UX Management: developing and growing yourself and a team of user experience professionals
Margaret Hanley, Web Technology Group, UK
Many people who move into a management role within a User Experience (UX) or Information Architecture group are left to work out by themselves ways to lead, manage and develop both their team and their practice. We are not given the guidance on how to create those favourable circumstances for our team to shine or shown how to enable our staff to design and develop the web site or products that we are tasked to create.
This course helps provide managers, at whatever stage of their career, the ability to put in place procedures and environments for development. The course will also help managers to work out the strategy for their team; identify the correct skills mix for a team and talk through common problems as a group.
The workshop is made up of two parts; the first focusing on the development of the UX practice in your organisation and the second on the development of the team.
The course will be taught as a combination of lecture, exercises and discussion.
A number of “management challenges” will be explored, from hiring to allocation; from identifying the market for your services, to dealing with politics. In this course, a number of case studies based on those challenges will be provided that the participants will firstly discuss in small groups and then discuss as a whole group identifying ways to address the problems.
As well as questions being taken throughout the workshop, there will also be question times at the end of each session. Participants are given the chance to write down their burning questions throughout the course, which will be reviewed and answered at the end of the day.
There will also provide as a supplement to the core notes for the course
- A list of links to key management books for UX professionals
- A list of web sites and discussion groups for UX management issues
- Documents that can be used as templates for development like Personal Development Plans, Skills audits and Interview questions and exercises
Eric Reiss, FatDUX, DK
Quick question: Ever been to a crappy website about a subject that really interests you? Yeah – we all have. And the chances are you forgave the brain-dead structure and dilettantish design. Why? Because the content was interesting/relevant/useful/entertaining.
This is why the Nobel Prize for literature doesn’t go to the designer of the dust jacket. It’s also why content remains the single most important element in most on-line UX projects.
In just one morning, Eric will show you how to create findable, scannable, skim-able, and readable on-line content. This is the stuff that creates understanding, builds trust, and increases conversion rates. Topics include:
- why writing for the web is different (basic observations and hard facts)
- navigation (labels, not graphics)
- shared-reference building (getting folks on the same mental page)
- descriptions (core content)
- contextual navigation (locally relevant links)
- convenience text (alt texts, pop-ups, FAQs, and instructions)
- information architecture (from a content-provider point-of-view)
- metadata (machine-readable keywords, titles, and descriptions).
Eric won’t teach you how to un-mix your metaphors (if you’re a lousy writer, this is not the workshop for you). But if you’re already a decent wordsmith, here’s how you can take your talent to the web. And Eric will also kill off a bunch of myths about what works and what doesn’t, and give you the tools needed to enjoy online success.
Leisa Reichelt, UK
Many a design project could benefit from the insight gained through user research. However, too many projects get by with just usability testing or no research at all. Design research needn’t be an arduous and expensive undertaking.
In this workshop, we will focus on a practical approach to design research that can be applied to projects small and large.
During this session, you will also learn:
- A toolkit of design research approaches and techniques.
- How to design the right research approach for your project.
- Interview technique – how to get the gold from your participants.
- Research analysis – techniques to get everything you need and more from your data.
- Applying design research to the design process – getting research out of a report and into a product.
James Kalbach, LexisNexis, DE
This half-day workshop covers principles of web navigation and methods of navigation design with practical examples and exercises. Participants should have some experience creating or maintaining websites and are looking to deepen their design skills. This includes graphic designers, webmasters, usability experts, and beginning to intermediate information architects.
The web has changed in the last decade. The notion of Web 2.0, in particular, marks a second phase of the web characterized by user-generated content, collaboration, communities, and broader participation in general. And new technologies, such as Ajax and Flex, point to a more interactive web with highly functional applications.
Amidst this change, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. This workshop offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic in creating websites: navigation design. It will offer you insight and practical advice for approaching a range of navigation design problems.
Agenda
Principles of navigation
In navigation design, it’s important to understand overarching principles of navigation behavior. We’ll look at transitional volatility, banner blindness, and the scent of information, among other things.
Elements of navigation: mechanisms, types and pages
Navigational mechanisms are the basic building blocks of navigation systems. But not all mechanisms on a site are equal. You must determine the purpose and importance of navigation mechanisms within your site, bringing similar options together and presenting them as a cohesive unit. This section of the workshop surveys common mechanisms, as well as various functional types of navigation.
Cores and Paths
Finally, you’ll apply many of the principles from throughout the day in a technique called Cores and Paths, which was pioneered by Are Halland in Norway.
After this class, you will be able to…
- Understand and apply basic principles of web navigation in your work
- Recognize different mechanisms, types of navigation, and different page types
- Apply current methods of navigation design to create a unified navigation system
Target Audience
- Beginner to Intermediate IAs
- Usability experts looking to expand web design skills
- Graphic designers and others working in related roles seeking to better understand navigation design