background on business to buttons

I’m excited to be keynoting at the Business to Buttons conference today in Malmö Sweden. The organizers and hosts from InUse have done excellent work putting together their first event with a list of great speakers that will be tough to choose among.

My presentation will be centered on the topics of business and user experience. I’ll start by exploring one popular aspect of the relationship between business and UX: measurement and profitability. But the heart of the talk will push beyond that aspect, advocating for a focus on the use of experience as a core component of business strategy.

I’ll try to get some of the slides up soon, but here are some of the works and concepts I’ll be referencing in the presentation:

From the intro:

• Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto
• More on Taylorism

Regarding measurement and UX:

• Adaptive Path’s ‘Leveraging Business Value’ report including the linking elephants method and multiple case studies on the ROI of UX.
• Henning Fischer’s essay on Business Case Modeling for Design Initiativesincludes “how-to” information as well as a spreadsheet for doing it
• Fred Reichfeld’s ultimate question for customer loyalty, and his HBR essay on Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s success with it (PDF)

Regarding experience strategy:

• The value curve example comes from Blue Ocean Strategy, but the authorsprior article in HBR is cheaper and a faster read, if you’re looking for short cuts.
• Scott Weisbrod’s example of the value curve for the Wii
• Michael Porter’s writing shaped my one-slide primer on strategy: His HBR essay on “What is Strategy?” (for a fee) and a recent interview with Wharton School explaining why “being the best” isn’t a strategy (requires sign-up).
• A blog post detailing one of my examples of experience strategy, the Target ClearRX drug delivery system
• Peter Merholz on Kodak and Experience Design on core77
• Kevin Cheng’s presentation on Communicating Concepts through Comics
• Bain & Company on Closing the Delivery Gap, where on 8% of the companies who profess to have superior customer experiences have customers that agree with them