In this week’s article, UIE’s Christine Perfetti sat down with Scott to talk about his new book and his research in the area of innovation.

One problem we often see is when the user researchers get overzealous in their improvement suggestions. They start to make recommendations in cases where there may not be any clear evidence the change will eliminate frustration or improve the design in a measurable way.

His initial solution was to hire a consultant to run some usability tests, gather the essential information, write a report, and present it back to the team. I had a different idea: I suggested we train the development team to do their own testing. In my 28 years of experience of doing this work, I’ve found there is no single experience more educational than conducting usability tests.

User experience teams serve the various product groups within the organization, helping them create the best possible product or service. This can only happen if the team has a great relationship with the group.

Maybe I’m an optimist, but I believe it’s possible we can arrive at productivity measures that work (meaning, when gamed, they produce the results we were hoping for) for design teams. These measures would quantify the results the team produced and compare them to the effort it took to produce it. From there, we could determine what practices and skills are most efficient at gaining the best results. We can also use these measures to help us make budgets and predict timelines.

But what happens when they’re one in the same? What happens when the user is the developer, and vice versa? It turns out to be a powerful combination that leads to unseen advantages that those building for others don’t have (and might not be able to duplicate).

(Part of a series on Web App Trends. See also: Fast Iterations)

Last week, I talked about the difference between generalists and specialists. In that post, I may have implied specialists are often singular in their specialty, such as a specialist in ethnography.
However, I think that would be a narrow interpretation of how specialties work.

Our early research findings suggest that fewer than 15% of the organizations we’ve studied have the economic conditions that could support user experience specialists. These organizations have enough workload to keep a usability professional just doing research, day in and day out, or an information architect just working on IA issues, etc. This means the other 85% of the organizations should be looking for people with a broader set of skills. They should look for people who understand the different disciplines and can move between them quickly.

UIEtips 7/11/06: Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team

UIE’s Christine Perfetti recently interviewed Sarah Bloomer and Susan Wolfe, two premier User Experience experts, to discuss how organizations can make their UX practices a success.

UIEtips 6/28/06: Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part II

In the second part of his interview, Joshua Porter catches up with Luke Wroblewski about the intersection between visual design and web site usability. Here is what Luke had to say.