When I talk about Red Hat and the growth we’ve had in the User Experience Design (UXD) team over the past few years, I am often asked how we got buy-in from the organization to grow so rapidly. Selling the value of user experience when all areas of the business are feeling under resourced can be challenging, but we were… Read more →
Author: catrobson
UXD Levels of Engagement
I often find that I need to discuss the different ways we are engaging with teams with stakeholders. As a central UXD organization in Red Hat, we have to prioritize which areas we focus our attention on, making sure we are spending our UX resources in the right way at the right time. We want to build long term relationships… Read more →
UX Project Prioritization
Now that I’ve been at Red Hat for nearly 5 years, I’ve built a lot of relationships with teams and individuals across the organization. As a UX leader in an organization, once you have established these relationships and educated those around you with what UX can achieve, the inevitable next problem is prioritization of all the incoming requests that suddenly… Read more →
Going from request to requirements
User experience practitioners often end up needing to disentangle the web of asks and turn those into solid requirements that are actionable. Requests typically start quite broad when working with a team that doesn’t have experience with UX designers. It then falls on us as UX experts to help tease apart the real goals, and solidify them as agreed upon requirements… Read more →
Where should UX sit in the org?
Should UX sit in engineering, product management, marketing, under a special design organization, or somewhere else? There are advantages and disadvantages to each. A few weeks ago I attended a great UX managers symposium run by Sarah Bloomer. One of the topics discussed during this day by several of the attendees was around where they belonged in the organization in… Read more →
User Stories, Scenarios, and Use Cases
Stakeholders use the terms ‘User Stories’, ‘Scenarios’, and ‘Use Cases’ often, and usually interchangeably. What are these things and are they the same or different? Well – they are different, and below we’ll go through what they are and when to use them. Why are we discussing this? The next step in our User Centric Design for developers series after knowing… Read more →
Informal UX Testing
One of the most useful things a team can do is talk to their users about what they are creating. Ideally, this happens before you build anything, and then along the way to validate the designs and implementation. Understanding how the user thinks about the system and how they react to certain designs is crucial to creating a usable solution.… Read more →
User Centric Design for Developers
Back in April, I gave a presentation at DevNation in San Francisco about user experience for developers. My goal was to provide both Red Hat developers and our customers some information about how to approach their projects in a more user centric, design first way that will reduce re-work for developers. Developers spend 50% of their time fixing avoidable issues. The top… Read more →
The “WOW” Factor
As a user experience professional, I often find I need to provide ways of sharing work and thoughts with a larger audience. Thus – this blog has begun. How did I get into user experience? I have been working in the user experience field for over 7 years. From the beginning, I was always interested in the fact that… Read more →