Keith Instone — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:53:17 GMT

I think a lot of us are coming to the same “change agent” place. I may have gotten there a slightly different way. I started looking into “innovation” (e.g., hanging out with local business school people). I like to say that CEOs will pay a lot more for “innovation” than for “change” but otherwise they have a lot in common. I am starting to see that people are assuming a new, high-quality total user experience is a requirement for “innovation”. Innovation often implies change AND a better UX: a nice combination (nice for user experience professionals, at least). Perhaps if you can get work on “innovation projects” then the agent-of-change aspect will be easier. When I have attended “innovation” conferences, this UX person and the “innovation” people got along nicely.

I also discovered a nascent community of practice around “change methods”. There is a bible of “change methods” called, oddly enough, The Change Handbook. Many of our strategic user-centered design methods belong in that book (and some are being added to the next edition, I am told). You can study “organization development” in business school if you really want to be a “professional change agent”. I went to the “Nexus for Change” conference earlier this year, spending 2 days immersed in change methods. Some of it was way too touchy-feely for my comfort zone, but that was exactly why I went. It was very educational (or enlightening?), and I think people learned from me when I explained what I do as a UX professional. (It was also quite eerie: it was almost like I was at the first IA Summit.) A UX person and the “change methods” people got along nicely.

As seems to often be the case in our work, we are finding that we need to be good at things that are normally outside our professional “comfort zone,” like being a change agent. It is important that we recognize that there is already a profession that specializes in it. We need to “hang out” with them, learn from them, and teach them some of our tricks of the trade. For example, most of the change agents I met do not have a lot of experience with technology or implementing change driven by technology. They can make us better UX professionals; we can make them better agents of change.

I have a very loosely connected set of blog entries on my site tagged “Innovation, change”. See http://instone.org/innovation-change

PS Yes, I used WAY too many quoted terms above. Apologies.

Keith Instone — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:47:25 GMT

Hi Olga – thanks for raising awareness of this aspect of making a difference. I think too often we get wrapped up in the “corporate” world in our discussions about user experience. One small nit about the title of your article, however. How about “Designing WITH Nonprofits” instead? I think the subtle change from “for” to “with” demonstrates the collaborative nature we are evolving to (instead of the “I am the design agency and you are the client”).

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Keith Instone