Managing User Experience Strategy
- San Francisco: Tuesday, June 15
Christian Rohrer
Full-Day Tutorial
Traditional business concerns are often about dollars and cents; for many companies, design is simply part
of their product development costs. Some companies, however, are now recognizing that great experience
design is an important, non-price driver of bottom-line growth.
Using this newfound approach, companies can adopt user experience and customer-needs satisfaction as a
strategy to drive the business. In so doing, they create products and services that are uniquely
differentiated from competitors and thereby establish a defensible position.
Once a company tastes experience design’s rewards, it might well want more (if done well, it
will demand more). To create this type of success repeatedly, companies must understand not just
methodologies, but also the possibilities for developing a user experience team or department and how doing
so might impact the business. What functions should be included? What processes should take place?
How should it be funded?
In this tutorial, we’ll investigate these and other issues using real-world case studies from top user
experience companies. We’ll also explore key international and global considerations for user experience
design (UED). Finally, we’ll do personalized interactive exercises to solidify your newfound knowledge.
You’ll come away with a strategic understanding of three key areas:
- Essential user experience methods
- The business relevance of user experience
- People/organizational issues that impact user experience effectiveness
What You’ll Learn
This course will teach both user experience novices and seasoned researchers how to
understand research methodologies suitable for a corporate setting. In addition, attendees will do hands-on
exercises to explore four key methods:
- Why companies that embrace user experience at the highest level will win
- How to position user experience to have a significant effect on the business
- Common user experience organizational models
- How to attract and retain the best user experience talent
- Keys to developing and executing a user experience strategy, based on examples
Course Outline
- What is user experience?
- What is a user-experience-centric company?
- The UED context: Meeting business needs
- Aligning with the corporate brand; the value proposition
- The role of segmentation and personas
- Creating competitive business advantage
- Organizing user experience
- Disciplines in user experience organizations
- How these disciplines work together
- User experience processes and methodologies
- Positioning user experience within the organization
- How various companies organize UED
- The advantages/disadvantages of some UED organizations
- Success measures of experience design
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, large-scale visual representations and concepts, video highlights and research reports, and in-class exercises.
Handouts
Copies of all presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This course is suited to any user experience professional who is grappling with the issue of how to build or work in a user experience organization—big or small.
Instructor
Christian Rohrer is a veteran of Web user experience research and design,
having participated directly in the development of some of the world’s most popular Web
destinations, including Yahoo!, eBay, and Realtor.com. In his current role as Senior Director of User
Experience Design at Move, Inc., he leads a talented team of designers and researchers in developing
top real estate websites and applications. He previously served as eBay’s Director of Customer
Intelligence for Products and was a founding member of the eBay Research Council, an executive-sponsored
body that advises the company on best research practices and synthesizes insights from market research,
community outreach, international research, Web analytics, and user experience research. Prior to that,
he was Director of User Experience Research at Yahoo!, where he was also a founding member of the Yahoo!
Research Council. Before joining Yahoo!, Rohrer conducted design research and ethnographies for NCI (now
Liberate), focusing on the strategies employed by people learning to use interfaces on TV-based Internet
appliances. He also spent five years as an independent UNIX consultant and two years as a support
engineer at SCO. Rohrer has a PhD in symbolic systems in education (cognitive science) from Stanford
University and a BA in computer and information sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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