Day 2 was just as satisfying as day 1. As with the post I did about MX East Day 1, this is a stream of consciousness ramble rather than a deep reflection on the proceedings.

Mark Jones of IDEO started the day with a loosely joined series of experience design insights. He described the ‘new customer,’ who’s expectations are set by the best experiences they have from any industry. The new customer is not loyal to companies that provide lousy experiences, in fact they actively evade old-school lock-in techniques. Then Jones gave three techniques to design experiences for the new customer.

• Look wide: look at the customer’s whole lives; the service ecology that they inhabit; find appropriate, targeted and strategic roles for your services
• Prototype early: prototype services during the brainstorming phase; role play; use front line people and executives together; scenario, story board and video narrative
• Communicate: rally around a single vision; involve stakeholders in the design, then use them to help with communications; visualize the goal – be compelling; prototype branding and marketing to visualize how an offering fits in the market/strategy

Next was Chris Conley from Gravity Tank, speaking about building a creative culture. My favorite insight was that companies are organized to efficient execute their present strategy; innovation is pretty much impossible in a normal corporate environment because they are purpose-built to prevent it. He presented an extended examination of Pixar’s culture of innovation. It’s all from the Incredibles DVD, so you can watch it yourself.

Then came Sara Ulius-Sable of Whirlpool, who gave one of my favorite talks. She is the metrics manager for Whirlpool, which sits atop 22 famous brands, like Kitchen-Aid and Maytag. She spoke about how tactical metrics can have a major impact on strategy. Her team at Whirlpool works with business units, engineering and UX to target dimensions of experience that represent ‘healthy’ for each brand. She listed her four attributes of a good metric.

• Predictive: correlated to business measures and outcomes
• Sensitive: differences are detectable
• Actionable: able to provide clear direction
• Relevant: to brand strategy and product domain

Irene Au from Google gave us 9 ways to succeed as a UX manager. My favorites were #6 “let skeptics fail”; and #7 “deliver excellence on a few projects.” She recommended selecting projects carefully using explicit internal priorities. Be transparent about the UX team’s level of commitment. Avoid coming in late to rescue doomed projects. Avoid projects that aren’t committed to an open collaboration with the UX team. And so forth.

To be continued…