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
The author gets into the nitty-gritty of what it means to practice user experience in an Agile environment. She lists out some of the benefits of UX , some potential set backs to UX in a true agile environment, how to address these problems and three different types of UX roles, that when combined in a team create a solution. Those roles are:
- The Integrated Practitioner
- The Support Practitioner
- The Researcher
Integrating UX into an Agile Environment
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What makes an effective UX team is the completeness of the skillset across all the members. The roles of individuals are secondary &emdash; a team with generalists will always be more flexible than a team of specialists.
Specialists help when the local economic conditions support their being there. Yet, specialists have general knowledge, so they can be flexible and interact with the rest of the team in a productive manner.
Ideal UX Team Makeup: Specialists, Generalists, or Compartmentalists
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Interesting presentation at SXSW from Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple, who tried to assess how Apple can ‘get’ design when so many other companies try and fail.
Apple’s Design Process
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When a company wants to make a certain segment of the organization better, usually they “throw more money at it” and hire more employees. The problem with doing this for a UX team is that people with overlapping skills and ideas usually end up hindering user-centered design rather than helping. Conflicting design decisions will soon turn into a design by committee situation that won’t help the consumer nor expose individual expertise (Brown 2004).
User Experience Group Development and Integration
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This website aims to tap the collective expertise of the user experience community to develop a guide on how to manage UX teams.Two user experience team managers- Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin share their insights and facilitate the discussion as they create this guide.
Managing UX Teams
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