Business: Role of UX

Should UX designers be able to facilitate teamwork and engage in organizational design? A few years ago, the most likely answer would have been: No. We have process consultants, Human Resources (HR) consultants, and all sorts of coaches to help organizations organize their people and processes. But today’s businesses are confronting some significant changes that impact the role of User Experience, as follows:

1. Design challenges have become more complex. Some prominent. independent design firms have decided to join bigger collectives to address such issues. Recently, IDEO joined the kyu collective, Adaptive Path was acquired by CapitalOne, and there have been many other instances of this trend.
2. The role of the UX designer is shifting from merely imagining and executing on solutions to fostering collective creativity and engaging all sorts of professionals in a co-creation process.
3. Just as the impact of the design discipline has gradually expanded from products to services, over the last few decades, it continues to expand to process and organizational design. Branding agencies like Wolff Olins and transformation consultancies like SYPartners are leveraging the power of design to help companies re-imagine the way they work and organize themselves.

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“Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.”—Alan W. Watts

Making a Business Case for User Experience

Building modern software products is expensive. The design and implementation of a product user experience typically requires 40% of the overall software development cost. Therefore, on a $2 million software development project, building the user experience will require roughly $800,000 of the project budget. This is a non-trivial amount of money. Of course, just designing and building the product is not the end of it. There are the costs of marketing, advertising, and selling the product, as well as the cost of supporting it after its release. The total expense of creating a software product can easily run into millions of dollars. Read More

IA Summit 2006 comprised three conference tracks:

• Learning IA—focusing on IA education and research
• Doing IA—presenting professional practice, techniques, and process
• Selling IA—evangelizing the value of IA

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