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Among UX Marathon 2011 speakers there are authors of popular books: Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior(Indi Young) and Storytelling for User Experience(Whitney Quesenbery), as well as practitioners from leading UX companies — Chris Risdon from Adaptive Path, Rick Omanson and Aga Bojko from User Centric.

Some webinars will be based on extensive researches, e.g. Denise Belling will present the Best of Commonly Used Usability Techniques relying on the survey with over 40 user experience teams around the globe, and Aga Bojko, who is the author of many publications and the author of the coming book Eye Tracking the User Experience, will analyze the spheres of eye tracking usage. Other webinars will focus on speakers’ broad experience of working with certain programs and services, such as Axure, WebSort, Plainframe, CogTool,— or designing for certain platforms, such as iOS. Speakers will reveal many practical details of their own work with these programs and answer all questions from attendees. All webinars are divided into 3 tracks: Design & Prototyping, User Research, and Evaluating ideas.

No travel and extra costs are involved; one can benefit the global training from home or office for a very competitive price. The information considering event agenda, registration, fees and sponsorship is available on the website http://uxmarathon.com.

As the editorial review states it:

“The role of UX manager is of vital importance — it means leading a productive team, influencing businesses to adopt user-centered design, and delivering valuable products customers. Few UX professionals who find themselves in management positions have formal training in management. More often than not they are promoted to a management position after having proven themselves as an effective and successful practitioner.

“User Experience Management " outlines the robust framework for how to be an effective UX manager, from creating a team, to orchestrating product development, to ensuring UX is not compromised, to achieving company buy-in on results.

Dr. Lund takes a deep and wide look at the kinds of organizations and the different kinds of work that he has seen, from many vantage points, and uses that to engage a remarkable set of colleagues to reflect on, explain, and extend the practice of managing experience design.”

Natalia Kirilllova, commercial director at UIDesign Group, contributed to 2 chapters of the book. She shared her experience in managing large international projects remotely and talked about how to find and educate talented team members. It hasn’t been the first time Natalia participated in writing a book. Together with other colleagues from UXalliance she was involved in writing “The Handbook of Global User Research” edited by Robert Schumacher.

How was the workflow changed?

When Alisher joined “Odnoklassniki” team, the designers’ work was uncoordinated between different departments. Designers were working on their part of the service, being not involved in the whole development process. They just performed the tasks assigned by the managers. So, it was necessary to get people interested in each other's work, to build integral process of design.

The first step in this direction was the move to Agile. The team began to meet weekly and share information. However, it did not bring many changes. Uploaded templates and layouts were hardly reused. To solve this problem, Alisher suggested turning the guidelines from a static document into an interaction process. But at first, the team was to examine their interfaces, to gather all pieces of information on the current service design.

Alisher: "My major at university was history, and as a part of our study we had a practice of archeology, where a very interesting systemic approach to the study of layers was used.

First, one needs to determine the site, then to make a grid with ropes and wooden stakes, and carefully dig up every square in search for coins and pottery fragments. All finds are than put on the ground in the order they were found. Here are how step by step, archaeologists move from one layer to another. That is the first part of the work – the collection of information, which is followed by analysis. Students sort out their findings according to the age they belong to, thus acquiring knowledge about the developments in different times.”

Alisher decided to try applying this approach to interfaces and to arrange a workshop. During the workshop the site Odnoklassniki.ru was divided horizontally and vertically, and the following abstract layers were defined: the grid, registration form template, repeating blocks, elements of the blocks, graphics, complex interactive elements, styles (headings, colors, links), texts (the form of address), etc.

Alisher: "We started not with the inventing of a new ideal world, but with a simple inventory of interface items we had. For example, let’s take the styles. We wrote down all the colors, headers, types of links. We found some things redundant, which could be easily dismissed. We removed all the unnecessary in each layer. As a result, dozens of grids was reduced to three of them, same with headings and styles. Since then we have been holding such meetings every Friday. During these meetings we discuss what new elements have emerged, and put them in a special section of our corporate wiki «ABC" (as we called it).

As a result, designers started to use the available database to the full, and the work process became more efficient.

Work together!

To understand better each other’s work and responsibilities the following approach was used.

In addition to his work every designer was assigned to monitor some part of the "ABC", to ensure that all relevant documents are consistent and accepted by others.

If someone is working on a new functional, and he needs to decide on headers, indentation, etc., then this person will address the man who knows all about the style, the style “custodian”. He can also talk about his new ideas, and if the custodian agrees, new ideas will be added to the “ABC” for public use.

Alisher: "We continue this process. On the one hand, you can always use the old patterns, but on the other hand, it's a poor designer who always sticks to the solutions of the past. It is natural to want to do something new and better. All new ideas are thoroughly tested. If the functional is complex and requires a long implementation, we invite people from our target audience to test prototypes before the development."

Do not drag out the process!

Designers are creative people, but everyone needs discipline. All projects are to be finished in time, so ask designers and developers to give you exact timing.

Alisher: "I always ask designers when exactly the will show some results of their work. As soon as they give a date, I immediately send an invitation to everyone in the shared calendar. If I clearly see that a designer is postponing the meeting for no apparent reason, I suggest discussing whether there is any problem. If the designer has some ideas straight away, I ask him to make a quick paper prototype, so we could discuss it in an hour. Usually, when we discuss mock-ups several times during one day, the time required for the final design is reduced several times. It is essential to create more occasions for personal discussions - the more discussions you have, the more integral product is. "

So, early Sunday morning on May29 we met near the 32nd Child Neuropsychiatric Hospital. At first we thought that planting 150 trees will take a lot of efforts, but it proves to be like in the saying - You never know what you can do till you try. And, indeed, we coped with all work faster than we thought.

Although digging holes is a blokish activity, our ladies didn’t stand aside. To our regret we did not have enough spades, and that encourage competition for them.

An even greater excitement was stirred up over oaks. There were only three of them and they require careful attention, otherwise they won’t naturalize. First of all we needed to find a right spot for our oaks. As planned by designer Ludmila, trees had to be visible from the walking path. We had to fill in three holes before the "safe" place for our red oaks were found. These trees have large roots, that’s why it is essential to ensure that there are no bricks and pieces of iron (which we had dug a myriad of) hidden in the soil.

Once we figured out the right spot, a new problem arose. Oaks should be actively watered when planting and the water hose we had was too short. We had to carry water in buckets; however the works were joyous and pleasant.

The day passed quickly and cheerfully. We finished much faster than we had planned, and in the evening we had barbeque and played frisbee near the lake.

On behalf of UIDesign Group we would like to thank everybody who helped with this social project, our friends and relatives: Anton Alyabiev and his wife Lyudmila, Elena Borodina, Ksenia Gerasimova, Ivan Degtyarenko, Platon Dniprovskiy, Vladimir Zimin, Natalia Kirillova, Tatiana Shpilevskaya, Lyudmila Yel’china, Alexey Kopylov and his son Anton, Viktor Goy, Anastasya Lapina, Ilya Alexandrov and his wife Olga, Nickolay Makarov, Artem Ostapets, Elena Terekhina, Alla Shamsheeva and Fedor Lavanov.

Two weeks later we called the hospitals to learn how the trees were doing. They all naturalized, and changes with the hospitals were noticed not only by employees but also by patients, their friends and relatives. Everyone was wondering where it was from. Deputy Head Doctor of the 5th gynecological hospital replied to such questions that there was a miracle. As it turned out, indirectly we helped to get rid of unauthorized parking on lawns as well.

We are very glad that we could do something good for people around us, and make a small contribution to the community. What was the most important and valuable for us? Our colleague Artem Ostapets noted: "I think it is really cool to plant a tree. It will serve as memory, which might long outlast you. When I was born, my parents planted three birches next to the house. They have already grown big, up to the 7th floor. I think planting trees is very important thing in life. "

We had a great time all together, and each of us made an important thing. People got used to taking from nature without giving anything back. It is always a pleasure to create something with your own hands, especially something that will please others for years. We thank both hospitals for letting us fulfill our ideas.

“User Centric is excited to bring the conference to Chicago this year, because attendees will learn so much. What we do, user research and design, isn’t just about a product—it’s about the entire experience. Sometimes the change we affect is revolutionary but more often the small differences matter. Either way, we should recognize that what we do matters.” said Gavin Lew, User Centric Managing Director.

“This conference is more than moving from presentation to presentation. We want to make sure that attendees have the opportunity to share and debate practices and trends. We will have workshops and plenty of interaction allowing attendees to exchange ideas with colleagues from around the world,” said UXalliance Marketing Coordinator Aimee Reif.

For current program details, location information and registration visit uxmasterclass.com. Register before August 15 to benefit from the early registration discount.