Interactions - May/June 2010

[ 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.