UX Success

Suzanne Kimble shares user requirements documents to our group of PDX area UX practitioners.

Well, last night we kicked off the first Portland UX Show and Tell event here at Con-way Freight.

Fifteen UX practitioners and enthusiasts gathered at 5:30 for pizza and networking — and lots of hugging (we do that in Portland).  Psyched to see tweeps  @thisKat, @marniepw, @evamill and @storywoman  — and jazzed about making a few new friends @jean_marie and Jenine from New York.

….. and then we got down to Show and Tell.

Mark Little kicked us off by sharing a report out that included wireframes for a dashboard to be used by freight brokers.  He explained how he used the RITE process and participatory design to get to the wireframes that form the basis of  the product requirements that will be turned into Agile stories.

Next, Eva Miller @evamill wowed us with three examples of how she documents and communicates the user task flows that feed design requirements.  She brought us a question:  “which of these examples works best for what audience in your experience?”  Her example for a grant writing data visualization tool sparked lively discussion.

Johnny Levenson showed us wireframes for a brand asset management system dashboard he is working on.    We all nodded and laughed  a lot and shared his pain and triumph as he shared some effective strategies for collaborating with designers and developers.

Johnny Levenson shared some effective strategies for collaborating with designers and developers.

Suzanne Kimble ended the sharing with a bang by sharing her success in slimming down a massive written product requirements document into a very usable and consumable deliverable that includes visuals that designers and developers “get”.  Her project is to design an interface for CAD systems to be used by apparel designers.  We are going to start hounding her for PDX UX Show and Tell T shirts .  I look forward to sharing with Suzanne as we continue to navigate the Agile Waters in our respective jobs.

I had no pre-conceptions going into this thing except that I was psyched to meet up with some cool peeps I haven’t seen in awhile.  A few things struck me as take aways from this session:

1. Requirements – we all want to know “how do we do a better job of communicating requirements?”

2. BA and UX and Design and Development  are closely intertwined and collaborative in the most successful cases

3. UX builds bridges – in all cases we were the ones who communicated “what this thing is that we are making” and we did it by showing how our users would do their jobs better by using the thing what we are making.

I am super energized and grateful to be a part of this community of awesomeness!

Looking forward to next month’s event!  Join the PDX UX Show and Tell Group on Ning.

Happy Monday and February

The Boss  threw down a challenge last week.  He asked our team to put together a preso for brass outlining what should be our vision for Institutionalizing UX in Enterprise Services.  He asked for a 1, 3 and 5 year plan.   Someone has  had a wake-up call  and now IT wants to know how we are going to help our organization go from a focus of building lots of functions to meeting user needs — and how does that play with the Agile method we have adapted?  Sheesh.

Of course, the first thing we did was to go to Neilsen’s treatise on the stages of usability maturing.  The gist of his writing:  to truly become a user-centered organization, companies almost always progress through the same sequence of steps, gradually increasing their levels of commitment to usability.

Stage 1: Hostility Toward Usability
Stage 2: Developer-Centered Usability
Stage 3: Skunkworks Usability
Stage 4: Dedicated Usability Budget
Stage 5: Managed Usability
Stage 6: Systematic Usability Process
Stage 7: Integrated User-Centered Design
Stage 8: User-Driven Corporation

According to JN, it takes about twenty years to move from stage 2 to 7 and another twenty years to reach the last stage.

Links:

• Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4
• Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8

Right now, I am trying to figure out what stage we are in.   I am going to say off the top of my head that we are in Stage 3.  However, if we can actually get UX story points added to our projects, we might look like we are in stage 4.

We are in various stages depending on what project you are talking about.  I think we  are definitely in Skunkworks UX .  We still have a whole bunch of Stage 1 and Stage 2 thought and practice going on……

Some other things that I came across in my mad Googling:  HFI User Experience (UX) Maturity Survey.  HFI developed this survey to capture a comparative view of the maturity of usability operations around the world.  http://www.humanfactors.com/UXMaturitySurvey.asp

The good news is that HFI’s UX Maturity Survey 2009 seems to  indicate that usability has transformed from a business differentiator to a routine component of business practice — at least in the companies surveyed.   According to the blurb on HFI’s site:   “Stable, visible, internal usability and user experience groups with executive support have become significantly more prevalent since Eric Schaffer outlined the elements of a mature usability/user experience practice in his book, Institutionalization of Usability, A Step-by-Step Guide (2004).”   (I admit that I haven’t read this book – I just received it.  Thank you Amazon.com)

Also came across some articles that I have bookmarked as interesting  from my new fave UX resource site:  UXMatters

Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. “Sharing Ownership of UX.” UXmatters, May 28, 2007.

—— “Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy?” UXmatters, February 9, 2009.

Jones, Colleen. “When ROI Isn’t Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User-Centered Design.” UXmatters, May 7, 2007.

Nieters, Jim, and Garett Dworman. “Comparing UXD Business Models.” UXmatters, July 10, 2007.

Sherman, Paul J. “Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent.” UXmatters, January 20, 2007.

As we are figuring out what we want our take away to be when we present, we’ve come up with these bullets which are now attached to my cube on post-its:

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow (see Google)
2. Our company is HERE on the scale of UX Maturity and we want to be THERE
3. This is going to require both a cultural shift and a tactical shift

What took you so long??

Indeed.