This article had been sitting in my drafts for four years, completely forgotten until I stumbled upon it today and decided to publish it. Why not share the journey?
Recently, driven by my growing interest in UX Design and supported by my employer, I attended a virtual UX conference hosted by the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g). This conference reignited my passion to integrate UX into my daily work. Up until now, I worked as a software developer professionally and delved into UX design for personal projects. The conference made me realize the importance of user-centered design in product development and taught me ways to introduce UX design processes within my team.
I’d like to share some of my learnings and experiments with you. But first, let me briefly describe the courses I attended.
Generating Big Ideas with Design Thinking:
This course introduced the Design Thinking process through real-life examples, emphasizing the importance of identifying the root cause of a problem before jumping to solutions.
Facilitating UX Workshops:
This course focused on understanding different types of UX workshops and how to effectively plan and conduct them.
Being a UX Leader: Essential Skills for Any UX Practitioner:
My favorite course of the lot, it explained the various roles UX professionals might take on and motivated me to integrate UX within my team.
Assessing UX Designs Using Proven Principles:
This course covered different UX methods for analyzing interfaces, especially when user testing is difficult to arrange.
Lean UX and Agile:
Since my team follows Agile Scrum methodologies, this course was particularly beneficial. It explained how UX and Agile can work together seamlessly.
Each course offered valuable insights, and I was eager to bring these learnings into my work.
Key Takeaways and Implementation in Our Work Procedure
A Common Understanding About the Need for UX Design:
I created a short presentation to introduce my scrum team to user experience design and its importance in product development. I emphasized the need to get user feedback on designs as early as possible instead of waiting until features are fully developed. By applying what I learned at the conference to our project, I made the concept more relatable for my teammates.
Lean UX over Design Thinking Approach:
Design Thinking is a detailed, iterative process, while Lean UX offers a faster, less resource-intensive approach. Given that UX was new to my team, I opted for Lean UX to show high-impact results quickly and align smoothly with our sprint-by-sprint workflow.
Think About ‘Why’:
Since our product is for internal use, our users are easy to reach. Initially, the product owner and users suggested new features, which we, as developers, implemented. However, we often focused on ‘what’ and ‘how’ without questioning ‘why’ users wanted certain features. The conference highlighted the importance of understanding the underlying concerns and current workflows, which I brought back to my team.
Start Small:
Introducing changes in a large company with established procedures can be challenging. Our agile team had standard practices, and introducing UX in its entirety would have been daunting. From the conference advice, we decided to start small. We opted to tackle one user story using a user-centered approach of research, prototyping, testing, and iterating as needed.
Four years later, I’m still deeply involved in UX and loving it. I’d love to hear how you ventured into UX, especially if you took a non-traditional path.