Scrappy UX: How To “Start-Up” as the first designer
Starting in the career of user experience means stepping into varying states of the discipline for the teams you join. I’ve joined organizations with established teams as often as those who are looking for a founder to lay the groundwork across an organization. In both scenarios, there’s always been a need for scrappiness getting started on a team. I’ll walk you through some of the techniques I’ve used to get started as a designer using what I often call starter guerilla UX.
One of the first steps often in joining a user experience team is to contextualize and perform research to best understand the needs of the organization you’ve joined. Some may perform exercises like Jobs to Be Done or a context matrix as seen above.
User Experience design teams vary in size and skills depending on the maturity of an organization. With the rise of the discipline and proven success of leveraging methodologies of UX, more and more companies have begun to pivot and invest in understanding the problems their customers face and how their products can solve them. That’s where you as a designer come in.
Meet your stakeholders
When you first join a team, one of the first exercises you’ll want to do is set up one on one meetings with any stakeholders or influencers throughout the business. Ask them all about their role, their goals, their challenges, and their vision moving forward. Most importantly, ask them how they expect to partner with user experience to achieve these goals. This gives you the opportunity to form a relationship and prioritize your efforts based on what themes you may hear from your new colleagues. Most importantly, these may become the peers you invite to participate in research and design exercises moving forward, so it’s crucial to establish communication early.
Connect with Customer Service teams
Once you’ve begun to understand the context from colleagues, it’s time to understand your customers. Reach out to team members who are customer-facing, whether they work in a contact center or customer service role, to get a quick download on the feedback they are receiving. The contact center is the boots-on-the-ground and front of the line when it comes to voice of the customer, and they often have analytics surrounding their service and the feedback gathered by team members. Sometimes you may even be able to access previously recorded calls from trainings.
If possible, set up time to shadow their activities and listen in on conversations between the service team and the customer. This will help you understand what challenges a customer faces and how the team solves them today. When you’ve gathered enough data, this will help you create a service blueprint and even journey maps to help educate team members when it’s time to design solutions.
Another team to consider following is the primary service providers. This can range from a clinical team in healthcare to a teller at a bank in financial services. These are again service team members who will be able to help you understand the process for any customer engagement.
Meet and ask your customers
No one knows your product like your customer does - because they’re using it the most. When possible, set up customer interviews to understand everything about them: what motivated them to start using a product, what problems they face (and actually want solved), their interests and preferences, and so on. You may be able to enlist some ot participant in focus groups or diary studies to understand their day-to-day engagement. This data can be helpful in crafting personas to refer to throughout your design process or long term efforts.
Meeting your customers helps contextualize everything and inform your roadmap. The most excruciating of their pain points may get higher priority, or they may help you uncover new challenges or opportunities to pursue. Once you’ve understood these, make sure to strategize around how to engage their feedback at a regular cadence, whether it is through surveys, studies, or other engagement methodologies.
Benchmark the current experience
Benchmarking is a task that is helpful for new UX teams and may already be established for larger existing teams. With benchmarking, we are looking at the current state of the experience of a product or service and often compare with industry peers. This is often a task that involves multiple team members, but it can help contextualize the present state to better understand the goal forward.
When benchmarking, you can also look to competitors outside of your industry for inspiration. Who does a similar function to you, but better? Look to airlines for concepts such as searching and booking, or real estate for maps. It’s best practice to conduct a basic benchmarking called competitive analysis with projects to gather insights and inspiration for the problem-solving stage.
Establish a learning and communication space
When you’re a solo designer on a team, you may find yourself feeling stretched thin across a variety of projects. One of the most powerful skills you can leverage is evangelizing and educating your colleagues to help with the UX process.
Some of my favorite peers to work alongside that empower UX are my product owners and product analysts. These are the people who act as enablers of your work, and can help with key steps such as gathering analytics and defining key performance indicators for your efforts. Sometimes they like rolling up their sleeves and helping with facilitation of workshops or note taking for user research.
The best way to build up this partnership is through sharing knowledge and creating forums for communication. I’ve set up weekly “huddles” that are open to any team members who are interested in engaging with design and products. We cover everything from the status of ongoing projects, feedback on research and design initiatives, and even learning sessions for specific areas of UX. It’s a great opportunity to keep the team up to date on our efforts and open us up for dialog around the trends we hear about in the tech space. Everyone walks away feeling empowered to do their best work and prepared for what’s next.
Get creative in the tools that you use
Unless you are joining an established team or have a sizeable starting budget (lucky you!!!), you’re often picking and choosing what tools to leverage to complete your tasks. There are a ton of valuable resources out there for the best free tools, so I will just highlight a few of my go-tos when I have little or no budget.
Figma
Easy, free, and a flexible solution, Figma does all that you need to get started. You can quickly deliver low and high fidelity wireframes, and use it as a jumping point for usability testing with its prototype layer. Long term, it may be best to invest in an option like Axure for more intensive prototyping, but Figma’s many plug-ins work as an initial start for a team.
BONUS: Figjam is a free solution to use for your workshops that end up virtual with its easy collaboration tooling.
Microsoft Suite
For all of your Office needs, go to Microsoft. Most teams will have a license, so I always consider this a freebie that helps you manage your documents. Sometimes extended licenses may contain tools like Visio that can help with your workflow mapping, and Forms for simple surveys.
Zoom
Remote moderated usability studies are best done over Zoom. I love this tool because I can share my screen, record the session, and read transcripts after to gather direct quotes from the people I interview. This helps tremendously with quickly delivering case study readouts to stakeholders as well.
The ol’ paper and pencil
Sometimes it’s easiest to grab tactile in-person tools. You can make paper prototypes, use sticky notes for ideation workshops, and dry erase markers for capturing an in-person journey map. There’s something inherently powerful about UX in person, so when possible, leverage your best facilitation skills and draw it out IRL.
There’s so many tips, tools, and tricks to getting started that I could possibly write a whole book on scrappy UX. Maybe someday I will. I’m coining that title for future use, so no one steal it! At any rate, these tips will help you get started as a solo designer whether being the first UX or even joining a team. The key is to practice your foundational UX skills in research, ideation, and storytelling. The rest… well, that’s where you can get a little creative and solution for yourself, starting with these tips.
Do you have other questions? Reach out to me directly and let’s chat.