Usability Questions

There are several ways to effectively position a User Experience Team within a corporation. But picking the right location, is more of an art than science.  Historically, User Experience has been positioned in IT or Marketing organizations.  Both of these areas have positive and negative consequences on the growth and trajectory of a User Experience Team.  Although this is a gross over-generalization, corporate user experience teams fall in to two categories based on the targeted users of their deliverable: Outward facing teams (customer focused); and internal facing teams (employee focused).  Of course User Experience Teams may design for both customer and employee audiences simultaneously, but hopefully you get what I am saying.  Another important factor in a discussion on Organizational Positioning is the the complexity of the technical landscape which the User Experience designs.   Strictly speaking, a User Experience Team’s core competency is their design and possibly, display tier coding capability.  Alignment with technical resources, especially when design display tier code on top of  enterprise solutions, is a must in order to make things work on top of a complex technical system architecture. A third factor in the discussion is corporate leadership’s buy-in and commitment to User Experience.  This factor is probably the most important in positioning a team, but often initially overlooked.

So, after figuring out where your User Experience Team falls against these other factors, you might get the sense of how to best position your User Experience team.  But let me warn you… it is not that simple   

What are your experiences?  What have you seen work in your corporation for your User Experience Team?