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Joe: Hi, I'm Joe Welinske from Blink and I'm speaking with many of the presenters from
our upcoming ConveyUX event, which will be in Seattle in February. Today I'm speaking
with Phillip Hunter. Hello, Phillip, how are you?
Phillip: Hi, Joe. I'm really good. Thanks for having me today.
Joe: Where are you speaking to us from? Phillip: I'm over in Redmond, just across
the lake from Seattle, so pretty close by. Joe: All right. If you're not familiar with
Phillip, he practices in evangelizes experience and interaction design at Microsoft. He's
engineered the overhaul of UX at companies like Intervoice and also SpeechCycle, and
Phillip's topic for the conference is "Right experience, right people." Why don't you tell
us a little bit about your interests in that and what you'll be talking about.
Phillip: Sure. Thanks, Joe. I've been practicing design and user experience for about fifteen
years now and over the course of that time, there's two really big things that have come
to light for me. One is that we have to work harder than we think we do to actually get
at great experiences. Secondly is that we have part of getting the right experience
of design and getting it out there is more of a people problem and that is a practice
problem. What I mean by that is that we're still on such an early stage of what we're
doing with design and technology that we can't assume that people know all the right things
to do, or that people who call themselves designers are necessarily the only right people
to be working toward a great user experience. Over the course of the past five to six years,
those sorts of thoughts have really grown for me and have become almost a bigger obsession
sometimes than actually getting design work done. Not that I haven't done a lot of that,
too, but I like to step back and look at the mental level, or the models that are in place,
and I don't just mean static models that we draw for organizations, or mental models,
or things like that, but really the sort of dynamic models that are in place when a context
and people are in play. In the talk that I'll be giving in February,
I'm really going to try to marry these two topics in a way that I think will speak to
sort of both sides of the equation. One of those sides is what we think about when we
think about the word "experience" and what that means for people in their everyday use
of the products and creates. The other side of that is how do we attack the need to solve
these problems or create great experiences with the people in the organizations that
we have today? Again, to dive into both of those, we underestimate
or overlook, is even a better word, some of the things that are available to us, but not
necessarily things that are in our first line of sight or first round of thoughts when we're
going to go after a particular opportunity. So, not to give away everything head right,
there's a lot of people that will be excited about coming, but I have a model, two models,
really, that I'll be presenting. One is about how do we take the vast range of contextual
information that we available to us when we're designing for an experience and really frame
that in a way that we can actually do something about it. If you think about all of the myriad
of details that are present in a location, in a set of activities, in the people will
be in those locations and be doing those activities, there's really too much for us to try to grasp.
We talk about having empathy and it's really, really important, but there's no way we can
have empathy for each and every single person who's going to touch our product or try to
use our product, so we have to find ways of organizing and perceiving that information
in aggregate that is not just around personas, not just around scenario details, but is really
more deeply focused on the context. So that's one model I'll be talking about. That's on
the side of the equation where the users live. The other side of the equation is all of the
people who get the work done. People who are researching it, who are designing it, who
are building it. Traditionally, we have been stuck in the evolution of what I think of
as role-based organizations, where companies define a job very narrowly and they want me
to come in and fit that exact job. What we're moving to in the future is more of a work
focused organization, where the organization identifies the important things that need
to get done and then enables anyone who works for them to contribute towards those things
in whatever way they think is taking advantage of their skills. Not necessarily by title
or by traditional role, but more around, "I identify with this thing that needs to be
done, or this piece of this thing that needs to be done, and I want to step forward and
contribute there because I have the skills, I have insights about, and I can potentially
make a difference where there may be no one else in the organization that can make the
same difference." I present that in a sense of assessing and
understanding what the corporate, or what the organization is made of, whether it's
small or big, and then understanding the jobs that need to be done and how good you are
and then how good that you need to be in the future. That makes up the side of the equation
of people who delivering these experiences. Joe: All right, great. Thanks for taking a
few minutes to give us a preview and we will see you at the event in February.
Phillip: Thanks a lot, Joe. I appreciate it.