John Rhodes of Webword passed on a link to a nice pile of user experience resources and links hosted at the U. of Minnesota-Duluth. Link is here and below.
It’s a well organized and comprehensive set of links about UX. But I noticed one thing about it: there’s virtually nothing on how to *organize* user experience teams for success, and how to configure product design and development processes. There’s a bit about ROI, yes…but as John says – and I agree – I am less and less convinced that ROI makes a bit of difference to the decision-makers and leaders in the adjoining functional disciplines (e.g. product management, project management, development, QA, marketing) who both fund us and compete with us for resources.
I’m not slagging on the UMND’s resource. It’s a fine one. It just brought home to me yet again the fact that the real hard work lays in actually getting user experience properly understood, situated and funded. I just don’t hear many people talking about these issues – except for my collaborators John Rhodes and Dan Szuc (we’re running our tutorial on the subject at UPA2009 again this year), and a few other like-minded people.
There’s definitely a market need out there for this type of information. One I intend to fill. No, it’s not as sexy as the latest interaction design acronym (cough, natural user interfaces anyone?). But getting the organizational stuff right is what enables interaction designers to have the opportunity to actually do the sexy new stuff.
And while I’m up here on my little soapbox, I’m really starting to see a need for a unified and strategic approach to user experience. So many companies excel in one aspect of the total user experience but fall down on the job in another. I just did a presentation about this topic to the Online Marketing Summit attendees this week. I’ll blog about it later this week.
I guess you just have to have a passion about strategic UX to really keep thinking about it all the time.
Web Design References ::? University of Minnesota-Duluth
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