The UX industry, or user experience design, is growing exponentially. Companies large and small across every sector from web to mobile, consumer products, hotels and even office design, have realized that a great user experience is a key differentiator that makes a huge difference to their bottom line.
These associations have led to a higher focus on UX design, which has in turn changed every part of the user experience life cycle. Business strategy, product design and management right through to marketing, communication and delivery can all benefit from a comprehensively designed user experience. It is therefore imperative that businesses today and UX designers alike understand exactly what is UX, plus all the components of UX design and their own product's user experience in order to stay leaders in their field.
Create an end-to-end UX strategy
Create business cases and metrics in UX
Influence other teams, leaders and organizations
Create user flows and learn how to optimize them
Conduct concept, perception and usability testing
Successfully deliver a product for adoption
Understand the role of marketing and communications
Understand management of change and human behavior
Plan for ongoing improvements
Tadd Koziel. Vice President, Mobility and Workplace. Hewlett Packard
“Sarah has a unique understanding of UX gained from the ground up by teaching, evangelizing, and influencing others on a daily basis. She achieves a great deal of improvement with a minimum of resources: rather than big teams and large tests, Sarah uses small, focused sessions with a few key people. She has a pragmatic approach to applying theory to improve the real tools and products people use in their daily lives. I have appreciated her ability to infuse humor and explain design in simple terms that make people comfortable participating in activities to improve their work."
Learn how to think through the factors that make up the experience, how to measure the experience and how to be strategic in your UX work.
"Experiences today have to be intuitively intelligent, adapting to the users situation, making them smarter, faster, more engaged and more efficient. The hyper connected, online world we now live in, and with the collision of the digital and physical worlds a reality – experience design is the glue. Experience designers today have to understand how everything plays together to create the best experience for their users from start to finish."
Learn how to create ongoing improvement plans, how to capture the right user feedback and data to ensure ongoing adoption and success.
"The truth is, while we can all be considered a ‘user’, we are ultimately clouded by our own subset of experiences and interpret all design through our own schema (the way we view the world)...There should be some early thought as to ongoing success and strategy to enable a great design and delivery. Many people think of their ongoing experience measures and feedback/feed-forward loops and mechanisms last…this can lead to failure or a longer time to reach success."
Learn how to create and optimize user flows as well as conduct concept, usability and other end user testing.
"The whole point in creating things for users, especially when it comes to systems and tools, is to make the user faster and smarter in the completion of the task at hand...
How can you use known context to enable a better, adaptive experience depending on who the user is, their environment and what they are trying to do?
To bring all of this together – you can think of the task I like to call ‘Flow Optimization’. This is the process of looking at each step in the flow and balancing time, choice points, automation opportunities, context, information available and optimizing all of this to create the best path through the solution for the different users and use cases."
Learn how to conduct a change impact analysis, fundamentals of human behavior and how to plan the successful delivery of your solution for adoption.
"An interaction can be talking about or hearing about the entity, a thought of the entity or actually coming into contact with the entity. Perception is huge in experience, as experience is a space and encompasses everything the user sees, hears, feels and touches etc. Perception can affect how they react to the solution, how easily they adopt it, and what they tell others...You need to proactively transition users and plan for their adoption or minimization of impact.
To get effective results, i.e. adoption or sales, and therefore the value you need, the quality of the solution and the user acceptance of the solution both play a part. Management of Change (MOC) in today’s world has also evolved. Given new technologies and a world always on and connected, new expectations have arisen and have to be considered."
“Sarah's intuitive understanding of user behavior, combined with her significant technical and operations experience, makes her uniquely qualified to help others understand the importance of user experience.
Her ability to put the user at the center of her thinking enables others to appreciate the critical importance of understanding how user's behave and how a company's environment, products and services need to evolve in order for meet the user's constantly changing needs. "
Diane Forese. Marketing and Brand Consulting. DF & Associates
Sridhar Narasimhan
