To truly progress in user experience and documentation disciplines, we need to increase our influence in the organizations we work with. That influence will not come from better methods for working with users, but from better methods for working with business. While new methods for generating insight, prototyping, and defining solutions are useful, the bigger barriers in many practices are about building buy-in, bridging competing viewpoints, and actually executing.

In this environment, we need to cultivate business fluency and use our design toolkit to work with stakeholders, not just users. We need to understand and navigate the business of experience.

The business of experience requires us to understand both the impact of business on the practice of user experience, and the impact of user experience on the practice of business. Based on this understanding, we can cultivate new perspectives and methods that increase our influence.

How do you know if this is the session for you? You’ll find the concepts, case studies, methods and discussion valuable if you find any of these situations familiar:

» You have documentation, content models, architecture, wireframes, and usability reports, and yet you’re still hitting a brick wall on your project.
» Your projects get blindsided at the last minute by stealth saboteurs from Finance or IT or the office of the Marketing VP, or anywhere else.
» There’s a big vision that you’re supposed to support, but moving from hand waving to execution just doesn’t seem to get any traction.
» You are dealing with polarized camps where corporate politics trumps creating lasting project value.
» You’ve got an amazing design that users love, but the business just doesn’t get it. They want the logo to be bigger, though.
» You don’t have the organizational influence to do the job the right way (or maybe not even to do the right job).

Succeeding in the business of experience takes the right skillset and the right mindset. This session tackles both, leaving attendees with big picture thinking and practical tools they can start using right away. We will cover the current state of practitioner influence and build a foundation of core concepts including value-centered design, business fluency, design maturity, and the experience impact framework. Then the session will switch gears to illustrate specific methods and wrap up with tips on how participants can adopt this approach in their own work.

Participants will leave the session with a fresh perspective on finding the right opportunities and approaches to influence business stakeholders, and take home simple (but effective) methods to help them make a greater impact with their work.