Enterprise UX & UI Design Boot Camp

Course Outline

Day 1

• Introduction and kickoff

  • Roadmap and expectations for this course
  • Goals for our UX team
  • Summary of core tenets of UX and user-centered design
    • Focus on understanding end-users
    • Crafting visuals, workflow, content, etc. to support holistic experiences
    • Informing decisions with qualitative and quantitative data
  • Key considerations for practicing UX in a large retail enterprise
    • Acting as an internal agency
    • Navigating silos, politics, and bureaucracy and collaborating with large sets of diverse team members and stakeholders
    • Legacy systems that are difficult/expensive to replace and have technical limitations
    • Integrating complex systems
    • Working as a UX team of one
  • Defining a UX process framework; direction, not dogma
    • EXERCISE: Group discussion of team values/design principles and loose definition of team approach

  Crafting project-specific strategy

  • Planning project kickoff meetings to build trust and set tone for project
    • Asking the right questions; why this change now? What does success look like? Who needs to be involved? Who decides what?
    • Using kickoff to determine desired outcomes and set roles
    • EXERCISE: Practice vision exercise, this vs. that exercise, and filling out UX strategy blueprint
  • Understanding the root of the problem and basing project plan on insight
    • Stakeholder interviews and user interviews
      • Interview best practices re 5 whys, staying quiet, observe
      • Special considerations for talking to internal users
      • Focus on uncovering and prioritizing needs across stakeholders and users
      • Gaining access to internal users
      • Tying together stakeholder/business needs and user needs into a plan
    • EXERCISE: Practice conducting interviews, including interview preparation, facilitation and analysis
  • Planning project and meeting cadence; when will you check in, how will you prioritize work, how will you share data, how will you incorporate feedback, what are the expectations for stakeholders

  Day 2

  Choosing research approach

  • Types of research
    • Qualitative vs. quantitative, behavioral and attitudinal, exploration vs. evaluation
  • Focusing on determining goals of research and necessary data
  • Considering timeline, stage of a project, and key open questions
  • Prioritizing open questions
    • Discussion of prioritization models, including RICE, Feature shopping, Risk matrices
    • EXERCISE: Rank same set of open questions across different prioritization models

  Rapid iteration considerations

  • Turning research insights into concepts
    • Considering different channels and contexts
    • Analyzing existing solutions, customization, and from-scratch solutions
    • EXERCISE: workshop around solution exploration and value/risk mapping
  • Crafting experiment plans to answer key questions
    • EXERCISE: Crafting hypotheses and choosing experiment type
  • Choosing prototype fidelity
    • Pros/cons of different levels of prototype fidelity; concept vs. interaction detail
    • Doing the least amount of work to answer open question
    • Considerations for working with existing systems/set visual look
    • EXERCISE: 6 up 1 up sketching

   

  Day 3

  Mobile prototype deep dive

  • When to go mobile and why?
  • Responsive or native apps
  • Focus on streamlined content and simplified flow
    • Choosing core functions and navigational elements
    • Displaying content effectively
    • Inputs and selectors
    • Notifications
  • EXERCISE: Rapid mobile workflow definition and prototyping exercises – tool agnostic, focused on first creating flows, then defining core pieces of information, then layout.

   

  Rapid feedback collection and integration

  • Planning iterative feedback sessions with teams and stakeholders
  • Cadence for sharing work and integrating feedback
  • Planning and running rapid usability sessions
    • Bake a cake method
    • Hallway testing
  • Quickly analyzing data as full teams and learning together
    • EXERCISE: Prototype usability test. Includes coming up with the script, practice running sessions with peers, co-collecting notes and learning together analysis
  • Including team members in debrief and solution ideation sessions
  • Managing continual insight
    • Collecting and understanding ongoing metrics
    • Framework for organizing and categorizing ongoing research and findings
    • Discussing research outcomes and UX plans during retrospectives/planning sessions

   

  Day 4

  Collaboration within the UX team

  • Finding ways to pair as sole UXer for a project
    • Defining strengths and weaknesses – the T or broken comb model
    • Finding complementary partners to work with and learn from
    • Structured growth – picking one item to learn each spring
  • Design and research review cadence and best practices
  • EXERCISE: Team description of necessary skills across a team. Individual activity to rank themselves on each of those items and identification of one mentor/mentee on a team.

   

  Collaborating across teams, increasing buy-in and influence

  • Building empathy and trust across stakeholders of all kinds
    • Including stakeholders throughout the entire process
    • Using “Yes, And” to acknowledge existing knowledge
    • Prioritize transparency and over-communicate
      • End each checkpoint with a 1-minute test (3 questions)
    • Internal PR
      • Publicize in progress work
      • Over-publicize past successes
      • Have open UX sessions
      • Frame your work
    • Align UX goals with business needs and influence decisions
      • Tying UX work to dollars and numbers
        • Understand the costs of low efficiency, high need for training and support, shifting priorities that aren’t based on real feedback
      • Make stakeholders look good
        • Help things be cheaper, faster, and better
        • Rely on non-arguable data
      • EXERCISE: Make an internal case study.