ACM Interactions

I am pleased to announce that the new Interactions forum dedicated to the business of UX has just launched. Please take a look at it if you don’t subscribe to the print version.

I mentioned in my opening blog that this would be my focus and now I am delighted to extend the discussion into Interactions to provide a more in-depth focus.

The official description is as follows:

The Business of UX is a forum dedicated to maximizing the success of HCI practitioners within the frenetic world of product and service design. It focuses on UX strategy approaches, leadership, management techniques and above all the challenge of bringing HCI to peer level status with longstanding business disciplines such as marketing and engineering.

The inaugural column previews some of the complex UX leadership topics practitioners face in the corporate world today. These include:

• Who owns the user experience agenda in the corporate world
• Whether or not Agile methods are working for or against our usability goals
• Positive and negative side effects of the Design Thinking movement
• Assessing the opposing trends of centralization, federation, or decentralization of user experience teams
• The role certification/licensing could play in improving UX practice

The list of potential Business of UX forum topics is inexhaustible and I would love to hear your ideas for topics most relevant to you. And… if you are passionate about an experience, theory, or solution and you want to share please step up and pitch your article to me for inclusion in an upcoming issue.

Let me end this blog with a sneak preview: The next issue is on how mergers and acquisitions (M&A) effect the management and the goals of a UX team. This topic was debated at CHI 2010 and 2011 conference panels, but to my knowledge the forum will provide the first comprehensive article summarizing best practice from a UX leader who has lived through about a dozen of these M&A events.

Daniel Rosenberg is Chief Design Officer at rCDOUX LLC

Daniel Rosenberg