Submission deadline for DUX 2005 extended to July 1

To accommodate the strong interest in submissions and the posting of the Submission Kit later than expected, the DUX 2005 Conference Chairs announce that the deadline for submissions has been extended from June 15 to July 1. (The decisions about submissions will likewise be extended by two weeks, from August 1 to August 15.)

Designing for User eXperience (DUX) invites submission of longer Studies and briefer Sketches, described on the DUX 2005 website. The downloadable Submission Kit elaborates on details regarding language and format, and provides a template to further guide authors.

We invite you to participate in the premier conference for User Experience practitioners.

Richard Anderson, Brian Blau, John Zapolski
DUX 2005 Conference Chairs

The Chief Experience Officer

A few years ago, a new C-level executive -- the Chief eXperience Officer (CXO) -- began to appear here and there, though mostly in e-business consultancies. I talk about this role on my website (see "Changing the Role 'User Experience' Plays in Your Business"), refering to it as having "responsibility for integrating 'customer experience' into every step of an organization's process." And I quote Challis Hodge's 2001 description of the role:

"The CXO should ensure that an organization delivers the appropriate experience at every point of contact it makes with the public. This CXO must understand the processes, methods, and tools necessary to understand people, and should be able to translate that understanding into successful points of contact with users, customers, shareholders, employees, partners, and visitors. ... In both corporate and professional services positions, the CXO should be responsible for keeping the entire organization focused on the user and the points of contact with the user."

About that time, I proposed a "Rent-a-CXO" business idea to Marc Rettig, former CXO at Hanna Hodge. However, the CXO concept did not gather momentum, and the number of CXOs in business declined with the number of e-business consultancies.

More recently, there has been a rise in the number of Directors and VPs of User Experience, as an increasing number of businesses recognize the important role user experience plays in business success. However, few if any of those roles have the breadth of responsibility envisioned for the CXO. Hence, might the concept of the CXO be largely relegated to a blip in history?

In a March 2005 article entitled "Who Knows the Customer Best?," Jeffrey Rayport writes, "Customer interfaces can either be a strategic advantage or a huge liability—a chief experience officer can ensure it's not the latter."

More from the article:

"Many companies have worked hard to meet customer needs by deploying interfaces wherever consumers or customers want them, whether essential or not. At most companies, this helter-skelter deployment has resulted in a plethora of interfaces—retail points of sale, call centers, interactive voice-response units (VRUs), sales forces and detail people, interactive kiosks, and Web sites, not to mention marketing-communication mixes that range from television and print to events and sponsorships. While managers might question whether all of these elements—especially marketing activities—constitute a company's presentation layer, customers make no distinction. The fact is, every one of these touch points strategically shapes customers' attitudes and behaviors.

In modern companies, who takes responsibility for these disparate interfaces and touch points? Who's accountable for the optimization of interfaces on both a stand-alone and an integrated basis? Who ultimately ensures that the elements of complex corporate systems—technology, marketing, processes, and R&D—create loyalty-inducing experiences for customers? Often the responsibility falls to the CEO, who's best positioned to see across the entire organization but is overburdened with other responsibilities; sometimes it falls to the chief marketing officer, who understands the marketing challenge but misses, or can't influence, the integration across nonmarketing interfaces, such as call centers and Web sites. It may fall to the CIO, who may control the technology but not marketing, sales, or service strategies. Given these barriers, none of these is a good answer.

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). This executive's strategic agenda starts with a line of inquiry regarding the company's presentation layer. In every business that competes on service or relationships, these questions can highlight enormous strategic internal issues, such as operating efficiency, organizational design, and enterprise economics.

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."

Might the time finally be ripe for the role of the Chief eXperience Officer in business?

"The magical interdisciplinary view"

Planning a project? Figuring out what to do? Gathering requirements?

How do you approach these things?

Scott Berkun, speaker at Tuesday evening's BayCHI meeting, provides some answers in a chapter of his newly published book, "The Art of Project Management."

In it, Scott describes three perspectives that comprise those answers -- business, technology, and customer, and argues that the latter is the most important, though it is the weakest in most organizations.

Scott recommends use of a Venn diagram of these three views to diffuse perspective bias (i.e., to show, for example, that there are "great technological ideas that do not benefit the business or the customer, as well as great ideas to help customers that are not viable for the business or possible with current technology.") Such a diagram "generates respect across perspectives because everyone is forced to realize that they need to collaborate with people who have knowledge they don't possess in order to be successful."

Scott writes, "if no effort is made to bring divergent points of view together, ... planning meetings become battlefields for attacking and defending opinions based on these perspective lines." "Bringing an interdisciplinary view to a project enables you to make choices that cut across the very boundaries that limit your competitors."

Scott argues for "organizing the planning process first around customer research," then problem statements derived from the customer research (i.e., "descriptions of specific end user or customer issues"), then conversions of those problem statements into feature statements or scenarios (i.e., descriptions of things "a customer will be able to do as a result of the project, or the tasks they will no longer have to do"). This ensures that arguments from any perspective will be made within the context of the most important perspective -- that of the customer.

You can download this chapter of Scott's book for free at www.scottberkun.com/books/artofpm.

Partnering with power

In a presentation at CHI 2005, Dennis Wixon emphasized the importance of partnering with power in order to play a strategic role in a business. In a January+February 2005 interactions magazine article entitled, "Ease Your Design Anguish," Deborah Gill-Hesselgrave and Mark Hall stressed the need to "become business partners with the people whose mortgage payments rely on meeting business-performance objectives and incentives."

But how do you do that? How do you go about "partnering with power"?

Partnering with power is rarely solely a matter of walking up and saying, "Hey, partner with me." Plus, it is often the case that those seeking such partnership hold less power, and sometimes, in part because of that, the existing relationship is strained.

In a previous blog entry, I referenced a couple of examples of partnering with power from my work, calling them "perturbing the ecosystem," since they were such a signficant shift from the norm. In those examples, the power consisted largely of ownership of important decisions (e.g., about product strategy, concepts, designs, ...) which those of less power wanted to own or wanted to influence more substantially.

As stated in that previous blog entry, involving those with power in an intensive process of rapid ethnographic research and its analysis/synthesis in certain cases and in an intensive process of rapid iterative design and evaluation in others was key. And they were involved in such a way as to enable them to exercise their ownership, enabling them to directly experience how important user experience should be to shaping those decisions. The ultimate result was an elevation of user experience personnel into a relationship of strategic partnership.

As reflected in the case reported by Dennis Wixon, the business benefits of such a partnership can be phenomenal (see www.mgsuserresearch.com).

Do you still feel undervalued and not strategically positioned where you work? Consider developing a strategy for partnering with power akin to that described above. And if you are among those with such power, consider developing a similar strategy in which (other) user experience personnel can demonstrate the importance of the roles they can play in your decision making process.

Perturbing the ecosystem: Getting UX-related organizations to work together

Twice in this blog, I've referenced the CHI 2005 Development Consortium, which I led earlier this month in Portland, Oregon. In my most recent reference, I described this 2-day workshop as an opportunity to "perturb the ecosystem" -- to significantly increase collaboration among UX-related professional organizations, and to create a hunger and an opportunity for more to happen along the same and similar lines in the future.

Over the intensive two days, leaders of multiple professional organizations examined user experience practitioners' experiences of the organizations and their offerings, why the organizations and their conferences are as they are, ways the organizations and their offerings are changing, alternatives to professional organizations and their offerings, needs of user experience practitioners and of companies that hire them, and ways the organizations could collaborate to meet more of those needs. Participants emerged from the consortium committed to making things happen and very eager to take next steps.

Specific outcomes will be reported in upcoming weeks, primarily via UXnet. However, you can now access an overview of the consortium, as well as position papers submitted by participants prior to the consortium, at http://uxnet.org/devcon/.

"You're Richard Anderson, aren't you?"

"You're Richard Anderson, aren't you?" asked a fellow I didn't recognize at the farmers' market in San Francisco. "I attended alot of the BayCHI programs you ran for many years, and I'd just like to thank you so much for all the work you did. Those programs were really great and had a great impact on me and my thinking and my work."

Though I resigned my position as BayCHI Program Chair two and a half years ago, this type of interaction still occurs quite often, most recently at an eBay party in Portland, Oregon (site of CHI 2005) two weeks ago.

Sometimes the people who approach me in this way, as was true most recently at an Adaptive Path party last month, tell me that they took my full-semester user-centered design course and thought I was a great teacher, and say they are still using lots of what I taught. This is particularly interesting to me, since I last offered the course in the year 2000; hence, these people took my course no less than 5 years ago but sometimes as many as 12 years ago.

That Adaptive Path party -- a delightful throwback to parties of the dot.com boom days -- brought me face-to-face with several people who took my course. Not surprisingly, Peter Merholz, one of the principals of Adaptive Path, was there, who has said my course had a major impact on his career path. Lillian Svec was there; Lillian was the first Director of IA at Studio Archetype and Sapient, and later became Director, User Experience at Wallmart.com. Also there was Rick Bond, who became Manager of Intuit's User Experience group; Alex Wright, who was Director, User Experience at Phoenix-Pop; ...

I saw several former students of mine at the CHI conference as well. For example, Kit Lofgren was there; Kit is still head of Abbott Usability, which is doing some very interesting work, as she described to me during the conference reception. Pradeep Henry was there; Pradeep became very successful in India, where he founded and heads Cognizant's busy and growing India-based usability group, wrote a book on technical communication usability, founded South India CHI, developed the first usability conference series in India, etc. And so on.

I also ran into people who have worked for me in the past. For example, I was delighted to run into Michael Kronthal, whom I hired at Yahoo! and who proceeded to do nothing short of fabulous work there. Via those who have worked for me in companies such as Yahoo! and Sapient, I've been able to have a major impact on the roles user experience and user experience personnel play in those companies, which has been most rewarding to me.

"Look at all the people you've influenced," my girlfriend tells me alot, such as after the scene at the San Francisco farmers' market.

It has been a great pleasure, but there is much more influencing to be done. The DUX conference, UXnet, and the CHI 2005 Development Consortium provide venues via which I'm able to do some of this. But I'm eager to greatly extend the kind of work I've done when working within companies.

DUX 2005 CFP now available

The Call for Participation for the second Designing for User eXperience (DUX) conference is now available at www.dux2005.org.

As for the first DUX conference, four categories of submissions are solicited: design case studies, design research studies, design practice studies, and design sketches. Studies must report on implemented designs and the methods and techniques people have used, specifying what worked, what did not work, and why.

Look over the CFP and start composing your submissions, as the deadline for their receipt is June 15. A submission kit that provides greater detail about acceptable submission format and structure will become available via the website soon.

Note that DUX 2005 is a fabulous opportunity for your company to make it clear that it supports good design for user experience. Look for descriptions of sponsorship opportunities to appear on the website soon as well.

Send your questions or comments to me via riander@riander.com, to all three conference chairs (myself, John Zapolski, and Brian Blau) via conference@dux2005.org, or to the program chairs (Nancy Frishberg, Rakhi Rajani, and Clark Dodsworth) via program@dux2005.org. We are planning a somewhat bigger and even better conference than DUX 2003, which was a sellout and a wonderful experience.

Perturbing the ecosystem via intensive, rapid, cross-disciplinary collaboration

Last month, a group of 40 people comprised largely of "usability practitioners" and open source developers assembled in San Francisco for a "Usability Sprint." For 3 intense days, participants worked in small teams to improve the usability of 6 software development projects. But the larger goal of the sprint, and the reason it was a sprint, was to "perturb the ecosystem" -- to "make the community smarter, not just the individuals" -- to dramatically change open source developers' understanding of usability and the common belief that open source and usability don't mix well, and to create a hunger and an opportunity for more to happen along the same and similar lines in the future. And according to the participants who described the 3-day sprint on the March 8 BayCHI program, all of these goals were met.

In my work at Yahoo! and at Viant, having business, engineering, and user experience (UX) personnel collaborate in rapid ethnographic research and its analysis/synthesis resulted in UX personnel becoming partners in the development of business and product strategy, which was a major change to the ecosystem. This created a hunger and opportunity for more to happen along the same and similar lines elsewhere in both companies.

Also in my work at Yahoo!, having designers, design researchers, users, and sometimes other members of the product team collaborate via intensive, rapid, iterative design and evaluation not only improved design but also improved the relationship between designers and design researchers, and between these UX personnel and product management. This, too, created a hunger and opportunity for more to happen along the same and similar lines elsewhere in the company.

Intensive, rapid, cross-disciplinary collaboration is common in companies known for their ability to innovate effectively, and is somewhat akin to a process used in companies like Landmark Education, which claims to transform people's lives.

In a couple of weeks, I'll be leading a two-day consortium for leaders of multiple UX professional communities focused on meeting the needs of UX professionals and the organizations that serve them. The intent of this somewhat intensive, rapid, cross-disciplinary collaboration is to perturb the ecosystem, resulting in significantly increased and ongoing collaboration among UX-related professional organizations, and ultimately among the professionals they serve.

Jef, you will be greatly missed

Jef Raskin -- creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, a much-published writer (e.g., The Humane Interface, Addison-Wesley 2000), consultant, and so much more -- died this past weekend.

Jef was always willing to speak at a BayCHI meeting whenever I asked him to do so, which I did multiple times when I was BayCHI's Program Chair. On one of these occassions, I was given the privilege of interviewing Jef on stage on the topic of "crimes against the human interface." And Jef appeared on the final program of my 12-year, Program Chair stint. During all of his appearances, Jef talked at least abit about his experiences with companies that did not understand the important role of the "human interface" to their business.

Jef was passionate about his work, and was passionate about so much else as well (e.g., building and playing organs, building and flying kites), as was evident when I visited Jef in his home.

I did not know Jef well, but he was a friend and a big supporter of mine. I will miss him.

He will be greatly missed by many.

Getting the organizational relationships right

The CHI 2005 website now reveals several details about the conference program, including information about the opening plenary. According the the website, Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University will be opening the conference with a presentation entitled, "Confessions of a Technologist who has worked with Psychologists, Artists, Designers, and Other Creatures who are Strange to Me." And among the points Randy will be emphasizing is that "neither side can be there 'in service of' the other."

Recently, someone I know expressed concern about a new group in his company -- one that is being labeled as a group that provides design services. In this person's view, the group is going to have problems if it is positioned within the company as a service group.

Don Norman spoke of this when I interviewed him on stage at CHI '99 (for the full interview, see Organizational Limits to HCI: A Conversation with Don Norman and Janice Rohn from the May+June 2000 issue of interactions magazine): "An extreme oversimplification that a friend of mine made is that there are two kinds of people in organizations -- there are peers, and there are resources. Resources are like usability consultants -- we go out, and we hire them. We’ll hire a consultant, or we’ll have a little section that does usability and think of it as a service organization. We call upon them when we need them to do their thing, and then we go off and do the important stuff. That’s very different than peers, where a peer is somebody I talk to and discuss my problems with, and who helps to decide upon the course of action. As you get higher and higher in the organization, this becomes more of an issue. The executive staff talks to the executive staff, and they have beneath them all this organization, which are their resources that they deploy. But the big decisions are being made among peers. And it’s really important, to advance in the world, to be thought of as peers."

A design manager in one of my client companies would often say that product management tended to treat user experience personnel solely as "pairs of hands" rather than as "heads." Product concepts would be developed and sometimes pretty thoroughly fleshed out by product management before they would involve the user experience personnel (i.e., interaction designers, graphic designers, user experience researchers, etc.) in the company. Hence, user experience personnel, who believed they needed to be involved in product conceptualization, were often unhappy with the tasks they were limited to, and felt undervalued and not understood. Meanwhile, product management, who just wanted the user experience people to do what they told them to do and when they told them to do it, felt user experience personnel were the source of too much complaining and resistance. This was an unhealthy relationship that needed to be fixed.

What relationships do user experience personnel have with others in your company?

Serving on a jury / Collaborating on a judgment

Over "the holidays" (late December and into January), I found myself serving on a jury in a court of law here in the United States. Instead of arranging and taking a last-minute trip to Europe to celebrate the new year (as I was thinking of doing and was being encouraged to do), I sat in a jury box watching and listening as opposing sides in a tricky civil case fought to win me over.

I had served as a jury alternate a few years ago, present at the full trial but then not permitted to participate in jury deliberations at the trial's conclusion. On another occasion, I was selected as a jury member, only to watch things end immediately following the prosecution's presentation of opening arguments when the case was settled out of court.

Few people I have asked have ever wanted to serve on this kind of jury, since most have argued that they have better and more profitable things to do. And I've always been troubled by the idea that justice is well-served by placing a critical decision in the hands of 10-12 citizens, most of whom do not want to be involved. (My knowledge of the research of Elizabeth Loftus only strengthened this concern.)

But I've always wanted to participate in a jury's deliberations, to experience directly what that can be like.

So, I got my chance.

Success in the business of "user experience" requires working together -- bringing multiple perspectives to bear on a problem -- collaborating on a judgment. And rarely do participants in this process think it is done particularly well. There are excellent methodologies for doing this well, most of which rely on a good facilitator. But few know of or employ them.

So, just how well might a somewhat randomly selected group of jurors work together, locked in a room, assembled around a table to debate the issues of this tricky case, and guided by a foreman selected from among them?

I was impressed.

Did things go as smoothly as they could have? Not exactly. Jurors often talked over each other, got frustrated and upset, insisted that only their perspective could be right, etc.

Did jurors consider more than the evidence presented in court, contrary to the instructions of the judge? Yes.

Were jurors swayed by an inaccurate understanding of the way memory and remembering works? Of course (see the work of Elizabeth Loftus referenced earlier).

Did irrelevant factors (e.g., a desire to not have to come back the next day) sometimes influence how jurors voted? Yes.

Nevertheless, I was impressed -- greatly. All jurors took their responsibility very seriously. All jurors cared about reaching a just judgment. All jurors made significant contributions to the deliberations. All jurors ultimately seemed to give consideration to the input of the others. And almost all jurors contributed to the facilitation of the process. In the end, all jurors seemed to think very highly of all of their colleagues and that our final judgment was as just as it could be.

Do I think there is a better way to run a collaborative session? Yes.

But on the basis of this experience, I'd be happy to serve on a jury again someday, though preferably not instead of ushering in a new year in Paris.

DUX 2005 -- specifically where & when (& who)

In an earlier posting, I announced that the next Designing for User Experiences conference -- DUX 2005 -- would be held in San Francisco (as was DUX 2003) and much later in the year than DUX 2003 (which was held in June).

Indeed, DUX 2005 will be held in San Francisco at Fort Mason Center, a unique cultural and educational center located on San Francisco Bay, from Thursday through Saturday, 3-5 November 2005. Mark your calendars now.

As was DUX 2003, DUX 2005 is being co-developed by three professional associations: ACM SIGCHI, AIGA Experience Design, and ACM SIGGRAPH. The DUX 2005 conference chairs: yours truly (i.e., Richard Anderson), John Zapolski, and Brian Blau (contact all three of us via conference@dux2005.org). The DUX 2005 program chairs: Nancy Frishberg, Rakhi Rajani, and Clark Dodsworth.

More info about DUX 2005 will become available during the upcoming weeks. I'll announce the availability of the website and CFP via this blog.

Easy5: India's fifth usability conference

And speaking of offshore user experience research, design, and development...

I used to teach a full-semester (15-week) "user-centered design / usability engineering" workshop via University of California Berkeley Extension. It was a very successful course, one which significantly changed many of the participants' worklives for many years to come.

One of those participants was Pradeep Henry, who after taking the course, returned to India to, among other things, build India's first usability lab, write a textbook on user-centered information design, found and chair CHI South India (India's only chartered SIGCHI chapter), build a usability & design team at Cognizant (which has completed more than 225 offshore user interface evaluation and design projects), and chair India's first five conferences on software usability.

For each of these software usability conferences, Pradeep has asked for my recommendations regarding who to invite to appear as a plenary speaker, and he has followed my recommendations each year, beginning with Susan Wolfe for 2001, then Joe Konstan for 2002, me for 2003 (hey, he had actually asked me to be the plenary speaker for 2001 and then for 2002, so when he failed to ask me for 2003, who else was I going to recommend? ;-), Aaron Marcus for 2004, and Marc Rettig for this year.

This year's conference -- Easy5 -- takes place later this week in Bangalore.

(Pradeep will be a member of the "Outsourcing & Offshoring: Impact on the User Experience" panel I'll be moderating at CHI 2005.)

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.

the CHI 2005 Development Consortium

User experience (UX) practitioners encounter numerous obstacles to their professional development. Among those obstacles are a large and growing number of professional associations that compete for their attention, involvement, and money.

At the same time and, in part, because of this competition, many of these professional associations are struggling.

What is needed to improve the situation? Increased sharing of resources among UX-related professional associations? More conferences like DUX 2003 and DUX 2005, targeted more directly at the UX practitioner and the joint-product of multiple UX-related professional associations? Development of new, better-targeted professional associations and/or a redefinition of the focus of some of those which exist? Creation of new professional association memberships that are comprised of products and services from multiple associations? Development of a new organization -- think UXnet -- designed to enable increased collaboration and coordination among existing professional associations?

Just prior to CHI 2005 in April in Portland Oregon, I'll be convening a two-day consortium focused on developing answers to these and related questions. Among the expected participants are leaders of many of these professional associations.

The goals of the consortium are to:

• develop a deeper understanding of the situation and barriers to improving it;
• examine a mix of potential or partial solutions that have been or are being attempted, or are being considered;
• examine a mix of (partial) solutions developed for similar problems in other domains;
• generate new ideas for improving the situation;
• establish relationships and a roadmap to facilitate problem solution.

If you think you might like to participate, make your way to the consortium's CFP as soon as possible, because submissions for the consortium are due January 3.

The need for good facilitation

A month or so ago, a contributor to a popular usability mailing list asked others for pointers to materials on facilitation. As I recall, all of the responses referenced materials on how to facilitate usability tests.

Given the nature of the mailing list, the focus of the responses on usability test facilitation was not surprising. However, facilitation of usability tests is only a small subset of the types of facilitation which are critical to improving the role "user experience" plays in business.

Too little attention is paid to other types of facilitation, and too few people are well-prepared to provide them.

Hence, collaboration gets condemned as "design by committee," as it was by a panelist at an event held earlier this month in the SF Bay Area, even though the event was partly about the importance of increasing collaboration.

Numerous collaborative methodologies and techniques exist that work wonders, but only when they are well-facilitated.

Focus on developing the capability of your organization to be effectively collaborative via attending to the critical role of good facilitation. Bring in people who understand and who can effectively facilitate the full range of collaborative methodologies your business should employ, and who can leave your organization better equipped to be effectively collaborative on its own.

A different take on ROI

ROI is abit of a controversial topic in the world of "user experience," with some people arguing -- as did a panelist at last week's BayDUX event focused on the future of digital product design -- how important it is to talk in terms of ROI to executives and senior management, and with others -- as did Jeff Herman of eBay in a short presentation at CHI 2004 -- explaining how to estimate ROI for user experience projects, but with others -- as has Dan Rosenberg, Oracle's VP of development for usability and interface design, in a recent issue of interactions magazine -- arguing that commonly recommended ROI analyses are of little value in the real world.

With collaboration being so important in the business of user experience, a different take on ROI is worthy of note.

Linda Dunkel, President & CEO of Interaction Associates, uses the letters ROI to mean Return On Involvement rather than Return on Investment. According to Linda, "involving key stakeholders in decisions produces significant benefits, both emotional and financial," and she references evidence of this:

"Dr. Victor Vroom of Yale University, an expert in the field of leadership and decision making, recently pointed us to some remarkable data that supports collaboration as a business necessity. In his book, Why Decisions Fail, Dr. Paul Nutt examined the implementation rates of nearly 400 management decisions — and found that over 50% of the decisions failed. The decisions were not implemented at all, were only partially implemented, or were adopted, but later overturned.

Nutt found that the most successful implementation tactic was asking for the participation of those who would be affected by the decision. That tactic had the lowest failure rate: 30%. But at 23% usage, it was the least used tactic!

John Kotter and James Heskett in their book, Corporate Culture and Performance, showed that firms which focused on stakeholders and developed involvement strategies increased revenues over an 11 year period by an average of 682%, versus low involvement cultures which turned in an average of only 166%. Net incomes improved by 756% vs. 1% in these same firms."

How much is "involvement" valued in your corporate culture? Are there people in your company who know how to achieve effective collaboration among the appropriate stakeholders?

References

1. Dunkel, L. "Return on Involvement."
2. Herman, J. A process for creating the business case for user experience projects. CHI 2004 Extended Abstracts, pp. 1413-1416.
3. Knemeyer, D., with Allen, S., Day, N., Gabriel-Petit, P., Leftwich, J., Wroblewski, L., & Ramirez, F. The future of digital product design. BayDUX, December 12, 2004.
4. Rosenberg, D. The myths of usability ROI. interactions, September-October 2004, pp. 22-29.

"The glue" & Sara Little Turnbull

Last month, I had lunch with Sara Little Turnbull, Director of the Process of Change, Innovation, & Design Laboratory of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Eighty-seven years of age, Sara has been a trusted advisor to corporate CEOs, national governments, and universities for decades, and she understood the importance to business of design to improve user experiences long before any of us.

I've had the great privilege of interviewing Sara on stage at two events: a BayCHI meeting at PARC during January of 2002, then again during the closing plenary of the first Designing for User Experiences conference during June of 2003 (www.dux2003.org). Later during 2003, I brought Sara into Yahoo! to speak to User Experience & Design personnel while I was working at Yahoo! as a consulting user experience research manager and a product development process advisor.

According to Sara, effective design emerges at the intersection of culture and commerce; hence, a deep understanding of how cultures solve problems can give businesses a competitive advantage. Hence, she has used her training in design and cultural anthropology, and her wonderful enthusiasm, to help her do what I have worked to do at Yahoo! and elsewhere: bring the worlds of design, business, and engineering much closer together.

Over lunch, my conversation with Sara was initially wide-ranging, including discussing Paul Saffo's claim that good management kills innovation (see my earlier posting on this) as well as what Bill Gates' mother would say many years ago whenever Sara asked her what the then young and unknown Bill was up to when the two good friends got together for coffee. But soon, the conversation became focused on glue.

I spoke with Sara about some of my efforts at integrating design and research and product management and marketing and ... -- at strategically increasing collaboration among multiple types of expertise and organizations -- and about the challenges of finding good opportunities to do that kind of work in a substantive way. Sara spoke of the challenges she has had in bringing multiple disciplines together both in businesses and at Stanford, and the cultural forces that tend to resist such collaboration, though the benefit is huge.

As put by Sara, I am a good example of "the glue" that most companies need, and I have the advantage of being very good at making it possible for people to express themselves effectively, as Sara has experienced in my conversations with her both on and off stage. But as also put by Sara, few companies recognize their need for that glue, and few companies understand that needed leadership involves making it possible for employees to express themselves in an effective way.

Does your company include people who effectively play the role of "glue"? What do you think of Sara's claim of the importance of such a role? Do you feel that your perspective and expertise gets heard and is involved in the best ways at the best times in your workplace?

For more on Sara, see:

1. Lawrence, P. Stanford's Sara Little Turnbull on design. @issue, 7(1), 2001.
2. Malone, E. DUX -- Five lessons learned. Boxes and Arrows, June 30, 2003.
3. Vienne, V. The why of it all. Metropolis Magazine, November 2001.

What is happening with UXnet?

I am a member of the Executive Council of the User Experience network (UXnet), an organization focused on furthering the User Experience (UX) field, in part by facilitating collaboration and cooperation among UX-related organizations and individuals. Earlier this year (in June), we "soft launched" UXnet to facilitate our networking with prominent UX-related organizations and individuals about UXnet while we worked on a roadmap for long-term UXnet governance and funding.

This morning, we disseminated an announcement about what we have been up to since the soft launch. Here is that announcement:

UXnet Update

The tremendously positive response since UXnet's soft launch in June has greatly strengthened our belief in UXnet's mission to help make connections between the people and organizations that represent User Experience disciplines. As you can tell from our early and incomplete list of both organizational and individual supporters (see uxnet.org/supporters), this concept of connection and collaboration is one that resonates for many.

We wanted to let you know that we have been busy moving UXnet forward. Since June, the Executive Council has been at work formulating a comprehensive, long-term strategy that will enable us to achieve our goals. Look for more about this sometime in January.

We have also been busy with our initiatives. Since June, UXnet's Local Ambassador initiative has rapidly gained momentum, with over 25 participants in 18 regions spanning nine countries and four continents. These Ambassadors have begun to provide user experience opportunities and resources in their respective localities. In fact, events in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Zurich have already been hosted in cooperation with UXnet.

The UX Events Calendar & Groups Directory initiative has been working with the Local Ambassadors to understand their needs as users and enablers of the directory and calendar. Additional research has included a review of existing calendar systems and the technology, standards, and policies behind them.

As for the Organization Collaboration initiative, UXnet will participate in and is encouraging the participation of numerous UX-related organizations in the Development Consortium being held just prior to CHI 2005 in April in Portland, Oregon (see www.chi2005.org/cfp/devcon.html). This two-day consortium will assemble organization leaders and others to identify strategies for working together to better serve the needs of the UX professional and of the organizations.

As you can tell, things are going well. But we welcome your help! You can find out more by visiting our initiatives page (uxnet.org/initiatives) or by emailing us at council@uxnet.org.

Thanks to everyone for their continued support, encouragement, and contributions to moving UXnet ahead.

The UXnet Executive Council

Done any good improv lately?

Last weekend, I attended a performance by the outstanding BATS Improv company in San Francisco. It is always a delight to watch the members of this company get inside the heads and the experience of multiple characters so quickly, and to interact meaningfully and fluidly in those roles with others, without benefit of either script or rehearsal.

Have you seen any good improv lately?

Have you DONE any good improv lately?

I'm sure you have tried to put yourself into the "shoes" or heads of potential users or customers, in an attempt to figure out what they want, what they think, how they might react, what they might experience, etc. But few people fully employ improv in this effort, though role playing has been advocated and effectively used in this context for many years.

For example, IDEO has asked all sorts of people engage in role playing as part of "experience prototyping" (see Buchenau & Fulton Suri, 2000), and employ it from the earliest stages of design and throughout the entire design process (see Simsarian, 2003). They use it to help teams develop a shared understanding of existing experiences and use contexts, explore and evaluate design ideas, and communicate ideas to others.

Last month, Steve Portigal had a CHIFOO (Computer-Human Interaction Forum Of Oregon) audience in Portland engage in improv and drew important parallels between the rules of improv and the rules of good ethnographic research.

And there is much about the rules of improv that can be applied to facilitating collaboration in the workplace. As described on the website of Progettoratto Compagnia di Improvvisazione Teatrale (based in Rome), the rules of improv are about creating a solid work group -- requiring the application of knowledge, attention, listening, not prevailing on others, never saying "no," and accepting.

Have you done any good improv lately?

Improv classes are offered by lots of improv companies, community colleges, university extension programs, etc. Some improv companies are willing to teach their classes in your business or can come to engage in or facilitate role playing at different points during your product conceptualization and design process.

Readings (all but Portigal available in ACM's Digital Library):

1. Buchenau, M. & Fulton Suri, J. Experience prototyping. DIS 2000 Proceedings, pp. 424-433.
2. Portigal, S. Whose line is it anyway: Innovation, ethnography, and improv. CHIFOO (Portland, Oregon), October 2004.
3. Sato, S. & Salvador, T. Playacting and focus troupe: Theater techniques for creating quick, intense, immersive, and engaging focus group sessions. interactions, September-October 1999, pp. 35-41.
4. Simsarian, K. T. Take it to the next stage: The roles of role playing in the design process. CHI 2003 Adjunct Proceedings, pp. 1012-1013.
5. Svanaes, D. & Seland, G. Putting the users center stage: Role playing and low-fi prototyping enable end users to design mobile systems. CHI 2004 Proceedings, pp. 479-486.

Connecting

A couple weeks ago, Julie Delpy appeared at the Rafael Film Center to answer questions from the audience after a special screening of her fabulous movie, "Before Sunset." That movie consists largely of a single, wonderful conversation between Celine (played by Julie) and Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) as they walk about Paris -- a resumption of a conversation begun 9 years earlier when they first met in the prequel "Before Sunrise." In that prequel, the two instantly connected, and their resulting walk around Vienna consisted largely of a wonderful, intimate, revealing conversation, akin to the followup in "Before Sunset."

Have you participated in those kinds of conversations -- conversations where a strong connection is established quickly -- a connection that enables the participants to be unusually open and to readily reveal much of importance?

I had had a conversation not long before that special screening that seemed to me to be of the nature of the conversation depicted in the two movies. The conversation began on our initial meeting immediately following my on-stage conversation with Don Norman (see earlier postings), resumed over dinner 4 evenings later, continued through coffee in a late night cafe, and then extended through rainfall -- mostly unnoticed by the two of us -- as we strolled along a San Francisco street into the wee hours of the morning. It was wonderful. It was unexpected. It was rare.

But I've had many conversations of a related nature -- conversations I've initiated and that emerge from the very quick establishment of a connection which facilitates participant openness and substantive revelation -- conversations with colleagues or with people who have reported to me in a workplace, or with potential users of a product or service as yet to be conceived or in some stage of design, or with experts in business, design, or the like on stage before an audience at an event -- all conversations essential to "changing the role user experience plays in business."

I had several such conversations with potential users of a product earlier this week. And they, too, were wonderful. No, not as wonderful as my conversation in the rain, or the conversation between Celine and Jesse. But they left all participants happy they had established such a connection, and they revealed much of great importance to the design of the product.

According to Julie Delpy, the conversation in the two movies, which was so real, had been entirely scripted. But it had emerged from a collaboration among Julie, Ethan, and director Richard Linklater, all committed to developing a rich, real experience -- just as my partly-scripted portions of my conversations with potential users emerged from a collaboration among designers, engineers, other potential users, and business personnel committed to developing the best user experience possible.

How well does your business connect with users or potential users of its products and services? Are those essential connections unexpected and rare? Or are they initiated frequently, and conducted in such a way that they contribute greatly to developing the best user experience possible?

Is it true that "good management kills innovation"?

Yesterday, during one of a series of forums at PARC on invention and innovation, Paul Saffo, a forecaster and strategist at the Institute for the Future, spoke about the Silicon Valley and about why it has been and continues to be the center of so much technological innovation.

According to Paul, technological innovation is "extra-logical," and in the Silicon Valley, "advances from failure to failure, not from success to success." As such, according to Paul, "innovation gets killed by good management."

I discussed Paul's claim with a friend following the forum, and though we accepted Paul's claims as being valid in the context of the tech sector and what Silicon Valley has been and is still largely about, neither of us believe the statement that "good management kills innovation" is always true.

I had the privilege of interviewing Paul on stage with Jaron Lanier back in 1997. Paul is an amazing fellow and much brighter than I can ever hope to be. But I don't think that Paul himself even believes that statement is always true.

Whether or not it is true depends, my friend and I agreed, on what one considers good management to be. Perhaps what is often considered to be good management of engineers tends to kill their ability or attempts to innovate. But good management, in the context of fostering good "user experience" and "design," facilitates innovation -- my friend and I humbly believe ;-). And does so in the Silicon Valley.

Is the impressive innovation achieved over and over again by, for example, IDEO (see The Art of Innovation, by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman) a product of "bad" management? Or is it, instead, that the kind of management that fosters innovation is difficult to replicate within most companies, particularly in the tech sector?

During the opening plenary session of the first Designing for User Experiences conference, Bill Buxton pretty much agreed with Paul Saffo by arguing that after software companies develop their initial products, new, innovative products tend to come from those same companies only via acquisition rather than from internal development. And when they do emerge from internal development, "it is generally due to a skunkworks project, rather than something that is 'managed' and part of the organizational process." Bill also talked about how installing a good design process that is distinct from engineering can be upsetting to a company, even when the process results in a new product that proves to be successful in the marketplace.

Why is this true? Does it have to be true? Is it not possible for "good" management to foster innovation beyond initial offerings in more companies?

"Big Night"s

I spent several days in Sorrento Italy this past April, staying at a fabulous B&B that is also a cooking school (see www.mamicamilla.com). Each evening's cooking lesson would begin at 4pm and end just prior to the evening meal which was served at 8. As you might have guessed, the cooking lesson involved preparation of the evening meal, and to varying degrees, students participated in that preparation. This was delightful, and Chef Biagio is a masterful cook, enabling preparation of amazing, multi-course meals every evening.

What made things even more delightful was the fact that we prepared these meals for, and ate these meals with, 20-30 people from multiple countries every evening. The dinners were long, with me always among the last to leave. And the conversations and connections made with the many guests were truly wonderful.

These great experiences made me determined to attempt to recreate them, albeit on a much smaller scale, in my home. And I've been delighted to have been able to do that with success -- involving guests in the preparation of the meal, dining for hours, and creating or strengthening multiple connections.

At one of these dinners, a plan was hatched to tackle the preparation of timpano, an amazing and complex Italian dish that plays a prominent role in the movie, "Big Night." And our version of "Big Night" was held this past weekend in the home of a friend.

The many ingredients of the timpano -- quail, pasta, meatballs, chicken livers and hearts, fresh peas, hard-boiled eggs, multiple varieties of wild mushrooms, buffalo mozzarella, ragu napoletano, and more -- were prepared by the 9 participants working in a coordinated and collaborative manner over several hours. Then came the climactic point at which the prepared ingredients were placed in layers within a pastry dough that lined, and later also covered, a gigantic bowl.

After cooking the timpano in the oven, the long feast ensued.

The timpano was magnificent.

One of the extra special moments of the evening was the toast just before the meal -- a toast "to collaboration."

How do you effectively help people achieve recommended organizational change?

Last week, Cooper published an article in its newsletter in which Kim Goodwin writes, "Building better, more innovative, and more profitable products requires organizational change on a deep and difficult level." These words are similar to the words of many others, including Mark Hurst who wrote, "Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work," in a June 2003 version of his newsletter, and Dennis Wixon who, in the July+August 2003 issue of interactions, made a similar point indirectly by criticizing the formal literature as "failing the practitioner" since it "treats usability studies as if they were experiments, when in reality they are more like organizational interventions."

Advice regarding how to achieve such change has come from many (see the lengthy list of references, old and recent, that I include with my "evolving commentary" on "Changing the Role 'User Experience' Plays in Your Business" -- www.riander.com), but lots of people still struggle with this difficult task.

During my on-stage interview of Don Norman on October 12 (see my initial blog posting for my first blog words about this event), Don refered to a forum he ran for "user experience executives and those on the executive track" on, among other (related) things, "how to advance the cause of 'User Experience' throughout your organization." Quoting further from one of Don's announcements of this October 2003 forum:

"I have long been bothered by the lack of senior management from within the ranks of the user experience community. I believe that user experience-based design will make the greatest impact only when the executive ranks of corporations adopt UE design as part of their culture. This is only likely to happen when UE professionals become UE executives."

According to Don, few enrolled in this forum, it lost money, and he offers it no longer.

Also according to Don, few enroll in tutorials offered during the Nielsen Norman Group's User Experience tour that are intended for people with experience.

I recently started to offer a workshop focused on "The Critical Role of Collaboration in Enabling Your Business to Provide the Best 'User Experience'" and intended for a similar audience, though offered for delivery in-house.

But are workshops/forums/tutorials not the best way to reach and help the people who are in a better position to influence the organizations in which they work? If not, what is? The combination of everything else that is out there, including the many relevant publications I reference above, does not appear to be enough.

???

When and where will the next DUX conference be held?

I've been receiving an increasing amount of email asking when and where the next Designing for User Experiences (DUX) conference will be held.

I was a Program Chair for the very successful, first DUX conference, and I am a Conference Chair for the second. And DUX 2003 was held in early June. Plus, there is no information to be found about the second DUX conference on the web, except for an news item on the home page of the first conference which invites people to join us for DUX 2005.

So, it is not surprising that I've been receiving such email.

DUX 2003 was held in San Francisco, and interest was high in keeping the conference there, at least for the second edition. So, you can look for DUX 2005 to be held in San Francisco.

But we are presently targeting DUX 2005 for much later in the year than June.

As soon as the specific dates and venue have been nailed down, you will be able to learn about them here.