August, 2006
Chapter Business
The September meeting will be on the 21st at Staples in Framingham. We will have our famous 10 minute talks moderated by Chauncey, and there are still a few slots open. E-mail Susie if you want to talk.
Chris gave a short recap of the Deborah Mayhew workshop, which was a big success. Folks can suggest ideas for future workshops or offer to present themselves. E-mail Jen if you have ideas.
We need ideas for World Usability Day activities/events and volunteers to help out. The Museum of Science wants to use us as test bed for new exhibit ideas for their museum and other museums potentially nationwide. We are looking for a volunteer coordinator, a design firm that may have prototypes for a "road to usability" exhibit, a journalism student to put together podcasts, etc. during the day, and people who want to help us do better signage. If you have ideas about what to do with a Wang computer, or ideas about how to improve the current metro system for converting tokens to tickets (that we might present to city later!), let Chris know.
Job List:
- Molecular - 3 jobs on web site (cards on front desk)
- Autodesk - 3-4 positions (Lynn)
- MathWorks - Talk to Susie if interested
- MetLife - Mary Weinstein - looking for information architect; see metlife.com.
- BA/usability - but position is in Cleveland Nokia looking for design house - Adam
Presentation
Jared 's intent was to impart to his audience tricks that organizations do to put teams together, and he led off the discussion with a business card balancing act (quite a trick in and of itself!) :
Introduction
Jared illustrated how iPod excels because it presents a complete user experience with iTunes, ties its use to fashion, and has good design, etc. even though its hardware is inferior to competitors like SanDisk. Apple, a complete outsider to the music industry, is now a top seller of music; they are also a computer company now selling consumer electronics at an incredible rate.
There's a similar story with NetFlix (versus BlockBuster). For them, word of mouth spreads subscriptions. Their marketing budget is small because their customers are their sales force. This has extreme predictive qualities. Supreme experience design translates into revenue. Executives now interested. (Ethnography now is hot.)
It is possible to have experience design (i.e. "improvements") result in disaster = lost revenue. How does one successfully improve the experience?
NetFlix users don't talk about IA, social networking, or use of technology like AJAX. This isn't that important. They talk about the movie selection, obtaining/returning process, etc., which is key. The only way to deal with NetFlix is through web site (and all questions are answered on the web site), but no one mentions it, because successful experience design is INVISIBLE. We only notice when things are broken! So the question is, how do you convince people that everything you do well is valuable when the results are /success is invisible?
SouthWest Airlines' most restricted fare rules are one page in English, versus other carriers with pages and pages of legal mumbo jumbo. SouthWest want their customers to understand the terms and for there to be no questions - this tells us something about decisions made during design.
Experience Design Team Skills
An experience design team is a multidisciplinary activity, involving the following:
- Copywriting
- IA
- Iteration Management
- Usability practices
- Info/interaction design
- Visual design
- Editing
- Ethnography
- Domain knowledge Business analysis
- Analytics
- Technology
- Marketing goals
- ROI
- Social networks
- Use cases
- Agile methods
Team Building A5pproaches
There are several approaches to building a user experience team:
- Consulting: When an internal/external team/person does the design (self service). This approach only works when there are a small number of projects.
- Review & Approve: This is the most popular approach. There's too much work, so they do the design, and you approve or make recommendations for improvement (this is the process). There is use of style guides/templates etc. This approach makes the design team a bottleneck.
- Educate & Administrate: This approach is proactive versus the previous (which is reactive). You do the recommendations up front by sharing what you know about design, techniques, and audience. You assist groups from the start. (This approach is still the minority but is growing in popularity.) This approach scales best, and gets the entire organization focused on successful experience design!
The "Educate" Part
- You need to know the desired experience (i.e. vision) for the long term (e.g. 3 years down the road), and communicate that vision to everyone.
- You need a path to disseminate user feedback quickly.
- You need to use design problems as a teachable moment, not a punishable offense.
- You need good communication paths to design agents (including secondary folks who have impact on the experience-those who don't know they are doing this or are educated to do so).
The "Administrate" Part
- Make collecting feedback inexpensive (e.g. recruit many UT participants at once; set up once/month pre-scheduled tests where teams can bid on who gets to use them).
- Constantly share learnings across the organization (but no large binders of UT reports!) Use blogs, Wikis, or text-only email newsletters.
- Make doing good design practice the path of least resistance.
- A team does not need usability professionals to be successful.
Specialist vs. Generalists
Both specialists and generalists gain experience and skills through repetition and study, and both are needed for usability practices to succeed. It's not unreasonable now to see usability professionals specializing in industries like financial services. Note though that specialization is not compartmentalization (i.e. people who can only work with their skill sets). Professionals still need a breadth of skills to understand and interact with other areas. The most successful teams have specialists but are not compartmentalized.
Economics drives whether you can have specialists in your organization; generalists are required everywhere budget doesn't allow for specialists. If usability professionals are only specialists, we cannot meet the needs of experience design that is becoming more understood by executives. We must be able to live with generalists (i.e. folks who are well versed in a variety of UX disciplines) and make sure our community provides support for the generalists. We have to get to an "educate & administrate" model where we have the skills both to do the work and to teach it. "Watch one / do one / teach one" needs to be in our practice (like it is in the medical profession).
Questions
Q: How can we educate programmers?
A: Programmers hate redoing things. Use this approach when educating. Use the "How can we make their lives easier?" angle.
Q: How does marketing research overlap with usability?
A: Marketing and usability have things in common (e.g. techniques), but have different objectives. Marketing wants to know who would pay for the product they're building and why. They are more demographics focused. Usability wants to know who uses the product and how.
Q: How do you justify spending more money for specialists?
A: Specialists must be good at what they do but also be able to train generalists. There's currently no equivalent of doing "hospital rounds" (team swapping for 6 weeks) in many organizations. Temporary reassignments have huge impacts.
Q: What role / job description is first to hire on UX team?
A: This is based on organizational culture, what are you trying to accomplish, and what the vision is. It's probably best to hire someone who can hire the others (i.e. a manager-type). You can't solve all the problems with just one person (there are few Chauncey's on this planet!). People should have evangelism skills and a number of other skills (IA, interaction design, user research, etc.). Building a team is often a bigger job than what you think. You have to change the culture as well.