A Crash Course in Creativity

Filed under Good Experiences, Management
August 12, 2012 at 3:36 pm

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Come work with me

Filed under Good Experiences, Management
January 21, 2012 at 4:03 pm

I am looking for the right person join my team as Director of User Experience Design.

I am in the process of creating one integrated multi-disciplinary experience design practice (the organization used to have several separate compartmentalized/specialized departments). To become one team, I’ve consolidated the existing groups (40 people) and identified four main areas of oversight for our service so we can divide and conquer. For each of these areas, a director of UX design will oversee a team that will focus on a core aspect of our offering, developing subject matter expertise over time and establishing a long-term design vision.

This role has two core responsibilities: 1. To support and grow a team of talented UX people 2. To define and steward an experience vision for the aspect of the service they focus on.

In a year’s time this person will have taken a group of folks with information architecture, interaction design, content strategy, graphic design and other core skills and expertise, and successfully turned them into a team that acts as a unit.

They’ll have contributed to creating a work environment that fosters productive design practices, including training and practicing critiquing, presenting, storytelling, sketching and facilitation. The team will be capable of designing solutions that adequately translate into device-agnostic experiences employing a foundation of modular, responsive design.

Individuals on the team will have a clear picture of what their role responsibilities entail and what opportunities for growth, improvement and career advancement are available to them. They will be confident in the UX design director’s leadership and management skills, knowing they can be counted on to act in the best interest of the team and its members.

Executive leadership will trust the UXD director’s long-term design vision and have an understanding of how it aligns to the overall department and company-wide strategies and pursuits. That vision will be easily articulated by any member of the Experience Design team and used as a reference point to direct long-term design decisions.

The organization will have become accustomed to modeling approaches of varying fidelity as a method to explore design solutions and feedback cycles with users as a foundation for incremental improvements. This will signal a particular focus of the UX Design team on delivery over deliverables, solutions over documents.

Moreover, the quality of users’ experiences will be markedly improved by a concerted effort to establish a cohesive design system that unifies the service offering, addressing the core issues users experience. Given the breadth and depth of our offering, this will have been made possible through the establishment of a strong foundation of design standards and guidelines combined with a robust design practice and a team of individuals empowered and prepared to make decisions.

Are you that person? If so, please apply today.

Update: We are in the middle of updating our HR recruiting tool so if you have any difficulty with this process please email greg.killeen@marriott.com

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Make it happen 2011

Filed under Good Experiences, Management, Me, me, me!
June 16, 2011 at 3:25 pm

Next week I’ll be giving a talk and participating in a panel at the Design Management Institute’s Design/Management Thinking “Make It Happen” conference in Seattle. I’m excited about this event because they’ve framed it as:

We know quite well the value of Design to business, and Design Thinking to problem solving. But what remains a bit fuzzy for many organizations is the distance between thinking and doing—the proverbial gap between strategic intent and execution. Or, how to make it happen. This year’s design thinking conference will focus on closing the gap—and moving from design thinking to design doing.

What one actually does. I enjoy the conversations about design thinking but they tend to lead to a lot of hand waving and I have found many designers and specially young managers struggling to grasp just what it is they need to do (not just talk about) to produce the positive outcomes discussed in this context.

My talk, which could not have been more appropriately timed, will be a journey through my work at Comcast between 2004 and 2011. I’m going to talk about how the UXD practice was established, how it grew, changed and evolved over the years, and what impact it’s had in the company culture and products.

What aspects of this journey would YOU be interested in hearing about? DMI is recording the video for this session so you’ll have the opportunity to see it later in case you can’t make it to Seattle. Please let me know what points in this story you’d find most useful learning about or any questions you may have.

I’ll post a summary after I’m back. Thank you!

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