Enterprise UX & UI Design Boot Camp

Part 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

Part 2: 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

Part 3: 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

Part 4: 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

Part 5: 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.  

Part 6: 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

Part 7: 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.

Part 8: 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.

This UX and UI course will give you the knowledge and tools needed to become a more effective UX designer, UI designer, product manager, and marketer. This course is beneficial for anyone who is involved in the UX and UI process and journey, including:

• UX designers
• UX architects
• UI designers
• UI architects
• Web designers/architects
• Web developers
• Web masters
• Information architects
• Chief experience officers
• Experience architects
• Graphic designers
• Interaction designers
• Creative directors and managers
• User advocates
• Content strategists
• Account managers
• Marketing managers and specialists
• Programmer/developer

• What key considerations you should take before practicing UX in a large retail enterprise
• How to Focus on understanding end-users
• Craft visuals, workflow, and content to support holistic experiences
• Plan project kickoff meetings to build trust and set the tone for projects
• How to develop an enterprise UX strategy blueprint
• How to choose the right research approach
• How to turn research insights into concepts
• When to go mobile and why