User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams

by Arnie Lund

Overview

User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing. The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan. This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780123854964
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	04/28/2011
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Arnold (Arnie) Lund, PhD, CUXP is a Principal Director of User Experience at Microsoft. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories in applied research, and helped build the science and technology organization at Ameritech. He managed design and exploratory development teams at US West Advanced Technologies, and served as a director at Sapient (where his focus areas ranged from information architecture to leading a global program in emerging technologies). Arnie has been elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy; and co-chaired the CHI conferences in 1998 (Los Angeles) and 2008 (Florence, Italy). He is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and served on the HFES Executive Council. He has long been engaged in human computer interaction (HCI) standards and in the area of accessibility and emerging technology, including chairing the HFES Institute and overseeing the HFES-200 standard and its approval as an ANSI standard. He is a certified user experience professional and served as president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE).

Arnie received his BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in experimental psychology: human learning and memory from Northwestern University. He has published widely in R&D management and on research in natural user interfaces, and has a variety of patents. He has been on the advisory and editorial boards of various journals (e.g., Journal of Usability Studies and the International Journal of Speech Technology), and served on the board of directors for INFINITEC (focusing on infinite potential through assistive technologies). Arnie has taught user centered design at Northwestern University and elsewhere, and can be heard periodically teaching at the University of Washington.

You can reach out to Arnie over LinkedIn, and follow his experiences as a UX manager on Twitter @ArnieLund.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction2. Building the Team3. Creating Your Team4. Equipping Your Team5. Focusing the Team6. Creating A High-Performing Team7. Communication and Collaboration8. Transforming the Organization9. Evangelizing UX10. Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Straight from the office trenches…. the first complete toolbox of tried and tested UX management techniques

Editorial Reviews

"Few have had the time or opportunity to get the kind of experience that Arnie Lund has had. Our very good fortune is that Arnie is the very essence of the reflective practitioner, and has the generosity of mind and spirit to turn his own career experience not into an autobiography or a "managing as I see it" book of tips. Instead, Dr. Lund takes a deep and wide look at the kinds of organizations and the different kinds of work that he has seen, from many vantage points, and uses that to engage a remarkable set of colleagues to reflect on, explain, and extend the practice of managing experience design. Arnie has been managing on the edge of the emerging fields involved here for as long as they’ve been emerging. The breadth of his experience and the discipline of his reflection on it makes for a remarkably comprehensive collection of issues." —Dr. Rick Robinson, Research Fellow, Design Continuum, Boston

"Lund, a user experience manager who has taught user-centered design and related topics at universities, explains how to be an effective user experience team manager. He draws from his experiences and those of other managers to focus on the specific issues associated with managing user experience skills and leading a team in corporations that are mostly engineering-based. He discusses building, equipping, focusing, nurturing, and creating a high-performance team, including defining a strategic framework, creating team identity, identifying and shaping shared values, growing the team as individuals, dealing with conflict, and balancing work and personal life, as well as transforming the organization." — SciTech Book News

From the Publisher