This document has been created as a reference for senior management in product groups who wish to learn more about incorporating user centered design practices into product ideation, design, and development processes. The terms ‘user experience’ and ‘user-centered design’ are used interchangeably in this document.
The four main sections of this document provide the following information:
- An overview of user centered design methods and techniques, and how they are incorporated into UX teams’ processes
- A description of how the team fits into the development lifecycle
- A detailed breakdown of what it costs to implement and UX/UCD team in a single product organization
- The UX team engagement mode – that is, what services the team provides, to whom, and when
- Descriptions of the difficulties typically encountered when a product organization decides to build a UX team.
- A reference section that provides descriptions of and access to user centered design tools and templates, deliverable samples, and recommended readings.
The User Experience Team Kit: How to Hire a UX Team and Incorporate User-Centered Design Methods into Your Software Development Lifecycle Process (PDF, 390 kb)
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The authors propose two metrics to demonstrate the impact integrating human-computer interaction (HCI) activities in software engineering (SE) processes. User experience metric (UXM) is a product metric that measures the subjective and ephemeral notion of the user’s experience with a product. Index of integration (IoI) is a process metric that measures how integrated the HCI activities were with the SE process.
Both metrics have an organizational perspective and can be applied to a wide range of products and projects. Attempt was made to keep the metrics light-weight. While the main motivation behind proposing the two metrics was to establish a correlation between them and thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of the process, several other applications are emerging.
The two metrics were evaluated with three industry projects and reviewed by four faculty members from a university and modified based on the feedback.
User Experience Metric and Index of Integration: Measuring Impact of HCI Activities on User Experience (PDF, 163 kb)
Six ways to be more agile and better integrate user experience and information architecture into agile development teams.
Agile + UX: six strategies for more agile user experience
Summary
As their usability approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research. An organization that reaches the managed usability stage still has far to go to reach usability nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.
Stage 1: Hostility Toward Usability
Stage 2: Developer-Centered Usability
Stage 3: Skunkworks Usability
Stage 4: Dedicated Usability Budget
Stage 5: Managed Usability
Stage 6: Systematic Usability Process
Stage 7: Integrated User-Centered Design
Stage 8: User-Driven Corporation
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8
As a user experience consultant, a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading any existing user research reports. These reports help understand the user research history of the project (i.e. the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration). For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that the author recommends including in a user research report to help build a user research history for the project.
User Research Reports: Six Data Points to Create a ‘User Research History’
Summary
Enemies of usability claim that because “the experts disagree,” they can safely ignore user advocates’ expertise and run with whatever design they personally prefer.
Building Respect for Usability Expertise
These patterns are recurring, and can be found in almost all companies that have a user experience practice. The author has grouped them into 5 models of how companies incorporate user experience in their culture. These 5 models are based on where in the corporation the user experience practice resides, and what types of interactions the user experience practice has with the rest of the organization.
- User Experience in I.T
- User Experience in Operations
- User Experience in Marketing
- User Experience as a Unique but Equal Entity
- User Experience as a Unique but Superior Entity
The 5 Models of Corporate User Experience Culture
HFI’s UX Maturity Survey indicates that stable, visible, internal usability and user experience groups with executive support have become significantly more prevalent since 2004. But having a presence is not the same as having a practice.
The HFI UX Maturity Survey – 2009 (PDF, 630kb)
A discussion on how to communicate and sell the UX message across all levels of an organization, and what strategies and tactics for evangelizing UX have worked for the panel.
Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization
Corporate ethnography isn’t just for innovation anymore. It’s central to gaining a full understanding of your customers and the business itself. The ethnographic work at my company, Intel, and other firms now informs functions such as strategy and long-range planning.
Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy