During the UX Connect 24 event, he presented a course summary, emphasizing the frameworks and skills necessary to achieve better projects and relationships.

Course Syllabus

Module 1: Definitions and fundamentals

• What is Strategy and what is UX Strategy
• Lean Thinking: directing UX towards Value
• Agility in UX
• XDM: UX from decision theory
• Components of a UX Strategy
  • Direction, resources, and context
  • Vision
  • Objectives and metrics
  • Planning

Module 2: Strategic competencies

• Leadership
• Emotional intelligence
• Linguistic acts and agreement definition
• Rhetoric and persuasion
• Influence and negotiation
• Conflict management
• Effective delegation
• Rational decision making models
• Management and prioritization tools

Module 3: UX strategy in projects

• Project anatomy
• Objectives vs. Requirements vs. Desires
• XDM: Managing complexity and decision levels
• Iteration anatomy
• Integrating UX and Development processes
• Facilitating decisions with IT & Business
• How to present design
• UX Research informing strategic decisions

Module 4: UX Strategy in the Organization

• Cómo entiende a UX el Negocio
• El lenguaje del Negocio: terminología básica para UX
• Análisis, gestión y estrategia de Producto
• Madurez y valor del Diseño en la organización
• Formando equipos y escalando UX en la organización
• How the Business understands UX
• The language of Business: basic terminology for UX
• Product Analysis, Management, and Strategy
• Design maturity and value in the organization
• Forming teams and scaling UX in the organization

“Requirements” are not the starting point of design; they are its outcome.

Bustelo’s talk highlighted essential distinctions to avoid common pitfalls, starting with the myth of so-called “requirements.”

Projects often operate under the assumption that “the client knows what they want.” This is a fallacy. In reality, no one truly knows what they want: hence the need for analysts. Yet, this fantasy often crystallizes into “requirements,” condemning all subsequent definitions.

A requirement is a description of a visible functionality or attribute. What we can call “design requirements”, such as a style guide or a Design System, are not the product of what the client requests. They are the result of a design process, driven by design decisions. These decisions should be supported by business decisions – the true domain of the client.

The concept of “requirement” originates from development methodologies, starting with the “Waterfall method,” whose first formal description in 1970 pointed out its ineffectiveness.

What are often called “Development methodologies” focus on execution processes. They do not consider where the requirements come from, nor neither offer tools to evaluate their validity. This is the domain of UX Research.

The UX design process doesn’t start with so-called “requirements.” It begins with defining objectives and outcomes. The result of the design process is the specifications that the development team needs.

FrAgile methodologies

Las metodologías ágiles, nacidas para dejar atrás el dogmatismo, fueron adoptadas por el Negocio… de manera dogmática. Y confundiendo la “agilidad” con “velocidad”. O más precisamente, con “apuro”.

Agile methodologies, created to move beyond dogmatism, were adopted by business in a dogmatic way, confusing “agility” with “speed” or more precisely, “haste.”

Here are some distinctions to better focus discussions:

• “Agility” fundamentally refers to “responsiveness to change” versus “sticking to a plan.” We can call this ability “being adaptable.”
• “Agile” is, for example, the olympic skier who dodges obstacles and reaches the finish line.
• “Hurried” is the skier who ends up in the hospital.
• No one can deny that hurried people make mistakes.
• And I add: people who build software in a hurry, make mistakes that software multiplies.

Focusing the project on outcomes

It is essential the critical distinction made by Josh Seiden between output (deliverable) and outcome: a measurable change in behavior that drives business results.

While the visible part of our work may be pixels, screens, wireframes, mockups, etc., that is not our focus. As Robert Fabricant defined in 2008: “Our medium is behavior”.

Focusing our projects strategically (rather than merely executing tasks) requires answering these questions:

• Objectives: What problem, for whom, are we trying to solve
• Outcomes: What behaviors, from whom, need to change?
• Validation: How will we know if we’ve succeeded?

Influence

Given the amount of confusion that precedes our involvement in a project, often spread by sponsors or stakeholders – that is, the people with authority to give the project the political and financial support without which it cannot exist -, we can only help our clients achieve better projects that involve us, by developing competencies in influence and negotiation.

Influence is defined as the ability to enter the decision making process of others, without relying on authority. This can be summarized in three stages:

1. Entering the other’s acceptance space: active listening, empathy development, and initiating relationship-building.
2. Entering their decision making process: applying Experience Decision Making, a model that adapts decision theory to the UX process.
3. Building commitment: requiring responsibility and, above all, knowing how to say “no” in a responsible and professional manner to things we cannot or do not want to commit to.

Knowing how to say “no” is essential for maintaining our identity and integrity. Doing so professionally requires overcoming ineffective approaches:

• Accommodate: saying “yes” when we want to say “no,” out of guilt.
• Attack: saying “no” poorly, out of anger.
• Avoid: saying nothing at all, out of fear.

Negotiation expert William Ury proposes in “The Power of a Positive No” a three-step approach:

1. Reaffirming our principles and commitments.
2. Declaring that due to our principles and commitments, we cannot accept the proposal.
3. Affirming the relationship and building a new proposal for mutual benefit.

Some examples are, when faced with a request presented as an urgency resulting from ignorance and anxiety, clarifying that “What you are asking of me is the result of a process.”
Or, as Juan Carlos Lucas explains: “Having ideas is not the same as having offers. We value our ideas ourselves and they may seem great to us, but the offers are valued by others”. From this perspective, our professional identity is not in executing the client’s ideas: but in helping them have good offers for their customers.

Un proyecto es un tejido de conversaciones. La calidad de nuestros proyectos y relaciones, depende de la calidad de nuestras conversaciones. Por ello, los profesionales tenemos que ser impecables con nuestras palabras.

Si “el problema más grande del mundo se podría haber resuelto cuando era pequeño”, de cada proyecto malogrado podemos preguntarnos en dónde surgió la confusión que llevó al gran problema.

A project is a fabric of conversations. The quality of our projects and relationships depends on the quality of our conversations. Therefore, professionals must be impeccable with their words.

If “the world’s biggest problem could have been solved when it was small,” for every failed project we can ask ourselves where the confusion that led to the big problem arose.

And we can also adopt a coaching tool with our interlocutors: when we are bogged down in confusion, recognize that a conversation was missing.

The entry Santiago Bustelo presents UX Strategy at UX Connect 24 was first published on Kambrica.

The topics covered summarize 20 years of professional experience and discussions on this issue with designers, employers, and clients from Latin America, North America, and Europe.

Professional Respect is what allows a professional to perform their tasks. If a doctor did not have the professional respect they deserve, it would take a long time to convince us to undress for an examination.

Designers worldwide often face situations where we do not have the necessary professional respect. How can we achieve it? What is the gap between university and professional practice? How can we bridge it effectively?

The Levels of Professional Respect

Together with José Allona, co-coordinator of IXDA BA, we developed what we call “the ladder of respect.” There are a series of steps we need to cover to reach “universal respect,” which is when “designer” becomes a title sufficient to establish productive conversations, much like how titles such as “doctor” or “engineer” achieve that status today. The first step on this ladder is moving from dealing with artifacts to engaging with people.

Central Concepts:

• Acceptance Criteria: Moving from technical criteria (where an authority approves or rejects the result) to professional criteria (the fulfillment of a committed obligation).
• Professional Communication: Distinguishing between ways to listen to information or emotions (understanding vs. empathizing), ways to express them (explaining vs. expressing), and the appropriate moments for each.
• Planning and Management: Understanding the triple constraint model (quality, time, cost) and the actions needed to keep the project properly framed, or reviewing the framework in time if necessary.
• Avoiding Attachment to Decisions and Results: The designer’s job is not to make “the” decision and achieve “the design.” It is to provide resolution alternatives so that the project leader can understand the pros and cons and guide each stage. This involves developing alternatives in an economically reasonable manner, presenting their pros and cons, and supporting an informed decision.

The entry Design Leadership: on earning professional respect was first published on Kambrica.

This presentation consolidates previously presented content:

• Application case of KLM-GOMS for operational improvements in management systems (first presented in 2008 at the Microsoft RAF event),
• Heuristics understood from principles of cognitive psychology (presented since 2015 in the UX Workshop).

In the User Centered Design process, it is crucial for all those involved in Design, Development, and Business decisions and execution to observe users operating with the product.

While user testing allows us to observe what needs improvement, it doesn’t provide concrete information on what we should modify in interfaces and interactions so that users can achieve their goals with greater effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

This presentation exposes Principles and Heuristics of perception, selection, and operation, as well as models for quantifying interaction costs (Hick’s Law, Fitts’s Law, KLM-GOMS) necessary to achieve better results.

In the User Centered Design process, it is crucial for all those involved in Design, Development, and Business decisions and execution to observe users operating with the product.

The application of these principles and tools allows for significant operational improvements in systems that are used recurrently. Reducing just 10 seconds of operation in a functionality used more than 100 times a day results in more than 15 minutes gained per day of operation, and more than 8 hours gained per month.

This increased operational efficiency leads to measurable improvements in productivity, quality of care, and user satisfaction with internal systems.

The entry Methodology and Tools for Designing High-Performance Systems was first published on Kambrica.

Presented at:

• Artmedia 2016: Universidad Maimónides / CCGSM, Thursday, November 10, 2016
• Interaction South America 2016: IxDA / Universidad Católica de Chile, Thursday, November 3, 2016
• XI Latin American Design Meeting: Universidad de Palermo, Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Software is eating the world: not only is it omnipresent today, but its practices and methodologies are also changing the very way we plan and do things. Experience Design (UX), which emerged within the context of software, is beginning to encompass and impact other design disciplines, shaping their future.

In this presentation, we’ll take a brief look at the milestones of the last 15 years in Experience Design, and project the direction all design disciplines will take in the next 15 years.

The entry The Future of Design and UX: The Next 15 Years was first published on Kambrica.

Summary: What can UX professionals learn from Marketing’s mistakes?

Between the 1950s and 1990s, Marketing worked hard to position itself as the missing link between companies and customers.
Today, far from that position, it tends to be one of the least respected disciplines in business, both by companies and customers.

• How did this happen?
• What marketing promises is UX now repeating, risking our credibility?
• Are we making the same mistakes? (hint: yes)
• How can we avoid falling into the same traps?

The promise: Marketing’s golden days

A brief summary of Marketing’s early successes, its promises, how it changed the way business was understood, and how it earned a seat at the table. Case study: Louis Cheskin and the application of the scientific method.

The disappointment: Marketing’s fall from grace

The sins that led Marketing to fail as a discipline: Arrogance, Complacency, and Superstition (Cargo Culting).

Reflecting on UX

A parallel between Marketing’s ups and downs and our current situation. How, by ignoring Marketing’s history, we are doomed to repeat it – and how we are already falling into the same traps.

Taking the wheel

It’s not too late. We can still envision the path forward, anticipate risks of derailment, make decisions, and take action as professionals and as a community.

• Identify mistakes that have already begun (that must be stopped) and anticipate new mistakes (that must be prevented).
• Recognize the good actions already in progress (that must be supported) and project the good actions not yet initiated (that we must start).
• Engage as professionals and as a community with the future of our practice.

About the author

Santiago Bustelo is the Director of User Experience at Kambrica, a UX consultancy based in Buenos Aires. He chairs the local chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA BA) and was the first Regional Coordinator of IxDA for Latin America.

Santiago began his career as an interaction designer in 1996, designing business simulators for management training. At that time, Total Quality Management was in vogue. It didn’t live up to its promises. Today, we are repeating the same cycle with Lean and Agile.

The entry Professional UX practice: What can we learn from Marketing’s mistakes? was first published on Kambrica.

The panel took place on Tuesday, July 30, in the Auditorium of the University of Palermo. Other speakers included María Eugenia Marín, Martín Noe, Nora Palladino, and Damián Kirzner.

The focus of the talks was based on the premise: “In a field where change is constant, staying updated on new formats and digital platforms is a real challenge. What are the must-know novelties for creatives and communicators?”

What’s new in the digital universe?

As a designer, I have the habit of questioning the question to reach slightly deeper answers. In this case, I ask: What do we mean by “new”? It seems like things emerge with the label “new,” and there’s a specific moment when that label peels off… A moment after which, things are no longer “new.” Is that really the case?

Suppose we come home and find a dog. That’s new! But the dog itself isn’t new: it didn’t come out of nowhere, it was born some time ago. Why is it “new” to us? The appearance of the dog brings us questions and forces us to make a decision about what to do with it. And that, to me, is what makes something “new”: it generates questions we hadn’t asked before and presents possibilities and decisions we hadn’t considered until now.

What do we design?

So, what’s new in the digital world? Something inherent to digital since its inception is that it expands and encompasses more and more things. In this expansion, there’s always a part that is novel, which becomes commonplace. For example, today it’s rare to go job hunting with a newspaper under your arm like 20 years ago. The norm today is to prepare our resume on a computer, search for job offers online, and send emails. The digital advances into the everyday until it becomes diluted, until we no longer perceive it.

The new product of this advancement is that designers start designing the invisible. New professions like interaction design have emerged, focusing on defining ways to interact with a system. For example, the gesture of pinching two fingers on a screen to zoom out, which seems so natural, didn’t come from nature. It’s the result of a design process. Someone decided to use that gesture instead of another method and for the system to respond in a certain way to make it satisfying. The person who made those decisions is an interaction designer.

Another discipline that designs the invisible is user experience (UX) design, where we intervene in artifacts and services to ensure people have a specific experience. It’s not about designing the screen: it’s about designing what happens in front of the screen.

These are relatively new design professions that affect the already established design disciplines. And they lead us to ask: if designing is not just about working on the visible, what is designing?

How do we design?

Another aspect in which the digital has been influencing the design world, beyond these new disciplines, is the way we work. In software, agile methodologies have emerged and formalized. In themselves, they are not new: the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. But they bring us questions that we are still working on.

Agile methodologies emerged to respond to the inherent uncertainty of a complex project. Applied to design, these methodologies are helping us gain greater control over the complexities inherent in the creative process, the relationship with the client, and with all other stakeholders.

So, the agile methodologies that appeared within the framework of software engineering are now also contributing to design. And as software design disciplines are feeding back into traditional design disciplines, they are also incorporating these new ways of working. One advance in this regard is Core Design, the initiative we promote from the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) for university education in Design.

Where is the world heading?

As the digital advances into the everyday, today we talk about digital transformation. The biggest challenge in this process is not technical or about generating more technology, but the cultural changes that are necessary.

Every human organization is built on declarations and agreements that we can call “political.” Software, on the other hand, is concrete and operates on the measurable and specific. Digital transformation therefore requires organizations to move from establishing networks of declarations to managing networks of well-defined commitments.

This will necessarily lead to social and cultural transformations: in what ways will we coordinate efforts to build the future?

What is our responsibility?

Every tool has two parts: one part that adapts to the problem (the technique) and one part that adapts to a person, which is the design space. Without technique, there’s no technology, just science fiction. And without a person, without design, there’s no technology: only technical curiosities.

In a world with more and more technology, which people depend on to perform social functions like getting a job, the designer’s social role is to understand and integrate all people into their work. This is known as accessibility: ensuring anyone can use an object, visit a place, or access a service, regardless of their technical, cognitive, or physical abilities.

Design today, then, is being redefined. It cannot be limited to satisfying a client, aesthetics, or even the visual. It’s compelled to face questions that rediscover its noble purpose: the ability to understand people and provide solutions to their real needs. That is the responsibility and social role of design in this digital world.

The entry Encuentro UP 2019: What’s new in the digital universe? was first published on Kambrica.

When we consider integrating User Experience (UX) and Agile Methodologies, our framing conditions us to think that once we identify the intersection point, we’ll have all the answers we need.

This would be correct and sufficient, if we had not had disagreements before the advent of agile methodologies. It would apply if we had been working smoothly until the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001; however, the reality is more complex.

Agile methodologies are often proposed or imposed by engineering, and here we see that the “agile methodologies” universe consists of two dimensions: Engineering and Management. The relationship between Design and Engineering has been problematic not just since 2001, but for ages: architects and engineers have been criticizing each other for centuries.

The first step towards healthy collaboration is resolving the relationship between Design and Engineering. For that, I really like this definition that I knew from Bret Victor: “Technology satisfies human needs by amplifying human capabilities”.

This definition is revealing in several ways. First: Without people, there is no technology. Second, it clarifies that Engineering focuses on functional aspects that address the problem… while Design ensures that the solution fits the user by understanding their needs and capabilities. Technology is not limited to the mechanical; it’s not something engineers invent and designers merely color. Without Design, there is no technology—only technical curiosities.

To incorporate Design into the process, I find three critical questions useful: What problem are we solving? For whom(s)? And how will we know we’ve succeeded? These questions allow us to integrate the three areas of the problem in a single conversation: Engineering, Design, and Management

When discussing Management, it’s essential to understand what a Methodology is: a framework for organizing a process that involves people. The key takeaway from this definition is that it reveals what a Methodology does not encompass.

A methodology does not replace people (involved in the process), conversations (tool to share vision of the future and coordinate actions), nor to decision making. Choosing a methodology is, in itself, a decision.

A methodology cannot prescribe decisions, just as traffic rules (e.g., “drive on the right”) cannot dictate where to go; they can only provide the organization needed to reach the destination while minimizing the risk of accidents.

Decision-making is a fundamental part of Design and the most significant value it brings to the process. It’s common for those who hire us to view Design solely in terms of execution, making “pretty” the design decisions previously made by Engineering and Business (often without understanding what a design decision entails).

As designers, it’s our responsibility to make the right distinctions, ensuring that we help Engineering and Business make better decisions.

As designers, we must make the right distinctions, proposing and delivering on the promise of helping Engineering and Business make better decisions, to the point where design decisions inform the business decisions they should be based on.

When Design is viewed merely as execution, a project may seem more or less complex based on the “number of screens” to be produced—or any other quantifiable deliverable.

At Kambrica, we’ve found that the complexity of Design can be more appropriately understood as a product of the complexity of the execution due to the complexity of the decisions. This model allows us to clearly demonstrate the necessary role of UX in facilitating stakeholders’ decision-making processes and providing information to make them evidence-based.

Another important distinction is the common misuse of the term Agile. Particularly in Business, there is interest in adopting agile methodologies due to the idea of speed.

The reality is that speed is not part of the agile manifesto’s principles: what they propose is responsiveness to change rather than clinging to a plan. In other words, agile is the skier who dodges obstacles and reaches the finish line; rushed is the one who ends up in the hospital.

The rushed skier throws themselves toward the goal in an act of faith, driven by anxiety. The agile skier considers the terrain’s evidence in a constant decision-making process: a cycle of observation, orientation, decision, and action.

In a project, UX research provides the evidence-based information necessary for decision making. However, it’s often dismissed with the excuse that “it’s slow,” which is another way of saying, “there’s no time.” But time isn’t something that can be stored in a drawer.

Time is something to be allocated. What does “no time” really mean? Suppose someone goes to a ski resort, asks for skis, and when the attendant asks their size, the customer says, “I don’t have time to put on boots; I just want the skis.” What he means is that he does not understand boots as a necessary condition for using skis.

UX professionals need to learn to hear “no time” not as an inflexible rejection, but as an invitation to point out the necessary condition between our proposal and what our client needs.

In our client’s decision making process, there is a balance with two trays: one with what they don’t want, present or future problems, their fears; and the other with what they want, the future they want to be part of, their desire.

Addressing concerns is critical to getting attention: anything we propose before satisfying that point will be ignored or misunderstood, to the point that instead of being seen as part of the solution, it may be viewed as additional problems weighing down the fear tray.

This approach helps address the common request for quantitative techniques, even when we find they contribute little or nothing to understanding and solving the problem. The reason for this request is that the clients who make it, need something to present to their superiors: they are being measured. These interlocutors’ main concern is not aligned with design quality; it’s focused on their survival within the organization.

In these cases, quantitative research should be presented as a necessary condition for achieving a quantification that our clients will find positive. This means recognizing metrics that can show increasing measures throughout the project. I distinguish three levels in quantitative research:

• Validation (checking what “we know we know”) is the simplest qualitative process, the least risky, and the one most feasible to establish quantitative metrics for.
• Investigation (searching for what “we know we don’t know”) involves greater uncertainty and is only viable once our client has understood the value of UX in reducing risks, typically after validating assumptions that were initially presented as truths.
• Exploration (searching for what we don’t know we don’t know) is the qualitative process furthest from the client’s concern for their organizational survival; it’s only viable when our client has resources, political capital, experience, and commitment.

Only with solid tools for conversations and decision-making can we focus on designing a methodology.

The most important goal of any methodology is to achieve a healthy client-provider relationship on the project scale. Without any methodology, as more people join from both sides, cross-conversations, confusion, and problems arise, leading to the formation of two camps: “those jerks” and “that bunch of useless people”.

That’s why every methodology proposes a single interlocutor on each side, with authority, technical competence, business understanding and management skills.

A critical foundation for agile methodologies is the Lean philosophy’s Value vs. Waste distinction. Value is what the Client values; waste is everything else… even things we consider necessary conditions for achieving Value.

Identifying waste forces us to question all the activities we undertake. In the case of building a house, the walls –providing protection from the elements and preserving privacy– are clearly a Value. However, scaffolding, though considered necessary for building those walls, are actually construction waste: the inhabitants won’t live with the scaffolding once the building is inaugurated. If the scaffolding were made of gold, the budget would increase by several million dollars, without the end clients finding any Value in it. That’s why scaffolding are modular, reusable, and in many cases, rented.

Other types of waste can be more straightforward to identify. If materials are unloaded 10 blocks away from where they are needed instead of at the right spot, additional time and effort will be required to move them where they should have been unloaded initially.

Identifying waste in software is much more difficult. Lean Software Development is a valuable tool for identifying, reducing, and eliminating waste in our projects:

Product Waste:
These are the most obvious… but also the latest to be identified. They become evident once the project is in production… and therefore, when there are no longer resources to resolve them. UX research aims to identify these wastes economically, in a controlled environment, when there is still time and resources to mitigate them:

• Defects: bugs, things that don’t work according to the end user’s expectations, usability issues.
• Unused Functionality: typically, the result of a lack of understanding of users’ real needs and capabilities.

Process Waste:
These can be identified and addressed during the process itself. Addressing them reduces the likelihood of product waste manifestation. They require management skills, team responsibility, and Client expectation management:

• Hand-offs: When a task is passed from one person to another, there is either a necessary conversation between those people, or information is lost in the process.
• Multitasking: Humans can consciously perform only one task at a time; “multitasking” is actually interleaving fragments of two or more tasks. Switching from task A to task B requires an effort greater than zero to understand the context of the second task; this penalty applies again when returning to task A.
• Relearning: Returning to a task or practice after a long time requires effort to regain context and operational capability, which can be avoided by maintaining continuity.
• Waiting: This occurs when someone cannot proceed with their assigned tasks due to a lack of decisions or inputs they depend on. One way to avoid these situations is by managing a “sprint” schedule that imposes cadence on the project and must involve the Client.
• Incomplete work: All unfinished decisions and executions increase technical debt to the point where the cost of settling it in the future may become unfeasible. It is often the result of project haste and pressure, lack of planning, and vision.
• Unused talent: One common scenario is when the Client considers Design to be mere execution, overlooking the team’s ability to help the Business make better decisions. It requires management, authority, expectation management, and commitments. This impacts the project in ways that cannot be quantified (no one can measure against what “could have been”) and affects the team in terms of motivation breaks.

At Kambrica, we developed, iterated, and proposed a model that first recognizes the value of Facilitation and Research processes in reducing the complexity of decision making. It reveals that design execution, far from “solving” (as is often the client’s perception), actually always opens up new questions that require appropriate processes for their resolution.

Our minimum sprint model considers weekly cycles, with a Management track running one week ahead of the execution track. During the Planning phase, the two tracks overlap, also including a mid-week follow-up instance with the Business to reduce risks and deviations.

By applying this model, we successfully coordinate all projects, regardless of their complexity.

In summary, integrating User Experience and agile methodologies requires working across several dimensions, from general to specific: from the understanding of Design, Engineering, and Management, to the design and application of a particular methodology to guide projects by identifying and reducing waste, and establishing and fulfilling commitments responsibly.

The Measure of Design 2018: Slow Methods in agile times – IxDA Viña del Mar

The event featured Mauricio Azócar (Agile Coach at Tinet), Estefanía Cotrini (Project Manager at Ilógica), and Santiago Bustelo (Founder and UX Director at Kambrica).

The digital service design industry increasingly relies on agile methodologies, which have brought new ways of working, with different rhythms and goals that have proven to contribute to efficiency and transparency in design and development processes. However, many agile methodologies like Scrum, Agile, or Lean were created from development, and therefore do not initially consider the relevance of the role of design in the experience, its teams, or its methods.

In this context, IxDA Viña del Mar raised the following questions: What is the role of “slow methods” inherent to UCD and research in the agile times we are in? How does each type of methodology address the user experience? What external, human, or other factors favor or hinder the development of processes under each methodology?

Many thanks to Nicolás Espinoza, Katherine Exss, and the entire team and volunteers at IxDA Viña del Mar for the invitation, the excellent reception, and the effort to make everything possible!

Presentation Credits

• Framing hammer – Luigi Zanasi (CC BY-SA 2.0 ca)
• Iceberg in the Arctic with its underside exposed – AWeith (CC BY-SA 4.0)

All other images and videos under CC0 License (Free for any use without attribution required), public domain, or self-produced.

The entry Agile Methodologies as a Design Challenge was first published on Kambrica.

Experience Decision Making (XDM)

On October 31, Santiago Bustelo presented Experience Decision Making: The Missing Link Between “Design Thinking” and “Doing Business.”

Designing, operating, and maintaining experiences involves new ways of undertaking projects and businesses. This challenge has been fertile ground for new working methodologies, all of which promise the success that eludes others. While useful, they all share the same limitation: a working methodology proposes a way to organize people and processes. It does not replace people or their decision making processes.

Experience Decision Making (XDM) was born from recognizing this missing piece. It is a system of models and methods to achieve better decision making processes in the experience industry, integrating elements from decision theory, behavioral psychology, negotiation, and management.

The entry New Frameworks for Better Decisions at ILA19 was first published on Kambrica.