Todd Wilkens

A talk I gave at UX STRAT 2014 in Boulder, CO discussing the IBM Design initiative as a whole then covering the specifics around their new Product Management practice as well as the strategy taken to roll it out across all of IBM. I shared our early successes as well as some lessons learned. The talk focused on delivering a lot of ideas about concrete steps you could take in your organization to embed UX and Design in your strategic activities.

Video of a talk I gave at MX: Managing Experience conference in March 2014 outlining all the programs and activities we're engaged in to transform the culture and practice of IBM, reasserting human-centered design and innovation at every level.

IBM has a strong pedigree in design and at many points designers have occupied a central and foundational role in the organization. Recently, IBM has embarked on a massive transformation focused on integrating design and user experience practice… Show more

Video of a talk I gave at MX: Managing Experience conference in March 2014 outlining all the programs and activities we're engaged in to transform the culture and practice of IBM, reasserting human-centered design and innovation at every level.

IBM has a strong pedigree in design and at many points designers have occupied a central and foundational role in the organization. Recently, IBM has embarked on a massive transformation focused on integrating design and user experience practice back into the core of everything the company does. This is the largest such transformation ever attempted and the very scale of IBM as an organization means that it can't help but have major impact in the world of design. For example, the current trajectory will make IBM one of the 5 largest design organizations in the world in the next 4-5 years.

As we all know, this kind of change isn't easy. But the team leading the initiative at IBM is having a lot of early success. In this session, you'll get a peek into the inner workings of the initiative, including an overview of the key parts (from hiring to process change to culture change), early successes, and lessons learned. Show less

Agile developers and UX designers have a lot more in common than you might think. We'll show that both agile design and development work best when they integrate and when users are put at the center of the process. We'll focus on what works and what doesn't. Much of this presentation builds off of a national research study on design and development practices as well as case studies from Adaptive Path project teams.

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can--and should--use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

Narrative is perhaps the oldest and most widely used form for organizing information and human experience, thus, it is not surprising that there is a significant body of research concerning narrative and its importance to comprehension and understanding. One important outcome of this research is the concept of narrative intelligence, the human tendency to fit experience into narrative form. This research is extremely relevant to information seeking in general and sense-making† in particular… Show more

Narrative is perhaps the oldest and most widely used form for organizing information and human experience, thus, it is not surprising that there is a significant body of research concerning narrative and its importance to comprehension and understanding. One important outcome of this research is the concept of narrative intelligence, the human tendency to fit experience into narrative form. This research is extremely relevant to information seeking in general and sense-making† in particular. This paper outlines the ... Show less

To support effective browsing, interfaces to digital video libraries should include video surrogates (ie, smaller objects that can stand in for the videos in the collection, analogous to abstracts standing in for documents). The current study investigated four variations (ie, speeds) of one form of video surrogate: a fast forward created by selecting every Nth frame from the full video. In addition, it tested the validity of six measures of user performance when interacting with video… Show more

To support effective browsing, interfaces to digital video libraries should include video surrogates (ie, smaller objects that can stand in for the videos in the collection, analogous to abstracts standing in for documents). The current study investigated four variations (ie, speeds) of one form of video surrogate: a fast forward created by selecting every Nth frame from the full video. In addition, it tested the validity of six measures of user performance when interacting with video surrogates. Forty-five study participants ... Show less

Every time we visit a design blog or conference someone is touting the benefits of Service Blueprints, Scenarios, Experience Maps, or some-such-thing. Every consultant would like you to believe your organization needs one (or more!). You and your team are still trying to figure out what everyone is REALLY talking about. Chris and Todd have walked these roads many times and lived to tell the tale. In this talk, they share lessons of how customer journey mapping is done well, what value it can… Show more

Every time we visit a design blog or conference someone is touting the benefits of Service Blueprints, Scenarios, Experience Maps, or some-such-thing. Every consultant would like you to believe your organization needs one (or more!). You and your team are still trying to figure out what everyone is REALLY talking about. Chris and Todd have walked these roads many times and lived to tell the tale. In this talk, they share lessons of how customer journey mapping is done well, what value it can bring to your organization, as well as how to avoid wasted effort from amateur mistakes and service design snake oil when you hire outside help. Show less