Starting a New Club - User Experiences in Business

A group of my friends at grad school and I are starting a new club dedicated to User Experiences in Business. As business students at a STEM & Operations focused school, we lack exposure to creating thoughtful design aesthetics or even building the vocabulary to critique design considerations. We wanted to prepare our students for cross-functional careers relating to human centered design and have fun in the process.

At our first meeting, we skyped in Stephen Woodburn, who works in IBM CIO Design. Our founding members got to learn more about the evolution of user design through his experiences over the last 20 years and hear about current projects at IBM. Here are some of my takeaways that I would like to share:

1. If you are going to design a survey, know what you want to test. Have a Null Hypothesis. Keep the survey short.
2. User Experiences is not just about looking pretty - good UX drives simplicity and ease of use, which leads to higher productivity
3. Focus on Agile Principles - instead of building a bunch of cool features, focus on the core features that adds the greatest value
4. When designing new tools, you need to balance the various factors that influence implementation. A new tool may be superior, but it might have a slight learning curve and people like the comfort of going to a familiar tool that they trust.
5. Your online portfolio is critical for many UX positions. As a club, we are trying to help students expand their online presence. There is a great need for this among our cohort. None of the students who I have talked to that want careers in digital marketing have their own websites. 

Thank you to everyone who came, even if it was just for a little bit. Overall, I'm really excited for this club and all the energy that the members brought into our first meeting. More to come soon.