Changing the Role User Experience Plays in Your Business — DUX 2007

iander
Changing the Role User
Experience Plays in Your
Business
DUX 2007
Chicago
5 November 2007

iander
Richard Anderson
User Experience
Practice, Management,
and Organizational Strategy Consultant

iander
Richard I Anderson is a UX practice, management, and
organizational strategy consultant with more than 20 years of
experience.
He started and directed the Experience Center at Viant, as well as the
User Research & Experience Strategy discipline at Sapient and
Studio Archetype. For those and many other companies, he has
extended the reach and effectiveness of multidisciplinary, "user-
centered" design practices. Recent(ish) work has included co-
developing and co-teaching a Managing User Experience Groups UC
Extension course, and managing user experience personnel and
facilitating product development process improvement at Yahoo!
Richard is Incoming Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, and
at CHI 2007, Richard received SIGCHI's Lifetime Service Award for
extensively facilitating and spreading the development of the field via
his leadership contributions to BayCHI and to other chapters of
SIGCHI around the world.

iander
“The focused weekly sessions helped me to bring a structured approach to elevating
the effectiveness of UE in my organization. I feel well-equipped to lead a UE team after
having taken this course."
"The class was one of the bright spots of my year, with thought-provoking sessions
and great insights. Thank you for that. I've been recommending it all around."
"Thank you very much for putting this class and the overwhelming and useful resources
together and sharing it with us. This immensely helps me lead the good fight."
"The most valuable part of this course was really getting to know what the current
thinking is in this new field from instructors and classmates. Not offered anywhere
else yet. Real Bay Area practitioners. Two instructors great for two viewpoints. I
thought there would be more about practices, but what I got was much more
useful as (for) practices there are books to go to, so we used class time to
discuss what can't be found elsewhere."
"The most valuable parts of this course: the provided course materials & exercises/
assignments, exchanges with other students, learning that most organizations have similar
problems (its like group therapy!)."
"The most valuable part of this course were the reading materials, case studies, and
the enormous knowledge and experience of the instructors."
"This (final) assignment has a really good one which made me think about every single
aspect of how the team could be set up. This was a good practice for me to really come up
with a model/plan for a UED in the future when I get an opportunity to build and run the
whole team."

iander
User Experience Managers & Executives Speak
February - April 2008
"Richard Anderson teaches a remarkable user-
centered design course which alighted me on the path
I am today." -- Peter Merholz, President Adaptive Path

iander
“I live for the day one of my
ideas goes into a product.”
interactions, Sept+Oct 2007

iander
Plan
• examples of what can impact the role UX
plays in a company
• exercise to identify what is holding UX back
where you work
• exercise to identify what has helped propel
UX forward thus far where you work
• examples of strategies for changing the
role UX plays in a company
• exercise/discussion about elements of
strategies that might propel things forward
further
• exercise/discussion regarding roles UX is
playing and could/should be playing where
you work

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What can impact the role user experience plays in a
company?
your and others’ understanding &
expectations regarding UX work

iander
…user experience is specifically native to digital
interactions. That is what defines it: having to do
with the holistic quality of digital interactions. …
what characterizes user experience, what sets
its boundaries as just one component of human
experiences, is the fact that it has developed
from and is centrally a measure of the digital.
Knemeyer, D. The State of User
Experience, April 21, 2005

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Don Norman: I believe that what's really important to the people
who use our products is much more than whether I can use
something, whether I can actually click on the right icon, whether I
can call up the right command... What's important is the entire
experience, from when I first hear about the product to purchasing
it, to opening the box, to getting it running, to getting service, to
maintaining it, to upgrading it. Everything matters: industrial design,
graphics design, instructional design, all the usability, the
behavioral design... so, I coined the term "user experience” some
time ago to try to capture all these aspects.
Organizational Limits to HCI: A Conversation with Don
Norman & Janice Rohn (interactions, May+June 2000)

iander
User experience should not be just about interactive systems
-- it's a quality that reflects the sum total of a person's
experiences with any product, service, organization. When I
walk into a store, I'm having a "user experience." When I call
an airline to make a reservation, I'm having a "user
experience." And innumerable elements contribute to affect
that quality of experience.
Merholz, P. User Experience is a Quality,
Not A Discipline, April 20, 2005
…the user experience is more than just the product design.
User experience includes, but is not limited to, branding,
messaging, positioning, "store" experience, user experience,
and post sales experience. All too often, teams focus on one
or two aspects at the expense of the others. Its a symphony
and all of the instruments have to be in tune.
Larry Marine, experiencedesign yahoogroup,
December 20, 2006

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Adaptive Path Blog, September 12, 2006
“When asked if respondents
used the term ‘user experience’
within their organization, about
89% said yes.”

iander
The philosophy behind user-centered design
is simply this: users know best. The people
who will be using a product or service know
what their needs, goals, and preferences are,
and it is up to the designer to find out those
things and design for them. One shouldn’t
design a service for selling coffee without first
talking to coffee drinkers.
Saffer, D. Designing for Interaction,
New Riders, 2007, p. 31.

iander
You are welcome to join us at the Society of Technical
Communication’s upcoming event:
User-centric Design Practices
September 19, 2006 at 7:00 pm
YWCA in Downtown Vancouver
User-centric design is all about observation. It's not what
you think customers need or what they say they need; it's
about closely watching real human beings solve problems,
and understanding what will help them.
Richard Blitz of Intuit Canada will discuss user-centric
design tools such as site visits, concept analysis, needs-
based design, prototyping, and usability testing, and will
describe how Intuit uses them and where information
designers fit into the process.

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Rotman Magazine, Winter 2005

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interactions, September+October 2006

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Teague, R. C. & Whitney, H. X. What’s love got
to do with it? Why emotions and aspirations
matter in person-centered design. User
Experience, Winter 2002.
…begin to think of and talk about our customers and users
as people who have needs for status, esteem, a sense of
belonging, love and, of course, usability. Users need to
complete tasks. People need to feel needed. Approach what
you do from a person-centered perspective. Replace user
with person in your research and design vocabulary and
you’ll be amazed at the change in your and your team’s
thinking. Yes, it is just a change of a word, but it can have an
immediate impact on your team and the groups they
influence.

iander
Other "users" are people with substance
abuse problems.
anthrodesign posting of December 30, 2005
…only in drug trafficking are there also
"users" …
Designing for Interaction, 2007

iander
the word “user,” which was helpful in early engineering
environments, is problematic in today’s broader context. …
Computer users do not consider themselves “users.” … The
term “user” retains and reinforces an engineering
perspective. (And) the term “user” suggests that there exists
a typical user or range of users.
Grudin, J. in Communications of the ACM, April 1993.

iander
Let me first say that I really dislike the word
“user” intently, but, for the sake of being
understood, I use it now.
In conversation with Adam
Greenfield, DUX 2007 website

iander
usability
user experience research
design research
market researchcustomer insights
consumer research ?
?
?

iander
Customer experience managers should manage an
economy of insights: Customer experience managers
should act as facilitators for cultural and process changes that
make organizations yield positive customer experiences more
often. To do so, they should measure their success not by the
intrinsic value of the customer insights and experiences they
generate, but by the value of the insights that get used,
adopted or implemented across their organizations. They
should be good facilitators and know that their power does
not come from their tenure or expertise, but that it comes from
harnessing and sharing the voice of the customer.
Watson, S., The Business of Customer
Experience: Lessons Learned from
Secil Watson, interactions magazine,
January+February 2008.

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Gabrielli, S. & Zoels, J-C.
Creating imaginable
futures: Using human-
centered design
strategies as a foresight
tool. DUX 2003.

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?
?
?
your and others’ understanding &
expectations regarding UX work

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the personnel involved in the UX work &
the support provided to them
company?

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Usability
Accessibility
Information
architecture
Human factors
Visual design
Interaction design
Technical
communication
Industrial
design
Content
management
Brand / product
management
Marketing
Software
development
Project
management
Business
analysis
...

iander
Example: Complete and successful UCD team!
1
2
3
4
Information
Architecture
Interaction
Design
Visual Design
Project Management
User Lab
Research
User Field
Research
UI Tools & Frameworks
Task Domains
(Apps, Tools &
Admin UI)
Rosenberg, D. &
Innes, J., 2006

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The elements of user experience.
March 30, 2000

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Expanding the approaches to user experience design. March 10, 2003.

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“be opportunistic; make adjustments based on
skills, background, interests, …”

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“hire for motivational and thinking skills, rather
than for whether they have done the same thing
before”

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before”
“hire ‘commercial’ designers, not artists”
“a good ‘aesthetic’ is not enough; need to marry
creative thinking with analytical thinking”

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before”
“needed are collaborative people -- people who are
participatory, flexible, facilitative, consultative (i.e.,
can ask the right questions, create a dialogue,
reflect back, etc.)”

iander
before”
“needed are collaborative people -- people who are
participatory, flexible, facilitative, consultative (i.e.,
can ask the right questions, create a dialogue,
reflect back, etc.)”
“consider where you want to take your group, and
hire people who will be able to do what you want
them to do at that later point”

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Brown, T. Strategy by design. June 2005.

iander
“…you don’t necessarily want a team of all T-shaped
people. The reality of the world is that you have T- and I-
and bar-shaped people, and I suspect that the strongest
teams are comprised of all three that work in concert. Me,
I’m a bar-shaped person. I’m all about the connections
between disciplines, and being able to articulate the power
of that integration. Obviously, T-shaped people are
important, too, people who can bridge that synthesis and
go deep. But perhaps most important is that we no longer
marginalize I-shaped people. It’s easy to dismiss I-shaped
folks, people who simply want to focus on, geek out to,
their particular passion. But these people can be amazing
on teams, because once you give them a bit of a direction,
they can do amazing work.”
Merholz, P. Beyond the “T” - Coordinating realistic
design teams. August 14, 2007.

iander
User Experience Managers & Executives Speak
February - April 2008

iander
Because your boss said so
To make your mother proud
To buy that new Maserati GranSport
To have less work to do (it’s rarely true)
To make people suffer in living hell forever
Common Bad Reasons for Becoming a Manager
Berkun, S. Advice for new managers, part 1. January 26, 2006

iander
You’re ready for more responsibility
You are interested in leading and teaching others
You’ve excelled at a specific role and want to
help others do the same
You like setting people up to succeed
Good Reasons for Becoming a Manager
Advice for new managers, part 1. January 26, 2006

iander
- one who enables the vision to come out of
the good people that one hires
- one who understands why they are there
- a good listener
- able to read people
Justin Miller, eBay, 2006

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?
?
?
the personnel involved in the UX work &
the support provided to them

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organizational relationships,
positioning, & culture
company?

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engineering
The engineering team thinks it already understands
user experience. After all, their previous customers
were happy. The engineers themselves have no trouble
with the product. Who are these new customers who
need so much hand-holding? What’s the matter with
them, anyway.
Norman, D. Want Human-Centered Development?
Reorganize the Company, 1998.

iander
November 2005
May 2007
June 2007

iander
The marketing group thinks it already understands user
experience. After all, marketing is in close touch with
the customer: it knows first-hand what they want. Do
they want ease of use? Sure, add it to the list of
features. Do they want an attractive product, sure, hire
a graphics designer to make it look pretty. Each item
gets added to the list of things to be accomplished, as if
the total user experience were a feature like “more
speed” or “more memory” that can be
marketing

iander
If the user experience group
is in the development
organization, there is a
natural tendency to be put
them at tail end of the
process in the execution
rather than at the front-end
of the process in defining the
strategy and direction.
Miller, J. from Moving UX into a
Position of Corporate Influence: Whose
Advice Really Works?, CHI 2007.

iander
A designer will often be most successful when
engaged … close to the means of production
(engineering). By co-locating with the
development team, a designer is better able to
understand the historical and current design
challenges. Working close to engineering also
helps to remove the old “nice design, but it
cannot be implemented” excuse.
Kowalski, L. A “Survivor”-like Designer
Reality Show? interactions magazine,
November+December 2007.

iander
"There should be a natural tension between
Customer Experience (pulling to pure experience,
facilitating completion of tasks, etc.) and Marketing
(which is about selling and profitability and driving
traffic etc.). Since we are positioned in Marketing,
we share Marketing's goals, which can be
challenging, since Marketing might go for short term
gain, which results in long term loss."
Mark McCormick, VP Customer Experience
Research & Design, Wells Fargo, 2005

iander
Merholz, P. The frozen middle, August 17, 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.”

iander
Korman, J. Where Do Product Managers Fit?, 2004.
Berkun, S. The Magical Interdisciplinary View, 2005.
Watson, S., The Business of Customer Experience: Lessons
Learned from Secil Watson, interactions magazine,

iander
“… 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.”

iander
"...product management doesn't build or design products: their
job is to own product vision and strategy (naturally with the
other stakeholders' input). Engineers own code development
and code quality, with a wide range of specialties (architecture,
code design, QA, and release management, to name a few).
Product marketers take clear ownership of marketing
communications and product campaigns, keeping the pulse of
the marketplace, and trying to detect what it will buy.
Therefore, it's only logical that human-computer interaction
professionals take ownership of the user experience. We are,
after all, user experience experts, despite the fact that we
depend on other development participants to meet user and
business needs."
Arnowitz, J. & Dykstra-Erickson, E.,
It’s mine…, May+June 2005

iander
Is design leadership an executive level
position? Do you have a Chief Design Officer
reporting to the president? My view is that if
you do not, you are not serious about design
or innovation. Furthermore, you are
telegraphing this fact to all of your
employees, along with a clear message that
they need not be either. As a result, you
might as well fire all of your creative people,
since you are setting them up to fail anyhow.
Buxton, W. Innovation vs.
invention, Fall 2005.

iander
interactions, July-August 2007
"Tuesday's offerings (of CHI 2007) included a panel organized by
Richard Anderson titled, ’Moving UX into a Position of Corporate
Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?’ Much to our surprise, the
panelists all seemed to scoff at the idea Richard posed: the need for a
chief design officer or chief user experience officer or an alternate C-
level design presence. One commentator said, 'The last thing you want
is the board dictating the colors or fonts or other designs.
The panelists here were completely off base. The chief design officer
(CDO) concept is meant to avoid this very thing. A CDO should set the
design strategy for the company and make sure it stays on course.
Being a C-level officer, the CDO has enough clout to keep boardroom
design from taking place."

iander
I mentioned earlier that I don't think having a Chief Experience Officer is
the right direction, because you don't want to have all of your other
organizations not focused on it. But where I think we generally get stuck --
and maybe this is true industry-wide -- but certainly at eBay, is that we
think of the user experience of the site, or the user experience of whatever
product. I think that is a very narrow view.
What we have got to be thinking about is the complete user experience,
the holistic user experience, which includes the word of mouth they hear,
the marketing they see, the experience they have on the site, the
experience our customers have when they talk to customer support, ... All
of that is part of the user experience, and I haven't seen very many
companies tackle that issue. That is a place for a C-level user experience
person -- someone who can be looking across the organizations, someone
who is not directly responsible for the user experience on the site, but
helping customer support, marketing, the product or website, etc. work
together to create a holistic, collective, positive user experience that
reflects the brand promise.
Miller, J. from Moving UX into a Position of
Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really
Works?, CHI 2007.

iander
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as hiring a chief
design officer and declaring design as your top
corporate priority. To generate meaningful
benefits from design, corporations will have to
change in fundamental ways... To get the
benefit of design, companies have to embed
design into -- not append it onto -- their
business.
Martin, R. L., Creativity that goes deep,
BusinessWeek, August 3, 2005.

iander
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.
Forrester Research, Culture and Process
Drive Better Customer Experiences,
March 31, 2006.

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Martin, R. L., Design Thinking: The Next
Competitive Advantage, CONNECTING
‘07, October 20, 2007.

iander
Why should any particular organization own it?
The company should own it. ... I think a
successful company is one where everybody
owns the same mission. Out of necessity, we
divide ourselves up into discipline groups. But
the goal when you are actually doing the work
is to somehow forget what discipline group you
are in and come together. So in that sense,
nobody should own user experience;
everybody should own it.
October 2004

iander
Treat customer experience as a competence,
not a function. Delivering great customer
experiences isn’t something that a small group of
people can do on their own -- everyone in the
company needs to be fully engaged in the effort.
Forrester Research, Experience-Based
Differentiation, January 2, 2007.

iander
In our Internet channel strategy team, ... we have
different disciplines represented: UI design, IA,
content strategy, UI development, customer
communications, servicing experience, product
management, strategic planning, market research,
user research, syndicated research, metrics
analysis, statistical modeling, process consulting
and business and technical architecture.
Their collective goal is to create positive customer
experiences, which we believe lead to long term
customer value. We think that we can only arrive
at positive customer experiences if we collaborate.
None of the disciplines can arrive at the right
solution in their silos, since they each have a
limited vantage point.
Watson, S., Sr. VP Internet
Channel Strategy, 2007, quoted in
my Breaking Silos blog entry.

iander
Who owns user experience (UX)? This is the wrong
question to ask. We don't believe any single group can
own UX. What's the alternative?
In our view, a useful focus is collaboration, not ownership.
The best successes come from collaboration. Whatever
type of product, service, or document you are creating,
whether it's a Web site, an application program, an MP3
player, or a financial form, user experience encompasses
so many diverse aspects of your product that 'ownership'
just isn't a useful perspective. UX is about providing value
to your customer and the business serving that customer.
The best user experience is the product of many different
disciplines working together.
UXnet Board of Directors, May+June 2005
special issue of interactions entitled,
"Whose profession is it anyway?")

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collaboration
White, N. Surfing the second wave of online
collaboration, 2006.

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Anderson, R. et al. Improving the
design of business and interactive
system concepts…, June 2002.

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obstacles to collaboration
• ego
• not knowing that others are doing the same or related work elsewhere in
the company
• different interpretations of the same terms
• language & time zone differences
• hidden agendas
• divergent interests (i.e., little interest in collaborating)
• differing priorities
• unclear work process
• lack of time
• "the more people involved, the less efficient..."
• tendencies for people to engage in the same discussions over and over
• inability to assess level of participants' understanding of UCD
• discrimination (of many types)
• lack of respect (sometimes justified)
• conflicts of interest
• territoriality
• some feel threatened by UCD
• environments in which collaboration is considered to be optional
• prior negative experience with UX personnel
from “Managing User Experience
Groups” students, 2/15/2006

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obstacles to collaboration
- geography; time zones
- unfamiliar or misunderstood terminology/vernacular
- different world views / domains
- different work processes
- power relationships
- individuals' defensiveness & desire for job security
- poorly focused facilitation
- excessive workloads
- team spirit ups and downs
- tyranny of the urgent vs. exploration and reflection
- deadlines
- unclear decision criteria
- hidden agendas / politics
- past poor experiences with attempts at collaborating
- people not getting along with each other
- distrust / disrespect
- incentive systems promote individual contributions rather than team contributions
- organizational silos
- nature of the physical work environment
- unclear goals
- unclear roles and responsibilities
- bad management/leadership
- the cost (e.g., in time) of building new relationships is high
- difficulties determining who to involve
- difficulties converging on a solution when there are lots of ideas
- "Microsoft did it that way, so we should as well"
from “Managing User Experience
Groups” students, 11/1/2006

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“the big challenge is
to work across
disciplines fluently"
Moggridge, B. December 2006

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“the hard problems are social and
political”
BayCHI, February 1993
CHI 99, May 1999
BayCHI/BayDUX, October 2004

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• Stage 1: A company can remain hostile toward usability for
decades. Only when a design disaster hits will it be
motivated to move ahead.
• Stages 2-4: Companies often spend two to three years in
each of these stages. Once it enters stage 2 (usability
recognized, but derived from the design team's own
opinions), a company typically takes about seven years to
reach stage 5 (forming a usability group with a usability
manager).
• Stages 5-7: Progress in maturity is considerably slower at
the higher levels. A company will often spend six to seven
years each in stages 5 and 6, thus requiring about thirteen
years to move from stage 5 to stage 7 (integrated user-
centered design).
• Stage 8: Few companies have reached this highest level of
usability maturity, so it's premature to estimate how long it
takes to move from stage 7 to stage 8 (user-driven
corporation). In most cases, it's probably twenty years.
Nielsen, J. Corporate usability maturity: Stages 4-8. May 1, 2006.

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?
?
?
organizational relationships,
positioning, & culture

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Changing the Role User
Experience Plays in Your
Business
?
Role(s) UX Now Playing
Where You Work
Role(s) UX Could/Should Be
Playing Where You Work
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-?
? ?
?
?

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What is Holding User
Experience Back Where You
Work?

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strategies attempted for changing
the role
company?

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“usability” vs. “user experience research”
“web experience” “user experience”
“web experience” “customer experience”
“interaction designer” “experience designer”
“user experience research” “design research”
“design research” “customer insights”

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“the process needed to be shown and explained,
to demonstrate that it has rigor akin to the rigor
that business strategists’ work has”
Secil Watson, SVP Internet Channel Strategy
Wells Fargo

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For Blue Shield in particular, it was incredibly important
to establish a visual (process) model, working with
multiple teams, multiple disciplines, multiple business
units, that they can refer to when they were struggling
with or trying to understand when to engage the user
experience team. ...
Shauna Sampson Eves, Director of User
Experience, Blue Shield of California
I think that user experience teams spend a lot of
time trying to justify themselves, and I wish they
would spend the time and energy that they spend
justifying themselves actually doing design work...
Jeremy Ashley, Vice President of
Applications User Experience, Oracle

iander
Teams need to avoid the role of evangelist for
user-centered design.
Bloomer, S. & Wolfe, S., in Building and
managing a successful user experience
team, July 2006.

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Do NOT evangelize.
Tobias Herrmann & Manfred Tscheligi,
MobileHCI’06, September 2006.
In particular in the beginning, it is very important
to do some very fast, very efficient pilot projects
so that people can see the effects and can see
the return on quality, the return on process
improvement, or whatever… At the beginning, the
small steps are better than talking about the big
steps. Manfred Tscheligi from Moving UX into a
Position of Corporate Influence: Whose
Advice Really Works?, CHI 2007.

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What did it take to impact change?
Our first initiative was a success: The first project
that utilized our user centered design methodology,
which was not formalized at the time, was the
homepage redesign project. It was groundbreaking at
the time, and very successful. I could explain to
executives how listening to customers and analyzing
their tasks had actually paid off. Presenting tangible
results before presenting a new way of doing things
was critical.
Watson, S., The Business of Customer
Experience: Lessons Learned from
Secil Watson, interactions magazine,

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changing labels, developing process
descriptions, evangelizing
?
?
?
making sure first project is a success,
such as via small first steps
??

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a tailored ROI model was the key to success
Tobias Herrmann, Corporate UX -- Bringing
value to the mobile industry, July+August 2006.
The UXD group seeks projects on which they
anticipate a minimum revenue increase of $25
million in the first year.
Jim Nieters et al., The internal consultancy
model for strategic UXD relevance, CHI 2007

iander
Our ROI model contained, among other
things, the monitoring of user experience-
specific key performance indicators (KPI),
internal performance measurements,
standardized product evaluations from a
customer’s perspective, and, of course,
exemplary case studies with high customer
and revenue impacts.

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Financial Impact Score
Demand Index
Prioritization scorecard – a simple system that takes
frequency and importance of customer activities from the
task model and adds to each activity a financial impact score

iander
Recently, however, we looked at those calculations -- we
looked at what everyone had been presenting over the past
years. After someone would present their ROI estimates,
they would come back a year later and say "here is how we
did." We looked at the results and found that at least 90% of
us came back and said, "we did great." But if we looked at
the actual return that we should have got if every one of
those projects actually delivered what they said they would,
we would be 10 times the revenue of what we are today. We
realized that looking at ROI on a project by project basis was
not the right approach, whether it was the user experience or
otherwise. We needed to be looking at the user experience
and other things at a higher level.
Miller, J. from Moving UX into a Position of Corporate
Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?, CHI 2007.

iander
So, now we are focused on the initiatives. We
are not focused on the individual projects.
What are we trying to go after? We are, for
example, trying to increase conversion rate, so
when a buyer looks at a listing when they
come to a site, what percentage actually bid on
an item? That is the kind of thing we are
looking at -- at whether we able to move those
metrics, not at whether a particular project
moved the needle by some percentage. And
that has had a huge impact and changed the
morale of employees, focusing less on the
details and the tactics, and focusing more on
the big picture, because you can really
understand that if you can generate a change
at the high level, that has a big impact.
Miller, J. from Moving
UX into a Position of
Corporate Influence:
Whose Advice Really
Works?, CHI 2007.

iander
Our field has been overly preoccupied with ROI as the
basis for making the business case for user centered
design (UCD). However, experience has shown that the
most brilliant ROI analysis may often not win the day in the
real world of business. Cost justification and ROI is often
not persuasive, especially when we are talking to strategic
level decision makers. At a certain point in the evolution of
UCD, ROI arguments may have helped us gain credibility
and get “a foot in the door.” However, excessive
dependence on ROI arguments can have some
destructive effects. ... It can work against our field’s efforts
to get involved earlier in the product planning process
where we can have a more decisive impact and potentially
contribute to strategic risk reduction.
Siegel, D. Making the business case for
user-centered design strategically,
CHIFOO, February 7, 2007

iander
If your company is still in the position of
asking for ROI, or if you feel you need to do it,
your company just doesn't get it. If they don't
get the value of design, I'd move to another
company.
Jeremy Ashley, Vice President of
Applications User Experience, Oracle

iander
…it’s essential for user experience groups to
be able to say, “No.” If we want to be
considered for a seat at the strategy and
planning table, if we want to be taken seriously
as instrumental contributors to the companies
we work for, we need to make sure that we
only work on that which satisfies a true
strategic direction of our organization. If we’re
willing to work on any old thing, then we’re also
easy targets for “headcount reduction” when
times get tough.
Merholz, P. Is your user experience team
too big?, Adaptive Path blog, September
24, 2007

iander
About, With & For,
2005

iander
The RECoRD Method
Rapid
Ethnographic
Collaborative
Research &
Design
… research applied to product strategy and design in
RECoRD time

iander
When Microsoft hired me eight years ago as the first
official anthropologist, they weren’t sure what to do
with me, so they had me design my own job. I soon
realised that Microsoft had until then the tendency to
come up with feature and product designs within the
confines of its own walls. … What went on in the
minds of Microsoft’s brilliant software engineers and of
people outside the walls of Microsoft, was not always
very congruent. So I created the Real People Real
Data (RPRD) programme...
My work on the RPRD programme was in fact the
start of a revolution within Microsoft, and (is helping)
the company change from techno-driven to people-
driven design. Experientia interviews Anne Kirah,
October 2006

iander
...a transition from a product- to a more customer-centric
culture. This shift was becoming crucial as disconnects in
customer experience increasingly arose not within the
boundaries of the product and service platforms but in the
transition and integration points between different areas...

iander
“we created an online customer panel
including more than 4,000 (non)customers
that ‘revolutionized’ our everyday work”

iander
working middle out
?
?
?
prioritizing
perturbing the ecosystem
clever cross-disciplinary collaboration
ethnographic research

iander
Sato & Patton, DUX 2003

iander
• Formalize communications
• Manage expectations
• Facilitate
• Respect cultural differences
• Identify common goals
• Deliver quality
• Be proactive
• Be resilient
• etc. interactions,
May+June 2005

iander
Chris Rodgers, Informal Coalitions:
Mastering the Hidden Dynamics of
Organizational Change, 2006.

iander
“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

iander
How to get upstream
“I'm a usability engineer - I run lab studies, heuristics, site visits,
the whole 9 yards. Problem is 95% of the time I'm asked to do
verification type things. I get downstream designs that are
mostly baked and they want me to put the usability stamp of
approval on it (or confirm that the stupid things in the design are
as stupid as they thought). This was fun for awhile, but after a
year I see how much value I can have if I were involved
upstream: at the early prototyping, experimenting and exploring
stages.
How do I get from here to there? What do I need to do to get
people out of the ‘usability as a verification test’ mindset and
into "usability as an exploration tool" one? And how do I do
more lightweight studies without violating their view of me as a
‘scientist’ or ‘data queen’?”
Scott Berkun’s uxclinic, February 20, 2006

iander
How to get upstream
“When salmon try to go upstream, they don't worry much about
method. They jump, strafe, slide, struggle and fight their way.
To get upstream means adapting to the conditions of the
stream - and you won't get far until you stop binding yourself to
the classical bounds of "researcher" or data queen. I can't count
the number of times I've see people stick to their researcher
guns, talking about protocol, sample sizes, or confidence
intervals, not realizing that everyone upstream is immune to
those guns (and the people wielding them).”
Scott Berkun, uxclinic, March 1, 2006

iander
How to get upstream
“Upstream work is organic and chaotic - changes are frequent
and sizable. If you want to work upstream you have to have the
tools and attitude that fit - the tough love truth is that many
usability engineers think they want to work upstream until they
get a taste for what upstream is like: it's the opposite of what
they were trained (as psych majors) to handle. It's all about
speed and instinct, not about method and certainty.”

iander
How to get upstream
“Specific tactics: Who's influential upstream? What questions
are they trying to answer (and when do they need answers)?
What upstream assignments can you sign yourself up for? Ask
yourself how your toolbox can be of use and sell those tools as
answers to those questions, or as the means to achieve the
desired ends. If your toolbox proves useless, find (make) new
tools borrowing from whatever discipline or person you can find.
Don't get hung up on protocol or precision: you're not writing
papers or publishing research - instead your job, as is anyone
working upstream, is to make good decisions happen. Not
much else matters.”

iander
What has Propelled User
Experience Forward Where You
Work?

iander
?
Components of Strategies
That Might Propel Things
Forward Further
Rationale
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Changing the Role User Experience Plays in Your Business — DUX 2007

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