Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent

Every time we reach across discipline boundaries to keep a product team focused on users, drive changes to products or services based on user data we've collected, or design interactions with a clear focus on the target user, we are functioning as agents of change within our organizations.

Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Creating the Out-of-the-Box Experience: A Case Study  

While producing a new deliverable to improve the out-of-the-box experience for a major software product, the team of writers, graphic designers, human factors engineers, and marketers responsible for the deliverable faced many challenges and overcame many obstacles. Anyone involved in the production of such a deliverable will learn from a discussion of the problems we faced and the approaches we took to solving them. This discussion will be particularly relevant for anyone creating such a deliverable for the first time.

Hogan, Tim. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>TC>User Experience>Collaboration

How to Succeed As a First-Time UX Manager

In my last column, I suggested that being a manager of UX is no better—and no worse—than being a great designer or user researcher, but the roles are very different. In fact, as the book The First 90 Days [1] points out, the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader.

Nieters, Jim. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Management>Collaboration

The Public Library as a Meeting-Place in a Multicultural and Digital Context: The Necessity of Low-Intensive Meeting-Places  

The purpose of the paper is to develop an improved conceptual framework for researching and discussing the public library's role as a meeting-place in a multicultural and digital society.

Audunson, Ragnar. Journal of Documentation (2005). Articles>Collaboration>User Experience

Sharing Ownership of UX

By working closely together in harmony, product management, UX, and engineering can achieve synergy, making the product user experience greater than the sum of their individual efforts.

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

UX Community

To all of the bloggers who have written about UXmatters and people who have sent email messages and comments, thank you for warmly welcoming UXmatters to the UX community. We've been gratified by the high level of interest in and enthusiastic response to this Web magazine. There seems to have been some pent up demand for a publication that covers the breadth of user experience for digital products!

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2005). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

In Search of Strategic Relevance for UX Teams

Although our UX management peers have shared many tactics with us that have made their groups more strategically relevant, we’re presenting just a few here. We’ll highlight what we feel are the most salient factors in getting you to the strategy table.

Nieters, Jim and Laurie Pattison. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Management>User Experience>Collaboration

Communicating Customer and Business Value with a Value Matrix

What happens to the personas and scenarios once you’re ready to start requirements definition and design. Are you sure you’ve adequately communicated the type of system your users need to the Business Analyst and Interaction Designer on your team?

Cecil, Richard F. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Collaboration>User Experience>Assessment

The UX Designer’s Place in the Ensemble: Directing the Vision

What does directing have to do with creating a user interface design? Well, we know a director is responsible for the strategic vision of creative work. That’s a given. But, did you know he is also responsible for ensuring a successful outcome that both meets his vision and is in line with the producer’s desires and budget? To make that happen, a director works with the cast, crew, costume and set designers, and everyone else who contributes to a successful theatrical production to pull together a cohesive product, without losing site of his vision. It’s a complicated job.

Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration>Project Management

Conversing Well Across Channels

Whether you call it cross-channel experience or multichannel experience, the reality is that customers interact with companies through more than one channel, so it’s important for us to understand cross-channel customer behavior.

Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Communication>Collaboration>User Experience

The UX Customer Experience: Communicating Effectively with Stakeholders and Clients

Effective communication with stakeholders and clients is critical to the design process itself, but this is not a topic we often address, because, at first glance, it doesn’t appear to contribute directly to our primary goals, which are to create, build, and ship digital products. Certainly, as an industry, we are attuned to client service in a general sense, but there’s no doubt that methods of UX customer communication, education, and collaboration are sometimes overlooked and underutilized aspects of the design process. We can and should treat the elements of stakeholder and client communication as a kind of user experience. And we should design this experience for our UX customers so far as it’s possible to do so.

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration

Using Web Software for Collaborative Work on Virtual UX Teams

Increasingly, virtual teamwork means UX professionals must get things done in an environment devoid of the physical presence of colleagues and lacking the relative ease of on-site collaboration. Effectively completing UX tasks while at a distance from our clients, stakeholders, and team members can be challenging, from both technical and process perspectives. How can we, as UX professionals, enable the close collaboration with others we need and manage the process of creating engaging digital experiences when we’re so far apart from each other physically?

Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Collaboration>Software>User Experience

Experience Themes

When a screenwriter can summarize a story in one sentence, he has a compass that can guide him throughout the writing process. Cindy Chastain chronicles how we can translate this approach to help us remember the quality and value of the experience we intend to deliver.

Chastain, Cindy. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Collaboration

Design Partners: Passing on the Knowledge of UX

The two main drivers for a successful relationship were to respect each other’s opinion and to use active listening to understand what the other was saying.

Richkus, Rebecca. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>User Experience>Collaboration

I Have an Idea! Forums for Design Conversations and Negotiations 

Working together in a group to produce a creative outcome is difficult—don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. A time or two, I’ve had that same feeling of being dumbstricken when participating in various forms of UX design brainstorming sessions.

Lepore, Traci. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration