I am in the process of creating one integrated multi-disciplinary experience design practice (the organization used to have several separate compartmentalized/specialized departments). To become one team, I’ve consolidated the existing groups (40 people) and identified four main areas of oversight for our service so we can divide and conquer. For each of these areas, a director of UX design will oversee a team that will focus on a core aspect of our offering, developing subject matter expertise over time and establishing a long-term design vision.

This role has two core responsibilities: 1. To support and grow a team of talented UX people 2. To define and steward an experience vision for the aspect of the service they focus on.

In a year’s time this person will have taken a group of folks with information architecture, interaction design, content strategy, graphic design and other core skills and expertise, and successfully turned them into a team that acts as a unit.

They’ll have contributed to creating a work environment that fosters productive design practices, including training and practicing critiquing, presenting, storytelling, sketching and facilitation. The team will be capable of designing solutions that adequately translate into device-agnostic experiences employing a foundation of modular, responsive design.

Individuals on the team will have a clear picture of what their role responsibilities entail and what opportunities for growth, improvement and career advancement are available to them. They will be confident in the UX design director’s leadership and management skills, knowing they can be counted on to act in the best interest of the team and its members.

Executive leadership will trust the UXD director’s long-term design vision and have an understanding of how it aligns to the overall department and company-wide strategies and pursuits. That vision will be easily articulated by any member of the Experience Design team and used as a reference point to direct long-term design decisions.

The organization will have become accustomed to modeling approaches of varying fidelity as a method to explore design solutions and feedback cycles with users as a foundation for incremental improvements. This will signal a particular focus of the UX Design team on delivery over deliverables, solutions over documents.

Moreover, the quality of users’ experiences will be markedly improved by a concerted effort to establish a cohesive design system that unifies the service offering, addressing the core issues users experience. Given the breadth and depth of our offering, this will have been made possible through the establishment of a strong foundation of design standards and guidelines combined with a robust design practice and a team of individuals empowered and prepared to make decisions.

Are you that person? If so, please apply today.

As a manager there are many things I try and do to establish and keep clear goals in mind as well as a simple and direct line of communication across the team. This month we are finally going to make the deeper structural changes needed to integrate this team and organize ourselves so among many other things I sent this email to the team.

I’m posting it here because I thought it could be interesting to see how I try to articulate my intentions for the team and what I’m trying to portray. I’d love to see how other people do this so I thought I’d start. Note that this is not the only time I am expressing these things; I’ve talked about all of them at different times before and will talk about many of them and others again many other times. Learning doesn’t happen on single exposure.

— beginning —

<introduction omitted>

Priorities should help us make decisions about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. Priorities are not projects. Priorities are not deliverables. Priorities should be criteria for decision-making, the WHYs, not the WHATs. As a rule of thumb, more than two priorities are too much for a person. The larger the criteria set to make a decision, the harder the decision becomes; as a tool to make decisions, priorities should be top-of-mind and not in any way overlapping or conflicting.

Having said that, as we start this new phase with an integrated team I would like us to work off of shared goals so we know where we are all going long-term and have specific priorities on a quarterly basis to help us focus our decisions. For the first quarter this year, this is our team’s priority:

Support the team transition into one unified experience design practice

That’s the only one. As you commit to a project, talk to other people, make decisions and define next steps for things, I want you to ask yourself, is this supporting the team transition into a unified experience design practice?

This includes, being flexible with the ambiguity we will experience during this transition such as work on projects or activities that you haven’t worked on before, work with people you haven’t worked with before, work on areas of our product you are not familiar with, take an active role in ensuring communication is clear, and so on. I am asking you to embrace the opportunities that will be presented and really do what is the best for us as a team; you will be doing these things with many unknowns until we get more established.

See someone struggling with a new thing? Help them.

See someone doing something that is just completely wrong? Try and understand why. And help them.

Having difficulty getting something done or dealing with someone? Ask for help.

Conversely, don’t take the established things for granted. This is the time to question why we have operated in certain ways, done things in a certain fashion and revisit decisions we have made but struggled with since. But please take this seriously; this is not about complaining. This is about identifying an opportunity or a problem and pursuing a resolution. It assumes follow-through. If you identify something and alert someone else of it, follow up and see where it goes. The goal is to improve things for us all not to make problems for others.

Annoyed about how much time you spend creating documents? Question if the level of detail is adequate. Then address that.

Disappointed that a particular process is cumbersome or has no clear path forward? Contact the responsible person and present the problem/opportunity. Take some responsibility for resolving it.

Reached a dead-end for trying to figure out a solution to something? Escalate the problem. Ask for help.

Tried everything and everyone and have no idea what to do next? Come talk to me.

There is room for failure. We can try our best and fail in our execution and still learn from the experience of failing. As long as you use this priority as your compass and reflect on why and how you are making decisions to help with that, I am confident any and all failures will be the best failures we could possibly get. In fact, I welcome your notes about things you are trying, failing or succeeding, and what you’re learning in the process.

Our team’s mission is to ensure the quality of users’ experiences with our services is the best possible. None of us can accomplish this goal individually. We can’t do that without being a team. This is why this is our one and only priority.

I’m delighted to be working with you and having the opportunity to build this team together. Let’s get this year started and make this team the best team you’ve worked with.

— end —

We know quite well the value of Design to business, and Design Thinking to problem solving. But what remains a bit fuzzy for many organizations is the distance between thinking and doing—the proverbial gap between strategic intent and execution. Or, how to make it happen. This year’s design thinking conference will focus on closing the gap—and moving from design thinking to design doing.

What one actually does. I enjoy the conversations about design thinking but they tend to lead to a lot of hand waving and I have found many designers and specially young managers struggling to grasp just what it is they need to do (not just talk about) to produce the positive outcomes discussed in this context.

My talk, which could not have been more appropriately timed, will be a journey through my work at Comcast between 2004 and 2011. I’m going to talk about how the UXD practice was established, how it grew, changed and evolved over the years, and what impact it’s had in the company culture and products.

What aspects of this journey would YOU be interested in hearing about? DMI is recording the video for this session so you’ll have the opportunity to see it later in case you can’t make it to Seattle. Please let me know what points in this story you’d find most useful learning about or any questions you may have.

I’ll post a summary after I’m back. Thank you!

Simple, straightforward and embraces all dimensions that are relevant about meetings. I love how she used the hand-washing analogy. If you’re interested, join the Facebook page.

I translated it to Portuguese, just to exercise my language muscles. Download the PDF:

The bigger problem is that if I am not providing updates to other people than it is likely I am doing a bad job keeping track for myself. That really should be the central reason for doing it in the first place but without external accountability I’m just a lazy ass.

Today I had 5 minutes so I decided to write my boss an email just to give him a glimpse into where I am with things. I used this model:

I am working on 7 projects at the same time right now at different stages of development so I wanted to give him just a taste of what is going on where.

Project name and a one liner about the last thing I accomplished was the bare minimum I thought was necessary. Two bullets indicating what is going to happen next and what risks may be incurred seemed to be the additional two most relevant pieces of information.

Finally, the red/yellow/green flags are really just to make the one page scan-able so he can see that I have 2 projects on green, 1 on yellow and 4 on red and without my whining – but knowing what the issues highlighted are – see that there are blockers or resource problems making that happen.

How do you keep people up to date about what you’re working on on a regular basis? How do you provide project updates to your peers and bosses?

Let’s say you are working on a project and your main goal is to solve an information access problem: “audience X does not have access to Y data sources which would help them do their job better”. The value of the information they would draw from these data sources is indisputable.

You know from some preliminary interviewing that audience X is made up of people in different roles that share the overall problem but are interested in different parts of those data sources available. You also learned that while access is the first barrier, other barriers to use are: domain knowledge (understanding that data, knowing what to do with it), language (different segments speak about the same data in different terms) and lastly, some tool knowledge issues: the majority of people feels overwhelmed by the poor ways this data is accessible today (reports, databases, online systems, etc) when/if it is accessible to them.

From that, you feel sufficienctly confident to say you need to do something that is not just optimizing the solutions that (sorta) exist for these people, rather, you have enough information to justify that a good candidate solution to this problem is to make it easier for people to get to these data sources by creating a mechanism that democratizes access (aka provides them with a starting point to the many sources, at the very least), simplifies the consumption of said data (using plain language, removing decorations, providing relevant visualization, making it clear what the sources are, etc) and make their use of this data more pleasurable, understandable, meaningful, usable, and that ultimately becomes part of their day-to-day work (at the most ambitious).

So you are ready to go for that: How do you actually plan this “product”? (will use this term to make it easier to describe the solution). How do you make the leap from this cursory understanding to a level of “this is the stuff we need to build”? I generally have many answers for this question, but here’s where I’m stumped:

• This is an internal project and I don’t have many resources at all to get started with (thought I know that once some success is shown, I can get more resources). That includes time for the type of research I would normally like to do for this.
• The volume of data available is just insane. Simply building a “flexible” system that could accommodate any and all scenarios would be a very stupid idea and I know would not accomplish any of the goals above.
• The audience I’m talking about doesn’t know what they want. They definitely expressed all the values and attributes of what they want, but this doesn’t exist and they never had anything that did this for them, so I don’t have good hints as to what are the pieces of this puzzle I need to put together (read: features).
• In my mind, if I had a mental model map where I could align features to user tasks, I would have the right tool to be able to select what to start building first in order to make some headway. I, however, don’t know how to go through the process of creating a mental model from thin air (or my preliminary interviews). I can’t really think of how I would structure the research interviews that I would use to comb tasks from. Also, never done that for something that is entirely new (nothing to validate against).

In short, I can’t think of a better way to get from “knowing about these people pains, desires and expectations” to “here are my priorities for what to build”. I am seeing this is a new product management challenge for me in addition to UX problem to solve. Not only do I have to figure out how to create a solution that meets those goals, but I have to do this over and over for a long long time, because the success/failure of this effort = my success/failure, which is very different accountability than solving someone else’s problem. I am really enjoying that challenge, but need to learn how to bridge the gap in my own expectations and tools I would normally use to resolve this.

So, what do you think? I may not have given all the information that would help resolve this, but ask away and I’ll clarify any points.

Am I lacking tool or perspective?

[I'll update this with a link once it's published]

My question is an old concern about how new practitioners are being introduced to User Experience Design and Research practices by being fed a multitude of methods and not given much support about how to decide the right circumstances to use them.

It is not sufficient just to know how a certain method works. It is also not sufficient having used that method once or twice. What is it about our experience as practitioners that makes us better or worse decision makers? How do we choose to dedicate time and money to an 8-week long project to produce personas instead of a different approach?

What distinguishes the practitioners that not only choose methods and know how to apply them, but choose the methods that are most effective for a given problem?

A few years ago, Jared himself told me a story about an experiment where two distinct research teams (unaware of each other I believe) were given the exact same research goal and employed the same methodology to achieve it, and came up with different results and findings.

When that sort of thing happens, I wonder: Can we really trust our methods? But more importantly, if we accept that our methods are not really scientific and that we can’t really have a high level of confidence about the results we end up with, how do we choose one over another?

Somehow we just do. But some do better than others. Some do MUCH better than MANY others. If you have the opportunity to work with practitioners with enough experience and knowledge, you see excellent arguments for why to do A versus B for a given set of circumstances. So yes, only experience will help one make better choices, but everyone’s experiences are different. As a way to try to educate new practitioners we coach and mentor by teaching the methods and also giving advice such as “be flexible” and “don’t marry a particular process” and “figure out what kind of problem you are trying to solve first”, which are all excellent advice, but not strategic enough and often not practical enough that it can really help someone make a decision when they are faced with a new challenge.

Jared’s opinion is that our field is still too young and we haven’t yet been able to articulate the criteria we use in that decision-making process. I agree, however, it worries me that many think they are advancing in their practice because they know more, when in fact, they just learned new methods, but don’t really have the skills to assess risks, and benefits, between choosing one over another.

Being a runner gets you to the finish line, knowing which way to run wins the race. I really hope we become better equipped to pass on knowledge about how we make choices and why because, paraphrasing Jared, knowing a lot of recipes a restauranteur does not make.

Yes, you read that right: I’m not going anywhere, yet, I’m going forward!

Coming to Comcast was a great opportunity for me – I wanted to work for a large organization and experience the trials and tribulations that my clients expressed when I worked as a consultant. I also wanted to manage a larger team and experience the challenges of long-term people management. Comcast welcomed me with an opportunity to do all that and more. Not only to manage people, but to start and build a team from scratch; not to just be in a large corporate environment, but establishing a new competency (information architecture and usability) across a very large organization.

This was a very enriching experience and I’m extremely satisfied with the outcome. What a learning experience! Fortunately for me, realizing that I reached this point didn’t mean I’d come across a dead-end at Comcast. Comcast Interactive Media is continuing to grow and so we came up with the Principal position, allowing me to keep growing and focus on new strategic challenges.

As Principal of Information Architecture I’ll be responsible for evolving the vision and establishing UX best practices across Comcast Interactive Media properties. Those include Comcast.net, Fancast, Ziddio.com, GameInvasion, Chill and all Comcast Cable, High-Speed Internet and Voice services.

I couldn’t possibly do that without passing on the baton of managing team and practice to someone else. That is a hard call to make given that this is “my baby” and I want the very best. Which is why I’m THRILLED that my dear friend Dennis Schleicher stepped in to take on the Director of IA role. Dennis is one of the nicest people I know. I’m not just saying that because we share a love of cheese. He’s also very talented and inspiring to be around – nothing seems impossible or hard when you discuss it with Dennis – you know you are talking to an anthropologist when you start answering your own questions. Welcome Dennis!

I’m very excited about all this so I’ll try and blog a little more frequently to talk about what I’m up to. The last I’ll add today is really the only reason I decided to write this post, to say thanks to the absolutely fantastic team that made this possible for me. Crystal Kubitsky, Eddie James, Austin Govella, Aparna Ramchandran, Paul Kali, Cynthia Hoffa and David Fiorito. You all rock. I hope I have reminded you of that frequently enough and I hope you are as proud of this team as I am. I can’t wait to continue working with you.

Download the recording (52MB, 76 minutes, Mp3)

PLEASE DO NOT LINK TO THE MP3 FILE. LINK TO THIS POST INSTEAD

• [00:00] Olga Howard & folks introduce the organizations that supported the event and panelists introduce themselves
• [09:37] Olga introduces the panel
• [11:12] We talk about what challenges us during recruiting
• [17:44] I talk about how to get a job
• [21:00] What I want to see in a resume
• [47:50] Looking up people online
• [54:17] What we look for in an interview
• [48:12] Relevance of Educational background, transferable skills & how people get into IA
• [64:34] How to get into IA and other Q&A

Here is the resume template (36KB, Word Document) that I mention during the panel. If you read my notes and recommendations for writing a successful resume and getting the job you want while you listen, it will be easier to follow.

I received great feedback from the people who attended the panel and workshop saying they got great value out of it, so I’m extending my offer to you, reading this blog: I’d be happy to review your resume and give you advice. I only ask you to first listen to this recording, read my recommendations and re-write your resume before you ask for help.

Many thanks to Olga for making this happen!

Also, today Crystal asked me if I would be interested in doing another one of these panel/workshops (possibly for PHICHI). I’d be happy to do it again, but are you interested? Let me know (leave a comment)!