The Usability Professional as Visionary/Strategist

Have you had insights and observations that go beyond the scope of a particular system or site? Are you talking with business leaders, sharing how things could be better for users overall? A quality user experience is important for organizations and their customers, citizens, and staff. User advocates can take on a “thought leadership” role within organizations and projects. This talk addresses how we can do that.

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Duane Degler

Business as (Un)Usual: How a UX Audit Can Help

It may be the understatement of the century to say that 2020 is not going the way any of us had planned. In the best of times, it can be difficult to justify the allocation of resources to assess and redesign your UX. And in tough times, like now, it can be especially hard to make needed progress, which is where a UX audit can really make a difference.
Don’t Document it—Prototype it!

In this article by Michael Owens, she explores the Catch 22 of traditional documentation: that whatever you write is inevitably going to be either too much or too little. Walking the tightrope between providing enough detail to be useful and avoiding too many words to be overwhelming can be a delicate balance to strike for any designer, and that's where prototypes can make all the difference.
The Delicate Art of Facilitation: Preparing for a Facilitation Session

A successful facilitation session is one where participants are empowered to achieve specific outcomes supporting a shared goal. In this blog post, Duane Degler and Karen Bachmann detail the most important aspects of preparing for a facilitation session to ensure that you set out with the right maps, milestones, and possible alternative paths at hand.
Don’t Document It, Prototype It!

In this DCUX 2019 lightning talk, Michael Owens shares valuable tips about communicating UX requirements to your development team with annotated prototypes.
The Delicate Art of Facilitating a Content Strategy

Good facilitation skills are essential for many content strategy tasks and projects. In this session, Duane Degler discussed techniques and approaches to channel the passions and personal goals of each participant, effectively guiding the group towards successful outcomes. Topics covered include learning how to lead discussions, manage personalities, and adapt to the unexpected to benefit both clients and customers.
The Delicate Art of Facilitation

Good facilitation skills are essential for many IA tasks and projects. The ability to successfully guide internal colleagues as well as external groups to shared, valuable outcomes serves a wide range of project needs – achieving stakeholder and team consensus, creating a clear vision for IA strategy, refining a taxonomy, to name just a few. This IAC2019 workshop builds activities around real-world scenarios from the presenters' own experiences that participants can use to plan for and guide their own work.
Integrating Taxonomies and Ontologies into Enterprise Search and Browse

In this Data Harmony User Group 2018 session, Duane Degler outlines approaches for increasing taxonomy integration into search and browse, thus drawing the greatest value from your taxonomies for your users.
Guerrilla Glue: Making Collaborative Digital Innovation Projects Stick

In this MCN2017 session, Duane Degler moderates a panel discussing how institutions and projects are using linked data and modern technologies to achieve long-term outcomes for themselves and others.
Split Focus: Designing Applications for Multiple Monitor Setups

In this UXPA 2017 session, Lisa Battle, Michael Owens, and Rachel Sengers discuss new UX design patterns and challenges that arise in software and web-based application design for multiple monitors, illustrating them with real project examples.
Ethics: A Human-Centered Design Goal

In this UXPA 2017 session, Karen Bachmann addresses about how to talk carrots (value) and not sticks (legality) to make ethics a core human-centered design constraint.
Aligning Your Organization's Strategic Direction, Roadmaps, and Technology

In this session, Duane Degler helps association executives think about how we can better use roadmaps to plan our technology journeys and keep everyone in sync, and provides valuable insights to help coordinate organization and technology goals across parallel initiatives and departments.
7 Steps for a More Accessible Association Information Ecosystem

It can be easy for associations to get buried under all the information they produce and curate. Here are seven steps create an information ecosystem in which resources are accessible and up to date.
Delicious Design: UXers and Visual Designers Collaborating Together

Led by a UX designer and a visual designer, this session provides practical ideas and recommendations for ensuring a smooth and effective collaboration between specialists in these disciplines.
Keeping the Vision Alive: Techniques for Communication Throughout the Project Lifecycle

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. Also, as consultants there is much we can do to prepare the project team to hold the line on needed improvements, advocate for user needs, and build on the “big picture” over the long haul after the UX work is completed. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process, and beyond.
Keeping the Vision Alive: UX Leadership in Long-Term Projects

As UX practitioners, we often face challenges “keeping the vision alive” as projects get caught up in constraints, details, and politics. But we cannot let those things derail us or take things too far from that solid, long-term vision. In this talk, we discuss strategies and practical techniques to help teams stay focused on meeting long-term goals, while addressing short-term needs and facing the circumstances and challenges that arise through the design and implementation process. Topics include: maintaining the rationale behind “blue-sky” thinking, methods for questioning constraints to get to innovative ideas, working with interim designs as intermediate steps to the final vision, and creating shared understanding and buy-in across the team for the long-term vision.
Design Guidelines: Real-Life Stories

As an organization grows and its products proliferate, how can it maintain a coherent sense of identity and usability across them, while allowing room for flexibility and growth? For a family of online communications channels or applications, design guidelines can document and disseminate the organization’s UX principles and patterns. This presentation offers resources and insights from both practitioners and professionals outside the field who have undertaken these types of projects together.
Applying User-Centered Methods to Inform New Product Selection and Strategic Planning

Usability professionals always say the best time to start user-centered design is at the beginning of a project. But what about starting even earlier, when the vision or concept is first considered? This presentation discusses integrating UCD with marketing methods to inform/support executive decision-making and strategic prioritization of projects.
Integrating UCD with Requirements Engineering: Improving Processes, Formats, and Communication

User-centered design practitioners are skilled in eliciting user needs and translating them into design. However, our methods are sometimes poorly integrated with requirements engineering. This panel discussion presents practical approaches to coordinating UCD with other types of activities involved in the creation of requirements.
Requirements in User-Centered Design and Software Engineering: Tools for Bridging Design Cultures

This workshop explored various formats for documenting user needs, and discussed approaches to better integrating UCD and traditional requirements engineering approaches for interactive systems.
Patterns of Integration: Bringing User Centered Design into the Software Development Lifecycle

Faced with a need to integrate user-centered methods into existing software development lifecycles, many practitioners lack clear direction and continue to negotiate the scope of their involvement on a project-by-project basis. There are best practices that can be adopted, however. This book chapter distills the experiences of many practitioners into a collection of process patterns that describe an evolutionary path towards full integration.
When Your Group Can’t Do It All: Investing UCD Resources Wisely

When an organization’s internal UCD group is too small to support all projects that request its services, management is faced with a need to prioritize and invest its limited resources wisely. This is how one UCD group defined different levels of service and implemented criteria for evaluating project requests.

Matt Oliphant’s blog on this presentation
How to Design User Interfaces to Support Users and Their Tasks

An analysis of users and their tasks typically generates a lot of rich information… but the process of translating that information into design solutions may seem like “magic.” The truth is that user-centered design is iterative, and requires a mixture of art and science — it takes a series of small steps that both transform and refine the collected information into design solutions. This presentation uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate the process from high-level visioning all the way through detailed design.