I've studied and practiced strategy through the lenses of interaction, service, and systems design, as well as general business. I'm influenced by John Boyd, Donella Meadows, Nassim Taleb, and others.
UX Skills and Organizational Capability
Keeping business needs and employee skills in alignment to product innovative products requires a broader and more systematic view than inconsistent job descriptions and fungible org charts.
In late 2012, it became clear that Microsoft needed to assess how well equipped its user experience engineers were to successfully handle the next few years. In order to do that, I created two sets of materials to connect corporate needs to engineer skills by working with a team of Senior UX leaders from across the company who had identified a full set of key skills that UX engineers and teams needed to possess. Using that as a basis, I drove an effort to create a framework and tool for understanding and measuring the relationship between skills and organizational needs, and how well teams thought they could meet them. The tool was lightweight and quick to use, replacing a much more cumbersome and overly detailed program.
It enabled team leaders to assess, during brief, guided interviews, their team's level of readiness to meet future needs by assigning scores to current and desired abilities, along with a priority relative to product business goals. The delta between current and desired was multiplied by the priority to produce a weighted score. The higher the score, the less prepared that team was to achieve what would be asked of it.
Once I had a reasonably-sized set of scores, I guided a data visualization team to produce a static representation for initial discussion combining the numeric data with a graphic. This led to significant conversations, as intended, within the leadership team about why certain skills were in their current states and what to do about improvements. Two major initiatives were begun to roll out skills growth programs, one for design research and one for design. Both were welcomed by UX teams.
I revised the initial tool to incorporate a dynamic visualization to see individual product data and a whole company view. After I left the project, the team I was on began to create an online version to use with other disciplines over the long term. I presented the conceptual and mechanical framework for this strategic view of team skills at the 2013 UX STRAT conference in Atlanta, GA. In addition, I created a concept model of how skills and roles at the team and individual levels collectively represent UX capabilities for an organization. This has been helpful in defining strategic experience efforts.
Keeping business needs and employee skills in alignment to product innovative products requires a broader and more systematic view than inconsistent job descriptions and fungible org charts.
In late 2012, it became clear that Microsoft needed to assess how well equipped its user experience engineers were to successfully handle the next few years. In order to do that, I created two sets of materials to connect corporate needs to engineer skills by working with a team of Senior UX leaders from across the company who had identified a full set of key skills that UX engineers and teams needed to possess. Using that as a basis, I drove an effort to create a framework and tool for understanding and measuring the relationship between skills and organizational needs, and how well teams thought they could meet them. The tool was lightweight and quick to use, replacing a much more cumbersome and overly detailed program.
It enabled team leaders to assess, during brief, guided interviews, their team's level of readiness to meet future needs by assigning scores to current and desired abilities, along with a priority relative to product business goals. The delta between current and desired was multiplied by the priority to produce a weighted score. The higher the score, the less prepared that team was to achieve what would be asked of it.
Once I had a reasonably-sized set of scores, I guided a data visualization team to produce a static representation for initial discussion combining the numeric data with a graphic. This led to significant conversations, as intended, within the leadership team about why certain skills were in their current states and what to do about improvements. Two major initiatives were begun to roll out skills growth programs, one for design research and one for design. Both were welcomed by UX teams.
I revised the initial tool to incorporate a dynamic visualization to see individual product data and a whole company view. After I left the project, the team I was on began to create an online version to use with other disciplines over the long term. I presented the conceptual and mechanical framework for this strategic view of team skills at the 2013 UX STRAT conference in Atlanta, GA. In addition, I created a concept model of how skills and roles at the team and individual levels collectively represent UX capabilities for an organization. This has been helpful in defining strategic experience efforts.
Microsoft Ads and Small Business
Online advertising has a poor reputation, hit-and-miss success rates, and a large and unwieldy system supporting it. But of course it plays a huge role for corporations and small businesses alike. At Microsoft, we wanted a clearer picture of what we could do to get a better handle on the overall situation as well as enable more small business to take part and represent themselves well in our ecosystem.
Using sketches of various parts of the system from internal leaders and external sources, I helped guide discussions around a more completely mapped model. This would allow us to see opportunities and problem areas more clearly.
In addition, I facilitated explorations of how small businesses see the system, what they perceive their place in it to be, and how we might empower them to exploit opportunities more fully.
Much of this work is confidential, so only glimpses are given in the images below.
Online advertising has a poor reputation, hit-and-miss success rates, and a large and unwieldy system supporting it. But of course it plays a huge role for corporations and small businesses alike. At Microsoft, we wanted a clearer picture of what we could do to get a better handle on the overall situation as well as enable more small business to take part and represent themselves well in our ecosystem.
Using sketches of various parts of the system from internal leaders and external sources, I helped guide discussions around a more completely mapped model. This would allow us to see opportunities and problem areas more clearly.
In addition, I facilitated explorations of how small businesses see the system, what they perceive their place in it to be, and how we might empower them to exploit opportunities more fully.
Much of this work is confidential, so only glimpses are given in the images below.
Intervoice Services Innovation
I had been at Intervoice for 4 years and assumed a development management position when I volunteered to be part of a project trying out a new over-the-phone speech recognition technology. Although we expect it today, 17 years ago it was unknown and not yet commercially proven. Despite the challenges we encountered, it became clear to me that this new tech would be an important part of the future.
In addition, I was exposed for the first time to human-computer interaction ideas and skills. The ideas of more intentionally designing how people would experience the systems turned on a lot of light bulbs in my mind. I quickly started learning more and saw that Intervoice needed to change. There was no organizational concept of user-centered design.
My role soon changed to start and run the speech application team. We had much to learn about using the technology, however, I knew our real focus had to be to learn how to design the applications well, then teach the rest of the company about design and speech.
That was the beginning of a 4 year journey, which ended in a successful transition to deploying primarily speech application produced using a solid UCD process. Getting there was difficult, though, as it required battling incumbent technology, processes, and even business models.
To cut to the chase, by 2003, we convinced the company to invest in design fully, resulting in a first-ever design team of 10 designers, 3 user researchers, and a usability lab. We deployed scores of speech applications for companies such as Fidelity, American Airlines, and Wells Fargo. My team created the first comprehensive design resources for speech reco apps, including the manual below (see chapter 2). And perhaps most significantly, I pushed to move from charging nothing for these custom applications to them becoming a primary revenue source in the tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to the positive design and business impact, I'm also very proud of the team I grew and mentored. Many of them have gone on to further success and sharing good design work.
I had been at Intervoice for 4 years and assumed a development management position when I volunteered to be part of a project trying out a new over-the-phone speech recognition technology. Although we expect it today, 17 years ago it was unknown and not yet commercially proven. Despite the challenges we encountered, it became clear to me that this new tech would be an important part of the future.
In addition, I was exposed for the first time to human-computer interaction ideas and skills. The ideas of more intentionally designing how people would experience the systems turned on a lot of light bulbs in my mind. I quickly started learning more and saw that Intervoice needed to change. There was no organizational concept of user-centered design.
My role soon changed to start and run the speech application team. We had much to learn about using the technology, however, I knew our real focus had to be to learn how to design the applications well, then teach the rest of the company about design and speech.
That was the beginning of a 4 year journey, which ended in a successful transition to deploying primarily speech application produced using a solid UCD process. Getting there was difficult, though, as it required battling incumbent technology, processes, and even business models.
To cut to the chase, by 2003, we convinced the company to invest in design fully, resulting in a first-ever design team of 10 designers, 3 user researchers, and a usability lab. We deployed scores of speech applications for companies such as Fidelity, American Airlines, and Wells Fargo. My team created the first comprehensive design resources for speech reco apps, including the manual below (see chapter 2). And perhaps most significantly, I pushed to move from charging nothing for these custom applications to them becoming a primary revenue source in the tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to the positive design and business impact, I'm also very proud of the team I grew and mentored. Many of them have gone on to further success and sharing good design work.
