Blogs

I am presenting "Designing Mission Critical Experiences" at Michigan State's World Usability Day 2016 conference tomorrow. November 16 update: PDF of "public" slides attached and SlideShare version embedded.

Links from presentation

Below are links to things I reference, just in case you want to learn more about something I mention.

• The Future is Learning: We are here
• The Fourth Industrial Revolution
• The Future of Employment: Paper (PDF), Slides (PDF)
• Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America (PDF)
• Education and accelerated change: The imperative for design learning
• Michigan CEO Summit 2016
• America's Leading Design Cities
• Design in Tech Report 2016
• CIO Relevance in a Digital World
• Drinks x Design Detroit: World Usability Day
• Experience Architecture at MSU

Additional notes

• Why Robots Will Not Decimate Human Jobs: Argues against Oxford study, but seems to confuse "robotics" with "automation" and totally misses the point of the study: job growth will be in the more "creative" areas. Still, I now need to read Bob Gordon's book, which was the purpose of his post, no? (added Nov 22 2016)
• AI conference panel on how artificial intelligence will affect jobs. (added Dec 6 2016)
• Automation, jobs, and the future of work: "...They are actually cases where humans are made more powerful by this background. And that creates a better customer experience, which creates new demand." (added Dec 6 2016)

I am doing a user experience presentation at the Lima Tech conference (LRITA) tomorrow. Below is the description from the program. I will upload the slides afterwards, in the slight chance anyone wants to see them.

When User Experience Becomes Mission Critical

The role of CIOs and the focus for IT leaders is constantly evolving. In 2006, it was about Innovation, in 2009 is was about Collaboration, in 2011 it was Intelligence, in 2014 it was Customers. In 2015: Digital Transformation. Now in 2016, CIO priorities includes User Experience.

As the corporate IT mindset for User Experience evolves from "Don't care" to "Mission critical", there are many paths, steps, and options along the way. Keith will share stories and examples of how companies have made progress along their journey to mission critical user experiences.

Aspects of the journey include:

• User interface design: from "lipstick on a pig" to guidelines and standards that improve usability, reduce costs, and increase business value
• Requirements processes: from spreadsheets of features to priorities based on deep user insights
• Project management: from waterfall management focused on cost-savings to agile & iterative design and development focused on quality, hypothesis-testing and user satisfaction
• Governance: from chaos and technology-driven decision making to portfolios of projects based on user experience (and business value) benefits

Because the paths to mission critical user experiences will be different for each company, the session will be interactive, where you can ask questions to understand what other companies have done, and discuss what might work for your companies, based on where you are at in terms of UX maturity and what your goals are.

I will be doing a short talk at the next PMI WLEC meeting, January 12th. That's Project Managers in Western Lake Erie, aka Toledo Region. I am going to give them an intro to the user experience and software developer communities around here, and see what we might want to do together.

Below is what I wrote to help me prepare and give them some sense of what I want to cover. I will pull up a few web pages along the way to provide some context and trigger discussions.

• My LinkedIn profile
• What is User Experience? One view (of too many):UXnet Umbrella
• PM and/vs UX: Silly discussion about PM & UX, Better list of ways PMs can help UX, Specific to usability testing
• Make it official: Lots of PMI certification options/specializations but "UX" is not one; Someone is thinking about that, tho
• Pause for discussion. What is your experience managing UX projects, a UX team, and UX activities?
• Software development methods often force the framing of the PM/UX relationship; for example, Dual-track agile; How did Fall PD: Agility beyond the Team go?
• IT Community: Tech Toledo, Toledo Tech Events, EPIC Connect I.T.
• UX Community: UXTR, Lean UX meet-up, Toledo Web Professionals meet-up
• Next big event: Feb 3 UX Conference at TMA w/ remote speakers, Product management & UX
• Pause for questions about conference, ideas and discussion for working together in other ways

Many software project managers are finding that they need to collaborate with user experience teams in order to accomplish the organizational results required for business success. User Experience professionals do more than make screen looks pretty. They do more than make features usable. They make the experience of using the product or service delightful. UXers often also use design methods to lead strategic customer decisions and stakeholder engagements.

As software development teams adopt agile, scrum and lean methods to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, they are also exploring how to collaborate with user experience professionals. Design is becoming an important competitive advantage in e-commerce, mobile app and other software marketplaces. Intranets and enterprise software are expected to be as good as consumer applications.

Project managers, software developers, and user experience designers all need to work together for projects to be successful. Shouldn’t we also be learning together and networking with each other “outside the office”? Let’s talk about what PMI WLEC is doing this year, what the software, tech & design communities in the Toledo Region are trying to accomplish, and see if we can do some things together. For example, we have already collaborated on EPIC’s Connect IT, where we had a PM roundtable to go along with application development and IT infrastructure topics.

The next (best) opportunity for learning together and networking might be the 4th User Experience Toledo Region conference on February 3rd. It will be at the Toledo Museum of Art and features remote speakers by Rosenfeld Media. The topic is PRODUCT management and user experience (not quite the same as PROJECT management, but close). The world-class experts include Jeff Gothelf, Jeff Patton, Laura Klein and Christina Wodtke. Learn more at User-Experience.org.

About Keith Instone - Keith is a user experience consultant and experience planner. He has “global” clients (like Lenovo) that he works remotely with, “midwest” clients (like a consumer products company in southern Ohio), and “local” clients (like Owens Corning). They usually hire him to make their technology easier to use but he often ends up helping them change the organization and culture that is getting in the way of people-centered design.

His most intense experience with PMI-certified colleagues was during a 10 year stint with IBM, where he worked with a wide rage of “pure” PMs and “UX” PMs. He was part of the first cross-IBM Agile UX working groups, which did early attempts at integrating agile software development and user-centered design processes.

Today, he is active in building up the UX and software tech communities in the Toledo Region. Check out User-Experience.org, TechToledo.com, and the community calendar ToledoTechEvents.org to join us.

I am giving a talk on Thursday (3/26) at the Mad Ave Collective, part of their Shop Talk series. My topic is "User experience concepts, skills and methods for strategic creatives".

My basic agenda:

• My life as a User Experience Freelance Consultant
• Who we are: Strategic Creatives
• UX Concepts, Skills & Methods that you can use to do your current job better
• How to "learn me some of that UX"

Links to things I plan to mention:

• Example customer experience map
• The Creative Professional
• Core activities: Sketching, Storytelling, Critiquing, Presenting, Facilitating
• Core UX & enterprise skills
• User research methods
• Rosenfeld Media books, esp. The User Experience Team of One
• All You Can Learn
• Online reading: Putting People First, Boxes and Arrows, UX Booth, UXmatters
• Toledo's local UX community

Way back in November, I did another talk about user experience and visual literacy. This time I partnered with Mike Osswald. We led a session entitled "Visual literacy in a business context" (aka "Design and visual literacy") at the IVLA 2014 conference, right here in Toledo.

• Slides on Slideshare
• Video recording on WGTE's KnowledgeStream and on The Art Museum's YouTube channel (Did I really wave my hands that much??)

Mike did a great job putting the slides together, even tweaking them for the 9-screen display we had. Slide 28 shows that well, and also serves as the list of UX "top of mind" topics that we thought had strong connections to visual literacy issues.

• Modular Content for
 Multiple Contexts
 (Responsive)
• User Interface 
 Metaphors
 ("Flat" design)
• Layers and Motion
 in User Interfaces
• Gesture Literacy
• Storytelling
• Human Factors 
 and Devices
• Data Visualization Democratized
• Infographics & Information Literacy

We got the audience engaged, heard good feedback afterwards, and learned a lot doing it. So it was a success! Not sure what UX & VL connections I will make next, but I plan to keep exploring the intersection.