Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work
Summary
All of us work as part of something bigger, and we have a set of processes that allow us to make sense of our day-to-day work and its value context. What happens when you need to quickly grow and change, how to you understand those processes? How do you grow your understanding, internally, to improve your teams? First things first, you have to understand the processes and experiences that are going on right now. That takes research. So, let’s get meta.
Key Insights
-
•
Applying user-centered research techniques internally helps understand and improve team experiences effectively.
-
•
Diary studies combined with contextual interviews reveal rich insights into daily work challenges during team growth phases.
-
•
Internal personas for roles like product managers and Scrum Masters clarify responsibilities and pain points.
-
•
Service blueprints expose communication gaps and broken handoffs between internal and contractor teams.
-
•
Using scripts during interviews ensures consistent data collection and helps make participants comfortable.
-
•
Sharing service maps publicly invites team corrections and fosters transparency and ownership.
-
•
Defining skills gaps based on internal research allows recruiters to find better hires tailored to actual team needs.
-
•
Informal team rituals and ongoing communication across locations strengthen bonds and create a supportive work family.
-
•
Many organizations overlook researching their own internal users (employees) in favor of external customers.
-
•
Embedding empathetic conversations into weekly routines yields ongoing team insights and improves processes like onboarding.
Notable Quotes
"Are you really doing user centered teamwork when you're thinking about growing a team?"
"Talking to the people that I work with about the experience of doing their job in order to improve their job experience is probably the most overlooked skill set that we have."
"Do you have personas for the people that work for you? Do you use them to help define how your processes work?"
"You need to make sure that they’re comfortable and you need to do it with a script and representative users of your team."
"I do this in public, put this on a wall where you can test it so people can come and say, that is not right."
"Use these tools to define who you are going to hire next and what gaps those hires need to fill."
"The answers that they gave you are the questions you need to ask people you interview."
"Diary studies are fantastic when you're looking at growing a team and onboarding new people."
"The true problem was that two companies weren’t communicating, it had nothing to do with the UX team itself."
"We created a family by interacting with each other and sharing our problems with work and trying to solve them together."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"We have never played together before and never rehearsed, yet we pulled off a great rendition spontaneously."
Jim KalbachJazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration
November 6, 2017
"Writing a book is awful in terms of time, sweat, and time away from your loved ones, but it’s an amazing gift to dig deep into something you care about."
Louis RosenfeldCoffee with Lou: Should You Write a (UX) Book?
March 7, 2024
"Building influence has been such a challenging part of growing in my own career. It takes a lot of communication and understanding others’ goals."
Catt Small Micah Bennett Brian Carr Jessica HarlleeWhat's Next for ICs: Exploring Staff and Principal Designer Roles
February 22, 2024
"I think we as UX researchers are uniquely positioned to forge bonds with data teams because of our storytelling and cross-functional work."
Marieke McCloskeyUser Science: Product Analytics & User Research
March 11, 2021
"Processing limits and licensing terms currently restrict how much video and audio these AI tools can handle."
Llewyn Paine[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings
June 5, 2024
"If you cannot remove a treatment, it may not be a true cause."
Joshua NobleCasual Inference
October 6, 2023
"If the scale delivers bad news, we jump on and off to check; if it delivers good news, we accept it quickly."
Sara LogelYour Colleagues are Your Users Too
March 29, 2023
"Sponsor sessions may require registration by email to prevent Zoom bombings and protect session integrity."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldWelcome
January 8, 2024
"If you have to learn a workaround, you want to learn it once and reuse it again and again."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
June 7, 2023
