Leading UCD Education within an Organization

OVERVIEW 

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Opportunity

Elevate was repositioning itself as a UX-centric agency. All employees were involved in moving the company in a new direction, whether by creating a new process, auditing employee jobs, or working on the new brand positioning.

 

Challenge

The repositioning was an exciting opportunity for me and my team. However, after running UX at Elevate for awhile, I knew there were gaps in skills to move from a company that does ux in its process to one that is built around it as a methodology. Also, everyone was excited for change, but many were apprehensive about what it meant to be a "UX-centric agency."

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Solution

Educating all employees with experience and knowledge of UCD methods would make them feel secure that they understood where the management team wanted to take the company. It would also empower them to incorporate it into the company's new direction and within their own roles. 

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I proposed, and then conducted, internal workshops around the high-level ideas of the ucd/hcd process. Due to cost and timing limitations, I leveraged free materials from IDEO to run weekly collaborative workshops.

 

I took an active learning approach to the workshops. Each week focused on a specific topic, i.e. conducting research, developing insights. Readings and videos were assigned ahead of time. We then came together in workshops to discuss the topic further and in-person collaboration. 

 

These workshops covered everything from identifying and narrowing in on the problem to solve, the research further into this problem, synthesizing data, and ideation.