Four UX industry leaders came to SI tonight to talk about 'What makes an effective UX professional;' the event was put on by Michigan UPA (MUPA), the Michigan/Ohio chapter of CHI (MOCHI), the Student Organization for Computer-Human Interaction at the School of Information (SOCHI), and the School of Information Career Development Office. Each panelist gave an introduction and some tips, and then the panelists took questions from the audience. Following are some liveblogged notes from each panelist's individual talk as well as a summary of the panel discussion.
James Anderson
VP of electronic services at Michigan First Credit Union.
Best practices often do not exist out in the real world - this is an opportunity to be the guru, sentinel, cowboy if you well. Get involved in a shop that does agile development. This needs to become more accepted in the real world.
Politics and interpersonal skills are also important - the ability to convince others, make connections, getting buy-in in order to be effective.
Barbara Hernandez
User Experience Manager TechSmith
"We believe that people should just be able to use software and not have to learn how to use software."
UX Team has five designers and two full-time researchers.
Designers at TechSmith live and breathe with the development team, know their product inside and out, use their people skills to make changes.
"If you are doing user experience, you are doing agile development" because the process requires iterative development. "The closer you can be to where the decisions are made, the more influence you can have"
"Be close to the decision making process, find successes to build on."
Product management is next - must be able to influence product managers to make changes. "Cradle to grave design" - I hate to use the 'f' word, 'feature', but we try to solve real problems iteratively; design great interactions; involve the team; design collaboratively; and created finished art.
Now that we are integrated we are trying to integrate the visual style and interaction models across our products - it's important to look like our diverse products are from the same company. But the work is slow, and we have some cross-platform design issues - Camtasia just released for the mac!
User research: we do usability testing and other methods. Involve designers/programmers.
Design skills: visual design/communication, workflow modeling, interaction design, leader, facilitation, open mind, technical skills, and an open mind. Need skills like expression blend, Flash for rapid prototyping purposes.
Research skills: usability testing, survey testing, being highly collaborative, + more.
Successes for TechSmith: Very close relationship between design and research team. Champion users, and providing opportunities to see real users use the product. Data collection and aggregation.
Keith Instone
Information Architecture Lead for IBM's web presence
IBM Corporation
This is still a good profession to be in. UX is still a hot job.
Started out in the sales area, and in a big corporation it does matter what branch of the org you're in; so originally he was on the web team.
Team is 8 (IA, Designers), works on the public website. Another 6 work on intranet in parallel. Right now he's on an extended team of about 40 people.
User researchers have been on a different team, for some reason...
When he first started it was software UX, but now it's getting to be web UX.
Showcase of 'design convergence' project - built two different sites for the public site vs the intranet site, so they wasted money; bringing the two sites together is a current project. "One way of doing a CSS class will save IBM a million dollars, another won't."
- So technical skills are important - defining HTML/CSS specs.
- Abstract/modular design skills - altering pages to display correctly on mobile devices.
- Branding, marketing, business strategy, cross-channel design, "web presence," social media, language, culture etc. One difficulty is the new micromanaging of website information.
- Social media - he's supposed to put together the IA of 100 different twitter accounts.
- Roadmaps - what do we want the UX to be? How do all the pieces fit together? How do we affect the entire user experience? How can we communicate across the organization to strategically plan these moves? He is doing program management on these meta-type projects.
"You don't design pages anymore; you lay out the information. It's going to be used in many different contexts."
Laurie Kanter
Tec-Ed
5 employees, and trusted associates. national, international.
"The team thats looking for projects"
Super-set of skills required in effective UX teams and people:
Tec-Ed's niche is research - they are originally a technical communication firm. They do a fair amount of design at this point, and they also do some training.
- If people come in with the wrong experience, there is some 'undoing' to do - so she enjoys mentoring people who have the right basic skill set.
- Realize if you are a researcher who does design or a designer who does research.
- IA does straddle design and research.
- It's best to have a fresh pair of eyes when you're researching/validating your own designs.
- Good to have coding skills.
- Content development - making your information usable for the consumer, whether internal or external.
- Domain specialization is a good thing.
- Project definition; the ability to take the client's problem and design a strategy to research it/etc.
- Project management is a skill/art and makes the difference between profit and loss.
- Tec-Ed's projects are actually quite diverse - not just research, but a fair amount of design.
- Fundamental skills to improve: writing, communication, presentation, time management, information management, use of office software.
- Special skills: accessibility, benchmark testing, remote testing, prototyping, team leadership, etc.
Panel discussion:
Interview tips:
- Good to understand the political environment small team/ vs large team.
- What did you do in the groups you worked on? Give specific examples. Don't 'set off the BS detector' by only stating what your team did and not what you individually did. Be able to turn failures into successes.
How do you get people to do design work within the company? Affinity diagramming, persona projects, etc - at TechSmith, they try to get everyone on the team to generate design ideas.
Being able to break projects into manageable chunks and be 'agile' yourself can help you survive in many corporate environments. Working as a team, a team cohesive experience is important - instead of having developers 'make stuff' and trying to bring that together into a product.
"Stick a user in front of the interface and watch them fail" - that is the best way to convince the development team (or company) that there is a problem with the interface. "click and curse" technique. But don't show just one, show four - or else people will think that it's an unusual situation.
What is the connection between marketing and user interfaces? TechSmith: tried to incorporate branding into the user experience.
Wireframing - is it important, and what tool do you recommend?
Keith Instone: everyone should be able to communicate design, just use whatever presentation format everyone else is using.
Barbara HErnandez: they use Flash, photoshop, or paper and pencil.
James Anderson: important to also understand the implications on the back end as well.
