Session Title
Top-Down UX Strategy
Presenter
Nick Finck, Blue Flavor and Jess McMullin, nForm
Session Type: Presentation
We are living in difficult times when it comes to budgets and where to spend your time and energy. Now more than ever it is important to differentiate yourself as a business, technology is quickly becoming a commodity and it is simply becoming too difficult to compete on merits of price point alone. Businesses need to evolve their user experience and develop value added services and products in order to survive.
My intent with this presentation is to talk at a high-level about business and the user experience. I will cover how to define a UX strategy, where the UX strategy should evolve from, how this relates to your business strategy, when to create a RFP related to your UX strategy, when and how to bring in a UX consultant and agency, and most of all what having a solid UX strategy will do for the bottom line of your business.
Biography
Nick Finck, Blue Flavor
Nick Finck is a user experience professional who has dabbled in the web for over a decade. He specializes in information architecture, interaction design, usability and user research.
Nick has created web experiences for Fortune 50 and 500 companies including Adobe, Boeing, Blue Cross / Blue Shield, Cisco, CitiGroup, FDIC, Harpo, HP, IBM, Microsoft, PBS, Peet’s Coffee, University of Denver, and others.
He lives and plays in Seattle, Washington, where he’s the founder of Blue Flavor, a web design company that focuses on creating web experiences.
Nick has authored many web design-related articles for various publications. He’s the founder of the long-time and very popular Digital Web Magazine publication. Check out the magazine’s archives to see the caliber of authors and articles it presented to web designers from all over the world. He is a judge for an organization that presents one of the most prestigious web awards in the industry.
He has built a reputation as a community volunteer, promoting growth within the web industry both locally and abroad. You can find Nick giving lectures for leading organizations, events and universities.
Jess McMullin, nForm
Since 1997 Jess McMullin has focused his career on understanding and developing positive user experiences for his clients and their users. Jess draws on techniques from usability, information architecture, and user research to generate client insight to drive innovation and create better customer experiences. His value-centered approach grounds customer experience strategy at the intersection of business goals and customer goals to produce return on investment for clients, and ‘return on experience’ for their customers.
Jess regularly writes and speaks at conferences about user experience. He has contributed ideas and material for several user experience books, including Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed.; Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience and Peter van Dijck’s Information Architecture for Designers. His work appears as a case study in Designing Websites for Every Audience by Ilise Benun.
Jess co-founded the Information Architecture Institute, the international professional organization for information architects, and served on the Board of Directors for 2004 and 2005.
2 Comments
Not IxD focused enough, it’s all UX. Seems like a SxSW presentation or more general web.
Dan, I could see how you’d feel that way. My intent is to cover the holistic user experience… this means IA, IxD, visual design, branding, customer service, and more. So yes, its broad, but I think most of the talk will have a IxD slant and focus to it since that is the audience.