Kraig Finstad

The Manager's UX Survival Guide Kraig Finstad

You're a manager or a project manager. You're new to user experience and you don't know what you're doing. Worse, you can't tell if your UX practitioners know what they're doing either! If this sounds familiar, this is the book for you. I've worked in user experience for 18 years under 10 different managers, and only one of them was a UX person himself. Most of my managers didn't understand what I did - I was like a black box with problems and issues as input, and reports and redesigned systems as output. This only works in the short term, and doesn't foster the advancement of the UX practitioner's career or the UX department's maturity. I've written The Manager's UX Survival Guide to provide a background on practitioners and methods that will help management understand, promote, and evangelize UX. By giving management insights into how UX really works, this book will help the discipline of UX become more fully established in your company. The skills of UX professionals will be more valued and more appropriately positioned in projects. This sets the stage for moving UX from a problem-solving "nice to have" option towards a mature, competitive advantage capability. This book aims to further the field of User Experience through managers and project managers rather than practitioners. It's not uncommon for a manager to suddenly be in charge of UX due to personal interest but maybe not experience. Project managers may be mandated to incorporate UX but not know how to balance UX, Business, and Development priorities. This book provides the background needed to get the right UX people in the right roles through information on methodology, hiring interview templates, and a series of lessons learned to help avoid problems. After reading this book you will be able to differentiate between the skillsets needed to build out a complete UX department and become a better UX influencer with upper management