Managing User Experience Strategy

• Washington D.C.: Tuesday, May 15
• Toronto: Thursday, July 26

Christian Rohrer
Full-Day Training Course

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
  • Metrics
  • Funding

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, large-scale visual representations and concepts, video highlights and research reports, and in-class exercises.

Course Materials

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 Vice President and Chief Design Officer in the Consumer Division at McAfee, Inc. In this role, he is responsible for user-centered design efforts across all projects from ideation through delivery and beyond. In addition, he and his team determine processes for best gathering user requirements, own user needs definitions, establish UX success metrics, and make strategy/experience recommendations for getting users to move more effectively through the lifecycle. Christian is a veteran of Web user experience design and research, having participated directly in the development of some of the world’s most popular Web destinations, including Yahoo!, eBay, and Realtor.com (Move, Inc.). At Move, he led a talented team of designers and researchers in developing top real estate websites and applications, including the #1 consumer real estate website and the highest-rated real estate iPhone app, both under the Realtor.com brand. At both eBay and Yahoo!, he lead the User Experience Research team and was a co-founder of the Research Council, an executive-sponsored body that advised the company on best research practices and synthesized insights from market research, web analytics, and user experience research. Christian has a PhD in symbolic systems in education (cognitive science) from Stanford University and a BA in computer and information sciences with honors from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is an active member of various industry organizations, publishes frequently, and maintains a blog and site at www.xdstrategy.com.