Business: Business of UX

When leaders of UX organizations get together, we always seem to talk about how our UX groups are structured and why. Just as designers solve user interface design problems, their leaders solve organizational design problems. It’s what we do. At CHI 2005, Kartik Mithal, Director of User Experience at Sun Microsystems, and Jim Nieters, Senior Leader of User Experience at Cisco, spent hours sharing insights about how to best structure their groups for future success. Kartik and Jim agreed that the opportunity to learn from one another was one of the more valuable reasons for leaders of UX groups to attend CHI.

This manifest need for UX leaders to learn—and share—best practices was the rationale for the authors, Jim Nieters and Garett Dworman, to write and present a CHI 2007 Experience Report on the organizational structure that Jim Nieters created for his UX group at Cisco [1]. It also motivated us to follow up that presentation with a CHI 2007 Management Special Interest Group (SIG), “Comparing UXD Business Models,” in which participants compared different models of UX organizational design [2]. Our intent was to share experiences and systematically explore them in the hope that this information will aid companies in structuring their internal UX functions. To this end, we generated SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analyses of four UX business models. Read More

Now that you’ve convinced a client they want to work with you, it’s up to you to define the terms of your working agreement. Your goal in the contract negotiation process is not to determine the best price, but to most accurately define the scope of your project. This is possibly the most critical factor in the success of your project, and it’s something most consultants completely fail to follow through on.

A Statement of Work (SOW) formally defines the scope of the activities and deliverables for a project. BusinessDictionary.com defines scope as the “chronological division of work to be performed under a contract or subcontract in the completion of a project.”

Some clients have a very specific chunk of work in mind, while others just know they need help. In either scenario, use your expertise to determine the appropriate amount of work to tackle, according to several key variables: needs, resources, location, schedule, and budget. Read More

Recently, in managing a small user experience and design agency, I’ve discovered that there are some common misconceptions about Lean UX. Many companies have told me that they think being lean just means spending less money. Agencies cost money, so these companies think that keeping UX work in house is lean. Some of our clients have asked us to skip research, avoid creating deliverables, and complete our work based only on assumptions. They’ve asked us to participate in daily meetings, with the goal of working more collaboratively, but often this just slows us down. Read More