Facilitating workshops & exercises during DesignOps to encourage a user-centered and research focused mindset.
Role: Design Lead
I held regular team workshops with the design team in FigJam and Miro to advocate the value of UX research and methods for doing UX work. The goal of these sessions was to encourage designers to be advocates and design with a user-centered mindset when creating games, stories and advertisements on the platform.
It was important to establish a common language, and promote a culture of user-centered design by planning regular sessions. If we want to do more research we also need an understanding of how to conduct research, interpret the data and communicate those insights to stakeholders to work on optimisations.
Showing the value of UX research through a fun exercise.
I wanted to start the first session with a fun exercise. Something engaging my team could participate in to get them in the right mood and quickly help them understand the impact of just a little bit of UX research. To make this exercise more fun, since everything was remote, I decided to do the exercise in FigJam. First I assigned everyone a chocolate without asking what they liked or what their preferences were (* assumption alert * ). Next, it was time for an interactive session and I asked if everyone was happy with their assigned chocolate, if not they could now bargain and trade their preference with each other, by actively communicating with each other until everyone was satisfied with their chosen chocolate. It was a really fun session!
Before - Assigned chocolates
After - Traded tony chocoloneys
Explaining why research can make a difference.
Making assumptions about chocolate is just as harmful as making assumptions about user behaviour, preferences and the features to build next, therefore I explained through this simple exercise what the impact can be if we don’t engage in research, and what the value will be if we do by understanding and building empathy for users to make better decisions.
Introducing the basic rules of user research.
To better onboard the team into UX research, I introduced them to a few basic rules in user research and presented some key take aways.
The importance of formulating a steady hypothesis.
Next topic I covered was the importance of a well defined hypothesis in our experiments. When it comes to testing various elements or user behaviour it’s important to know how to formulate a steady hypothesis. The better the hypothesis is defined the more chance the experiment or A/B test will have significance.
After a few sessions more focused on theory, it was also important to put that into practise. I set up a workshop where we would practise creating hypothesis for existing use cases and campaigns.
Introducing the team to various research methods.
User research is made up of many varying methods, techniques and activities. Therefore, it can be daunting on where to start or ask the right questions. Therefore I provided a few tips, tools and methods to use quantitative and qualitative methods and more importantly when to use those methods.
UX principles to consider throughout the design process.
Next to research, it’s important to consider UX principles. Applying this principles involves thinking carefully about the way in which users will interact with our product, and the most common tasks they will use it for, and keeping these key concerns in mind throughout the design process was the goal of this session.
Learnings & result.
To educate the team on this aspect was not only fun to do, it was also a great opportunity for me as well to be able to share this knowledge with the team and contribute to UX maturity. It was great to see the team picking this up so well and put in the effort to integrate this into their way of thinking, but also for me to learn how to bring forward that knowledge, do more presenting, putting it together in a way that is engaging, work together with UXR team. It brought our teams together in a way that was fruitful for the future.