User Experience Managers and Executives Speak

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.

User experience work offshore/offshoring

While reading through interactions magazine's March+April 2006 special section entitled, "Offshoring Usability," I'm reminded of Fred Sampson's article entitled, "Taking UX Offshore," in the November+December 2005 issue. In that article, Fred describes abit of the early controversy surrounding offshoring (offshore outsourcing), but then states:

"Today, I think of offshoring as a non-issue. There's no point in lobbying against it, in writing letters to Congress or Parliament, much less to business executives. It's a done deal, a fact of life. Deal with it."

At CHI 2005, I moderated a panel entitled, ("Outsourcing and Offshoring: Impact and Consequences for the User Experience." Panelists discussed issues such as the impact of:

• time, language, and cultural differences;
• the nature and level of process development;
• infrastructure (both electronic and physical);
• location of users relative to offshore teams;
• level of training and expertise offshore; and
  
• characteristics of the work being offshored.

The panel's answer to the controversial question of whether offshoring of user experience work was good or bad pre-echoed Fred's view: don't view offshoring as good or bad; view it as a fact of life you must deal with.

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.

For those 5 years, I worked with (prospective) chapter leaders from long range as well as face-to-face, bringing many of these leaders together for annual workshops. I wrote and edited numerous articles to help (prospective) chapter leaders in all locations; articles included:

• Shaping the Roles to be Played During the 21st Century by Local Chapters of ACM SIGCHI, an article about the workshop for which I brought together leaders of 27 chapters from 18 countries;
• How New Local Chapters Work: The Experience of Czech SIGCHI, an article by Pavel Slavik and Boba Mannova about Czech SIGCHI's first two years and its plans for the future; and
• Diversity Within Unity: The Purpose of a Local SIG, about variations in chapter purpose and approach around the world.

And I represented the interests of local chapters worldwide as a member of an international SIGCHI Executive Committee.

Now, I'm a member of the Executive Council of the User Experience network (UXnet) which has Local Ambassadors in a rapidly increasing number of countries (25, I believe, as I write this) working to foster the growth of user experience communities and to facilitate networking among them (see UXnet Local Ambassadors: Building a Global Community One Locale at a Time). And I'm presently interacting with people in Asia and elsewhere to make UXnet's Advisory Board international.

I have also led expansion of user experience capability outside of the U.S. within businesses which have employed me, working with and within offices in multiple countries to develop and promote their user experience practice. I have hired, managed, coached, and advised individuals and teams in these offices, and worked to improve working relationships of user experience personnel with others within as well as across geographic boundaries.

I am very proud of all of this work, and I've delighted in getting to know and work with so many people around the world, traveling to Italy, France, Netherlands, India, Australia, Germany, U.K., Austria, and elsewhere to make it happen. Indeed, I hope much more work and travel of a related nature lies ahead for me.

Last November, I visited Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing to learn more about Neema Moraveji's exploration of issues of designing for the Chinese. As I stated in a recent blog entry:

"Great dividends await those companies who put ample resources in understanding the culture and living patterns of emerging markets, and in applying that understanding to identifying new opportunities for design for user experience."

Presently, I'm learning Mandarin via podcasts. I would have benefited from such learning when in Beijing last year, though I was able to get by reasonably well as the use of the English language in China is increasing. However, knowing more Mandarin than I did is important.

Offshore, and the offshoring of, user experience work is a reality that will increasingly affect us all.

Outsourcing & Offshoring: Impact on the User Experience

The extent to which product development is outsourced offshore continues to increase, creating considerable controversy.

What is the impact of this on the user experience (UX)? Can UX research and design be done effectively offshore? Should certain types of this work remain onshore? On what do answers to these questions depend?

At CHI 2005 in April, I'll be moderating a panel which will attempt to answer these and related types of questions. Organized by Liam Friedland and Jon Innes, the panel will feature an array of perspectives: from technology startup to large company; from U.S.-based outsourcing and offshoring of all or only select parts of UX research & design, to full-service design and development done entirely offshore.

What are your questions and experiences regarding this topic? Let me know as I begin to prepare for moderating this important panel.