A Kit For Building User Experience Teams in R&D Organizations

A Kit For Building User Experience Teams Within Product & Service Organizations Paul Sherman Sherman Group User Experience

I could do the UX kit spiel in less than 5 minutes. It’s actually quite a boring presentation. What’s interesting is why I needed one, why you probably need one… and what we should be doing about this. 2

  The sad truth about the need for a “UX kit”   The kit itself   A discussion about launching UX teams and spreading UX in medium to large orgs 3

User experience practice needs to be embedded more securely into product development lifecycle activities. 4

Despite what we may think, UX is still poorly integrated into product ideation, design, and development activities. 5

Like Jared said in his UPA 2009 keynote, there are gaps in our ﬁeld. I believe that one of them is the lack of organizational structure and process guidelines. 6

Why isn’t there good stuﬀ out there on how to integrate UX teams into organizations? There are discussions. A few books. But there doesn’t seem to be many lively, ongoing discussions about UX and organizational structures, cultures, etc. 7

But isn’t setting up a team a precondition to actually DOING user experience work? 8

1.  It’s a trivial problem… I’m stupid and everyone gets this stuﬀ but me. Note: this is a deﬁnite possibility. 9

2.  It’s a particularly thorny problem or a problem that our ﬁeld is not equipped to work on. But we have so many research psychologists in our ranks! 10

3.  It’s just not as interesting or sexy as other problems in our ﬁeld. 11

1.  It’s a trivial problem… I’m stupid and everyone gets this stuff but me. 2.  It’s a particularly thorny problem or a problem that our field is not equipped to work on. 3.  It’s just not as interesting or sexy as other problems in our field. I choose #3 12

…always working on the unsexy problems. 13

I’ve worked for several organizations that claimed to do UX. Some of them actually did… 15

Some orgs *thought* they were doing UX. But what they were really doing could be called “UX in name only.” 16

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-‐native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices… 17 <lazy>Yes I took this from Wikipedia.</lazy>

Cargo cults … conduct rituals imitating the behavior they have observed among the holders of the desired wealth in order to receive the wealth themselves. 18 <lazy>Yes I took this from Wikipedia.</lazy>

21 A cargo cult in Second Life?!? Cool.

The term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superﬁcial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance. 22 <lazy>Yes I took this from Wikipedia.</lazy>

Some orgs do something resembling UX… but it’s not really UX. 23

Admit it…you’ve seen this too. 24

At my former company I was asked to help put together UX teams in other product groups. It took me one failure to realize that I needed to give them more than: “You need a user researcher and an interaction designer and a usability analyst.” 25

I did what PhD’s do best: I wrote a paper. And then I ate my own dog food and cut it down by 2/3. So people would actually read it. 27

Senior managers and directors who needed advice and consultation on how to set up a UX team. Most had no idea that they would have to change processes and procedures to beneﬁt from UX. 28

I know! 31

Service Lifecycle Phase Description Provides: Investigation of users’ goals, objectives, tasks, and Rich descriptions of users’ goals, Contextual inquiry Ideation limitations/constraints; at the users’ place of business (or motivations, environment. other appropriate use context). Task analysis Ideation Step-by-step, granular identification of users’ work tasks. Details of the users’ processes. Detailed reports of real users; what they do, how they do it, A “library” of user profiles that can User profiling Ideation etc. be used to guide design. An abstracted description of users, based on the attributes A “design target” specifying who Persona creation Ideation of real users. the design is aimed at. Role/task matrix Additional details about who does what in a particular Task/object matrix environment, as well as the importance of particular tasks. “Quasi”-quantitative information Design Task frequency & about users, roles, tasks, etc. criticality ratings Scenarios Designs describing the flow or transformation of information Information about how a design Use cases Design through a system, and how the system and user interact should work in the “real world” Process flows with each other. when implemented. Early-phase usability Testing the process flows and scenarios to ensure that they Validation of the design and Design meet real users’ needs. testing correction opportunities. A lo- or medium-fidelity representation of the feature or A working system that can be Wireframes & Validation & product. tested in late-phase usability prototypes documentation testing. Validation & The formal, complete documentation of the feature or A specification to code and inspect UI / interaction spec documentation product’s user interface. against. Validation & Formal documentation of the visual design for the product A specification to code and inspect Visual design documentation or feature. against. Late-phase usability Validation & Usability testing using a working prototype or mockup. Validation of the design and testing documentation correction opportunities. Usability testing of a finished version of the product, Summative usability End-of-cycle Information to feed into the next measuring key indicators such as average time-on-task, testing validation error rate, etc. lifecycle’s activities. 34

I provided crazy amounts of templates, data sheets, recruiting forms, report formats, etc. Note: when you steal from me, you’re stealing twice… 36

Hire at least 3 direct contributors – user researcher/usability analyst, interaction designer, visual designer – or more, depending on the size of your product. Hiring a manager or a director is also highly recommended. 38

Budget for between US$10,000 and US $60,000 in research expenses, depending on the size of your product team and how many products you support. 39

You can spend as little as US$1,000 or upwards of US$75,000 on usability and user research equipment. In any case, build the team and budget the research dollars ﬁrst. 40

Be aware that you will HAVE to change your ideation, design and development processes in order to successfully implement user experience. If you don’t explicitly make room for design research, ideation and iteration in your processes, you will not be successful in implementing user experience practices. 41

Meh. At ﬁrst, anyway. 43

It took about a year. But eventually the product groups started making the transition to more fully incorporating UX activities. They didn’t always go as far as my team. But they went further than they had ever gone before. 45

  Strategic user experience   Agile and other methods   How to deal with force reductions 46

My UX kit has gaps. It doesn’t cover smaller orgs or startups. Use at your own risk! 47

Absolutely. It helped several teams avoid making mistakes that organizations typically make when integrating UX teams into existing processes. 48

Kit: ShermanUX.com/Files/UXKit/UX_Kit_Jun09.doc This preso: ShermanUX.com/Files/UXKit/UX_Kit_Jun09.pdf 50

What are your experiences doing this sort of thing? 51

Paul Sherman Sherman Group User Experience www.shermanux.com paul@shermanux.com Twitter: pjsherman 52

http://www.usercentered.de	62
http://www.iroai.org	11
http://www.slideshare.net	11

A Kit For Building User Experience Teams in R&D Organizations

by Paul Sherman on Jun 13, 2009

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A Kit For Building User Experience Teams in R&D Organizations — Presentation Transcript