It is standard for a User Experience Designer to have a passion for the people, but occasionally they forget about the business that serves them. Christina Wodtke (twitter) gave the attendees of the IA Summit a reminder of why keeping the business in mind is important for any design project. The following are my tweets from her session:

Money is oxygen for a company, if you don’t have money you WILL die.

ROI is simply a return on investment. Whatever you put out creates some kind of value.

WIkipedia is a non-profit, but the still need money to operate.

Designers would profit from thinking about not just about helping the user but also helping the users.

Designers need to know what the key metrics are for a business and how that can effect their design.

If you are a book reseller how are you different from amazon? What do you have to offer that is better?

“A guy selling beans in a fish market is crazy, crazy like a fox!”@cwodtke

Behavior is just a function of a person and his environment. If you design the environment, you can change a persons behavior.

What is the one activity for my user to accomplish for the business to be successful?

Engineers see users as a set of problems that need to be solved equally.

Only 1% of your users are actually doing the work on Wikipedia. They are doing the heavy lifting for your business.

Group managers only make up a small % of a user group, but they monitor the site, kick people out, and do all the real work.

Deriving marketplace dynamics from ‘Hello Dolly’ – pure genius.

Advertising starts to become contextual based on what you are doing, which also reinforces the brand.

We need to ask ourselves about the rules that make sense to put into place as designers

Once you notice that demographics can make you money, you start looking at things differently.

“Your boss comes up to you and tells you that they want user generated content because it is free” @cwodtke

You need to think about how your users are connecting with each other, determine who are the word spreaders.

Money will come if you create a service that encourages users to care and become active, even if you don’t have a business model.

Free trails make it easier for users to evaluate the offering and commit to paying a fee to continue the service.

If people don’t eventually understand the value that you offer, then the card credit access will be turned off.

Having a combo business model, when the market shirts you still make money just from different offerings.

Over the users value, the user will come back for more, and eventually give something back. Content, Money, Sponsorship, etc.

You can prove through metrics that what you created actually does provide value, really hard to do without the metrics.

Customers centers are a good place to get an idea what the key metrics are.

It is easy to get caught up in user research and being an advocate for users that you loss sight of the big picture. At the end of the day, a product or service needs to give back to the business as much as it provides the users with a good experience. I think the most important aspect of Christina’s track is how a business can be structured to support multiple models. Having several models to support a business, users have more options on how they can interact with the business.