UX training for new employees

Noémie Lemaitre — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:53:17 +0000

At the beginning of September we got a few new colleagues, and I took the opportunity to organize a UX training for them. Some coworkers work remotely or in different countries and I don’t get to meet them often after their training at the company’s head quarters. That’s why it’s important for me to raise UX awareness as soon as possible.

Paper prototypes, low-fi and high-fi samples were pasted on the walls. Books, personas, surveys and other deliverables laid on the table.

Lengthy vocabulary explanations are usually the part to begin with, especially when talking about mostly unknown concepts, but let’s face it: it’s boring to listen at. So I began the training with an exercise.

My trainees got some time to figure out on their own what to do in case of a web application crash. Did they want to restart the app? To provide an error message?
They presented their concepts to the audience afterwards, explaining why they choose a specific solution. They came up with nice ideas, e.g. “It’s not an error, we’re just currently updating”!

According to their professional background, they focused on providing technical details about the crash and steps to check the browser’s health (developers), or on the Support team’s reachability and the system feedback’s wording (consultants). Some formulated their ideas with words, others drew the interactions. We discussed the pros and cons, and met a lot of aspects that also play a role in the design process (technology knowledge, expert users, multilanguage support, etc.)

At the end of the exercise the brains were ready to convert the information – about UX in general and UX within the company, visualized with a presentation – into their own way of thinking and with the colors of their own experiences. And “experience” is what it’s all about, right?

Presentation about User Experience

Noémie Lemaitre — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:08:33 +0000

My company offers the possibility to organize what we call a “Lunch & Learn”. It’s like a brown bag session, except that the company sponsors the food. It always takes place during lunchtime and one of us picks a topic he’d like to talk about while the attendees are eating. The subject range varies from technology to business processes, from in-depth coding details to software overview.

So I hold a presentation about our User Experience department and its work. I explained what UX is and what responsibilities and activities are related to it. I spoke about the UX workflow in the development team and the role of the UX Designer (me) in the making of our new platform. We looked at samples of personas, task flows, use cases and acceptance criteria in detail. Finally I reported about the training “Designing complex applications and websites” at the Usability Week in Berlin last week, and what I learnt from the cool sessions with Lynn Pausic. My colleagues came up with interesting questions, e.g. “How many developers can be kept busy by one UX professional?”.
I chose to display some real work on the walls to make the experience more practical. There were documents used in the daily work like design concepts drawn on paper, low-fi interaction design sheets, or full-grown specifications.

Developing the web » presentation

UX training for new employees

Presentation about User Experience