I was fortunate to attend China’s 5th annual User Friendly (www.upachina.org/userfriendly2008/en/index.html) conference in Shenzhen in October. What an impressive conference! China’s user experience community is growing rapidly and has the benefit of doing so when our field is well established.

Especially exciting to me was the theme of strategy and user experience. Paul Sherman, president of UPA International, opened the conference by reminding us that we are change agents. “Change agents must have conviction to state the facts based on data” even if the results are unpleasant. A strategic view of user experience, he said, requires a long term focus. Jason Huang, President of UPA China talked about the opportunity to make UX more strategic, and the barriers facing the UX community in China. 

Susan Dray presented a broader view of usability, aligning our activities with strategic business goals and the value proposition. Both Susan and Ginny Redish emphasized the value of user research to the whole company, not just to inform a product design or redesign.

Wayne Hom, CTO and EVP of Augmentum, described how UX can deliver value across the organization, from products to services and customers. Rachael Austin, Senior UCD Manager at HSBC, talked about her team’s global leadership role. They map the whole customer experience, including systems and in-branch experiences.

Change is always a theme in my projects involving in-house software design. I like to say “when you’re designing your systems, you’re designing your business”.  As such, we start with business goals—where is the business going, what are they hoping to achieve, and how can we align our design with those business goals?

Strategic user experience means looking across the organization, taking a view beyond each application or website. Paul talked about helping neighboring disciplines understand users—bringing data to the whole organization. Jason emphasized that our methods can target many business problems, it’s not just about research and testing. Ten years ago, my team and I created Corporate Usability Goals for several clients, goals aligned with business goals and designed to be applied across disciplines.

This validates the approach I teach in my UX Strategy course, which offers a kind of balanced scorecard approach. Start with business goals and enable adjacent groups to determine their own goals in support of the UX strategy, whether they are customer service, marketing, sales or product development. This allows the UX strategy to evolve in a cohesive way, and helps deliver a consistent customer experience. Of course, this approach is all about change—for us, for our companies, for the way we influence our businesses. That’s pretty exciting.

Design Thinking needs us

"Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context--a chair in the room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan."  --Eliel Saarinen

I've been following Design Thinking for a few years now. I read Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind. in 2005 I attended the DMI summer Empowering Innovation. I read BusinessWeek's section on Innovation and Design. I follow Roger Martin articles and Bruce Nussbaum's blog. I've checked out Stanford's d.school, and receive announcements from the Institue of Design in Chicago. I've even presented on the topic.

What's cool about design thinking is that it matches the way I work. I've been criticised for not being focused since I'm often found busy looking at all the possibilities. Design thinking is about seeking the possibilities without leaping to an answer. Designers are willing to make a lot of mistakes before arriving at a good solution. Business thinking tend to look for numbers, stats and proof that it's safe to explore an idea. Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, calls it Reality vs Validity. Design thinkers, on the other hand, look for validity in an idea. They are problem solvers. 

Design thinking may allow for mistakes, generating ideas and exploring options. There is still a process behind it. And that's where we come in. Martin also wrote "Great designers seek deep understanding of the user and the context, which entails consideration of many variables." User centered design techniques have moved beyond software design. They are being used to design processes, products, services, even businesses.

Why does a dean of a leading business school and a business magazine care about Design Thinking? Because it's being held up as an approach companies need to adopt to remain competitive.Claudia Kotchka, Design Evangelist at Proctor & Gamble wrote "Business people don't need to understand designers better, but to adopt design principles into their problem solving approach.

When we weren't looking, designers who are not in the software or web business started trying out user-centred design.

It's cool. And it's real.

On January 5, 2007 I gave two talks at the Easy7 conference in Bangalore, India. This is an annual conference organized by the CHI-SI group. All the speakers were excellent. Jeremy Ashley,Vice President of Applications User Experience at Oracle provided insight into how he tells senior management at Oracle what user experience design is. He called his talk "debunking the ultimate design myth" and clarified what goes into a "successful" user experience design, including the importance of multi-functional teams. Good design does not come from one designer.

Bill Scott, AJAX Evangelist at Yahoo! delivered a highly interactive presentation (I decided to rework my presentations after seeing his!) about Patterns and Designing for AJAX, thereby addressing two hot topics in one clear presentation. I sometimes struggle with UI patterns, and found his talk offered clarification.

Surya Vanka, Manager of User Experience Excellence at Microsoft, provided one talk divided into two parts on product innovation. Based on years of experience and much research, he showed what some of the essential ingredients are for creating an innovation culture, and validated many of my own findings.

One of the best aspects of the conference (other than the food) was the participation. All talks gave ample time to questions, and so we had excellent exchanges throughout the day. Many people talked about how new UI design is to India yet the discussion was anything but beginner.

As a bonus, I had the good fortune to visit ThoughtWorks in Bangalore. After learning how to eat pan (an unique experience!), I talked about user-centered design so that we could discuss how it fits with Agile Development. ThoughtWorks has a carefully thought out way of carrying out Agile Development, and I appreciated the overview from Deven Tolia (job title: "hustler") and Marco Jansen, a project manager.

India was magic, and it was fascinating to see the rapid transformation happening in Bangalore.

December 1st I visited Smith College as a guest speaker at the Picker School of Engineering. The School of Engineering is the first of its kind at an all women's college, and as a Smith alum, I wanted to get involved. Smith offers an undergraduate degree in engineering science, taking a multidisciplinary approach. I talked about user centered design and lead a workshop in contextual studies.

I spoke to students in the Design Clinic, a year long course in which students work on industry sponsored projects, to get first hand, real world experience. The projects are all challenging.

We had a great afternoon! The challenge was coming up with tasks which could be observed and analyzed in about 90 minutes. Susannah Howe, their professor, and I wanted to give the students a taste of this technique and we're hoping to repeat and improve upon it for next year's clinic. Yes!

I also accompanied Mary Beth Rettger who spoke at Olin College. Olin opened in 2002 and also focuses on engineering. Mary Beth spoke to the human factors class, where the students were learning user centered design techniques including contextual studies, paper prototyping, usability walkthroughs and creating applications. One of the most interesting aspects of our visit was examining the walls which were covered with project work, huge picture-rich documents which examined how people worked, or analyzing a process in the real world. It had a dynamic and highly creative feel to the campus, and we were pleased to confirm for the students that yes, we do create paper prototypes, we do develop personas and we do usability walkthroughs as part of our jobs.