Every Friday in winter quarter the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering brings industry experts to speak about current issues in user experience (UX) research and design.

All talks are free and open to the public. Students register for course credit with HCDE 521.

Talk title

Customer Focus Demystified

Talk abstract

Just about every company claims to be customer focused—but what does that really mean? It turns out that there are specific and definable aspects of customer focus that can be measured at good, better, and best levels. This talk describes the Customer Experience Capability Framework, a systematic approach to demystifying customer focus, getting past buzzwords, and how to define an actionable plan for improvement.

About the speakers
Jeanine Spence
Jeanine works with companies of all sizes to imagine innovative solutions that deliver customer value. Having worked on both the engineering and design sides, she draws together the vision and the plan to deliver unique experiences. She believes in the power of listening closely to people to understand their challenges and ambitions and accepts that not everything needs a technology solution. But when technology is needed, then that is when it gets really interesting. She shares this passion in her industry talks and workshops ranging across inclusive design, design thinking, scenario planning, ideation and iteration, and strategic prototyping.

Jeanine is the lead author of the Customer Experience Capability Model, a strategic framework teams use to examine their current skills against exemplary examples and define a transformation roadmap. Jeanine received her bachelors in Philosophy from Reed College and her Masters of Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Keeping up with the youth, she is involved with Destination Imagination and teaching design thinking at local schools.

Kent Sullivan
Kent believes strongly that integrating insights extracted from diverse data sources (design research, market research, telemetry, social networking, etc.) greatly increases the chances of those insights being breakthrough in nature. Kent has spent years fostering deep collaboration among team members and recognizes how hard it is to achieve this in a high-pressure corporate environment.

During his long tenure at Microsoft, it was Kent’s pleasure to work on a wide variety of products, especially Windows 95, where he led the exploratory user research that produced the Start Menu and Task Bar, as well as the iterative research that helped nail down the details. Kent spent ten years teaching and mentoring UX professionals inside of Microsoft. He then built and ran the user research team for Power BI. Since leaving Microsoft, Kent has been helping teams and organizations become more customer-focused.