Panel: The Business of User Experience;with Klaus Kaasgaard, and Scott Hirschat at BayCHI Program
Channel: BayCHI, San Francisco Bay Area ACM SIGCHI
Date: 2024-02-27

December 9, 2003
https://baychi.org/calendar/20031209

Panel: The Business of User Experience
Klaus Kaasgaard of Yahoo!, Jeffrey Herman of eBay, and Scott Hirsch, Independent Consultant. Moderated by Rashmi Sinha of Uzanto Consulting.

Meeting report by Nerija Sinkeviciute-Titus ntitus@baychi.org

The three speakers talked about the business of User Experience (UE) from somewhat different angles and touched different layers of the problem. Scott Hirsch approached the topic from a macro, conceptual level, Klaus Kaasgaard of Yahoo! described how UE can add value to companies, and Jeff Herman presented the process of UE design as well as specific practices at eBay.

Scott Hirsch of Adaptive Path started with a quotation from Harvard Business Review (May 2003) by Nicholas G. Carr: "IT doesn't matter." The underlying premise, according to Scott, is that "investing in fancy new technology is not where the competitive advantage is. Rather you should do more with the IT you have." If that is the case, User Experience should be an important area of focus…

(The full meeting report will appear here in February. BayCHI members read the full meeting report in the January issue of the BayCHI newsletter.)

Original Announcement

Short presentations by each of the panelists will be followed by open discussion of the topic.
Photo of Klaus Kaasgaard Klaus Kaasgaard is user experience research manager at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Aalborg University in Denmark and has published books and research papers in areas such as HCI, the sociology of technology and medical informatics. Further, he is a highly acclaimed lecturer and speaker, and has been a visiting research fellow at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, England. He is said to be "pushing the boundaries of the discipline."

Jeff Herman is a design manager at eBay, where he focuses on current projects, overall design guidelines, and long-term strategies. Prior to joining eBay in 2001, Jeff was a designer at Yahoo!, where he worked on Yahoo! Mail, and Apple, where he worked on Apple Guide and HyperCard. He received his M.S. from the MIT Media Lab, where he designed and developed an adaptive, personalized audio news guide. He holds nine patents, which include design work on software and consumer electronics.
Photo of Scott Hirsch

Scott Hirsch is an independent consultant specializing in project finance and development processes and the lead author of Return on Investment of User Experience Design: Case Studies in Business Analysis and Project Valuation (January 2004), a collaborative study sponsored by Adaptive Path and researchers from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Scott's recent clients include Google, Wells Fargo, Weight Watchers, and Network Associates.

Scott helps businesses understand and measure the value of their on-line user experience by examining their entire web development process with an emphasis on project selection, financing, evaluation, and accountability. This analysis provides clients with project-success criteria and financial metrics designed to capture valuable user experience data and prioritize future web development projects.

During his graduate studies, Scott extensively researched emerging techniques for using financial information analysis to value product design and development processes. Scott has an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a double BA in English and Geology from the University of Virginia.