User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams

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. Yet as important as the position of manager is to the advancement of the field there are no books that specifically address the needs of user experience managers. Though information is available on the Web, nothing ties that advice together in the way a manager would need to integrate it in their work.

User Experience Management speaks directly to the UX manager and to the unique challenges one may face. It 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. This acts as a checklist readers can use to make sure they have covered the bases as they think about how to build their own user experience programs. Written by an experienced UX manager, and containing testimonials from many leading managers in the field, managers both current and aspiring will find this an invaluable reference loaded with ideas and techniques for managing user experience.

• Gives a UX leadership boot-camp from putting together a winning team, to giving them a driving focus, to acting as their spokesman, to handling difficult situations
• Full of practical advice and experiences for managers and leaders in virtually any area of the user experience field
• Contains best practices, real-world stories, and insights from UX leaders at IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and many more!

About the Author

Arnold (Arnie) Lund, PhD, CUXP, is a Principal Director of User Experience at Microsoft. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories in applied research, and helped build the science and technology organization at Ameritech. He managed design and exploratory development teams at US West Advanced Technologies, and served as a director at Sapient (where his focus areas ranged from information architecture to leading a global program in emerging technologies). Arnie is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, and co-chaired the CHI conferences in 1998 (Los Angeles) and 2008 (Florence, Italy). He is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), and served on the HFES Executive Council. He has long been engaged in human computer interaction (HCI) standards and in the area of accessibility and emerging technology, including chairing the HFES Institute and overseeing the HFES-200 standard and its approval as an ANSI standard. He is a certified user experience professional and served as president of the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Professional Ergonomics (BCPE).

Arnie received his BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in experimental psychology human learning and memory from Northwestern University. He has published widely in R&D management and on research in natural user interfaces, and has a variety of patents. He has been on the advisory and editorial boards of various journals (e.g., Journal of Usability Studies and the International Journal of Speech Technology), and served on the board of directors for INFINITEC (focusing on infinite potential through assistive technologies). Arnie has taught user-centered design and related topics at Northwestern University and the University of Washington.