Business Thinking for UXers

What you’ll learn

UX researchers and designers have powerful tools for understanding people, but their training often lacks key skills needed to navigate and influence the business environments in which they work. This workshop will give you the business acumen you need to amplify your impact within your own organization or your clients’ organizations. Covering the fundamentals of finance, organizational structure, and strategy, you’ll learn the tools and frameworks that drive business thinking and decision making, and learn to be a better interlocutor between traditional business functions and your own function or department.
You’ll leave the workshop with:

• Foundational knowledge of business principles
• An understanding of how UX can be best positioned in relation to—not siloed from—the larger organization and its cross-functional teams
• A clear perspective on how UX can help define and meet enterprise business goals

Agenda

• Cultivating a business mindset in UX (30 min)
• Deepening empathy for the enterprise (30 min)
• The meaning and significance of key financial indicators (1 hr)
• The anatomy of an organization’s structure (1 hr)
• The building blocks for identifying and formulating corporate strategy (1 hr)
• Reframing our UX practices with a business mindset (1 hr)
• Optimizing cross-functional collaboration to meet enterprise goals (30 min)
• Wrap-up and group discussion (30 min)

Outcomes

• Techniques for thinking on your feet as you deal with difficult conversations in the moment
• Techniques for preparing for tough conversations to set yourself up for success
• Techniques for specific types of conversations typical to UX projects and processes
• Framework for assessing the obstacles preventing you from reaching productive conclusions

At the end of the workshop, you will receive a certificate of completion.

I learned how to ensure you are incorporating business thinking and strategy in every step of the research and delivery process to ensure your recommendations are meaningful to your stakeholders.

Carolyn helped build a great foundation around basics of business thinking and shared many valuable approaches to manage business stakeholders and create influence. I was very pleased with the overall outcome and see many opportunities to apply this thinking to current and future projects at work.

The worlds of the business and the user are too often perceived as separate, not only in the minds of the industry and corporate leadership, but also in the minds of us researchers. In this course, I learned how to build a bridge between these two worlds. Carolyn did a fabulous job of structuring the course, discussions, and assignments for us to get hands-on experience. I’m thankful to her for offering this course, sharing her knowledge, and equipping us for building these bridges in our own organizations.

About the instructor

Carolyn Hou is the Founder of Arlo Labs, a boutique insight and innovation consultancy for healthcare and tech companies. Applying methods and theories from cultural anthropology, social psychology, and behavioral economics, Hou helps companies better understand and design for their users. Her work has led to multiple award-winning designs on the market. Hou completed her graduate degree in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she also served as President of Oxford Women in Business. She currently resides in New York City.