Managing and leading the delivery of great experiences seems like it should be so simple. Apply what you know about good user experience, mix in the basics of management, and voila!, results.
Only it's not that easy.
And if managing experience is your job — whether it be for customer experiences, user experiences, or whatever-it-be experiences — you know it's not a solved field where you can follow in the footsteps of those before you. Because no one came before you.
That's why Adaptive Path puts on the MX: Managing Experience Conference. To create a space where people forwarding the practice of experience management could get together, honestly talk about what works, and what doesn't.
The Adaptive Path iPad app has just been updated to include speaker videos from the 2012 MX Conference. Here's a few takeaways to help you start to dig in:
Smart UX managers deliver better experiences and better revenue. That's their job.
At the heart of this year's MX Conference was a talk by Hotwire Group's head of mobile, Melissa Matross. Her story starts with her hatred of display ads and how they took away from the quality of the Hotwire experience as a “necessary evil.”
Knowing her frustration with the ads, her boss challenged Melissa saying, “If you want to get rid of the ads, find a way to replace the revenue.” This was the opening that Melissa says changed her career.
Before her story's done, you hear how she found revenue, dramatically improved the experience and Hotwire's brand impression, and ignited her career:
Melissa Matross | Better Revenue through UX: Bringing Down the Banners the Hotwire Way
Every March for the past six years, our MX: Managing Experience conference has brought together a growing community of managers, directors, and VPs of experience design teams (and their bosses) to discuss the unique challenges they face.
This year's sold out conference featured speakers from GE, eBay, Intel, Flickr, Salesforce.com, Sony, and Forrester Research, representing an excellent mix of examples of the role experience design is playing in the world's largest companies. This year's talks explored a range of topics from the journey to becoming a UX leader, to how design is used in tandem with user experience to drive revenue, and to what challenges and opportunities lie in the years ahead.
As a User Experience practitioner, you learn about UX in school (even if it wasn't called UX), you improve your skills in practice by being part of project teams, and you update your knowledge at a UX conference or training. But what about the people around you? Where do Project Managers, Product Managers, Developers, Sales, QA, Strategists, and Managers learn about User Experience?
Our annual MX conference helps managers working to deliver better experiences to the world. And that's right in line with Charles Warren's 10 minutes on how the three little words “How Might We” makes design deliver significantly better results.
Our annual MX Conference tackles the challenges of people who deliver new and better experiences everyday.
So it feels appropriate to kick off sharing videos from this year's MX event with a 15-minute story of a very real challenge from Typekit CEO Jeff Veen—Designing for Disaster.
Jeff's team at Typekit faced their biggest challenge and opportunity when the Typekit system faced the significant traffic brought on by a successful customer. Here how he cleared a path for the right people to bring together a great solution. It all started one morning when…
In a follow-up to last year’s MX presentation The Holistic Customer: Beyond The Website Experience, Samantha Starmer will be speaking to our audience about Designing Cross-Channel Experiences at this year’s MX on March 6th. Knowing that Starmer has worked on the front lines of customer service as well as in her current role as a Senior Manager at REI, we asked her a few questions about how she thinks about and approaches cross-channel experiences.
[Christian Palino] Lots of people these days get mixed up in the difference between the design for cross-channel experiences and services. Could you tell…
After an appearance at last year’s UX Week, Cameron Gray, Vice President of Engineering at online training experts Mindflash will return to our stage at this year’s MX Conference with a talk about Agile and UX.
As a design process freak, I jumped at the chance to interview Cameron and ask him about the way he is integrating UX in Mindflash’s Agile development methodology.
[Peter Boersma] You (re)joined Mindflash almost 4 years ago, after a 4-year stint at another company, and run the development team. What have you changed to the way that team is managed? What…
They say, if it moves measure it. I’ve been finding myself thinking a lot about how to measure UX lately—mainly to realize that I halfway don’t believe it’s possible. My gripe is that even if you can regularly track and look at numbers (itself no small feat), it’s hard to know what they mean exactly. And yet, without understanding the quantifiable effects, it’s very difficult to know or show what impact user experience is having in an organization. And that’s important.
