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Second Offering

Managing User Experience Groups

6 consecutive Wednesday evenings
October 11 - November 15, 2006, 6:30-9:30pm
UCSC Extension Silicon Valley Campus, Cupertino CA

Becoming an effective user experience group manager requires a significant shift from being an individual contributor or managing other types of groups. And thriving as a user experience group manager usually requires addressing significant organizational challenges.

What is the scope of "user experience" and of the work a user experience group does or should do? Who should be a part of a user experience group? With whom should members of a user experience group work, and how? How should such groups be positioned in companies? What reduces the effectiveness and impact of user experience groups, and what can be done about it?

Explore answers to these and other questions of relevance to effectively managing groups that are often cross-functional (i.e., composed of designers, researchers, information architects, and others) and often misunderstood. Learn answers to these types of questions for a wide range of user experience groups in a wide range of companies, and gain insights for answering these questions in your company.

Topics include:

• building a user experience group
• defining the work of a user experience group
• defining the composition of the team
• managing the employee
• making the case for user-centered design
• working together and with others in the company
• roles that can be played by user experience personnel
• positioning user experience within a company
• extending the reach of a user experience group
• involving user experience groups throughout the development life cycle
• the impact of "culture" on user experience group success
• overcoming common obstacles

This course is intended for those who presently, or may in the future, manage any kind of user experience group at any level. The course is also suitable for high-level managers whose multiple domains include user experience, and for others who can impact how user experience is addressed in their companies.

Participants in the course should plan time for readings and assignments between class sessions.

For credit: 1.5 units, 1.8 ceus

Instructors: Richard Anderson & Lillian Svec

RICHARD ANDERSON, Ph.D.(ABD) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a user experience management consultant (www.riander.com) with more than 20 years of experience. He started and directed the Experience Center at Viant, and started and directed the User Research & Experience Strategy discipline at Sapient and Studio Archetype. For those and many other companies, he has extended the reach and effectiveness of multidisciplinary, user-centered design practices.

LILLIAN SVEC, M.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design, has championed user-centered design and information architecture (IA) for fifteen years. She pioneered the IA role at Studio Archetype. At Sapient, she was the Global Practice Lead for IA providing leadership to 100 team members in 18 offices world-wide. At Walmart.com, she was the Director of User Experience. She is the program coordinator for the UCSC Extension Web Design and Development program.

Sample Student Evaluations:

• "The focused weekly sessions helped me to bring a structured approach to elevating the effectiveness of UE in my organization. I feel well-equipped to lead a UE team after having taken this course."
• "Fast-paced but invaluable content and exercises."
• "For those of you currently involved or interested in being involved in UE, I highly recommend this UCSC Extension course. ...extremely helpful in exploring User Experience from various angles. .. also provides an opportunity to network with some great people on the design industry."
• "Richard is an excellent instructor and employs an effective Socratic teaching style. Highly recommended course."
• "The most valuable part of the course was the amount of content we learned, the assigned readings, and the assignments -- very stretching."
• "Group discussions were extremely helpful; the lectures were very relevant; the readings were invaluable."
• "Thanks for a great class!"

• "This course is recommended for any UE professionals looking for a broader view of UE processes, methodologies, etc. from a leadership perspective."
• "Thank you very much for putting this class and the overwhelming and useful resources together and sharing it with us. This immensely helps me lead the good fight."
• "The most valuable parts of this course: the provided course materials & exercises/assignments, exchanges with other students, learning that most organizations have similar problems (its like group therapy!)."
• "Thanks again ... This project has stirred up much interest at my company."
• "I enjoyed your class very much, and I also thought that your assignments very challenging and interesting to work on. I was also very motivated to give the best I could..."
• "Thanks so much. I really enjoyed this class."
• "A very worthwhile course."
• "The most valuable part of this course was really getting to know what the current thinking is in this new field from instructors and classmates. Not offered anywhere else yet. Real Bay Area practitioners. Two instructors great for two viewpoints. I thought there would be more about practices, but what I got was much more useful as (for) practices there are books to go to, so we used class time to discuss what can't be found elsewhere."

• "The class was one of the bright spots of my year, with thought-provoking sessions and great insights. Thank you for that. I've been recommending it all around."
• "The most valuable part of this course were the reading materials, case studies, and the enormous knowledge and experience of the instructors."
• "Thank you for the assignments. I enjoyed the class, participating in it, and sharing (our) UE group's position."
• "This (final) assignment has a really good one which made me think about every single aspect of how the team could be set up. This was a good practice for me to really come up with a model/plan for a UED in the future when I get an opportunity to build and run the whole team."
• "Many thanks for a wonderful series (of classes)."
• "Thanks. This has been very helpful to put my thoughts down on paper so that I am thinking through some of the issues that are not directly bothering me at this moment, but I am sure they will in the future."
• "It has and will prove to be invaluable..."
• "Thank you for the great course on Managing UX Groups."