[ 4] Lund, A. “Expert
Ratings of Usability
Maxims.” Ergonomics
in Design, 5, 3 (1997):
15-20.
being treated as a service organization—a team that produces
usability studies and icons on
demand. To drive culture change,
it has been important to demonstrate leadership. Some of that
leadership comes with having a
vision, some with inspiring, and
some with motivating, equipping,
and training. But some of the
leadership comes with identifying the strategic questions for the
organization and the subset that
can be answered most effectively
through user-centered insights.
We then define the big-bet initiatives we want to undertake
that will move the needle for the
organization’s success in a big
way, equivalent to the impact
other teams have when they propose and deliver major new software initiatives. These big bets
might involve putting in place
a major user panel or a global
ethnographic study, or working through a major experience
design problem whose solution
will impact architecture—for
instance, implementing identity
in a cloud computing environment. These leadership opportunities become the new inspiring
examples of the vision from
which we harvest assets and best
practices that we drive through
the organization and the cycle
begins again.
May + June 2010
ment, and we’ll customize them
for our environment with our
vision, tools, metrics, and other
assets. We are also working with
the training department to see
if we can leverage their registra-
tion process in order to track
who is participating, and to bake
the training into the objectives
of individual project manag-
ers, developers, and testers who
share responsibility for the qual-
ity of user interfaces.
What we are creating are
user interface (UI) specialists or
champions within each of the
disciplines. The UI project manager is someone who is responsible for the end-to-end scenarios
that deliver usefulness and user
satisfaction; this project manager
is not so much the person who
owns developing the experience
as they are someone who serves
as a producer who engages others to design and develop the
experience and facilitates creation. The UI project manager
works well for many teams,
ensuring that teams without
direct design and research support have a better experience,
and improving effectiveness for
teams with design and research
support. UI developers will be
trained in the asset libraries
and principles of how to put
the blocks together in the most
effective manner; UI testers will
be trained in how best to use
personas and scenarios to frame
the questions they ask during
testing, in the bug-classification
scheme, and in design heuristics,
as well as in the use of the automated test tools and templates
we are helping create.
present the curriculum as teaching the ability to do very specific
tasks. The tasks would enable
teams without UX to do a better
job in what they designed; would
enable those taking the classes
to partner with UX people more
effectively; and would help UX
people to scale their impact ad
design direction beyond the
simple number of UX people on
a project. Since the designers
and researchers need to deliver
inspiring design as the core of
their day job, part of the goal is
to drive toward as many self-service courses as possible. We
also want to leverage the existing
training that the training department within Microsoft is offering, and complement it with the
training we create that is specific
to our local organization. The
design of the curriculum also
takes advantage of the fact that
different UX teams are focusing on their own organizational
needs yet can offer training in a
way that benefits a much larger
community.
There is an introductory class
to teach design thinking, the
vision, general principles of great
design [ 4], the process and how
to apply it, and provide an introduction to the available reusable
assets. There is a class in prototyping with wireframes, and a
class in simple validation with
users that includes several sessions and hands-on labs. There is
a class on scenarios, and one on
implementing the reusable assets
and customizing CSS. There
are also hands-on workshops
that we are developing with
the quality department around
resolving UX problems. Other
classes leverage courses already
developed or being developed
by Microsoft’s training depart-
About the Author
Arnie Lund has been at
Microsoft for seven years,
innovating and conducting
research in areas such as
natural user interfaces and
creating personal experiences. His work on
innovation and storytelling began at Bell
Labs and continued with inventing and
incubating new product concepts at
Ameritech, US West Advanced
Technologies, and Sapient.
leadership
I’ve found the biggest threat
to creating effective UX is UX
doi: 10.1145/1744161.1744170
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