Adaptive Path's newest conference on managing user experience - MX Conference - was kicked off by Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz, both of whom are President of the company. To note is that they are not "co-Presidents". After a social lunch at the City Club of San Francisco, Peter took the stage with Flickr cofounder, Caterina Fake who is now head of the Design Technology Group at Yahoo for an interview on product design and development.Caterina talked about the issues of managing a small design team in a startup [the extent of her experience prior to being acquired by Yahoo] and then translating these skills into the more structured, if not bureaucratic environment of a behemoth like Yahoo. She also highlighted some insights on "Hack Day" at Yahoo - where teams of programmers and engineers would be given a 24 hour challenge to come up with solutions or new features for any part of the Yahoo site regardless of where they were usually assigned. Apparently the intent of this challenge - to create unfettered by PRDs and design constraints - did not always cross cultures appropriately. Caterina shared the story of an offshore Yahoo facility where the Hack Day had been as structured as regular projects. Time was short else Ms. Fake's stories on the effective management of a hybrid creative organization - the small creative shop mashed with a large firm with systems and processes - were a fascinating peek into how products are designed and developed.
Brookes Protzmann the Manager of Visual Identity and Brand Experience at Dell Corporation [shown above] followed with a presentation on his employer's plans for a strategic overhaul of their product design and development process. Yes, Dell it seems, has finally "gotten design". Dell acknowledged that they'd been over much focused on cost cutting and supply chain efficiencies, to the point where it had affected their sales. They also stated that they had ignored or overlooked their retail customers in order to focus on their largest market, the enterprise customer. Some interesting snippets include the fact that the majority of their sales are from outside of the United States - perhaps its time they took a relook at the largest potential customer base for new technology acquisitions today, the first time buyer in emerging markets, often an aspirant from the bottom of the pyramid, since Dell offers a good product at the right price. Dell has also integrated their various design departments into one design group, a question was raised by Jesse James as to whether there were any tensions with integration of the Interaction Design, Industrial Design and Usability departments. Brookes said yes, and that clarity of communication was key to successful integration. Also raised was the question of how Dell managed between their Austin Design group and their Singapore Design group. Brookes acknowledged that the biggest challenge was time zones and thus, coordination of teams and conference calls based on timing that worked for all. One was surprised that there was only one offshore design center, since Michael Dell had announced in March 2006 his intent to hire 300 designers in Shanghai. Perhaps that is a different kind of design?
The definition of design came up at the start of Adaptive Path strategist Brandon Schauer's presentation on Connecting design to business value. The essence of Brandon's talk was that there were myriads of ways that revenue could be generated - he used Lulu.com as his example, an ondemand book publisher - and demonstrated all the ways that value could be generated by the careful redesign or design of features and messaging. Touching very briefly on the metrics involved with ROI of design, Schauer stated that value created could be identified but not always measured. He followed with a pointer to Henning Fisher's white paper on creating an effective user case for design.
The conference's focus on digital products was well suited to the audience of mostly up and coming user research, usability, interaction and interface design specialists.
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