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Most of the places I’ve worked I’ve been the only official user experience practitioner. Depending on the moment, this could be either great or incredibly frustrating. While I found the autonomy to be empowering there were times I really felt I needed to collaborate with other practitioners in person.

Recently, I had the pleasure of watching Leah Buley’s “How to be a UX Team of One” presentation which addresses this exact subject. I’ve included my notes below the embedded presentation:

Intro

• Leah’s dirty little secret when she was a ux team of one… she often wasn’t confident the design she had come up with was the right solution for the product.
• Just because you’re the sole practitioner it doesn’t mean others don’t have or can’t generate ideas.

Generative design process

• You should start wide and generate a lot of ideas.
• You should then work to refine these ideas toward a design solution.
• Techniques used to generate ideas should be lightweight.

Brainstorm a lot

• Design and brainstorm within good constraints.
• Utilize spectrums, 2×2, grids, and word associations to define your design framework and constraints.
• Keep an inspiration library (she points to the Screen Grab Firefox plugin and iPhoto to help facilitate this).

Assemble an ad-hoc team

• Utilize sketchboards to convey ideas. They can contain: requirements, inspiration sources, strategic ideas, etc. A “mood board for experience design”.
• Conduct and facilitate open design sessions: goal is to generate ideas, include ux practitioners and non-ux practitioners.
• Conduct template-based workshops: design the product box (features & benefits), concept sheet (picture that describes what it’s for, what it does, etc.)
• Design the experience: nouns, verbs, adjectives.

Selling User Experience

• Decorate your space with your design artifacts to encourage feedback from others.
• Don’t hide your ideas.
• If you don’t have walls carry your work around and ask people what they think.
• What it’s really about is “losing the beret”.

Pick the best ideas

• How do you pick the best ideas? You need a “star to sail your ship by”.
• What do you use as your star? Business needs? Why build it if no one wants to use it?
• Are user needs better? If they answer questions.
• Business needs + User needs = Design principles
• Design principle example: make it addictive - encourages everyone to keep coming back even after the initial invitation.

Get started

• Start sketching: Draw five pictures before you lay down any pixels.
• Schedule some workshops: order pizza, get people involved in idea generation process.
• Draft design principles: designers bring empathy + intuition to business.

Why this matters

• Instills confidence in your ideas.
• Generalist vs. specialist.
• Shows you “give a damn”.

I think we should definitely include others in our organizations, regardless of whether they are designers or not, in the official user experience design process. As Leah points out, she often found herself retreating to her cubicle after receiving business requirements to design the perfect solution and she wasn’t always satisfied with her results. This includes relinquishing some of the granular experience design decisions we regularly make over to others. For me, this is definitely an interesting place to be.

Posted in: User Experience Design