Today I’m posting the presentation and source document from my UPA2009 presentation “A Kit For Building User Experience Teams in R&D Organizations.” The talk went very well; nearly everyone in the (somewhat small but whatever) audience spoke up and contributed.
Happily, when I posted links to this content on Twitter I got about a half-dozen retweets, which for a second-stringer like me is not too shabby. So I think you’ll like this preso and the kit doc, which I’ve released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. BTW you can learn more about this license and what it means at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/. Basically, it means you are welcome to make use of the content as long as you attribute it to me and you share any derivative works under the same license. Which I think is more than fair, and leads to boatloads of good UX karma besides.
And here’s a little bonus: I asked my friend and session chair Lyle Kantrovich (@lkantrov for the Twitterati in the crowd) to take notes on the audience comments and contributions; which he peevishly (kidding! I meant happily) did. I’ve posted his notes below.
Before I link you out to the content you might be interested in the “story behind the story” of this presentation. About 7 or 8 months ago I decided to submit to UPA2009, and scoured my hard drive for something appropriate. I realized that I had created a comprehensive resource while at Sage that detailed how to staff, budget and run a user experience team at a medium-to-large software organization. I figured that this was as good a submission as any. Plus, it really fit my whole “get the organizational structure and processes right” theme. If you’ve been reading me for any length of time you know I have a passion for this area of our field, having trained in social/organizational psychology and built several teams over the past 12 years.
So I submitted a proposal, which went something like this:
This submission provides an overview of a “User Experience Kit” that one user-centered design team developed as an implementation guide for other product teams within their global organization. This kit was first released in mid-2007 within the organization, and has been used in the organization to guide the creation of four additional teams since then. The primary audience for this presentation is people who are able to drive change in their organizations and have the authority to support those changes with allocation of resources.
And it got accepted. Yay.
Of course I put off writing the presentation for months, but not for the usual reason (i.e., pure procrastination). As the day of the talk drew nearer, it became clear to me that the kit itself was a really boring story. And I don’t do boring. I HATE boring. I have high standards for presenting, I do it well, and I was stressing out about how boring this talk was shaping up to be.
That is, until I realized that the more interesting story was *why* I had to create a UX implementation guide/kit, what it said about my then-organization (and other organizations), and what we as a field should be doing about it.
And then everything was alright, I wrote some entertaining slides (keep on the lookout for “Captain Obvious”) and I gave a kick-@ss talk.
So, without further ado, here’s what I covered in my talk:
- The sad truth about the need for a “UX kit”
- A bit about the kit itself
- An extended discussion about launching UX teams and spreading UX in medium to large orgs
As I mentioned above, Lyle was kind enough to capture discussion notes, which I’m including immediately below. However, I recommend looking at the preso first (either in .pdf format or on SlideShare) and getting the kit source doc before reading the discussion notes.
Thanks again Lyle for capturing the audience comments. Here they are:
- Come back with data to show the value of what happened during UX processes.
- Be more of a teacher – share UX? techniques (aka “UX freeze-tag”).
- Be flexible.
- Triage projects early on – to discuss how UX can help.
- Focus on convincing people who can be convinced.
- Have an open-door policy on usability lab.
- Create an internal blog with test highlight clips.
- Conduct a quarterly UI workshop.
- Stay relevant – you know if you’re relevant by # of people coming to you.
- Focus on money/budget & key influencers in the organization.
- UX has to manage a lot of different things at the same time.
- “Customer Experience Bar Raiser Review Board”? – executives that help set UX direction.
- Selfishly share the glory – co-present success stories with clients/partners.
- Find a mentor/peer outside your organization to learn from, commiserate with and share with.
- Find an aspirational (design/product) example – something that reflects what you’d like the UX to look like.
A Kit For Building UX Teams [preso pdf]? [kit doc]? ::? Paul Sherman
