User Experience Podcast
I just listened to another great podcast from IT Conversations. This one is from the Adaptive Path series, and is a chat with Irene Au, the Director of User Experience at Google. Irene’s also a fellow alumnus of the University of Illinois (go Illini). User experience has always been a passion of mine, and it was interesting to hear what Irene’s done in her career at both Yahoo and now Google. The discussion was not so much about User Experience per se, but the way her and her teams have been utilized. If you’re interested in a little bit of insight into Google (the “testing on the toilet” part was great), I encourage you to give it a listen.
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[…] As I mentioned in my last entry, I just finished listening to a podcast from IT Conversations on the drive to the airport which was a discussion on user experience with Irene Au, Director of User Experience for Google. One of the questions she took from the audience dealt with the notion of having a centralized group for User Experience, or whether it should be a decentralized activity. This question is one that frequently comes up in SOA discussions, as well. Should you have a centralized service development, or should your efforts be decentralized? There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, however, it’s certainly true that your choices can impact your success. In the podcast, Irene discussed the matrixed approach at Yahoo, and how everything would up being funded by business units. This made it difficult to do activities for the greater good, such as style guides, etc. The business unit wanted to maximize their investment and have those resources focused on their activities, not someone else’s. Putting this same topic in the context of SOA, this would be the same as having user-facing application teams developing services. The challenge is that the business unit wants that user-facing application, and they want it yesterday. How do we create services that aren’t solely of value to just that application. At the opposite extreme, things can be centralized. Irene discussed the culture of open office hours at Google, and how she’ll have a line of people outside her office with their user experience questions in hand. While this may allow her to maintain a greater level of consistency, resource management can be a big challenge, as you are being pulled in multiple directions. Again, putting this in the SOA context, the risk is that in the quest for the perfect enterprise service, you can put individual project schedules at risk as they wait for the service they are dependent on. These are both extreme positions, and seldom is an organization at one extreme or the other, but usually somewhere in the middle. […]