March 17, 2008

UX Lunch: Experience is the Product

by David Sturtz

In an attempt to implement Jared Spool’s “educate and administrate” model* for spreading UX goodness throughout an organization, I’ve been assembling a series of brown bag-style, lunchtime screenings of pod-/slidecasts. The first one happened to be this talk by Peter Merholz from the 2007 dConstruct conference, which he has generously posted to Slideshare:

You may have read Businessweek’s (brief) coverage last week of a SXSW talk on Apple’s design process:

“Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. […] Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting […] to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work.”

I thought the idea of these “paired design meetings” meshed well with the emphasis Peter placed on having an experience-based vision for the product. Too often the focus is on implementation and the vision gets buried.