[Sigia-l] Internal usability/UE teams

[Stew Dean]

Hi Adamya,

Now I've seen the conversation so far and I'm going to stick my neck out 
and give an idea of team make up based upon the projects I've done - these 
have mostly been medium to large corporate sites. I'm going to paint a 
picture of an average team and point out some key deciding features on how 
many 'techies' it'll need and what kind.

Now lets say you're developing a site for 'Blue Whale' - it's a redesign 
and re-architect project and your brief is to integrate the new brand 
values (due to merger or just someone not like the original shade of blue) 
improve the product information and increase conversion rates (based, 
usual, on some fairly vague metrics set by the client).

So you'll need an account handler / project manager / producer  - you'll 
need you main user experience person. Usability - bit vauge that but if you 
mean user research I tend to keep that external to the main team - use a 
good trusted agency to one to ones and maybe do user research using you 
competitors and existing site (it's vital not to base research just on  the 
existing site) - so not sure they get counted in the head count. It's 
helpful to have another user experience person - maybe one person good at 
IA whilst the other is more interface based. One or two visual designers. 
One or two 'content' people - possibly a freelance copywriter come content 
strategist.  You might want to add a business specialist in the mix in a 
consultant mode who is called upon for specialist products.

So a good user experience team is about 5-6 people  with a couple 
of  Business people to ensure things fit with the big picture.  Notice 
there are no art/creative  directors here - keep in the advertising 
agencies- one of the designers will probably take the lead for the design 
and own it - that is often more than enough.

To flip over to the engineering side - as I think of it....  It's a given 
you need a technical lead - again not a CTO but someone who will coordinate 
the development process, can liase with the clients engineers and be hands 
on.  So two things to set the ratio - how much functionality does the site 
have (not content but unique tools etc) and how good is your/their CMS. It 
may knock the techie count to 1 (a good front end guy/gal). The ultimate 
CMS has yet to be created - especially an IA friendly one, in my view.

A third unfortunate factor is how is the client set up?  The nightmare is 
they've bought an off the shelf CMS system for a number with a few zeros 
after it which produces results easily matched by dreamweaver (I'm serious 
about that - I mention no names) and their internal system is designed to 
add zeros on to simple things like form creation. Expect more headaches and 
more tech involvement.

If the company is smaller you usually have less problems and therefore a 
good front end programmer (flash, xml, xhtml, ecmascript etc) or two plus 
some good database/ backend/ system architecture guys - say one to three 
and you can handle quite a hefty project. More can be added for intense 
functionally and the technical lead is best at knowing what is required there.

So, in summary, here is the agency kind of ratio. For internal you just get 
rid of one or two from the client relationship handling level.

Based upon past experience the average ratio of User Experience to 
Technical Engineering is, say,  1:1 (or 50/50).  Now I know companies that 
have a ratio of 1:15 (lots of tech - not so much UE) or lower - but mostly 
due to being a technical solutions company first. I also know companies 
that are more like.

I'm interested in other's view on this.

Cheers

Stewart Dean
User Experience Consultant