to tickle the organization sufficiently to make it move, you can start planning for your next upgrade...' 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 is Senior Director of Product -- Europe, eBay.

For a couple of my thoughts on Nielsen's stages of corporate usability maturity, see Changing the course or pace of a large ship.

Photos courtesy of Nancy Frishberg.

How would you change "interactions" magazine?

2007-05-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

Let's say you had an opportunity to become an Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine (subtitled "New Visions in Human-Computer Interaction" and a bi-monthly publication of ACM SIGCHI), or that you at least had an opportunity to provide input to the incoming Editor(s)-in-Chief.

How would you change the magazine? Would you change it? What, if anything, is missing? How could it be improved?

I have greatly valued interactions magazine over the years, from the initial issues overseen by Editor-in-Chief John Rheinfrank (the first issue was published in January 1994), through a period of time during which it looks like there might not have been an Editor-in-Chief, through Steven Pemberton's years as Editor-in-Chief, and most recently, while Jonathan Arnowitz and Elizabeth Dykstra-Erikson have been sharing that role.

Indeed, I have quoted and otherwise referenced content from interactions in several of my articles in this blog.

But there are some things about the publication that I think could be improved. Are there some things about interactions that you think could be improved?

Please let me know (riander at well dot com), as I have an opportunity to significantly impact the nature and content of the magazine.

How could interactions magazine become more valuable to you?

Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?

2007-04-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

I'll be leading an "interactive session" at CHI 2007 entitled, "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?" Here is the abstract:

"Professionals working to move user experience (UX) into a position of corporate influence are impeded by conflicting recommendations, including those regarding the roles of documenting and evangelizing UX work, ownership of UX, organizational positioning, calculating return on investment, and conducting "ethnographic" research. In this interactive session, a group of senior UX management personnel who have moved UX into positions of rapidly increasing influence in their varied places of work debate their different perspectives and approaches to help resolve the conflicting recommendations and generate some new and improved guidance."

A four-page description of this session will be published and will become available in ACM's digital library. However, I've prepared a longer version of the description for you to download.

During recent weeks, I've posted blog entries that provide even more information about the focus of the session:

15 Feb 07: Documenting and evangelizing user experience work

24 Jan 07: Ownership of the user-customer experience

01 Feb 07: Does it matter where User Experience is positioned in your corporate structure?

13 Mar 07 Calculating return on investment

5 Apr 07 Conducting "ethnographic" research

And I recently activated the ability to comment on those postings to invite you to share your stories about your experiences. For example, the first comment to the last posting referenced above is from me and says:

"What has been your experience where you work? Has conducting 'ethnographic' research played a role in moving user experience into a position of corporate influence, or has it not played such a role? If it hasn't, could it? If it has, what role has it played?"

If you'd prefer, feel free to share information about your experiences just with me via email.

The experiences that will receive the greatest attention during the CHI conference session will be those of the following people:

Jeremy Ashley, Vice President of Applications User Experience, Oracle
Tobias Herrmann, Head of Team User Experience, mobilkom austria (represented by Manfred Tscheligi, Managing Director of USECON, Wien Austria)
Justin Miller, Senior Director of Product for Europe, eBay
Jim Nieters, Senior Manager User Experience Design, Cisco
Shauna Sampson Eves, Director of User Experience, Blue Shield of California
Secil Tabli Watson, Senior Vice President Internet Channel Strategy, Wells Fargo

(And I'll contribute a couple of my own stories as well.)

Watch this blog for additional information on the (topic of the) session, but if you are attending CHI 2007, I hope you'll join us Tuesday, 1 May, 14:30-16:00 in the San Jose Convention Center's Civic Auditorium.

Ramblings on the experience of food -- its preparation, eating, & judging -- and technology

2007-04-14T18:21:00.000-07:00

When Claudia and I went skiing earlier this year, we arrived at the Berkeley Ski Club lodge late in the afternoon to find the kitchen starting to fill with activity. "Join us for dinner," said Adrianne Parks almost immediately on behalf of a group of 8 which had made plans to jointly prepare and share the evening meal. And happily we did, joining in the food's preparation, followed by a wonderful, long meal complete with delightful conversation.

I love these kinds of experiences, as reflected in one of my first blog entries, though -- or perhaps "because" -- such experiences were rarely a part of my life until well into adulthood. My upbringing in the center of the U.S. (most often called "the midwest") meant that my participation in meal activity was for years largely limited to quietly eating tasteless food and drying dishes!

Now my experience of food includes shopping and talking food at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmers Market nearly every Saturday, as I described in my reflections on the year 2006.

Indeed, we were there this morning. And when we were there last Saturday, we had the bonus experience of an appearance by Cat Cora in the Ferry Building's Book Passage to promote her new cookbook. I've often enjoyed watching Cat work her magic in competition with other chefs on the Food Network's Iron Chef America.

On Iron Chef America, after two competing chefs prepare 5 or 6 dishes -- each featuring and highlighting an ingredient kept secret until the competition begins, three judges taste the dishes and debate their quality, then rate each chef's output on taste (10 points), originality of the use of the secret ingredient (5), and plating (5).

Comparisons with analyses of user experience by people in the world of technology are interesting. For example, in Technology as Experience, McCarthy and Wright emphasize that user experience includes the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of our interactions. All three of these aspects appear to be embedded in the Iron Chef America scales.

Another example: Mary Beth Raven claims that a world-class user experience has 4 parts: visual style, innovation, execution (defined as attention to detail, emphasis on delighting, and avoiding dissatisfaction), and usefulness. The first three clearly receive the attention of the Iron Chef America judges; I wonder whether the addition of a usefulness scale of some sort could make sense.

Cat, like the other competing chefs, cooks with 2 assistants on the show. Her unique punctuation on this process is the toast of ouzo they share at the end of the one hour permitted for cooking and plating. Perhaps the judges could also rate the teams on how well they worked together. Collaboration in the kitchen can be no less challenging than the workplace collaboration I've referenced in multiple blog entries.

Another type of "collaboration" featured on Iron Chef America is the judging, portions of which viewers get to watch. The interactions among the judges are often as entertaining as they are educational, since they, too, can be challenging, particularly when food columnist Jeffrey Steingarten is a judge.

Maybe Chef Anthony Bourdain will someday rate the judges like he recently rated some of the Iron Chefs and others who appear on the Food Network. Somehow, Cat Cora escaped Bourdain's attention in his no-holds-barred evaluations. I'd most look forward to reading his opinion of Jeffrey Steingarten!

---
Some analyses of user experience, such as David Sward's which is depicted in the nearby graphic (from the February 2007 Bringing the Voice of Employees into IT Decision Making), go well beyond the scope of the Iron Chef America scales. Which analysis of user experience would be most appropriate or beneficial in your world of work?

If you'd like to learn more about Iron Chef America, see Wikipedia's detailed description. Better yet, if you can, just watch the show!

Conducting "ethnographic" research

2007-04-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

I have argued for a long time that use of "ethnographic" research methods can play a major role in moving user experience into a position of significant corporate influence.

And I've referenced at least three examples of this kind of impact in past blog entries:

In my first blog entry of the year, I described how user experience personnel at Wells Fargo embed ethnographic research insights in user-centered design tools they have developed that are increasingly used by business strategists for strategic business planning, facilitating "a transition from a product- to a more customer-centric culture."
In "On concept design, ethnography, MRDs, and product vision" and "Making changes to a company's culture," I described how ethnographic research enabled the conception and design of a new, successful product at Intuit, spawning a series of new products from a company that had been "entrenched in twenty-one years of legacy processes and mindsets" and, hence, hadn't released a "version 1.0" product for many years.
In "Perturbing the ecosystem via intensive, rapid, cross-disciplinary collaboration," I described how involving product management and marketing and engineering personnel in ethnographic research analysis and synthesis at Yahoo! changed a somewhat contentious, confused relationship between product management and user experience personnel into a strategic partnership.

References to additional examples can be found elsewhere. For example, during an October 2006 interview by Mark Vanderbeeken, Anne Kirah said:

“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 helped the company change from techno-driven to people-driven design."

(Note that later in the interview, Mark asked, "Is Microsoft now a people-centred company?" Anne's response: "Parts of it are, parts of it are not. But that is the direction they are going...")

However, is conducting ethnographic research essential for user experience to have that kind of impact?

At CHI 2007, I'll be leading a session entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?" featuring a group of 7 people who have been or who are in senior management roles in a mix of companies. Though all 7 have helped move user experience into a position of corporate influence, ethnographic research has not played (that much of) a role in all cases.

Why is this?

We'll address these questions, along with related questions regarding "ownership of user-customer experience," "organizational positioning," "documenting and evangelizing user experience work," and "calculating return on investment" during the conference session. And I'll address all these topics further and the CHI conference session itself in upcoming blog entries.

The internal consultancy model for strategic UXD relevance

2007-03-23T14:24:00.000-07:00

Jim Nieters, Manager of Cisco's "central" User eXperience Design (UXD) Group, Subbarao Ivaturi, Technical Lead in that group, and Garett Dworman, a Senior Design Architect for Tec-Ed consulting to Cisco, will be presenting an "experience report" entitled, "The Internal Consultancy Model for Strategic UXD Relevance" at CHI 2007.

I interviewed the three of them about the topic of the report last month.

Richard: Why did you choose to write this report for the CHI conference?

Jim: We had seen a lot of discussions about different organizational models at CHI. What we hadn't seen was anybody talking about the internal consultancy model. For example, there was a tutorial done at CHI that talked about different organizational structures. They talked about forming a team around a centralized funding model -- a cost-center model. They talked about structuring a team around a client-funding model where you get money from business units to pay for your team. And they talked about a distributed model where teams sit in the business units. But they didn't talk about an internal consultancy model. And we've found at Cisco that this model has been very effective. So, we decided that it would be worth sharing information about it with the larger community.

Subbarao: We also wanted to educate the CHI community about what experiences we were having at Cisco in using different models -- what successes we've had, what issues we face, and how we are addressing those.

Richard: Describe the internal consultancy model.

Subbarao: We function as a consulting firm within Cisco. We provide services to product teams that request them, but when we work on projects, we go in as a team rather than an individual, emulating portions of what design firms often do.

Jim: A design firm would come into the company, they would bid on a project, and they would assemble a cross-functional team of visual designers, interaction designers, maybe developers, user researchers, usability engineers, ... and they would deliver great value. In our case, we saw that when we had one designer focused on many projects, it was difficult for that person to dig deep, and it really diluted their value. Because Cisco is a technology-led company without full understanding of user experience, we could not afford to continue to dilute our value by delivering incremental improvements. So, we decided to focus on only a few projects very intensively and provide great impact. So, for example, Subbarao has led many teams within the organization that have delivered tremendous value, and he has been allowed to own the user interface, which is a part of our price of entry. Those are projects where we've made millions of dollars for the company. In the previous model, we may have made only incremental improvements which were difficult to measure.

Richard: The title of your report includes the word "strategic" -- it states that this model is for "strategic" UXD relevance. Is that what you are beginning to talk about? Is that why you say the model is important strategically?

Jim: That is exactly it. The typical structure is where one person works on many design projects, and you can afford that in companies where the UXD function is embedded and is a standard part of the process, because teams expect that. Cisco has been a technology-led company rather than experience-led, and we found that we can only make incremental improvement (using that model), and when you only make incremental improvement, the product team can then say a year later, "Well, gosh, it is not a great product; UXD only did a good job, not a great job." We decided that to make sure we had a presence at the table with executives making strategic decisions and to gain the visibility necessary to grow the function within the company, we needed to create a big name for ourselves. And that big name is achieved by working on projects where we can deliver, for example, $100 million dollars worth of impact. At Cisco, we have a huge scale, so $100 million worth of impact is possible, because we go after the projects where there is a lot of revenue opportunity. What that has done has given us a voice at the table from a strategic standpoint.

Garett: I'll interject from an outsider's perspective that at Cisco, there is a need for the UXD team to prove themselves. Many of us have experienced usability as being difficult to bring into design process, since lots of people don't quite understand what user experience means. But some companies are more receptive to that than others. Over the past 3 or 4 years, Cisco has been readily accepting the terminology, and happy to say, "yes, we want user experience." But when it comes to doing it, a lot of the personnel I meet don't really know what it is and don't always understand why it is valuable. They've been told they've got to do it, but they think it gets in their way. They have timelines which are often agressive; they have a lot of other teams they need to get work done with. Why should they bother talkiing with user experience professionals who appear to be slowing down the process by wanting to talk with users, when the product team already knows what users want (or so they think)? So there has to be palpable evidence that this is really worth doing. I think this has forced Jim's hand. Incremental changes are good and important, but people don't notice them.

Richard: It sounds as if there might be times when the UXD group turns down requests for services?

Jim: Many times, in fact. We've changed the dialogue so that we don't have to sell our services. Because of the impact we've been having, we are able to turn people away and choose the projects that are the most valuable -- projects where the people really want to work with us and will partner with us, where there is a big business opportunity so we can show a big financial return, and where executives will be willing to give us some of the credit so that we can articulate that they made a big return on investment in UXD.

Richard: Is there a danger in saying "no" to some requests. Might that not hurt you strategically?

Subbarao: There could be that danger, but with the previous model, we were accepting all requests, and we couldn't achieve the kind of excellence we wanted to on each project because we were spread too thin.

Richard: The internal consultancy model is actually only a part of the overall Cisco model with respect to user experience. Talk a bit about where UXD is positioned elsewhere in the company.

Subbarao: At Cisco, we have three main user experience groups -- one for the Cisco intranet, one for the external-facing cisco.com, and our central UXD consultancy that works on revenue-generating products that ship to customers. There also are smaller user experience groups within business units that are starting to build their own programs.

Jim: Our goal really is to help those product organizations understand the need to build a user experience competency. So we augment those smaller teams. When an organization's UX team can't handle all of their projects, they call on us on a project basis.

Richard: Where is your consultancy positioned within Cisco?

Jim: We're in the Customer Advocacy organization -- an organization outside of Engineering. We've been positioned within Engineering in the past. We've also followed the centralized model and the distributed model -- we've had teams in the business units as dedicated teams. At this point, Customer Advocacy is the voice of the customer to a great extent within the company. So, from our perspective, it made the most sense to locate there. Maybe in the future that should change.

Richard: Say some more about the history that ultimately led you to implement this internal consultancy model.

Jim: When Subbarao joined the company around six years ago, we had a client funding model where business units provided us with some of their headcount. Cisco was growing so fast as a company, that we actually had promises from executives that we were going to be able to hire 60 people in our central organization. It was as if everybody was throwing requisitions at us. Then we had the downturn in 2001. At that point, executives said they had to pull back their funding for UXD headcount. During that transition, we were successful at converting those people to be centrally funded resources. But the challenge with that was that we grew to almost 60 people, and when you grow to almost 60 people, you become a cost center. And when you are a cost center, people target you; even if you are delivering value, it can become a political challenge no matter what company you are in. Hence, we decided that being a cost center wasn't going to be successful. So, we moved out of Engineering and into the Customer Advocacy organization, and decided that we were going to have a smaller group that we would expand and shrink as needed via access to a pool of outside consultants. When a project requires resources beyond what we have in the UXD group, the business unit pays for those resources.

An example of how we do that is the case of a product that Garett, an employee of an outside consulting firm, is working on now with some members of our UXD group. The product team is paying us about $200,000, but we're supplying money as well. Hence, it is a shared model, with the goal of partnering very strongly with the business unit. Neither organization is paying the whole cost. The business unit is trying to start earning $20 million per year more than they are today, and they feel that our help, costing them $200,000, will help them do that. From their perspective, the return on that investment is pretty significant. So, you can see that the business units are providing us with the dollars that enable us to expand our staff as we need to by hiring consultants.

Richard: How well has that worked for you, Garett?

Garett: It has worked very well. In some ways, it has made it much easier for Tec-Ed, my employer, to move from one project within Cisco to the next. We don't have to go through a complete sales cycle each time. Now, when I am working on a project that is coming to a close, we can approach Jim to discuss projects that are coming up for the UXD group that I might move right on to.

There is a slight issue with identity, in that the UXD group wants to expand their ability by hiring outside consultants, but they still want to be seen by the rest of Cisco as just the UXD group. They don't want to be seen as the UXD group and other consultancies. We've been working that out, as Tec-Ed does want it to be known that it is involved in the work.

Jim: The issue of branding -- Cisco-branded, partner-branded, or co-branded -- is something that has to evolve more, because leveraging partnership has to be sustainable for everybody. That is one area of challenge that we have to solve going forward.

Garett: But it hasn't been that much of an issue. And it has been easier for us to consult to Cisco, because I can look to the rest of the UXD group as partners. So, for example, if we needed a report creation module on the project I'm working on now here, I can find out whether someone in the UXD group has worked on such a module on another project, and then leverage that work, which is truly helpful. Before, when I was working on a project for Cisco that lasted a year and a half, I was very removed from the UXD group and was working from a more isolated position; that made it easy for me to clearly say I'm from Tec-Ed, but I couldn't use all the resources of the UXD group.

Subbarao: Another challenge is that the consultants have to be able to quickly learn both the technology and the UXD practices at Cisco. We've tried to address that challenge by developing a pool of consultants that we use a lot, so most of the consultants we bring in already know a lot about the technology and our processes.

Richard: Talk a bit more about the culture of Cisco, and about any other characteristics of Cisco, which make the internal consultancy model advisable here.

Subbarao: The key thing, as Jim and Garett said earlier, is the need to show significant impact to product teams and other decision makers.

Jim: That is right. In the HCI industry, we talk a lot about return on investment and whether you can measure it. As part of the engagement model for the consultancy, we measure the "before" and the "after," and we make sure we will get testimonials from the executives to support our ROI claims. Over the years, the team has had over $2 billion of impact, which is tangible, and we can get testimonials from executives saying that that has been the case. This has made it possible for us to say, "Look at the value; it is a clear return on your investment." With prior organizational models, it was more difficult for us.

Also important is the partnership we establish with the product teams up front. It is a matter of ensuring that we are integrated with the teams and considered relevant by the teams' executives at the very beginning. We get those agreements up front, and that makes a big difference.

Subbarao: And coming out of all this is better user experience. We show tangible value not just in terms of dollars but also in how the user experience has evolved.

Richard: In what (other) types of companies should this kind of model be considered?

Jim: Companies where you don't have company-wide, executive level buy-in but where at least some product teams know they need an improved user experience and are willing to work with your UXD team and allow the team some ownership over the user experience.

Complex systems companies. You can contrast that type of a company with volume operations companies like Yahoo! and Intuit, where user experience is a requirement from the beginning. Cisco is technology-led and was successful as a technology company. We're trying to show -- and I think we are doing that -- that user experience itself can be that next advanced technology, that it is that next thing that can get you a billion dollars.

Garett: Of relevance to that point is the Cisco product I'm working on now. We've learned from customers that they think that the product does what Cisco says it does, and they are happy with that. However, they have had to go to extra machinations to find out whether it was doing what Cisco says it does, because the user interface is not very good. And what Cisco is finding is that competitors are making tremendous headway against Cisco in this product field. There is no evidence that competitors' products work better, but there is evidence that these other products have a user interface that provides users with the information they want about what is going on. With the Cisco product, users are not sure what is going on. It has become pretty clear that Cisco's product would really take off if it had as good or better of a user interface.

Richard: Will the internal consultancy model be best for Cisco long-term?

Subbarao: I think all models have to evolve, but I think we have shown tangible results for this model. When we see significant change in the Cisco landscape around others' expectations or behavior, or regarding how well we can scale our own efforts by staffing more people in-house, at that point we should look at how we should change the model.

Jim: I agree. For example, if Cisco were to hire a Director of User Experience for every major technology group that we have in the Engineering organization, we may be able to become largely a central infrastructure team providing tools, processes, labs, education, career progression, etc. Presently, we don't have the governance across the company that supports user experience actively enough. We only have local governance -- that is, governance at the product team level. Garret is right that the executives are saying the right things about user experience, but until we see it more globally accepted across the company, I think this model works. Once user experience gets accepted across the company, it makes sense to consider a different model.

Garett: I agree. There are two factors. One is resources. The UXD group doesn't have enough resources to cover all of Cisco's needs for UXD, even if it keeps hiring out to firms like Tec-Ed. The second is moving beyond jumping on the bandwagon and using the cool terms that are alive today. Once people understand what those terms really mean and imply -- once user experience has a good hold in the culture, and once there are enough resources, then the UXD group can move on to the next model.

Richard: Thank you.

Steven Pemberton

2007-03-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

I was delighted when I received email from Steven Permberton a couple of weeks ago saying that he'd be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area and asking whether I'd be available to get together.

I was fortunate to have worked with Steven when we were both on the SIGCHI Executive Committee several years ago. Steven was Editor-In-Chief of SIGCHI Bulletin for several years when SIGCHI Bulletin was actually a substantive publication; he was subsequently Editor-In-Chief of interactions magazine (1998-2004). Steven also helped found SIGCHI.NL, SIGCHI's chapter in the Netherlands; hence, Steven also participated in workshops I gave when I was SIGCHI's Local Chapters Chair.

Steven was visiting the area for a meeting of one of the two W3C Working Groups he chairs. This work and some of his other "Projects Past and Present" are described on his home page, where he states:

"If there is one thread that runs through these projects, it is about people. In particular, what are the changes that need to be made to the system architecture to make the resulting system more human oriented."

Steven shared the following elaboration with me:

"One of the main problems with current systems is that they are not built to support usability. Designers are forced to add usability as a layer over the underlying system. And then time and again, for each program anew. Imagine if systems didn't support filestores but only the ability to write bytes to the disk. Then for each program you would have to write the code to deal with files, and you can be sure that each program would have its own filestore bugs, programs wouldn't be interoperable at the filestore level, and there would be acres of guidelines on designing filestores. Well, that's what we have with usability today but on a far grander scale. System architecture is designed by technicians who don't realise the far-reaching effects their design decisions are having. And as a result, usability is a band-aid over the top of bad system architecture."

I asked Steven about the challenges he encounters in his work for W3C in addressing this problem:

"W3C is, of course, essentially technological, though there are areas that are people-oriented, in particular accessibility and internationalisation. I think the problem is two-fold: firstly, W3C is balkanised along the major design axes. There are people thinking about accessibility, device independence, internationalization, and so on, but they are not in general embedded in the groups doing the actual designs, so that often the non-design groups end up writing guidelines - band-aids. Secondly, W3C is member-driven. This is a good thing in general, but it creates a vicious circle: if W3C doesn't do usability, no one from usability will join, and if no one from usability joins, there is no one to demand that it be done. As a result, there is no group responsible for usability within W3C and therefore not enough attention is paid to it."

Steven travels a lot giving keynotes and other invited talks about his perspectives and his work for W3C. Slides from many of his presentations are accessible via his home page, along with audio of various interviews (most in Dutch).

Are you familiar with the concept and experience of a Dutch auction? Over a drink, Steven told me about his first-hand experience. Wikipedia includes a description, but that description fails to mention the second stage that is included for auctions of residences, a process via which Steven and his partner Astrid purchased the residence next to theirs enabling them to expand their residence to accomodate their growing family (those are their two sons riding on the front of Steven's bicycle).

Perhaps Steven and Astrid should expand their award-winning guide to Amsterdam to address Dutch auctions in full. Be sure to access that guide should you be planning a trip to their wonderful city.

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Top photo of Steven by Barbara Mensink.

Calculating return on investment

2007-03-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

Much has been reported about the importance of analyzing return on investment (ROI) for user experience to gain influence in a corporate context.

For example, Tobias Herrmann, Head of Team User Experience at mobilkom austria, wrote in "Corporate UX -- Bringing value to the mobile industry" that "a tailored ROI model was the key to success":

"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. Further, we included some major user experience KPIs in the Corporate Balanced Scorecard, and even in variable bonus systems for employees. As you might imagine, all these activities strongly supported organizational sustainability, but even more built up a common mindset on user experience and its relevance."

And my conversations with Justin Miller, now Senior Director of Product in Europe at eBay, confirm that estimating ROI has played a major role in moving user experience into a position of influence at eBay. Indeed, at CHI 2004, Jeff Herman described "A process for creating the business case for user experience projects" that enabled eBay's User Experience & Design group to achieve "significant success sponsoring successful user experience projects."

Yet, when he was VP of User Experience at Oracle, Dan Rosenberg wrote:

"…in my 20 plus years of experience, I have never been asked to produce an ROI analysis. Why has this never been necessary? Have I just been lucky in my choice of employers? Did these companies all have CEOs so enlightened about usability that no such analysis was necessary? I suspect not."

And just last month, David Siegel argued the following:

"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. To be convincing, ROI analysis has to focus on easily measured variables that impact near-term outcomes. This can distort the way the value of our contribution is conceptualized and recognized, and artificially isolates UCD from other factors that affect the product’s ultimate success. Even more important, it can lock us into a peripheral tactical role where we address only modest incremental improvements. 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."

Should you attend to calculating ROI where you work? Cannot such calculations contribute to strategic business planning?

This issue is among several that will be addressed by a group of people in senior management roles from a mix of companies during a session I'll be leading at CHI 2007 -- a session entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?". Tobias Herrman (represented by Manfred Tscheligi) and Justin Miller -- both referenced above -- and Jeremy Ashley, Oracle's current VP of User Experience, will be among the session participants.

As I reported in earlier postings, "ownership of user-customer experience," "organizational positioning," and "documenting and evangelizing user experience work" are among other issues that will also be addressed during that session. And I'll address all these issues further as well as the CHI conference session itself in upcoming blog entries.

"Check your disciplines at the door" when beneficial

2007-03-07T11:07:00.000-08:00

During a user experience leadership seminar that I gave last summer, I asked about the extent to which the company's user experience personnel collaborated with each other as well as with others. I had just argued that such collaboration is important and can have a huge impact on the success of a multidisciplinary user experience group or organization.

For the only time during the seminar, the group of user experience practitioners responded with near silence.

I was surprised by this, since discussions about collaboration are often quite animated and can yield lengthy lists of frustrating obstacles encountered in the workplace. However, in this particular workplace, collaboration was seemingly not viewed as an important goal.

To some, collaboration means that nasty "designing by committee" or being forced to defend one's expertise.

To others, a process which facilitates contributions across discipline boundaries is often beneficial.

Consider what Dave Malouf wrote about his new work environment this past December:

"While most design projects seem to have a single designer at the helm, there are projects where different players (industrial designer, researcher, ux designer [read interaction designer]) are all engaged on a single project (Industrial Designer is usually the lead), no one really cares where ideas come from. 'Credit' seems to be shared across the team, thus encouraging more ideas to be generated because people have less fear about grasping ownership and care more about creating great things."

In a recent interview by Lisa Reichelt, Bill Moggridge calls this "checking your disciplines at the door," which he recommends for teams which also -- and which often should -- include personnel from additional disciplines, such as engineering and marketing.

Don Norman concurs, as quoted in "Ownership of the user-customer experience":

"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."

Lifetime Award

2007-02-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

When Peter O'Toole was informed that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was to present him with an honorary lifetime award in 2003, "he originally intended to turn it down feeling that the lifetime award signaled the end of his career. He wrote the Academy a letter stating that he was 'still in the game'."

Peter's recent, wonderful Oscar-nominated performance in Venus and his upcoming appearances in several other movies shows how right he was.

At CHI 2007 this spring, SIGCHI will be giving me its Lifetime Service Award, even though I, too, am "still in the game." Peter O'Toole was decades older when he wrote that letter than I am now, but I greatly appreciate the award and am happy to have been able to contribute to the field worldwide via SIGCHI.

Here is what SIGCHI has published about me in its award announcement:

"Richard I. Anderson is a user experience practice, management, and organizational development consultant with more than 20 years of experience. He was on the founding committee and served as program chair (1990-2002) and chair (first elected chair) of BayCHI, the largest chapter of SIGCHI, but has also traveled around the world growing and facilitating SIGCHI chapters internationally. Richard was the SIGCHI Local Chapters Chair for 5 years, from 1996-2001. He authored numerous SIGCHI Bulletin articles, wherein he offered case studies, advice and support for local SIG leadership. He organized and led popular annual workshops for chapter leaders at the CHI conference. Richard also served as a member of 4 CHI conference committees (including the upcoming CHI '08) and served as the CHI 2005 Development Consortium Chair, in addition to serving on the committee for 3 DUX conferences. Finally, Richard has authored multiple articles for interactions magazine. Through his leadership, he has facilitated and spread the word about human-computer interaction literally around the world."

I've written about some of the above-referenced work in various places. For example, in "Offshoring user experience work," I wrote:

"As SIGCHI's Local Chapters Chair for 5 years, I somewhat unknowingly helped make offshoring of user experience work a fact of life, working with people around the world to help them set up and successfully lead and manage regional and national HCI communities. Countries in which I helped establish and grow SIGCHI chapters included India, Russia, Romania, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, Poland, Mexico, Czech Republic, Israel, Chile, New Zealand, and Bulgaria, many of which are identified in a January 2006 issue of BusinessWeek as countries competing for offshore outsourcing by U.S. and Western European companies."

In "1996-2001 CHI Local SIGs Column Sampler," I review the many articles I wrote and edited about forming, leading, and promoting professional organizations around the world. Many of them are still relevant and of value to (potential) chapter leaders of any professional association, not just SIGCHI, and to some extent even to (potential) leaders of user experience organizations in for-profit companies, though that was not my intent.

A list of the dozens of BayCHI programs I put together is still accessible on my website, though it and additional information about each program can now be found on BayCHI's website.

I still get called "Mr. BayCHI" every so often, even though I ended my 12-year stint as BayCHI Program Chair and emcee a few years ago. And, delightfully, I still communicate with and run into people from around the world that I worked with as SIGCHI's Local Chapters Chair.

I miss all that work sometimes. I still lend SIGCHI a bit of a hand, but my professional association attention has shifted more towards the cross-disciplinary focus of UXnet, for which I am a member of the Board of Directors. (UXnet is still in its early stages of development, but it recently launched an Organizations network to facilitate communication and collaboration among major non-profit, user experience related organizations; SIGCHI is among the network's initial members. Additionally, BayCHI has helped sponsor the UXnet ambassadors in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

I most miss my work for SIGCHI in and for other countries. I have done other work in other countries, but I am interested in working and having an impact on work in other countries much more. So, if you are, for example, looking for someone to oversee and coordinate development of your international user experience research and design practice and organization...

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No, of course I'm not comparing myself to Peter O'Toole, and, unfortunately, I never did make it to the Arabian desert, as he did as T.E. Lawrence.

The quote about Peter O'Toole comes from the Internet Movie Database.

Special thanks to Marilyn Tremaine.

Documenting and evangelizing user experience work

2007-02-15T11:40:00.000-08:00

Many have argued that explaining and advocating for user experience work is a critical part of every user experience professional's job.

And many have provided guidance for doing so better. Examples include:

Evangelizing User Experience Design on Ten Dollars a Day, a 2002 list of (and discussion about) "effective, low-cost techniques"
How Can Rhetoric & Argumentation Help Us Make the Case for UCD?, a CHI 2006 Special Interest Group session and CHI-Atlanta May 2006 presentation
Promoting Usability Within Your Organization, a May 2006 NYC UPA presentation

Our Managing User Experience Groups course also addresses this topic, providing guidance from a number of sources.

Yet, others have argued that user experience professionals excessively discuss the nature of their work -- that others don't really care nor should care or will just become concerned, and that process documents end up not getting followed anyway. As Bloomer and Wolfe state in Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team:

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

Is it truly never advisable to document and evangelize user experience work?

This issue is among several that will be addressed by a group of people in senior management roles from a mix of companies during a session I'll be leading at CHI 2007 -- a session entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?". Participants will describe the roles, large and small, that documenting and evangelizing user experience work have played in their workplaces, and will discuss the extent to which such efforts were important to achieving corporate influence.

As I reported in earlier postings, "ownership of user-customer experience" and "organizational positioning" are among the other issues that will also be addressed during that session. And I'll address all these issues further as well as the CHI conference session itself in upcoming blog entries.

DUX 2007

2007-02-12T19:23:00.000-08:00

DUX (Designing for User eXperiences) 2007 :: Chicago
November 5 - 7, 2007

Theme: Social media and networks are producing a new set of expectations regarding people's ability to contribute, create, personalize, and share information.

These new expectations are changing the roles, methods and responsibilities of Designers and Researchers. The effects are being realized through:

Ease of access to new types of information
Explosion and redefining of online communities
Emergence of new tools and capabilities
Significant shifts to the worlds of product development, advertising, marketing, and customer service

DUX2007 will surface issues and strive to define the role of designers in this time of shifting spaces.
Location: Intercontinental Hotel (on Magnificent Mile)
505 North Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611 USA

The conference website should be launching later this week.

Conference Chairs (chairs at dux2007.org):
Parrish Hanna, SIGCHI
Joseph O'Sullivan, AIGA
John Finnegan, SIGGRAPH

Mobile persuasion in short, high-speed bursts

2007-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

The design of the "conference experience" is an interest of mine, as one who has played various roles in designing different portions of conference experiences and, of course, as one who prefers to have a good experience at conferences I attend.

I was particularly interested in the design of the experience of the one-day, single-track Mobile Persuasion conference held at Stanford University last Friday.

The conference content was itself of great interest. The diverse collection of topics addressed included augmenting reality with mobile technology, using cell phones as performance coaches, using cell phones to facilitate social change, mobile advertising, mobile dating, using mobile technology for health and wellness, and the relationships people have with their mobile phones. Of particular interest to me, as one who has engaged in, managed, and advocated "ethnographic" research in business (see, for example, "Designing for emerging, non-western markets"), was the session on the different roles mobile phones play in different cultures.

Thirty-one speakers, not counting session moderators, were spread across 8 sessions, limiting each presentation to just a few minutes. "I thought the communicated limit of 9 minutes for my presentation was just a typo," proclaimed one speaker in the men's room. Some speakers were permitted even less time. And in the final "lessons learned" wrap-up session, each of the 4 speakers who were asked to share their interpretations of what they heard and saw during the previous 7 sessions were permitted to speak no more than 30 seconds at a time (each could speak several times, but for no longer than 30 seconds each time). And everyone was carefully timed.

Such limits can prompt experiences and expressions of frustration from speakers and attendees alike, unless each session and each piece thereof is appropriately designed. As suggested earlier, not quite all of the speakers were fully prepared to be constrained by such time limits; as Jeremy Lind blogged, some presenters were "skipping and flipping their slides (note to self: always prepare your slides for the right time limit)." And most presentations appeared to be independently prepared, without much knowledge of or reference to the contributions of other participants in the same session.

Yet, most speakers were ready for and, thankfully, didn't fight the time limit. And, in my view, the final session of the day in which the participants could speak in only 30-second bursts was greatly enhanced by that constraint, making the session more conversational -- more interactive, prompting more contrasts and comparisons of perspectives and resulting in comments that leveraged and built off of the comments of others.

I applaud the jam-packed sessions and the associated time constraints imposed by Conference Chair BJ Fogg, who had previously participated as a presenter in a conference program with similarly jam-packed sessions and for which I was a Program Chair -- DUX 2003.

Since so much mobile persuasion itself occurs in short, high-speed bursts, ...

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Note that the above posting is not a comprehensive review of the conference experience. Among conference features not mentioned were the many small, tall tables intended to attract attendees during breaks for discussions about the different mobile persuasion topics displayed on signs above the tables. And there were the fun giveaways that could be received only if an attendee returned from a break on time (that BJ is a stickler for time, no?). And...

Does it matter where User Experience is positioned in your corporate structure?

2007-02-01T15:44:00.000-08:00

Last May, I posted a lengthy blog entry entitled, "Where should 'User Experience' be positioned in your company?" that received a great deal of attention. In it, I referenced several factors to consider when determining organizational positioning. Among them:

what "user experience" means in the company
the nature of and effect on working relationships
organizational goals
who has the power
the corporate culture

I also referenced how organizational positioning is considered to be very important to a lot of people, including a lot of User Experience Managers, Directors, and VPs, and including everyone who had taken our Managing User Experience Groups course (many of whom were in user experience management positions). Indeed, figuring out where User Experience should be positioned is one of the many things students of the course work on, as reflected in the nearby photo.

And since last May, I've learned about additional situations in which organizational positioning appeared to be impactful. For example, Peter Merholz wrote about "the frozen middle" in August of 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.”

However, in March of last year, Forrester Research published a report entitled, "Culture and Process Drive Better Customer Experiences" that challenged the importance of organizational positioning:

"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."

While I agree that cultural factors and internal processes are very important, does the fact "that there is no single organizational structure that paves the way for delivering better customer experiences" mean that organizational structure has little impact? I don't think so.

Can't organizational positioning impact culture and internal process? Aren't culture and internal process among the factors to consider when determining organizational positioning?

Can culture and process trump any organizational positioning?

This issue is among several that will be addressed by a group of people in senior management roles from a mix of companies during a session I'll be leading at CHI 2007 -- a session entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?"

As I reported last month, "ownership of the user-customer experience" is another of the issues that will be addressed during that session. And, of course, I'll address all those issues as well as the CHI conference session itself further in upcoming blog entries.

S.M.A.R.T. versus I.T.O.C.A. goals

2007-01-31T09:34:00.000-08:00

Our course entitled (though apparently not just about) "Managing User Experience Groups," does address a few basic management topics, including setting individual and group goals.

During the first offering of the course early last year, we included a short section on SMART goals -- types of goals to which I believe I was first introduced when I was a Director at Studio Archetype. Indeed, one of my responsibilities at Studio Archetype was to help those who reported to me set goals that were Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-dimensioned (aka SMART).

However, when we addressed this topic during the course, we learned that most everyone was familiar with SMART goals. But perhaps more interestingly, many groaned as the topic was introduced. So, during the second offering of the course late last year, we didn't address such goals in class, though we provided students with a relevant, optional reading.

Some of those who groan on encountering the topic of SMART goals might be particularly interested in what Robert Middleton has to say about them:

"You've probably read a lot about goal setting. Perhaps you've heard of the famous "S.M.A.R.T." formula - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Specific. Well that's OK, but it's not really the best way to set goals.

To set and achieve goals you need to be unreasonable.

We tend to completely undermine ourselves by being reasonable. And unfortunately, the S.M.A.R.T. formula is totally reasonable. It keeps you inside a very rigid box of what's possible.

But why do you want to set goals that are possible? You want to set goals that are impossible. (At least from your current point of view.) You want to set goals that set you on fire.

Goals that take passion, sweat, blood and tears to achieve.

... I give you my not-so-famous I.T.O.C.A. Formula:

1. IMAGINE you're on your death bed looking back. And you say to your loved ones gathered around, "You know I've had a pretty good life, but I really wish I'd done X." What is X? That's your unreasonable goal.

2. THINK about it all the time. Don't push it out of your mind. Obsess about it; brainstorm and draw mind maps. Get the idea out of the abstract and into the concrete. Form a mastermind group and kick around ideas. Make it real.

3. Be aware of OPPORTUNITIES and coincidences that present themselves. You couldn't see them before, but now, with increased focus on your goal, you'll start seeing, reading, hearing about things that are connected to your goal. Explore these things. They're there to help you.

4. When the time is right, make a COMMITMENT. On the TV poker shows they talk about going "ALL IN." Don't hold back. Make a promise, not based on knowing how to achieve your goal, but on your desire to make it real. If you have to know how ahead of time, you'll never take the leap.

5. ACTION. Now it's time for the real work, and that consists of putting one foot in front of the other every single day. Keep things alive by creating action plans, researching, asking for assistance, and networking with like-minded people. In other words, create an environment in which the goal can be realized.

Imagine, Think, Opportunities, Commitment, Action: I.T.O.C.A.Now that's a pretty bad acronym compared to S.M.A.R.T., but I promise you it's a better formula for getting what you truly desire."

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Robert's full article is entitled "Setting Unreasonable Goals" and is dated January 30, 2007.

Yes, the S.M.A.R.T. formula Robert references is slightly different than the one I referenced. And there are additional variations; see "SMART Goals" for a list of many of these.

Frank N. Stein

2007-01-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

The delightful poster to the right was created to advertise a recent presentation of mine.

What might that green monster represent? The user experience created by your company? The user experience personnel in your company who complain that they want to play a bigger role in your company than you created for them to play? Other personnel in your company who won't let you, the user experience practitioner, play the role that you want to play in your company? ???

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The painting actually, in theory, depicts me in a past life -- Frank N. Stein, the creation of Maddy the Mad Scientist, the wonderful 9-year-old artist in a past life. But I like the metaphorical interpretations, such as those referenced above.

(The "N" stands for Nigel.)

Ownership of the user-customer experience

2007-01-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

Last month, I referenced a lament for "the many 'folks in the trenches' who are still fighting 'a constant battle, where they are forced to defend their position as user experience experts'." In the specific case that prompted the lament, the culprit was identified as Marketing. However, I've heard many similar complaints about Product Management, Engineering, assorted executives, and others from user experience practitioners in a wide variety of companies.

Frequently, these frustrated user experience folks proclaim that they are the ones who should own the user experience.

The editors of interactions magazine are among those who agree, as I quoted in "Walls":

"...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."

Another who appears to agree is Cisco's Jim Nieters, who, in a paper to be presented at CHI 2007, describes the role his user experience design focus team must be permitted to play before it is willing to get involved in a project:

“The UXD Focus Team functions as the architect who provides the blueprint for the elements of the product that defines the user experience, and the developers function as the carpenters who deliver to the specifications. If the product team does not agree in advance to these roles, the UCD group does not accept the project.”

However, contrast those perspectives on ownership with the perspective of Jeremy Ashley, VP of Applications User Experience at Oracle:

"A culture of UI entitlement creates an atmosphere where the UI designer will not perform until he or she is given a driving role in the process. ... The valued participant often finds a way to compromise..."

And consider the broader view of Don Norman, which I referenced in my first blog entry ever ("In a business, which organization should own the user experience?") as well as again in "Where should 'User Experience' be positioned in your company?". The latter includes the following words from Don:

"Why should any particular organization own it? The company should own it. ... Who owns user experience at Apple? In part it is Steve Jobs, but in many ways it is the company. Yes, it was Steve Jobs who put in the focus and said 'do it this way, or go away.' But 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."

Don's perspective is extended somewhat by Forrester Research, which in a report published just this month states:

“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.”

However, consider the following related perspective that implicitly references an important role which perhaps should be owned by "user experience personnel":

"We want to make customer experience everyone's business by making the process of creating experience intuitive and repeatable."

The above words are from Secil Watson, Wells Fargo's SVP of Internet Channel Strategy, and the "we" she refers to is her Customer Experience Research and Design group. As I described earlier this month, her group goes about doing this at Wells Fargo by embedding ethnographic research insights in user-centered design tools for strategic business planning. And this is changing the Wells Fargo culture. As stated by Wells Fargo's Robin Beers and Pamela Whitney:

“The UCD tools enable designers, researchers, and business people to make meaning together and this meaning is co-constructed such that no one functional area holds all, or even most, of the knowledge on a project. The willingness to invite full participation in the research and then release the findings so they can evolve within the organization are key factors that continue to push the Wells Fargo culture to become increasingly customer-centric."

So, are the user experience practitioners who think they should own the user experience wrong? Or are there at least some aspects of the user experience that "user experience personnel" should own? Is ownership advisable in some situations but not in others? What exactly does "ownership" mean?

This important issue of the ownership of user-customer experience is among several issues that will be addressed by a group of senior management personnel from a mix of companies during a session I'll be leading at CHI 2007 -- a session entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?" Secil Watson, Jeremy Ashley, and Jim Nieters -- all three of whom are quoted above -- will be among the session participants.

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Papers quoted include:

Arnowitz, J. & Dykstra-Erickson, E. It's mine... interactions, May+June 2005, 7-9.
Beers, R. & Whitney, P. From ethnographic insight to user-centered design tools. EPIC'06 Proceedings, 139-149.
Kowalski, L., Ashley, J., & Vaughan, M. When design is not the problem -- Better usability through non-design means. CHI'06 Extended Abstracts, 165-170.
Nieters, J. E., Ivaturi, S., & Dworman, G. The internal consultancy model for strategic UXD relevance. CHI 2007.
Tempkin, B., Manning, H., & Hult, P. Experience-Based Differentiation: How To Build Loyalty With Every Interaction, Forrester Research, January 2, 2007.