1. Co-design: Quantified UX Lead Generation
By: Marquis Cabrera
June 22th, 2015
Rough (Dynamic) Draft
Any use of this material without specific permission of Case Commons is strictly prohibited

2. IBM Interview on UX Workshops
“Good research is difficult, so competitive assessments are often the best in UX; then you mesh together your designers skills in aesthetics, usability, and intuitiveness to reshape the experience.
Workshop Process centers on business needs and goals; then use design thinking to solve the problem. Here’s our bottom line and competitive analysis, here’s what we would like to explore.
Start with: “Big Ideas” or “Hill Statements”--shortcut, concise statements about who the problem is focused around, what the problem is, and how we can solve it in a ‘wow’ fashion.
When you are creating your solution, and you start to veer off of that path, you are moving outside of the scope of what really needs to be done.
Workshopping for pain points in the business, understanding user frustrations and limitations, and competitive assessments. Business ideas are aleady there.
A competitive assessment is just look at the competition seeing what they do, comparing it to what you do; then building off of those ideas; however, you can do a lot of research.”
Note: In order to understand good UX design, I inquired about IBM’s UX design process from a friend working in their insurance unit.

3. UX Design Quotes from IBM and CGI
“Well for my area of work business ideas are already there. Thats the difference between startups and fortune 500s. My area is more, geico wants to increase x and reduce y, and we have a solution (watson or w/e) that can proably do it. How can we create a succesful user experience around that technology?” – Senior UX Designer at IBM
“The core idea here is that we can increase the bottom line, JUST by looking at how we can create a better experience for the user. It’s all user-centric.” – UX Designer at IBM
“We do design workshops which are based off of business needs and goals; then bring in design thinking to solve the problem. Ultimately, we say, “Here's our bottom line and competitive analysis, here's what we would like to explore.”” – UX Designer at CGI

4. Inception-Invention Model
Ideas 2
Ideas 3
Build
Ideas
Inception
Invention
TIME
Ideas – Broad based ideas stemming from a design thinking session.
Ideas 2 – Ideas culled into buckets.
Ideas 3 – Ideas with business implications
Build – Build market ideas
Legend
Does is make us money?
Does it save us money?
Does it give us a competitive advantage?
Note: Model was developed by Marquis Cabrera before CC.

5. Ideas Ideas1 Ideas2 Build
Examples of Inception with UX
# of ideas generated from co-creation
# of ideas generated from ethnographic
# of ideas generated from asking user for response
# of ideas generated that solve a researched problem
# of ideas that are attached to business goals
# of ideas submitted with market opportunity
# of ideas that are fleshed out and built that have a market implication and generate profit.
Ideas
Ideas1
Ideas2
Build
Note: Model was developed by Marquis Cabrera before CC.

6. Build market-worthy ideas
Stages of Inception-Invention with UX
Design Thinking, Rapid Prototyping, or some methodology that allows for us to secure a lot of insights at once.
Stage 1: Ideation
Research and suss out ideas that have significant pain points or business opportunities
Stage 2:
Explore
Build market-worthy ideas
Stage 3:
Invention
Note: Model was developed by Marquis Cabrera before CC.

7. UX Lead Workflow
Client has an issue or issues; end users face friction; our competitors are doing better in X area; or internally, we want to create a delta for X reason.
Define problem areas through inquiry or clarifying questions; then ideate around those issues/ reason/ problems using design thinking methodologies. For example: Throw-up post-it notes. Saying stuff like, “Website is hard to understand.”
Go through design thinking or rapid prototyping methodology to bucket experience issues, or learn from directly from users (or as a user).
Create user personas to explore micro and macro user frustrations.
Develop empathy maps of how the user thinks, feels—what they say, what they do.
Create storyboards of the users journey through the current system or with the current product.This means: We have, ultimately, delved into the users frustrations and have big ideas.
Create statements around those big ideas, where you can champion initiatives based off of them.
Note: This gets us into the “Explore” stage; then we want to get to ‘Invention Stage’.
Develop concepts, mockups, MVPs, prototypes; then present them quickly to check against business interest, and then bring vetted and/ or approved ones to life.

8. Quotient model emphasis actions in ‘Invention Stage’
Internal and External
Step 1
Client Problem
Step 2
Design Thinking
Step 3
Empathy Maps
Prototyping
Personas
Step 4
Conceptual Modeling
Story-
boarding
Statements
Wire-framing
Step 5
Insights
Business Interest
Actionable Items
Note: This is exactly how IBM does user research, but Marquis configured the “quotient model” to illustrate bottomline.