Management Articles & Videos

  • 3 Types of Roadmaps

    Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.

  • Management vs. Craft: UX Needs to Value Both

    Dual career ladders are important in user experience. Don't force talented UX professionals to become managers if their growth path would instead benefit from focusing on UX craft.

  • UX Roadmaps in 6 Steps

    A roadmap documents upcoming and future priorities for your user experience. The process starts with gathering goals, proceeds through the creation and sharing of the UX roadmap, and never ends, since the last step is to update.

  • UX-Maturity Stage 3: Emergent

    A company’s UX efforts at this stage are functional and promising, but inconsistent and inefficient.

  • Product & UX Partnerships

    Product management and user experience should partner throughout product development. But how? Here are 5 tips.

  • Design Thinking Learner's Journey

    Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.

  • How to Write a Mission Statement for a UX Team: A Case Study in Design Operations

    Create a team mission statement collaboratively with your team. Make sure everybody understands what a mission statement is and abstract the core purpose and value of your team by identifying themes in stories of value about your team.

  • UX Roadmaps 101

    A roadmap is a strategic plan for future user-experience work and user problems to be solved immediately vs. next vs. in the far future.

  • UX Team Structure and Reporting

    UX staff can be organized in two ways: centralized or decentralized (or a hybrid). The teams can also report into different parts of the bigger organization. There is currently no single best practice for these team-structure questions.

  • The 6 Levels of UX Maturity

    Our UX-maturity model has 6 stages that cover processes, design, research, leadership support, and longevity of UX. Use our quiz to get an idea of your organization’s UX maturity.

  • UX-Roadmapping Workshops: Agenda + Activities

    Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.

  • PM and UX Have Markedly Different Views of Their Job Responsibilities

    A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.

  • Stakeholder Analysis for UX Projects

    UX professionals often work hard to convince stakeholders to support UX research and design efforts. Recognizing who your key stakeholders are and how they impact your work is the first step to building fruitful stakeholder relationships.

  • UXers and Product Managers Both Say Others Intrude on Their Work

    A survey of 372 UX and PM professionals shows that duplicative work is frequent and generates confusion and inefficiency.

  • Starting a New UX Project

    At the beginning of a new project, identify the level of UX effort needed, and the key deliverables you aim to produce. Identify known and missing knowledge about users and tasks to uncover gaps before they bite you.

  • Tips for Motivating Stakeholders to Participate in User Research

    When stakeholders observe user research sessions, the credibility and acceptance of findings will increase. Since they are busy, make it easy to participate and work on increasing the value they get out of going.

  • UX Team Staff Size Relative to Development Staff

    We investigated current trends in design-team ratios, specifically: What's the typical number of designers and researchers in an organization relative to the number of developers?

  • UX in Scrum

    UX professionals should engage in all Scrum ceremonies. Here are tips for what UX should contribute to stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review, and retrospectives.

  • The 6 Steps to Roadmapping

    To create a roadmap, inputs are gathered and clustered into themes, then prioritized and visualized. This article covers 6 key steps to roadmapping that can be applied to any scope or industry.

  • 3 Steps for Getting Started with DesignOps

    Treat your goal to implement DesignOps like a design problem: Collect evidence that demonstrates where the true design-team challenges lie and align DesignOps efforts accordingly.

  • 3 Types of Roadmaps

    Roadmaps cover future work and vision, but this can be done at different scopes, from everything related to the product to only the UX activities and priorities, possibly narrowed to a sub-specialty of UX.

  • Management vs. Craft: UX Needs to Value Both

    Dual career ladders are important in user experience. Don't force talented UX professionals to become managers if their growth path would instead benefit from focusing on UX craft.

  • UX Roadmaps in 6 Steps

    A roadmap documents upcoming and future priorities for your user experience. The process starts with gathering goals, proceeds through the creation and sharing of the UX roadmap, and never ends, since the last step is to update.

  • Product & UX Partnerships

    Product management and user experience should partner throughout product development. But how? Here are 5 tips.

  • Design Thinking Learner's Journey

    Research with people who are learning Design Thinking shows that they progress in a nonlinear manner through 4 phases of increasing competency and confidence. Understanding these phases helps both learners and educators/managers.

  • UX Roadmaps 101

    A roadmap is a strategic plan for future user-experience work and user problems to be solved immediately vs. next vs. in the far future.

  • UX Team Structure and Reporting

    UX staff can be organized in two ways: centralized or decentralized (or a hybrid). The teams can also report into different parts of the bigger organization. There is currently no single best practice for these team-structure questions.

  • Starting a New UX Project

    At the beginning of a new project, identify the level of UX effort needed, and the key deliverables you aim to produce. Identify known and missing knowledge about users and tasks to uncover gaps before they bite you.

  • Tips for Motivating Stakeholders to Participate in User Research

    When stakeholders observe user research sessions, the credibility and acceptance of findings will increase. Since they are busy, make it easy to participate and work on increasing the value they get out of going.

  • UX Team Staff Size Relative to Development Staff

    We investigated current trends in design-team ratios, specifically: What's the typical number of designers and researchers in an organization relative to the number of developers?

  • UX in Scrum

    UX professionals should engage in all Scrum ceremonies. Here are tips for what UX should contribute to stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint review, and retrospectives.

  • Vocabulary Inflation in UX

    The user experience field is plagued by vocabulary inflation: repeatedly replacing well-known terminology with new fancy words that cause miscommunication.

  • How Can UX Professionals Balance a Range of Skills as They Build Their Careers

    Advice on how to balance breadth and depth of skill within the many different subdisciplines of the user experience profession. You can't be great at everything, so how do you choose where to specialize in your UX career?

  • Management vs. Specialization as UX Career Growth

    At the Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen was asked whether it's best for a UX professional's career to seek a management role or to pursue deeper and stronger levels of expertise.

  • 21st Century Design

    Traditional design education is too narrow. Don Norman advocates a broader perspective for design and designers.

  • What Makes an Effective UX Leader?

    We asked a group of user experience professionals what makes for efficient UX leadership in their experience. Answers differed, but included a lot of soft skills.

  • Retrospectives 102: The Sailboat Method

    After each sprint, the team should have a retrospective session to identify what went well or not so well. The sailboat metaphor is a nice way to structure such retrospectives.

  • Six Pillars Supporting Better and Easier UX

    Great design doesn't just happen. Rather, the organization must build 6 pillars that carry UX to success: capabilities, executive support, teams, resources, process, and schedule.

  • How to Create a UX Workshop Agenda

    UX workshops can drive projects forward and build consensus, but are only a valuable use of time when the agenda is defined from the goals you want to achieve. Here's a 3-step process for designing a useful workshop agenda in UX projects.

  • DesignOps 101

    DesignOps (Design Operations) is a system for amplifying user experience design's value and impact at scale.

  • The Myth of the Genius Designer

    Having a good designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. Risk reduction and quality improvement both require user testing and other usability methods.

  • Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability?

    Although the gains don't fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22,000% by fixing a basic usability problem.

  • Corporate UX Maturity: Stages 5-8

    An organization that reaches the 'managed UX' stage still has far to go to reach UX nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.

  • Corporate UX Maturity: Stages 1-4

    As their UX approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research.

  • Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point

    The evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture.

  • Productivity in the Service Economy

    Yes, it is possible for white-collar workers to work smarter and become more productive. While intranet usability provides substantial initial gains, workflow usability can go much further and will save millions of jobs.

  • Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution

    Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time.

  • Two Sigma: Usability and Six Sigma Quality Assurance

    On average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using websites. This is 100,000 times worse than six sigma's requirement, but Web usability can still benefit from a six sigma quality approach.

  • Do Productivity Increases Generate Economic Gains?

    Usability improvements can save time-on-task, but critics argue that this is not the same as saving money. Others worry that productivity gains cause unemployment. Neither is correct: usable design saves money and saves jobs.

  • Return on Investment for Usability

    Development projects should spend 10% of their budget on usability. Following a usability redesign, websites increase desired metrics by 135% on average; intranets improve slightly less.

  • Offshore Usability

    To save costs, some companies are outsourcing Web projects to countries with cheap labor. Unfortunately, these countries lack strong usability traditions and their developers have limited access -- if any -- to good usability data from the target users.

  • Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals 2001

    Usability is a well-paying profession these days: A usability specialist in California with five years' experience had an estimated cash compensation of $90,118 a year in 2001, not counting stock options or other benefits. This number is at the high end of our detailed survey, which analyzes salary data from 1,078 professionals who attended the User Experience World Tour from November 2000 to April 2001. The survey respondents represent a response rate of 40% of the 2,682 conference attendees. Because we surveyed people at a high-end professional conference, the data probably reflects the salaries of good user experience professionals.

  • Salary Survey: User Experience Professionals Earned Good Money in 2001

    A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field. In all three areas, salaries are highest in the U.S., lower in Canada and Asia, and much lower in Europe and Australia.

  • Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do

    Never listen to what people say in response to a survey: asking high-tech employees what will keep them in their jobs provides very different answers than the factors that actually drive retention.

  • The Definition of User Experience (UX)

    "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

  • Should You Outsource Web Design?

    Web design is a core competency for the network economy and should not be outsourced, even though certain specific components may be outsourced.

  • Top 10 Mistakes of Web Management

    Web project management impacts usability significantly. Mistakes include having site structure mirror your org chart, outsourcing to multiple agencies, generic links from offline collateral, and lack of strategic thinking.

  • Who Should You Hire to Design Your Web Site?

    You need to hire someone to design your Web site. What should you look for before signing on the dotted line? Let's look at a few different types of consultants.

  • Iterative User Interface Design

    In 4 case studies, the median usability improvement was 165% from the first to the last iteration, and the median improvement per iteration was 38%. Iterating through at least 3 versions of a UI design is recommended, since some usability metrics may decrease in some versions if a redesign has focused on improving other parameters.

  • Assessing the Usability of a User Interface Standard

    User interface standards can be hard to use for developers. In a laboratory experiment, 26 students achieved only 71% compliance with a two page standard; many violations were due to influence from previous experience with non-standard systems. In a study of a real company's standard, developers were only able to find 4 of 12 deviations in a sample system, and three real products broke between 32% and 55% of the mandatory rules in the standard. Designers were found to rely heavily on the examples in the standard and their experience with other user interfaces. Thovtrup, H., and Nielsen, J. (1991). Assessing the usability of a user interface standard. Proc. ACM CHI'91 Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (New Orleans, LA, 28 April-2 May), 335-341.