User experience and project management

30.03.2009 | Author: Eric Reiss
At the recent IA Summit in Memphis, Tennessee, I was asked to host a luncheon table for a group of folks interested in project management/UX. Loay Alfi of the University of Indiana, who had attended a table I had hosted the previous day, suggested this topic as a natural extension of the first discussion - the business value of UX.

Loay's question was simple (although the solution is not): who "owns" user-experience on a project team? What is the role of the project manager? How does one manage effectively in an "agile" environment? What will happen when folks start working seriously toward creating user experiences that transcend the online and offline worlds? How do we keep egos from getting in the way? Who has the most clout - project managers or project owners?

The eight of us at the table, Loay, Wolf, Matt, Craig, Kathryn, Carrie, Sam, and myself, discussed the various ways in which we currently handled these matters. But we know that there are more (and better) ways to create effective UX integration and more efficient project management.

Hence, we agreed to use this blog to collect ideas that can begin to form a body of knowledge around these issues. We look forward to hearing your comments, solutions, war stories, and other goodies. 

loay_and_eric 

Loay Alfi and Eric Reiss in Memphis

Filed under:  Other stuff | Tags: User experience, UX, eric reiss, ia summit, information architecture, project management, war stories, loay alfi

3 Comments »

  1. Hi,
    Ux is the jack of all trades, or talented generalist as you say in one blog.
    in this page you start a topic that is in my view the biggest problem with ux, the flow of a project and the use of specific recources all get messed up by using this wildcard
    You seem to miss this in your blogs, there are a lot of nice categories but nothing about managing the design and construction process.
    Also, it would be interesting to compare the UX generalist with the business informatics role which also is a bridge between (business) users and information systems and departments.
    In my opinion Ux is not well enough equiped to fill in the business needs and the Business informatics analist not well enough to do user interaction design
    grts.

    A name is not important, the message is.

    Comment by not important - 13:41 22.07.2009

  2. Dear "hi",
    You've really hit the nail on the head. Thank you. The flow DOES get mixed up. And the point of this post was to get people to start talking about managing design and construction. Ahh. But how quickly people forget. Despite the good discussions in Memphis, absolutely nothing has happened on this blog - which was one of the tools we talked about back in March.

    Regarding your distinction between business analysts and UX'ers, I agree entirely. In fact, I've been preaching about this for half a decade. Listen to the podcast from my talk "Seven Trends" back at the EuroIA Summit in Berlin http://www.iavoice.com/category/ia-network/

    And I look forward to continuing this discussion with you.

    Comment by Eric Reiss - 11:35 23.08.2009

  3. I like this article. Good article! Thank you so much for sharing this post.

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