One example from our experi-
ence involves work we did on
a global trade product for the
Brazilian market known as Nota
Fiscal Electronica. The core prod-
uct that needed modification was
built in Germany, the U.S., and
China. The product manager is
based in the U.S. and is fluent in
Portuguese, so he spent a lot of
time traveling to Brazil to talk to
customers and document their
requirements. The UX team co-
located the interaction designer
with this knowledgeable product
manager and adopted a patterns-
based approach to streamline the
design and development effort.

visual design contractors was necessary to increase the speed of design delivery. They worked on site with interaction designers and developers, with periodic check-ins from the central visual design and branding teams. The application developers were local, and collaborated closely with framework developers located elsewhere. Quick iterations of ideas, with discussion and feedback cycles unconstrained by time and space, fostered innovative thinking in the team while ensuring overall product quality and efficiency.

to articulate the value they provide
to the organization and allow for
rotation to ensure the UX profes-
sionals’ creative skills are utilized
appropriately. Otherwise, high
levels of employee attrition will
occur. Additionally, providing UI
guidelines training and resources
to the development and QA teams
will take some burden off the UX
professionals over time.

We encountered this situation when we acquired a company with a significant-size development team in India. Its UI staff was absorbed into our central UX organization. We provided training, mentor-ship, guidance, and support to our new team members. This investment allowed us to rely on them to provide the critical governance function embedded in the local engineering organization. Being in the same time zone, they provided on-site support, enabling the UX organization to be perceived as responsive and of high quality.

November + December 2011

interactions

Designing a New Product
Concept for Local Consumption
When the strategic business goal is
to create breakthrough innovation,
minimizing excessive coordina-
tion overhead is critical to achiev-
ing a successful result. In this
case, create a local autonomous
organization, preferably with all
key stakeholders, such as product
management, engineering, and
marketing. If it’s located outside
of corporate headquarters, plan
for periodic check-in meetings to
make sure the team is headed in
the right direction. Co-locating
the full set of UX skills mix—user
researchers, interaction design-
ers, and visual designers—allows
for maximum creative collabora-
tion and speed of execution.

Recently, we created a new product concept that incorporated social media into enterprise software to support the emerging collaboration practices of the business user. To achieve this, we created a core co-located UX team. The visual designers were initially located elsewhere, supporting the project remotely. As the project progressed, it was determined that hiring local

Providing a Ui Governance
Function to Local Developers

It is not unusual for business software companies to have a low ratio of UX professionals to other stakeholders. In such situations, the UX team cannot scale if they attempt to hand-design 100 percent of all UIs in the product. At the same time, any successful product will need to ensure the overall consistency of UX patterns utilized to fulfill basic usability. In this case, the UX team will need to come up with creative strategies to fill the gap. One such strategy is to categorize the UIs based on user and usage— for example, expert technical users doing system administrative tasks versus non-technical users doing business tasks. To scale effectively, establish UI guidelines and patterns of use for each class of user, build these patterns into the developer tools, and provide UX support for guidelines rollout, UI reviews, and other UI-related questions. In this case the UX team becomes more of a police force to ensure guidelines compliance.

It is important to note that extra
management attention is needed
to support UX staff placed in this
situation. Management will need

Ux Team Embedded in an internal iT organization Many companies maintain an internal IT organization to configure, customize, and integrate standard business software to their specific business needs. They also develop custom applications. In such cases, UX staff may be embedded within the IT organization. The advantage of this model is easy access to end users, who are typically internal company employees. It is logistically less challenging to arrange user-research activities in this scenario, since a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) and other types of special permission are not needed. However, UX may be co-located with IT development staff, while the end users for the system may be globally distributed. With up-front time and