Tutorials

This tutorial helps attendees position User Experience (UE) as a strategic business process within their company. Discussions, case studies, and exercises focus on: explaining the benefits of UE to management; ways to structure UE processes for maximum impact; effective tactics for organizational change, and integrating UE into existing business strategies.

PARTICIPANT KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE EXPECTED

This tutorial is aimed at intermediate to advanced practitioners who have several years of HCI related work experience in corporate settings. It is particularly appropriate for the manager or advocate charged with championing user-centered design processes. The material covered would also be of interest to product or engineering managers who have a solid understanding of HCI and want to promote user-centered design in their organizations.

Attendees are expected to understand and have experience with, or knowledge of, usability testing, gathering UI requirements, and UI design related activities. Some experience with managing or leading teams responsible for UE activities would be beneficial but is not required. Tutorial examples will primarily draw from software development contexts, but the material covered is broadly applicable to UE initiatives in any product development oriented business.

GOALS FOR THE SESSION:

After completing this tutorial, attendees will:

• Develop a conceptual framework for thinking about UE as a strategic business process rather than an isolated set of techniques and best practices.
• Understand the difference between operational, tactical, and strategic activities.
• Learn how to identify hidden cost reductions associated with UE efforts within their own companies and how to communicate those savings more effectively.
• Understand how three key factors in organizations (resources, processes, and values) impact product designs.
• Gain hands on experience with techniques to help prioritize work and identify ways of more effectively engaging other organizations in their company for maximum impact and visibility
• Learn about strategic inflection points and how UE is in a unique position to help organizations survive these situations.
• Practice articulating the rationale for UE as a must-have competence for every product development initiative using business terminology

While UPA attendees have diverse backgrounds, many lack formal training in management or strategic planning. This tutorial attempts to fill a void by discussing an important topic, how to better align our profession's goals within the context of an organization's business strategy. The tutorial materials reference works by noted experts in management science and business strategy literature (e.g., Drucker, Christensen, and Grove) that is highly relevant to UE practitioners, but likely to be unfamiliar to many UPA attendees.

HOW THIS TUTORIAL WILL BE CONDUCTED

The instructors will use a traditional business skills training approach that combines lecture and structured group exercises to introduce a framework for understanding UE as a strategic business process and positioning it as such within an organization.

The three broad topic areas for the tutorial cover the operational, organizational, and strategic aspects that UE groups can and should impact within product development companies. Each topic area will be discussed in depth and followed by a group exercise where attendees will have an opportunity to apply the concepts discussed to a problem faced at their own company or organization. These exercises are designed to facilitate group discussion and learning of the concepts.

Later in the day, the instructors will tie the concepts from the three sections together and discuss how to apply the concepts to influence organizational strategy. This will be followed by an exercise where attendees in each group work on creating a presentation aimed at the senior management at their company. After group review, each group nominates the best of these presentations and presents them to all attendees of the tutorial.

The instructors will share presentation and group exercise facilitation roles equally (50% and 50%) between them.

TUTORIAL SCHEDULE WITH TIME ALLOCATION

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF TUTORIAL

Instructor & Participant Introductions (10 minutes)

The instructors will introduce themselves. Participants will then be asked to briefly identify themselves, their organizational affiliations, and to identify one key learning objective they hope to take away from the tutorial.

Tutorial Overview (10 minutes)

An overview of the tutorial topics will be presented to help participants develop a conceptual framework for the discussions and activities to follow.

1. Operational Focus

Discussion: Achieving Operational Excellence (25 minutes)

In order to achieve operational excellence, your team must focus on providing tangible work outputs, at the right times, throughout the product development process—without negatively impacting product development schedules. The instructors will briefly review standard UE processes (e.g., user studies, prototyping, etc) and discuss strategies for cost-effectively applying these techniques in rapid, medium, and long term product development cycles. Finally, we will discuss implementing operational measures for UE group processes and the importance of communicating these measures as part of cost-benefit analyses highlighting your impact on the business.

Exercise: Cost Analysis, Value-Add, and ROI (45 minutes)

Working in teams, conduct an analysis of your own UE group's operations, and unique value-add. Develop a set of metrics for key UE activities that clearly demonstrate the contribution your team brings to the organization.

2. Organizational Focus

Discussion: Developing a Broad Organizational Focus (45 Minutes)

The key to become empowered as a group lies in your collaboration with other organizations and individuals within your company. The instructors will introduce the concept of value networks and explain how this concept applies to groups within organizations. We will describe tactics to widen the operational scope of your group's contributions to the development process by stepping outside the box of traditional UE activities into areas such as product planning, program management, and quality assurance. We will talk about how UE groups have broken out of their traditional roles to achieve greater success through collaboration and interdependence.

Exercise: Collaborating for Greater Impact and Success (45 minutes)

Working in teams, analyze your organizations for opportunities to find greater success and visibility through collaboration. Identify the tactics specific to various organizational contexts that foster collaboration and interdependence.

3. Strategic Focus

Discussion: Integrating UE into Strategic Initiatives (30 minutes)

Too many UE groups focus so much on day-to-day deliverables they fail to influence the company at a strategic level. We will briefly review examples of corporate strategic initiatives in high tech companies. The instructors will describe ways to get more directly involved with supporting corporate strategic initiatives. By getting involved, your group will not only improve its overall visibility, it will become more effective. Current trends in business process improvement will be reviewed from a UE perspective, including examples of how UE skills can be leveraged to support these types of efforts.

4. Putting It all Together—A Recipe for Success

Discussion: Preparing for Strategic Rollout (30 minutes)

We will review the key concepts from the previous three sections and how they relate to corporate strategies. How can your group's core competencies be leveraged more effectively by various organizations within your company to achieve strategic corporate level goals? How can you better communicate your group's value add? How can you become more visible to executive management, investors, customers, and partners? The instructors will present tips and best practices and lead the groups in a focused discussion on these topics.

Exercise: Strategic Rollout—Part 1 (30 minutes)

In part 1 of this exercise, each participant will create a strategic positioning plan for your own group within your company. Utilizing the outputs from the earlier activity sessions, you will create a high-level, 5 minute presentation suitable for presenting to a senior management team.

Exercise: Strategic Rollout—Part 2 (30 minutes)

In part 2 of this exercise, each participant will take turns presenting their plan within their working groups. Each working group will then nominate the best presentation to present to the entire class.

Pitching Your Vision (45 minutes)

The best plan from each working group will be presented to the entire class so that all participants may benefit from each other's insight and thinking. Feedback and critique will be offered so that attendees may further hone their plans and presentations for use in their own organizations.

Wrap Up (15 minutes)

Instructor led discussion, followed by time allocated to complete course evaluation forms.

SPEAKER BIOS

Liam Friedland

User Experience

Westbridge Technology

Liam heads User Experience at Westbridge Technology. Prior to Westbridge, Liam was a founding manager in Siebel's User Experience group where he grew and managed an interdisciplinary team. He has over 14 years experience introducing and managing user-centered design initiatives at some of the world's top software companies including Microsoft, Oracle, and Borland. Liam holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design, and has published several articles and co-authored a book chapter on HCI.

Jon Innes

Director User Experience

Vitria Technology, Inc.

Jon Innes is Director of User Experience at Vitria Technologies, the leading provider of business process integration solutions. Prior to joining Vitria, Jon built and managed an interdisciplinary User Experience team at Siebel Systems. He has designed and evaluated user interfaces for Cisco Systems, Oracle, Symantec, and IBM. Jon earned his Masters degree from New Mexico State University, where he studied Engineering Psychology. Jon is a member of UPA, HFES, and ACM CHI/BayCHI.