New(ish) Workshops/Courses
User Experience Managers and Executives Speak
 How do user experience managers and executives achieve success? What are their strategies? How do they approach the multitude of organizational challenges they face? What approaches do they recommend or avoid?
Receive answers to these questions from a wide range of user experience managers and executives from fields such as financial services, consumer electronics, health services, internet services, enterprise software, telecommunications, design services, and insurance, and who are or have been in such roles in companies of a wide range of sizes and at different stages of "user experience maturity." Ask your own questions of the weekly special guests, share your answers, and begin to formulate or make adjustments to your own strategies and approaches.
After completing this course, participants will be able to more effectively:
- position user experience in their own companies;
- address their own organizational challenges;
- increase the influence user experience has in their companies;
- lead their own user experience groups or organizations, or work with such groups or organizations led by others.
More about the offering via UC Extension in Silicon Valley.
Changing the Role User Experience Plays in Your Business
Why is it that at a time when user experience (UX) expertise is in high demand, countless UX professionals continue to feel misunderstood, undervalued, and unable to contribute to the success of the businesses for which they work in the ways and to the extent they can and often should?
Why is it that at a time when UX is becoming a critical marketplace differentiator, countless companies continue to not utilize or position user experience professionals in such a way as to enable them to effectively contribute to the formulation of business strategy?
What can be done to change this? What can YOU do to change the role UX plays where YOU work?
This highly interactive and participatory seminar borrows elements from the highly-praised, multi-session "Managing User Experience Groups" and "User Experience Managers and Executives Speak" courses offered in Silicon Valley, from the "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?" interactive session from CHI 2007, and from related sessions Richard has led within various companies.
This seminar can be customized for different situations, including in-house offerings.
Managing User Experience Groups
 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 building and 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
More about the offering via UC Extension in Silicon Valley. (This course can be customized for different situations, including in-house offerings.)
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Sample Past Workshop/Course Offerings
User-Centered Design / Usability Engineering
What makes a product (or system or website or...) "usable"? How can usability be "engineered"? Is "usability" enough? When should techniques of user-centered "design" be applied? What should precede design? What roles should ethnography play? Who should be involved? What affects our approaches to designing user interfaces and our opinions of user interface quality? What are the limitations/dangers of various techniques/approaches?
This course explores answers to these and related questions about contemporary approaches to designing or contributing to the design of usable (and useful and desirable) products/systems/websites/..., providing you with experience at using different approaches and enabling you to identify or formulate approaches best suited to you and your organization's needs.
Topics addressed include:
- the nature of usability, usability engineering, & user-centered design
- software user interface widgets/devices/styles
- design standards and guidelines
- consistency versus transparency
- user testing & other means of assessing/predicting usability (e.g., heuristic evaluation)
- usability objectives
- task analysis
- scenarios & use cases
- iteration & collaboration
- contextual inquiry & ethnography
- participatory design
- prototyping (low-fidelity and high-fidelity)
- metaphor
- design rationale
- role playing, story-telling, & improvisation
- integrating usability engineering & user-centered design with product/system development life cycles
- costs/benefits of user-centered design & usability engineering
- cognitive/cultural structures that affect designer/manager/user behavior and opinion
- organizational interfaces / groupware
- approaching usability engineering & user-centered design within the context of process improvement
- dealing with real-world constraints
- adoption strategies for & the future of usability engineering & user-centered design
Read more about this workshop as offered several times via UC Berkeley Extension.
Meeting the Needs of a Multidisciplinary Profession
 A large and growing number of user experience professionals are finding a large and growing number of professional associations and events of relevance and interest to them. Hence, these professional associations and events are increasingly competing with each other for user experience professionals' time, attention, and money. This leaves alot of professionals ill-served and unhappy, and some professional associations struggling to be successful.
What will it take to solve this problem?
- Increased sharing of resources?
- Improved access to information about the many organizations and events of interest?
- More conferences like DUX2003 and DUX2005, targeted more directly at the user experience professional and both the responsibility of multiple professional associations?
- The development of new, better-targeted professional associations and/or a redefinition of the focus of some of those which exist?
- The creation of new professional association memberships that are comprised of products and services from multiple associations?
- The development of a new organization designed to enable increased collaboration and coordination among existing professional associations?
Read about how twenty-two leaders of 11 professional associations tackled this for two days during April 2005.
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