Setting Aims
This is a story about User Experience when working with colleagues. It is about how my User Experience work is something that I share with colleagues, and that together drives our work.
User Experience is often the first part of the team to work on the project, and when a full team is assembled UX will have talked to Colleagues, Stakeholders, and People who do or will use the website or app. I've always found it useful to leverage this as a way to help set the scene for the project team as they do come onboard.
I gather the shards from quantitative interviews, and qualitative research, from mapping out User Journeys, from finding pain points, from finding problems, and crystallises those into a vision of what the project team are working towards.
What I gather from this process goes on to define mine and the team's work. The solutions to these problems are what makes my User Experience Design. These solutions become my User Journey Flows and embed into the team's work. They become stories in Agile. They become "As a User I would like to…"
Taking this a step further, solutions gathered from User Experience Interviewing become something more. They become a North Star for the project and for the project team. They guide the team, and Stakeholders, in making decisions which put the user's experience at the heart of our solutions.
When User Experience can point to this North Star of the project, the team can better navigate the work, knowing the priorities which have guided everyone all-along. Disseminating the solutions in a way which is understandable is the initial push in spreading a User Experience culture around a team, and can empower people to make decisions in the context of the creating a great experience for users.
