Jess McMullin
April 7 8:30AM
This half-day session is aimed at practitioners familiar with the nuts and bolts of user experience who are now looking to expand their influence in the organizations they work with.
Just as design demands empathy with users, it also needs insight into the needs, constraints and context of decision makers, from the CEO on down. Thinking like a CEO takes business fluency—both conceptual fluency in the language of business, and cultural fluency in understanding how a given organization or team operates. This session lays the foundations of key business concepts and practical tools so that participants can effectively understand and relate their work to business priorities and business value.
Those foundations include:
• Running a business reality check on survival, sustainability, or growth.
• The five CEO fundamentals of making money, saving money, reaching goals, managing risk, and hiring and retaining talent.
• The basic building blocks of business—leadership, management, and execution—and how they relate to design and user experience.
• Working with these foundations to add value, which transitions us to a deeper discussion of the business value of design and the larger role of design in management.
Attendees will walk away with useful insights that help them be more effective working with business stakeholders:
• Basic business fluency to better understand decision makers’ concerns and priorities.
• The myths (and realities) of Return on Investment.
• Practical business tools for understanding and communicating the value of design in a variety of business contexts.
Looking at today's market, UX practioners don’t just need more methods to create solutions or work with users. We need better methods to work with business. Those methods help us have a greater impact in our organizations. That impact starts with understanding the fundamentals of business and how we can speak to the value of design and user experience using the language of business. Attendees at this sesssion will be better prepared to tackle that challenge and make a bigger difference in their organizations and in the world.
April 8 9:00AM
This session is for practitioners who are interested in moving beyond screens and pixels and designing systems and services across multiple channels.
Today, more high-level web work is requiring coordination with other channels. From call centers to kiosks and retail to mobile, user experience designers can move beyond pixels to think about and design broader systems and services.
At the Centre for Citizen Experience, we are encountering more opportunities to work off the screen and design for systems that cross media boundaries. We’d like to share some simple, practical methods about designing for multi-channel systems in hands-on tutorial format. Since getting permission to work on multiple channels seems to multiply the politics and red tape as well, we’ll also talk about how attendees can promote their involvement beyond web efforts with their clients or boss.
We'll start the day with some foundations and key concepts to get everyone on the same page, then we'll take an expedition to do some fieldwork looking at different systems. We'll use those observations to create different deliverables that model systems and services. We'll finish the day by looking at how to sell greater involvement across channels using your current work as a springboard.
Attendees will walk away with several practical methods for understanding and designing systems and services across channels, including:
Service Inventories
Services need to be cataloged and audited just like content. We’ll show you how we do it from external observation and with client input.
Business Origami
We’ve recently adopted and expanded this tool (pioneered in Japan by Hitachi) to both help facilitate discovery of current systems and to design improvements and new services.
Customer Journey Mapping
Journey mapping creates a clear picture of the customer's experience across channels as they satisfy their hopes, needs, dreams and wants.
Multi-Channel Mental Models
You may be familiar with Indi Young’s mental models. For the past 3 years, we’ve been using them to look at multiple channels as well.
UX Swimlanes
These swimlanes capture both user flows and the other activities that have to happen at different touchpoints and channels to support that flow.
It's not just the web that demands better user experience, it's everywhere that people interact, from services to systems. By working across channels practitioners can increase their impact, tackle exciting new work and make a bigger difference to their organizations.
April 10 11:30AM
Why do projects fail? Sometimes it's poor methods, poor team members, or the
market. But more often, projects fail from poor decisions inside client
organizations.
If you've ever wanted to have more influence over those decisions, this session
is for you: the user experience practitioner who need to develop influence
inside the organizations you work with.
Gaining influence is a design problem, and user experience pros already have
the skills to increase their influence through understanding business
stakeholders and discovering, prototyping, and iterating the factors that
develop influence.
In this session we'll cover the fundamentals of influence: Evidence, Fluency,
Empathy, and Authenticity. We'll touch on the six classic principles of
influence from Robert Cialdini (Liking, Reciprocity, Authority, Consistency,
Scarcity, and Social Proof), and talk about the three elements of influence:
People, Decisions, and Actions.
With that foundation, we'll talk about a three-step approach for cultivating
influence inside organizations:
1) Identifying and acting on a step-by-step and person-by-person path to your
influence objective.
2) A six-step process for working with individuals at each step of your master
plan: Collect, Connect, Confirm, Contribute, Codesign, & Commit.
3) The reality that planning doesn't always pan out, and that it's the
principles that count, with tips on what to do when you need to ditch the
training wheels and build building influence into everything that you do.
These take-aways support practitioners as they move from the theory of practice
to the often-frustrating reality when organizations don't appreciate the value
of design. By designing influence, user experience pros can increase their
impact, create better experiences for people, and help their organizations
succeed.