User Experience Managers and Executives Speak
7 consecutive Wednesday evenings
February 13 - March 26, 2008, 6:30-9:30pm
UCSC Extension Silicon Valley Campus, Cupertino CA
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 (usually two guests each evening), share your answers, and begin to formulate or make adjustments to your own strategies and approaches.
Among the many guests slated to appear:
- Irene Au, Director User Experience at Google;
- Secil Watson, SVP Internet Channel Strategy at Wells Fargo;
- Klaus Kaasgaard, VP Customer Insights at Yahoo!;
- Jeremy Ashley, VP Applications User Experience at Oracle;
- Jim Leftwich, Chief Experience Officer at SeeqPod;
- Mark Plakias, VP Strategy & Design at France Telecom Orange Labs.
This course is intended for those who presently are, or may in the future become, a user experience manager or executive. The course is also intended for other types of managers and executives who (will) work with user experience managers and executives and/or can impact how user experience is addressed and positioned in their companies.
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.
Those taking the course for credit should plan time for readings and assignments between class sessions.
At least a basic understanding of user experience, user-centered design, user experience research, etc. will be assumed. Those who have already taken Managing User Experience Groups are likely to find the course especially valuable; however, that course is not a prerequisite.
Credit: 2 units
Instructor: Richard Anderson, Ph.D.(ABD) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a 'user experience' practice, management, and organizational strategy consultant with international management, cross-organizational development, and more than 20 years of experience. He is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine. He started and directed the Experience Center at Viant, as well as the User Research & Experience Strategy discipline at Studio Archetype and Sapient, and has held and supported other management roles in an assortment of companies. Via various consulting, advisory, and employment roles, and his workshops, courses, conference programs, and more, he has helped move 'user/customer experience' into a position of greater influence in numerous companies. At CHI 2007, Richard received SIGCHI's Lifetime Service Award for extensively facilitating and spreading the development of the field via his leadership contributions to BayCHI and to other chapters of SIGCHI around the world. (You'll be able to learn more about this course in his blog.)
Student Evaluations:
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"The single most informative course a UX professional could ever take."
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"Incredible breadth of knowledge and information resources in this space from instructor as well as guest speakers."
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"One of the best targeted classes for people strongly headed into User Experience."
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"Invaluable; you can't find this elsewhere in the Bay Area."
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"Loved the course."
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"I loved it. The instructor was experienced, calm, knowledgeable, well-connected."
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"Valuable course discussions and excellent speakers."
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"Most valuable was the active discussion; trying different ideas together; insights."
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"Real people, real stories of experience that can't be learned from a textbook."
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"Highly qualified, great speakers, and diverse too. Expert instruction. Good group discussions."
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"Please have this course again or continue on in the same area. I will take it!"
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"I greatly enjoyed the class. Made for a great counter balance to my current work situation. Thank you."
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"It's been great visiting with you, the speakers and everyone in the class as well. The whole experience will have a positive impact on my determination and effectiveness in this space for the rest of my career. The central value of course (for me) was simply discovering everyone else's situations and solutions, and frankly, coming out of isolation in how I approach this."
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"Thanks for the excellent course."
