New Frontiers: UX Professional as Business Consultant

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Cindy Chastain@cchastain

#uxconsultant

NEW FRONTIERS: THE UX PROFESSIONAL AS BUSINESS CONSULTANT

Interaction 13 | January 30, 2013

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Business (management) consultant:Someone who engages in the practice of helping organizations grow and improve their performance, primarily through the analysis of existing organizational problems and development of plans for improvement.

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UX Professional:Someone who engages in user-centered design practices to generate cohesive, predictive and desirable designs based on holistic consideration of a users’ experience.

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Customer experience and technology is becoming an essential business strategy

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The Panel

CXO,Adaptive PathSan Francisco

JESSE JAMESGARRET

IndependentConsultantNew York

KARENMCGRANE

CEO,NormativeToronto

MATTHEWMILAN

Principal,MeldSydney

STEVEBATY

IndependentConsultantMiami/NY

WHITNEYHESS

President,nFormEdmonton

GENESMITH

VP, EcommerceRazorfishChicago

SAMANTHASTARMER

IndependentManagementConsultantSt. Louis

DAVEGRAY

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Understand their customersIdentify market opportunitiesRethink business modelsArticulate a visionDefine their UX strategyPlan for organizational change

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For companies that have been around for a long time, it's often the case that they can see the looming threat on the horizon, that their business model is no longer working.- Dave Gray

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Companies think: we're struggling in this market. We need to reinvent and reinvigorate.- Steve Baty

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Companies are seeing that their products have to support their customers in a very different way than they've been doing it in the past.- Whitney Hess

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we have arrived

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sort of

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Any UX work that we've done has involved guiding a client through a decision-making process. That's the core of what strategic management consulting is.-Jesse James Garret

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I'm fond of saying that all the work we do is change management.-Karen McGrane

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picture WIP

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What Impactful UX Requires

Setting a clear vision of the type of experience you seek to deliver

Clear, consistent, and accurate picture of yourcustomers.

A set of activities and disciplines required to define the characteristics of a person’s interaction with your company.

Cultivating a culture in which delivering a great user experience is embedded in the organization’s DNA.

A clear, proactively-minded set of practices for monitoring quality and execution.

An ongoing set of practices to measure user experience quality enables the company to enhance and optimize over time.

ExperienceStrategy

CustomerUnderstandi

ngUX

DesignMeasuremen

t Governance Culture

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The more things are brokered through digital products and services, the more important it is to look into how these companies operate.-Gene Smith

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Some common threads…

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It’s about facilitating insight (supported by a design process)

picture

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What needs to be done is already known by the company.  It's just not consciously known. What I can do is to help facilitate that knowledge into consciousness.  -Dave Gray

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It’s about the people and the relationships.

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You could have the best recommendation in the world and the smartest person in the room, but it's a change management problem. Have to understand the subtle dynamics of how people feel and how they work together and you have to be able to influence that.  -Karen McGrane

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It’s about teaching a company to fish.

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We ask: what are the processes and capabilities we need to have in place internally in order to continue to deliver this experience on an ongoing basis?-Jesse James Garret

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The solution is not the service. The service is the path we can provide.

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Understand the problem and identify the opportunity.

Figure outhow to makechange happen.

Create a plan for implementation and sustainability.

research, prototype, test, refine

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We have come prepared…

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Ability to listen to customersSystems level problem solvingFacilitating consensusInquiry based processesAbility to go deepPatience around finding solutionsSeeing multiple facets of a problem

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A lot of business problems that fail in analytic approaches are much better served with a design approach.- Steve Baty

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The UX field benefits because all of us have a ground in making things. That is incredibly powerful. We're starting from being the builders. And moving upstream into the strategy world.-Karen McGrane

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But we’ve had to learn new things…

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Picture

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How to use and understand their language  How business models workBeing really good at translationUnderstanding how organizations workBasic sales stuffBudget and numbersEvangelizing and persuasionIntellectual honesty and strength

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So what does the future look like?

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Ecosystem maps will be the new journey mapsCustomer experience professionals and business process pros will become best friendsCustomer experience pros will chase employee engagementFirms will pay a premium for scarce talentForrester, January 2013

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Picture

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There’s way more clients who don't get it than those who do. It's the forward edge of the market that recognizes the value of an experience driven approach at the strategic level. -Jesse James Garrett

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There's a step that a designer needs to take where they abstract out from their particular type of design and recognize that at an abstract level there's a design process that has common principles. Once you can take the step you can start to appreciate the intent of the design process and then apply it in other ways. -Steve Baty

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So much opportunity if people want to be leaders. But they're going to need to know how businesses run. -Samantha Starmer

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I would be interested to see the field to stop acting like we are impostors and to start embracing this more fully.

-Karen McGrane

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THANKS!