Across my journey at Booking.com, I have provided substantial support to the UX community, by moderating sessions, buildng/sharing knowledge, applying trainings and making it stronger.
Design Critique
Alongside 2 other designers, I have organized series of Track Labs, enabling people from different roles to participate on a critique session on specific topic and design proposals.
This is improved the feedback culture on my department, making colleagues feel more comfortable about sharing their work earlier in the process. It also helped them focusing on real user problems instead of purely how it’s visually represented.
User testing training
After collaborating with User Researchers on my track running user tests, they started recommending designers and PO’s to come to me and ask for help when they are overloaded or out of the office.
Testing the usability of a product in advance is important to reduce the risk of:
∙ Spending time working on the wrong concept.
∙ Experimenting with features users can’t find/interact with.
∙ Dismissing good concepts that didn’t work because of usability issues.
However, user research had been raised as one of the most lacking skills in the design community.
By having the training in place, we enable more designers to:
∙ Know how to run user tests
∙ Collect feedback quicker using usertesting.com platform
∙ Scale research practices effectively.
This is really important, considering not all tracks have dedicated researcher and on design Skills calibration, Qualitative Research was one of the biggest debts on our community. That’s why we also connected with designer on Onboarding to inform about the initiative and try to make it part of the onboarding set of trainings for new hires.
Another highlight is the fact that many designers have conflicts on bringing their POs onboard with user testing and qualitative research. So we decided to also have a module focused on raising awareness to POs and to show them how they can collaborate with their designers on it.
This is a great case of improving the collaboration between Designers, Researchers and PO’s.
With this in mind, I’ve identified an opportunity to create the training around this topic and connected with researchers responsible for user testing to propose a collaboration on that. Coincidentally, they already had similar plans and were looking for designers willing to help.
After some pilot sessions, we got enough feedback from the participants (POs, Designers and Copywritters) to iterate on the training content, methodology and scale. This led us to split the training into 3 half day parts:
∙ We managed to have big part of the UX community trained by the end of 2018. Growing to 10 facilitators as well, to keep up with the growth of the sessions
∙ As designers become more independent from researchers, teams now can evaluate sooner and more often:
∙ how a product idea impacts on user behaviour;
∙ if a feature/change is solving or not a customer pain;
∙ if it is satisfying to business.
∙ Designers can iterate on their designs to improve usability before going to the experimentation stage.
∙ Better experimentation
∙ Career development for designers
The training managed to double the numbers of tests using the usertesting.com platform comparing to the previous year, and the quality of scripts also improved – consequently its results.
Safe Environment & Culture
Early 2020 together with other design leaders on my department we identified the oportunity to improve aspects of Safe environment & culture.
The Safe Environment & Culture working group set out to foster an inclusive and positive atmosphere so that we can achieve more together. The group focused on:
∙ Helping the community understand their own strengths, motivations, and weaknesses so that they can help each other.
∙ Building relationships and trust within the community to encourage collaboration.
Before COVID, our group created a template for the UXers to fill out so that they can get to know each other better on a personal and professional level. On the personal level, we organised an event where we learned more about what people like to do, what hobbies they want to start, and random fun facts. On the professional level, the plan was to use this information to create a mentorship program. Moreover, a Development and Learning group has been using it to understand what people want to learn more about.
Ever since COVID, the efforts of the group have been even more meaningful and impactful. We all know how important it is to stay connected while working from home so this group created a safe space where we could do exactly that. We posted daily challenges which gave the community an insight into people’s lives and personalities, and set up a pen pal program where you’d receive a nice surprising and creative note from someone in the community in your mailbox.
However, it’s not only fun and games. We also organised an Anxiety Party, which gave us a safe space to voluntarily and anonymously share what we are currently anxious or concerned about. Writing these down can be cathartic and can lift the pressure off your shoulders a bit. Reading the anxieties of others can be reassuring that others have either similar or different concerns at the moment.
