The Business of User Experience

What is the value of your user experience design? How do you develop smart design practices that satisfy specific business objectives? How do you measure your success within your organization? This two-day workshop will help you connect your design and business strategies, to build measurably successful Web sites.

Using Jesse James Garrett's renowned Elements of User Experience and Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams models, this presentation provides a framework for user-centered Web design with clear explanations and vivid illustrations that you can put to immediate use.

Creating a sound user experience can be overwhelmingly complex. With so many issues involved -- usability, brand identity, information architecture, interaction design -- it can seem as if the only way to build a successful site is to spend a fortune on specialists who understand all the details.

This presentation will impose order on the chaotic array of terms and concepts currently being used to describe user experience development. We'll review the big picture -- from strategy and requirements to information architecture and visual design -- and explain how each element of user-experience design can help you develop a process.

Companies are demanding measured accountability for every expenditure, and design teams are struggling to prove their value. But isn't it clear that a product that satisfies user needs is a product that will sell more, be used more, and earn more revenue? Well, not necessarily.

Design and development teams must learn to articulate their value to the business world. In this session, we'll make connections between the attributes of good design (usability, desirability, utility) and those of business value (increased revenue, decreased costs). Your skills do translate into corporate profits; we'll show you exactly how.

Successful Web teams have figured out how to work within their organizations to demonstrate the value of usable design. In this workshop, you'll learn proven techniques that will simplify internal politics, increase the resources available to you, and help you deliver your best designs.

Too many corporations believe that the benefits of user-centered development are intangible and far off. If your management team thinks that user-centered processes are "nice to have" but not critical, this session will teach you how to shift corporate mindset. We'll offer practical tactics for creating a user-centered organizational culture, and show you how to present user-focused customer experience as a vital, short-term process with immediate value.

Content management systems are billed as solutions to all of your Web site woes. They can also cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. So why do so many CMS projects fail? Because companies often don't do the necessary prep work. Expensive technological solutions are ignored when they don't meet your organization's expectations.

After working with several companies, and talking to people at dozens more, we've come up with eight steps that will help you to use your CMS efficiently. In this session, you'll learn how to inventory your content, analyze your current workflow, and deconstruct your current pages into templates. We'll help you use your existing CMS or move your site to a new CMS without all the costly mistakes.