Do I really need to write a book?

Last month, I was chatting with Peter Merholz at the Big Design Conference in Dallas. He was there promoting his new book, Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Teams — an excellent book by the way, and we were talking about how interesting it is that it is still important to write a book to be sought out as a consultant; blog posts are not enough. “You’ve never written a book, have you?”, said Peter, “Why not?” (Interestingly, it was Peter who first asked me years ago why I hadn’t started my own user research firm.)

Should I have written a book by now? Probably, yes. (Should I have started my own user research firm years ago? Again, probably yes.) I certainly have a couple of books in me, but do I really want to urge them out? Is it really true that good blog posts cannot suffice?

Well, without answering those questions (at least for now), let me spend a bit of time proclaiming the merits of reading old blog posts — not just anyone’s, but mine! I’ve written lots about topics such as those Peter addresses in his new book, and though many of those posts have aged a number of years, their relevance remains surprisingly — perhaps disturbingly — high. And what makes my posts particularly valuable is that they present and contrast the experiences and perspectives of many; they are not solely about what I think and have experienced.

For example, consider the topic of design collaboration. Cross-functional collaboration is now highly touted as crucial to successful design, but I know lots of designers who still do their work largely independently. WTF? Some of my blog posts on the importance of collaboration and keys to its success include:

• “The three-legged stool of collaboration”
• Breaking silos
• “Check your disciplines at the door” when beneficial
• The need for good facilitation
• Soft skills
• Walls
• Effective collaboration and fun

Numerous posts address (additional) characteristics of a good research and design process, something with which many continue to struggle. They include:

• Are you trying to solve the right problem?
• On concept design, ethnography, MRDs, and product vision
• A(other) call to action regarding healthcare
• Utilizing patients in the experience design process
• Go ahead — ask people what they want
• Applying “design thinking” to, um, design
• Prototyping for tiny fingers

But what do you do when you can’t follow an ideal process? I had a conversation about just that about a month ago with a director at a company that strongly touts its ideal process, but can’t always engage in it. I pointed him to, Working “middle out,” an approach which ends up increasing the chances of following a more ideal process in the future.

Multiple obstacles to employing design in the most impactful way can surface. Some of the many posts about such obstacles include:

• Preconceived notions
• “Designing in hostile territory”
• “There is only so much air in the room”
• Making changes to a company’s culture
• What is holding User Experience back or propelling User Experience forward where you work?
• Roles and relationships
• Eliminating noise and confusion

Each post in the above list also addresses how to deal with such obstacles. Additional posts which do the same include:

• Framing change / Changing frames
• Secret agent (wo)man?
• Changing the course or pace of a large ship
• Partnering with power
• Calculating return on investment
• Perturbing the ecosystem via intensive, rapid, cross-disciplinary collaboration
• Convincing executives and other management personnel of the value of ethnography

The design and positioning of design organizations is still a hot topic, as suggested by the reaction to Peter’s book. Among the posts I’ve written on this topic:

• Where should “User Experience” be positioned in your company?
• Does it matter where User Experience is positioned in your corporate structure?
• On the importance of alignment, trust, loyalty, …
• Hail to the Chief!
• Getting the organizational relationships right
• Ownership of the user-customer experience
• The internal consultancy model for strategic UXD relevance
• Who should you hire?

And I’ve authored posts on so much more. Indeed, there is gold to be found in these many blogposts.

Design leadership is a hot topic these days, and many of these posts could form the foundation of a very good book on the topic. But, can’t the blog suffice? Do I really need to write a book?

Well, things would be better organized in a book, and I’d update and extend the posts’ content, and I’d fill in some gaps, and…

OK, maybe I should write a book. But while I do that or consider doing that, look through the lists of posts I've presented above for those that might be of help to you now. Use the tags for help accessing others. As I mentioned earlier, even the older posts continue to be of relevance.

On what holds UX back or propels UX forward in the workplace

A version of this post has been published as a blog post for interactions magazine.

Among the teaching that I've done: UX management courses and workshops via the University of California Extension, during conferences, and in companies. And a topic I have always addressed therein: what holds UX back and propels UX forward in the workplace -- or to put it another way, what increases and what decreases the influence of UX on the business.

Last month, Dan Rosenberg authored an interactions blog post in which he states that a root cause for a lack of UX leadership in business decisions relates to "how the typical types and methods of user research data we collect and communicate today have failed our most important leadership customer/partner/funding source, the corporate CEO." (Dan will be elaborating on this in the March+April 2013 issue of interactions.) In my courses and workshops, we identify all sorts of reasons UX isn't as influential as it might or should be, and we often do so in part via use of a simple "speedboat exercise" as I described in a UX Magazine article entitled, "What is Holding User Experience Back Where You Work?". (A variation of the exercise can be used to help identify what has propelled UX forward in workplaces.)

I've also often addressed this topic in my blog, sometimes referring to discussions that occurred during my management courses or during conference sessions. For example, course guest speaker John Armitage made the following point:

"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."

Guest speaker Jim Nieters addressed the role that the positioning of UX personnel in an organization plays:

"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."

Organizational positioning and the type of user research conducted were two of the factors debated by a stellar panel of UX executives and managers I assembled for a CHI conference session entitled, "Moving User Experience into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?".

We also addressed this topic in interactions articles published when I was the magazine's Co-Editor-in-Chief. For example, in "The Business of Customer Experience," Secil Watson described work done by her teams at Wells Fargo Bank:

"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 ... 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."

Forming the centerpiece of their UCD toolkit: an extensive user research-based user task model. The influence of the use of these tools extended to project identification, project prioritization, business case development, and more.

I encourage managers to employ the speedboat exercise to prompt diagnosis and discussion in their own place of work. Also, peruse my blog posts and past issues of interactions for more on factors that impact the influence of UX. And give particular thought to the role user research might play; along these lines, look forward, with me, to what further Dan Rosenberg has to say in the March+April issue of interactions.

A(nother) call to action regarding healthcare

A version of this article was published in UX Magazine earlier this month.

For years, I have been addressing how UX can move upstream to play a more substantive, stategic role in business. An example of this was my CHI 2007 panel entitled, "Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?" Another example was my Mx 2008 presentation emphasizing the challenges UX personnel face when attempting to move their work upstream.

Related challenges (and warnings) were emphasized more recently by Samantha Starmer and Greg Laugero.  Starmer argues:

"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."

Laugero argues:

"UX design has done a great job in the last decade of redefining (for the better) how we define requirements for products with digital UIs. There is no doubt about this. But this has come at a cost of upward mobility in our organizations. We're functional players that make tactical work more efficient. We're not strategic players that help our organizations transform themselves. The closer we look at UIs, the more pigeonholed we're likely to be.

...stepping up [to strategic challenges] may mean stepping out of our comfort zones. ...we can't go in waving deliverables -- our standard bulwark. We have to step out from behind our wireframes and prototypes and think strategically."

However, will such a strategic focus actually satisfy UX personnel who have so often complained of corporate marginalization? Jon Kolko argues that the answer will often be "no" since most are actually interested in doing work that is usually much more meaningful and socially impactful than found in most corporations and consultancies. Consequently, Kolko calls on designers to reject the confines of the short-term focused, often marketing-driven corporate world to become social entreprenuers so to get the opportunity to tackle some of the world's many "wicked problems."

One of those wicked problems: a U.S. healthcare system declared "broken" by speaker after speaker at Stanford's Medicine 2.0'11 conference. This declaration has been echoed by many, including Donald Berwick M.D., who oversaw Medicare and Medicaid until this past December:

"Health care is broken. ... We have set up a delivery system that is fragmented, unsafe, not patient-centered, full of waste, and unreliable. Despite the best efforts of the workforce, we built it wrong. It isn't built for modern times."

UX personnel have worked in the world of healthcare at the level of the UI for years. Yet, many medical UIs haven't benefited from the input of UX personnel and most of the thousands of healthcare apps available today are considered to have been designed for the wrong people, and it is not clear how many of them really work. Even if more apps were well-designed and did work, would that fix what is broken with healthcare? Jeff Benabio M.D. tweeted his opinion:

To put the problem in UX/CX terms, what is really needed is transformation of the healthcare customer experience -- i.e., what is often referred to as the "patient" experience. And what is truly needed is not "improvement," but "transformation" as captured by this graph from Forrester Research's Kerry Bodine.

Can UX personnel contribute to this transformation? As argued by Laugero (see above), not so long as UX personnel have an excessive UI focus.

A recent paper by Don Norman and Roberto Verganti is relevant. According to Norman and Verganti, human-centered design as practiced by most UX professionals can contribute to only incremental innovation -- "improvements" to existing products or services. Radical innovation (a.k.a. "transformation," to use the terminology used above), on the other hand (see the nearby figure), requires technology or meaning change, the second of which can be achieved only via the comprehension and change of the dynamics -- often subtle and unspoken -- of socio-cultural models at play. According to Norman and Verganti as well as Jon Kolko, the design research that is often a part of the human-centered design process typically doesn't reveal such dynamics. According to Norman and Verganti, the focus of design research is usually not on such meanings; according to Kolko, the amount of time typically alotted to design research is too short to allow for their discovery.

Kolko argues that participatory design -- the practice of designing with rather than designing for -- can provide the time via which adequate empathy can be built to reveal the deep, tacit knowledge holding "critical truths and assumptions about behavior, policies, norms, and values." But there are sometimes other sources of this information as well. Interestingly, in the field of healthcare, I've found TED talks to be a great source, and I've written about them (and other sources) in "In need of transformation: the patient experience." For example, four powerful TED talks disclose the great extent to which medicine is conducted in a culture of physician superiority (USC's Dave Logan), anti-creativity (Jay Parkinson M.D.), denial of mistakes (Brian Goldman M.D.), and treatment of diseases rather than of people (Abraham Verghese M.D.).

Some of these cultural characteristics are reflected subtly in the language of today's healthcare system, as pointed out by a group of designers led by Hugh Dubberly: 

"We call individuals 'patients.' We call physicians healthcare 'professionals' (HCPs). Professionals 'care for' patients -- by observing symptoms, diagnosing diseases, and proposing therapies. Their proposals are not just suggestions: they are prescriptions or literally 'physician orders.' Patients who don't take their medicine are not 'in compliance.'

In the relationship between HCPs and patients, HCPs dominate. HCPs do whatever is necessary, with patients playing a relatively passive role. In some ways, the system reduces patients to the status of children -- simply receiving treatment."

Dubberly et al., focusing on the level of meaning as described by Norman and Verganti, describe an alternative healthcare model of self-management that is contrasted with today's model in the nearby chart. (Such an alternative model is consistent with a growing "e-patient" movement supported by the new Society for Participatory Medicine working to achieve a time "in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health, and in which providers encourage and value them as full partners.")

Much more work along these lines is needed. As stated by rebel Jay Parkinson M.D.:

"Going to the doctor, having routine surgery, buying bulk medications online -- all could be radically reinvented with the application of one type of medicine: designed disruptive innovation. Combining the principles of disruptive innovation with design thinking is exactly what health care in America needs. We need to disrupt the current business model of health-care delivery. And we need these disruptions to be designed experiences that are consumer-focused."

Recently, Valerie Casey issued a call to action in a short article entitled, "Healthcare Innovation: Time for Design(ers)." Her call to action was largely one of encouraging designers to respond to four innovation challenges issued by large pharma companies and healthcare organizations.

In my view, UX designers can do more. Learn about the problematic healthcare cultural characteristics that dominate and that need to change. Alter how you do design research. Don't limit yourself to incremental innovation and work that is narrowly focused on UIs. Question the advisability of doing projects that, in essence, only amount to putting lipstick on the very large healthcare pig. Escape your comfort zones in order to have the kind of impact on the world that you desire.

If only it were a matter of the following:

Indeed, designers need to care.

Impact of the role of the Chief Customer Officer

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?".

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

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

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Photo by Pabini Gabriel-Petit.

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

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.

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Related discussions in this blog include:

• Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?
• Does it matter where User Experience is positioned in your corporate structure?
• The internal consultancy model for strategic UXD relevance

"User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" update

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

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.

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

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)

Special workshop in NYC September 8

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.

So, whose advice really works?

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.

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

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.

The internal consultancy model for strategic UXD relevance

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.

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

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.