Evaluation and usability as a practice area has diversified its approaches, broadened the spectrum of
UX issues it addresses, and extended its contribution into deeper levels of product-development decision
making. This forum addresses conceptual, methodological, and professional issues that arise in the
field’s continuing effort to contribute robust information about users to product planning and design.
David Siegel and Susan Dray, Editors
Bridging the CEO
Credibility Gap
Daniel Rosenberg
rCDO UX | dan@rCDOUX.com
March + April 2013
Having recently made the transition
from a 30-year career leading industry UX teams to becoming a UX
strategy consultant and professor, I
have a natural opportunity to refine
my perspective on how companies should best utilize UX data to
inform business-level design investments in products and services.
This forum provides an opportune
time and place to reflect on this
“context of practice” topic regarding
the adequacy of our professional
approaches to collecting and communicating critical information.
By UX data, I mean in the broad-est possible sense all forms of
qualitative and quantitative information regarding user experience,
collected irrespective of methodology. This includes data from classic
usability lab sessions, field studies,
real-time event logging, and eye-tracking, as well as information
collected from Web-feedback tools
such as Opinion Lab and User
Zoom, click-stream analytics, formal BI tools, conventional surveys,
and focus groups. Even some of
the latest cutting-edge operational
intelligence tools, such as Splunk,
can generate relevant information
for understanding user patterns of
navigation and action.
I spent the last 17 years of my
corporate career at the VP and
senior VP level of two of the world’s
largest software companies, SAP
and Oracle. This required a sig-
nificant amount of time in the
boardroom attempting to drive
the corporate UX agenda forward.
When not presenting the latest
product design or the next-gen-
eration look-and-feel standards, I
spent a significant portion of this
boardroom time communicating
the current state of UX quality as
reflected through the aggregate of
available data sources. Investment
options and related user metrics
that would indicate when commer-
cially significant UX improvements
actually had been achieved were
also a common thread of discus-
sion. These latter topics require a
reasonable degree of UX metrics
literacy among executive partici-
pants. Unfortunately, boardroom
UX literacy does not develop by
itself. It is the role of UX leaders to
create an environment in which it
can develop within their compa-
nies’ leadership teams and to pro-
vide meaningful data to which it
can be applied.
interactions
The Unmet Need
Today, in a consulting capacity
through my new venture rCDO
UX LLC ( rCDOUX.com), I work
with CEOs, chief product officers,
chief engineers, and the leaders
of in-house corporate UX teams to
