SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award Talk The Business of UX

ABSTRACT

After four decades of practice, User Experience design has reached a maturity level integral to the success of every business venture. Whether the product or service provided competes in the consumer, enterprise or medical sector, UX quality is known to directly impact effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction, the combination of which determines consumer acceptance. However, great design alone is not sufficient to achieve meaningful impact. Products with high usability lab ratings have been rejected in the crucible of real-life usage because they don't add sufficient value for either the consumer or company that delivers them to market. The failure of these so called "great designs" reduces them at best to museum or portfolio pieces. True impact is only achieved when the designed artifact reaches a critical level of market adoption. The service benchmarks today are Facebook with over two billion active users and Google with 1.2 trillion searches a year. Achieving significant market adoption is difficult. It requires not only delightfully fulfilling users' needs but also a UX strategy and design optimization to fit corporate business models and marketing channels, both characterized by substantial financial risk. If there is no ROI for the product, then by association there is no ROI for design or the UX team itself. UX earns a "seat at the table" by simultaneously delivering value for both the business and the user. Owning the Business of UX role contains strategy and management challenges. Mastering them can bring UX to corporate parity with the more established engineering and marketing professions.