The MX San Francisco conference focused on helping managers and designers deal with the complexity, challenges, and opportunities that make every day so entertaining. Jeff Parks and Chris Baum sat down with several of the conference speakers and organizers to further examine the issues that the sessions revealed.
Podcasts from MX San Francisco
Some failure allows organizations to learn and grow; others times it can be catastrophic. In Part 2 of his series, Peter Jones explores timing dynamics of large projects and alternatives to the framing of UX roles and organizations today.
Failure is a matter of timing
Some failure allows complex organizations to learn and grow; others can be catastrophic. Peter Jones explores
how, as designers, we have a
responsibility to detect and assess
the potential for large-scale failure.
How can we help stop the train?
The organizational architecture of failure
Information architects working within enterprises are confronted by unique challenges, relating to organisational culture, business processes, and internal politics. James Robertson pulls the strands of situational spaghetti to get to the root of the project.
Starting Two Steps Earlier
As information architects, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change. Bob Goodman shows us how we can use business and management techniques to help us be more effective agents of change.
Within most corporations, taking ownership of an intranet is an unglamorous, exhausting, and thankless job for a new intranet manager. But if approached with the same rigor, discipline, and focus as any other business initiative, the task can quickly become much simpler.
Even with the present downturn in the economy, more companies, from new media to established banks, have larger usability and design teams than ever before. Should we be content that we have come so far?
Design is driven by many considerations. But on each project I’ve worked on, there seems to be a consistent center — a driver that determines priorities, direction, and the metrics used to measure success.
We need a way to document and express mental models that is as simple and robust as personas for user profiles and scenarios for tasks. By laying out users’ current mental models and a target mental model, we can clarify our thinking and communication about the user interface’s objects, metaphors, and interaction.