Most of us who practice user experience design are generalists. We need to know enough about technology to work with engineers. We need to know enough about visual design to work with designers. Every time we start a new project, we need to learn about our client’s business problems until we can recite them in our sleep. We need to be part designer, part psychologist, part researcher, part corporate therapist. We need to be able to write cogently, sketch our ideas so that even the most distracted marketing executives can understand them, and give killer presentations.

Managing a user experience team takes these skills to a whole new level.

Whether you manage a UX team, or you’re just thinking about it, this presentation will give you practical advice grounded in real-world experience.

In this session, you will learn how to:

* Find people who have potential to be as good at this work as (or even better than) you are.

* Inspire your team members to do their best work, and keep getting better.

* Handle a team member who is not performing.

* Keep yourself inspired, especially when your job is to make the rest of your team look good.

About Katrina Alcorn

Katrina leads the user experience discipline for Hot Studio, an award-winning design firm based in San Francisco. Since 1999, she has led information architecture, user research and content strategy efforts on a wide variety of projects, including online magazines, Flash demos and health care enrollment applications for clients such as InformationWeek, Sun Microsystems, Charles Schwab, Blue Shield of California, Architecture for Humanity, the United Methodist Church, Gap Inc., LeapFrog SchoolHouse and Adobe.

Before her foray onto the Internet, Katrina worked as a freelance writer and editor for several newspapers and magazines in Hawaii and California, and as an associate producer for an award-winning national PBS television series. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from the University of California, Berkeley.