Hi Mu & Adrian, I think alot of this depends upon what is being design and what the structure of the company is. That being said, for many product/service/business unit structures, having the design/interactive/usability funtion report into them is assumed. There are some benefits to having dedicated resources. Personally, I would think long and hard about working in this structure.
I am a fan of the shared services or internal agency model. While vertical expertise is important, so is diversity. I think it is hard to attract top notch talent to work on a single product over a long stretch of time. We all need a break. Additionally, if the the UI or IX person (we tend to be charged with user advocacey) reports to the business leads who's primary responsability is monetization, they are often rendered powerless in the final decision process. Not that many business leads and executives really buy into the user focus model (even though they may spout about it). I like a strong director of user experience who has essentially a veto power over bad design and bad user experience. In the end this is in the product and business's best medium to long term interest. Mark On Monday, November 12, 2007, at 09:34AM, "Adrian Howard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >On 12 Nov 2007, at 14:12, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> In a big company (more than 15.000 employees) with lots of >> departments, >> divisions and sections, where do you put the usability team? In the >> marketing department or IT-department or customer care or customer >> experience or R&D or ... ? > >Mu. > >I'm not sure there should be one. The problem that I see with a >central group is the same one I've seen in some companies that have >"Quality" groups - that they're the only ones that deal with user >experience issues. > >Does it actually help to have a central user experience group, or is >it better to push the people into individual projects? > >That said :-) I'd say usability is a cross-cutting concern. At the >organisational level I'd say it belongs at the same level as >marketing or customer care. > >Of course that can be a hard sell, so I'd start looking for the >department that's getting the most pain from usability issues and >stick it there. > >Adrian >________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
