Interaction 10

Filed under Good Experiences, Me, me, me!
February 9, 2010 at 12:59 pm

This past week I had the pleasure to present at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Ga. This was my first Interaction conference and I absolutely loved it. The city, the venue, the crowd and the content were all fantastic. Even the food was the best conference food I’ve ever had. The IXDA should be really proud for making such an excellent event happen.

I was excited to go but apprehensive because I was meant to present on a topic that is new to me and I had not had an opportunity to have other conversations about it across the community. Also, after seeing the first two days of excellent content one is bound to feel nervous about their own stuff! It ended up being great – I talked about key performance indicators and measuring success in the context of user experience (slides forthcoming – I’m writing notes because they are not good enough on their own as they were only triggers for my talking points).

While preparing for this talk I expected to have few people show up, precisely because of the reason why I am investigating this topic in the first place: designers don’t like numbers. I didn’t think the topic would be attractive at all (thus my “out there” title and description). The feedback I received and the types of questions asked during the event were really interesting and helped validate some suspicions about how our community sees metrics and numbers.

My main goal was to put something out there about KPIs and measures of success for UX so that we could start a conversation and really explore this topic. I have grown tired of how this topic ALWAYS ends up going into a “what is the ROI” conversation and never advances our ability to express what success means to us. Measuring success to show our value to others is a secondary goal, measuring success for ourselves seems far more valuable to me, which is why I am going to continue to explore this and try to focus the conversation on that goal.

The main theme I saw emerge from the feedback I received is that people felt validated; that I brought up the questions they all have but had not seen articulated in the community — which is precisely what I felt when I started looking into this 4 months ago. We can’t really learn and expand our understanding as a community if we don’t figure out what questions we’re trying to answer. And that is why, in my opinion, we always fall back on the pointless ROI calculation discussions.

I am very grateful for all who came, participated and found me later to discuss the topic. I am very excited about seeing what’s next.

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Project updates

Filed under Management, Me, me, me!
January 20, 2010 at 6:12 pm

I must have tried as many different ways as I have had projects in my career. I don’t know what is the problem, but I just suck at consistently keeping people informed in the same way.

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?

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Project 52

Filed under Me, me, me!
January 8, 2010 at 5:13 pm

You know I’m not a fan of new year’s resolutions, but I am a fan of projects with accountability, so I signed up to participate in Project 52.

Per the project’s page:

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

Let’s see how I do this thing!

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