Based on several articles I’ve read over the past months, and the session Eric Reiss gave at last years IA Summit on ‘ROI: Speaking the Language of Business‘, I wrote out this mind dump of how I think about selling User Experience. These ideas are fairly rough and are intended to see how closely my thought process aligns with that of my peers. Hope you enjoy!
I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on Jeff Parks i.a. podcast. This was my first time being both interviewed and recorded, and kudos to Jeff for making it an awesome experience! The conversation we had revolved around failure and why it’s so important for designers. The topics include concepts I brought up in my three part posting on the importance of failure, and feedback we received on the wiki he set up. Thank you to Christian Crumlish, Daniel Szuc, Jan Jursa, Valeska O’Leary, and Eric Reiss for that feedback btw! You can listen to the podcast either here or via iTunes. Hope you enjoy!
In the final part of this series on the importance of failure, I’ll be getting a little philosophical on the subject. Part 1 and Part 2 covered some practical means to take advantage of failure. The final two methods are meant more to change the mindsets of both individuals and organizational leadership to encourage an environment that takes full advantage of failure. Failure always has a negative connotation to it, and these final two approaches are perfect for finally putting a positive spin on the subject.
In Part 1, I showcased the first two methods for dealing with failure and learning from it. Part 2 will focus on activities that can be during a retrospective, or stand alone. These next two methods have a certain risk associated with them due to the emotions that can arise during the resulting conversations. If done successfully however, the passion these emotions invoke can help solidify the lessons that are available to be learned.
I’ve recently been working on a framework to help designers deal with failure. Failure can occur many times over the course of a project, and knowing how to use that failure effectively helps a team continue to work without losing steam. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting the methods I’ve identified two at a time that form the framework. The goal of these posts is to gather feedback on the value of these methods, and any suggestions you want to see that will help flush them out. In other words, have a nice virtual conversation around how to scare off the bogeyman that is Failure.
I know the majority of my readers are UX designers, so most of this will preaching to the choir. But, I promised the attendees an online version of my slides with what I wanted to say during the presentation. For you seasoned presenters I look forward to any feedback you might have on the quality of the presentation and the content. Hope you enjoy!
The Social Media Club of St. Louis is meeting on August 20th to discuss how IT has had to deal with the changes of the web over the course of the past 10 years. With the raise of Web 2.0 and the theoretical discussions going on about the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) throws a lot of wrenches in the gears of an IT department.
Later this month I will be speaking at Day of .Net, a local developer conference here in St. Louis. The topic of my presentation is ‘UX != User Interface’. I hope to clear the room on what User Experience is and how it helps developers effectively do their jobs. Since I don’t have nearly all the answers, I am hoping the User Experience community will provide me with a few talking points that are important to them.
Seeing Things Differently – It is always best to keep in mind the people that always need a little help.
Designing A Unified Experience – Kim Goodwin gives an outstanding overview of design. Great video to check out.
Todd Zaki Warfel – redUX DC ‘09 – Todd gives us a great run down of the workshop he gave on prototyping at the IA Summit back in March.
Ghost in the Pixel is one of my favorite Interaction Design blogs. Last May, Uday Gajendar posted some insightful questions to guide young designers on the path they want to take professionally. I found this helpful in allowing me to better define the type of designer I want to be when I grow up. Below are my answers.
