User Experience Management
Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams
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User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing. The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan. This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future.
Key Features
- Gives a UX leadership boot-camp from putting together a winning team, to giving them a driving focus, to acting as their spokesman, to handling difficult situations
- Full of practical advice and experiences for managers and leaders in virtually any area of the user experience field
- Contains best practices, real-world stories, and insights from UX leaders at IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and many more!
Readership
New managers, leads, or those that are expecting to become managers or leads in any of the user experience areas (e.g., user experience, human factors and ergonomics, usability, human-computer interaction, design, and user research)
Table of Contents
Dedication
About the Author
Chapter 1 Introduction
One Manager’s Personal History
Questions You Might Be Asking
Intended Audience
Navigating the Book
Highlights from the 2010 SIGCHI Panel “Managing User Experience—Managing Change”
Chapter 2 Building the Team
Hiring
Identifying the Skills Needed
Interviewing
Finding Great People
Interns
Vendors and Contractors
What About Certification
Salaries
Inheriting
Firing
Layoffs
Building a Great Team
Interviewing and Candidacy
Merger and Acquisition: Impact on UX Management
Building and Managing a Consulting Team
Letting People Go
Chapter 3 Creating Your Team
A First Day Experience
Sizing the Team
Small, Medium, and Large Teams
Defining the Mix of Skills
Positioning the Team
The Need for Champions
Distribute the Team or Centralize It
Positioning Within the Company
Higher or Lower in the Company
Where Should People Sit
Working Remotely
Moving Your Team in the Organization
Funding the Team
Estimating Your Needs
Direct Funding Versus Strategic
An Engagement Model
Positioning Within the Company
Working Remotely
What Do You Mean by UX Globalization?
Chapter 4 Equipping the Team
The Environment
Lab Space
Design Studio
Ambient Spaces
Tools
Budgeting
Other Opportunities
Budgeting
Chapter 5 Focusing the Team
Finding Your Soul
Ideas Shaping My Approach
A Strategic Framework
Defining Your Vision and Mission
Vision Statement
Mission Statement
The Elevator Pitch
Creating a Strategy
A Case Study: Creating a User-Centered Culture
Five Management Dimensions in Managing a Usability Design Team
Lessons Learned in Managing a UX Consultancy
Building an Integrated Information Architecture Practice at Sapient During the Dot-Com Boom
Chapter 6 Creating a High Performance Team
Define Your Team Identity
Taking the Team Pulse
What People Want
Moving Through the Growth Cycle
Managing Through Change
Winning Loyalty
Identify Shared Values
Clarity in Roles and Responsibilities
RACI
Mentoring and Apprenticeship Models
Training Organizations
Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y Differences in the Workplace
Using DISC Profiles to Get New Teams Talking
HR Policies and Rationale
Managing a Fast-Growing UX Team and Maintaining Quality
The 4 Stages of Team Development
Chapter 7 Nurturing the Team
The Critique
Growing Performance and Careers
Setting Commitments
Fruitful Coaching
Lavishing Recognition
Doing Performance Reviews
Encouraging Professional Activity
Managing Conflict
Creating Work-Life Balance
Leveraging Morale Events (Fun with a Purpose)
Taking Care of Yourself
Improving as a Manager
Performance Reviews
Rallying the Troops
UX Team Lunches: Creating Team Traditions
Growing Performance and Careers
Chapter 8 Transforming the Organization
ROI
Traditional Perspective
Rethinking the Argument
A Strategy Perspective
Positioning in the UX Process Maturity Model
Assessing Maturity
Developing the Portfolio of Work
Getting into a Project
Standardization and Reuse
External Standards
Scaling Up and Design Thinking
Training Others
Is Usability ROI Still Relevant? Was It Ever?
Defining Your Value to the Organization
Successful Collaboration Across the Organization
Developing a Portfolio of Work
Chapter 9 Evangelizing UX
Communication Plan
Group Branding
Managing Up
Books to Share with Senior Managers
Corporate Community Building
Managing Up: It’s About Speaking Their Language and Taking Their Perspective
Chapter 10 Conclusion
Leadership
Should You Be Managing?
A Final Comment
Management Observations
Appendix
Professional Society Conferences
Other Recommended Management Books
Nelson Soken Recommendations
Additional Helpful Resources
References
Index
Product details
- No. of pages: 312
- Language: English
- Copyright: © Morgan Kaufmann 2011
- Published: April 28, 2011
- Imprint: Morgan Kaufmann
- eBook ISBN: 9780123854971
- Paperback ISBN: 9780123854964
About the Author
Arnie Lund
Arnold (Arnie) Lund, PhD, CUXP is a Principal Director of User Experience at Microsoft. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories in applied research, and helped build the science and technology organization at Ameritech. He managed design and exploratory development teams at US West Advanced Technologies, and served as a director at Sapient (where his focus areas ranged from information architecture to leading a global program in emerging technologies). Arnie has been elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy; and co-chaired the CHI conferences in 1998 (Los Angeles) and 2008 (Florence, Italy). He is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and served on the HFES Executive Council. He has long been engaged in human computer interaction (HCI) standards and in the area of accessibility and emerging technology, including chairing the HFES Institute and overseeing the HFES-200 standard and its approval as an ANSI standard. He is a certified user experience professional and served as president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE).
Arnie received his BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in experimental psychology: human learning and memory from Northwestern University. He has published widely in R&D management and on research in natural user interfaces, and has a variety of patents. He has been on the advisory and editorial boards of various journals (e.g., Journal of Usability Studies and the International Journal of Speech Technology), and served on the board of directors for INFINITEC (focusing on infinite potential through assistive technologies). Arnie has taught user centered design at Northwestern University and elsewhere, and can be heard periodically teaching at the University of Washington.
You can reach out to Arnie over LinkedIn, and follow his experiences as a UX manager on Twitter @ArnieLund.
Affiliations and Expertise
PhD, CUXP, Principal Director of User Experience at Microsoft.