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This forum is dedicated to maximizing the success of HCI practitioners within the frenetic world of product and service design. It focuses on UX strategy approaches, leadership, management techniques, and above all the challenge of bringing HCI to peer-level status with longstanding business disciplines such as marketing and engineering. --- Daniel Rosenberg, Editor

This SIG will serve two purposes: to share the results of previous CHI leadership and management panels, workshops, and to provide forum for the management community to discuss topics of interest.

Usability research is dramatically affecting product design in the 21st century. Five user experience and research managers from cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies discuss the strategic relationship between user research and product design, organizational processes that succeed in helping user research and user experience design improve products, and what's different about user research and user experience design for Internet companies and Web sites.

User Experience (UX) leaders and managers are required to continually adapt to changes in: organizational strategies and re-structuring, resources, technology, economic pressures, and other factors. Simultaneously, more companies are realizing that they need UX expertise to ensure that they are competitive in today's marketplace. This panel is comprised of UX leaders who have created strategies and tactics to succeed both in spite of and with the aid of the past and current trends. The panel will focus on the current trends, what strategies and tactics have and have not worked in addressing these trends, and also discuss which future trends they think will impact UX departments, companies, and the field, and how they are preparing for these future trends. The panel will be of interest to managers, practitioners and those who work closely with these teams, including developers, project managers, market researchers, test managers, and executives.

This SIG is sponsored by the CHI 2006 and CHI 2007 Usability Community chairs to collect feedback and discuss how CHI can best serve the Usability Community, both at the annual conference and in other activities. If you're a practitioner or a researcher interested in usability, please join us and contribute your ideas!.

The practice of usability and user-centered design must integrate with many other activities in the product development lifecycle. This integration requires political savvy, knowledge of a wide variety of methods, flexibility in using methods, inspiration, and innovation. The speakers and their colleagues have met these requirements and describe their experience fitting various methods into design and development efforts. This forum highlights their successes and setbacks.

The adoption of user experience methods within companies has followed a similar evolution over the past two decades. Typically organizations originally institute formative lab-based evaluations, and then add field studies and other user experience methods to their repertoire. This evolution typically occurs because the organization recognizes the need for more data on customer profiles, feature requirements, and task flows, along with the ability to iterate quickly among various design ideas and directions. These methods that fall outside of the categories of formative usability evaluations and field studies are addressed in this paper. Although there are a wide variety of methods within this 'alternative' category, a few representative samples will be discussed in more detail here. In actuality, these methods are not 'alternatives,' rather, they are additions to the toolkit of user experience methods that should be used in conjunction with formative usability studies and field studies.

This paper describes the organizational approaches and usability methodologies considered by HCI professionals to increase the strategic impact of usability research within companies. We collected the data from 134 HCI professionals at three conferences: CHI 98, CHI 99, and the Usability Professionals' Association 1999 conference. The results are the first steps towards a toolkit for the usability community that can help HCI practitioners learn from the experiences of others in similar situations.

This panel explores approaches to making usability research more strategic within organizations---not just with respect to the product development life cycle, but pervasive throughout the organization. Six panelists discuss different ways in which usability can be strategic, depending on their organizational environments or "profiles."

This panel addresses the question of whether usability can help organisations to achieve their business goals through the integration of usability methods during the design and development of software.