- Our Newest Report: “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience”
- “ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet: Five Actionable Steps for Valuing User Experience Design” by Scott Hirsch
- Join Adaptive Path at our User Experience Week in D.C. for a Day or for the Whole Week
- Not-for-profit scholarships for Adaptive Path Workshops
In this week’s newsletter, we announce the launch of our newest report, our whole team heads to Washington, D.C., Scott debunks the myth of ROI online, and we invite not-for-profits to apply for our workshop scholarships.
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MESSAGE FROM A FRIEND OF ADAPTIVE PATH
CMS Watch Announces Version 6 of the CMS Report
The Summer, 2004 Edition of The CMS Report offers independent evaluations of 25 CMS vendors, plus adds new sections that critically examine CMS user interfaces, the role of use cases (“scenarios”) in vendor selection, and a reference model for enterprise content governance. You can get the outline and the details here.
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Our Newest Report: “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience”
Over the last few years, ROI has been sought as the “holy grail” of getting more headcount and credibility for Web design teams. But attempts to define the ROI of user experience investments have generally offered little more than baseless speculation and have fallen short of understanding customers’ total value.
Working in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Adaptive Path’s Business Strategist Scott Hirsch and partner Janice Fraser studied the Web operations of five major organizations in a year-long research project, analyzing how these companies determine the value of their user experience work. The result is our latest report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience,” which cuts through the ROI rhetoric and uncovers the truth about how the business value of user experience should be measured in the real world.
We’re offering a special discount on this $395 report for our newsletter subscribers. Just use coupon code BVNEWS for 20% off your entire order when you buy a copy of “Leveraging Business Value.”
Learn more about the report and download the executive summary (PDF, 84k).
ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet: Five Actionable Steps for Valuing User Experience Design
By Scott Hirsch
For years now, the “ROI of User Experience” has been sought as a means to justify larger corporate investments in web design. Although ROI methodology can be a useful tool for prioritizing possible web development projects, by itself ROI is not the answer to building a stronger user experience design competency.
In the world of financial analysis, ROI is a tool that helps executives to understand and compare possible capital expenditures, such as an investment in new equipment or software. These are large projects that have a pre-determined useful lifetime against which projected returns can be easily compared. While some large-scale web projects can effectively be quantified in terms of ROI, more often user experience improvements are an ongoing and iterative process. Design competence in this environment is an intangible asset that requires more specific valuation techniques.
Read the rest of Scott’s essay »
All of Adaptive Path Heads to Washington, D.C.
We’re going to D.C. for a full week of presentations from the whole Adaptive Path team as well as guest experts Christina Wodtke, Douglas Bowman, and Jason Fried. Our User Experience Week brings together our experienced speakers with attendees from all kinds of organizations in a collaborative setting.You’re welcome to join us for just a day or two, or come along for the whole week!
- Day 1 - Team and Process
In today’s environment, great design skills aren’t enough to get design projects funded or finished. Jesse James Garrett, Scott Hirsch, Janice Fraser, and Christina Wodtke will teach you how to build successful web teams, position design as a business strategy, manage politics, and effectively advocate for your team. - Day 2 - Interaction Best Practices
Day Two gives you the tools you need to focus and improve your design. Jesse James Garrett will discuss the impact of his Elements of User Experience model and best-selling book. Lane Becker will present an all new session on how to tackle interaction design. And guest speaker Jason Fried will share the core design elements that have made his company 37 Signals so successful. - Day 3 - Form and Function
Jeffrey Veen and Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign will teach you how to make form and function complimentary instead of contradictory. Jeffrey will show you how to avoid costly disasters when developing new content management systems. Douglas will speak on the beauty, benefit, and business of standards. Standards compliant design isn’t just a “nice-to-have,” and the value of using standards has never been more apparent. Douglas will help you make the case for standards inside your organization. - Day 4 - User Experience and the Big Picture
Peter Merholz and Jeffrey Veen will wrap up User Experience Week with a lively discussion about where the Web and the field of user experience are headed, and how you can prepare your Web site for what’s coming. It’s an opportunity to process the information you’ve heard over the past three days and figure out how you can take action on it in a way that ensures success in your organization.
And, as always, friends of Adaptive Path get a 15% discount on all registrations. Use the discount code FOAP when registering.
More info on the conference is available here.
You can also learn more about our guest speakers at their sites: Christina Wodtke, Doug Bowman of Stopdesign, and Jason Fried of 37 Signals.
Not-for-profit Scholarships for Adaptive Path Workshops
If you work for a not-for-profit organization, don’t let lack of funds be an obstacle to joining us for our workshops. We understand it’s difficult for many groups to find money for training and other necessities, because we’ve worked side-by-side with numerous not-for-profit web teams to address the unique challenges they face. That’s why we offer several scholarships to each of our 2004 workshops for not-for-profit employees.
Apply soon because we’ll be choosing the scholarship recipients for User Experience Week in Washington, D.C. shortly.
Information on our scholarships and the short application can be found here.
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