Educating the Wider Team
Recently my department has had a restructure, which has bought together eight centres of excellence to create a large Customer Experience department.
It is a big change for us, but one that I think is very exciting and hopefully will allow us to really make a difference for our customers.
However this change means that I now have a lot of new colleagues to educate about UX research. What it is, why we do it and what the process is.
I started by putting up invites to research sessions in the group chat, but I have realised that if you do not already know what UX research is then you might not bother to make the time to join me for live sessions.
So I have started to write articles for the department newsletter. This is good but only if people engage with it.
I also run a small meeting which I use to report back to the product managers each month and talk to them about their expected workload and how I can support them. With all the changes I am going to be inviting more people from some of the new departments we now work with to this meeting.
And lastly, because I had been posting invites in the group chat I was invited to present my findings back in the group weekly meeting. This was a great way to introduce everyone to what I do and give a flavour of the findings without going through the whole report.
I am hoping I can do more of these as we go.
Although this is what I am doing now, I am always on the look out for other ways to pass on my knowledge so I may well add to this list in the future.
When I first came across UX research I was told that actual research is only a tiny part of the job and most of your time is spent educating people around what and why we do research.
It is only now that I find for myself that this is very true.