Onboarding Yourself

UX teams are generally massively underfunded, and understaffed. Most I see or work with have a tiny team of designers feeding dozens or hundreds of developers. Many are alone, the only designer fighting the good fight for user-centric design, and data-driven product development.

After some questions lately on how to start your job when not joining a large and well-organized team, I wrote up my tips on carving out a space for your work, and creating the right environment for design-centric product development. There are some special notes on mobile issues, or how to move your existing team from traditional desktop digital into the mobile space as well:

Start before you get hired

Ask questions during the interview process, when people are pretty chatty and you already have them on the phone. Find the size of the organization, the structure and location, and the plan for when they all come back to the office. Find out exactly who you’ll work for, in what department, and what that means; if all your deliverables are to another department, what influence does that have on your work. Who does build what you design, and do they exist already? What do they think your role is? Make sure it matches your conception, and you don’t end up being a UI only person or not having any power to improve products.

Understand Where You Work

Whether as part of the hiring process or right after you start your new job, you can begin gathering up documents about how the organization and your department work. Find share drives and online workspaces, document repositories, and the useful bits of the corporate intranet. Find the brand resources, and get access, and save everything that seems boring like org charts, training documents, and project Powerpoint decks.

Become a Student of the Organization

Take classes and attend meetings, forums, and lunch-and-learns. If they offer classes in industry technology, visits and tours of the factory or store, take them up on it. Did your CEO write a book, or get interviewed in a magazine? Read it.

Take-Your-Designer-to-Work

Tag along with co-workers, or or the people they manage as they do their work. This is especially helpful if they visit customers, the factory, the retail store, or provide service for your products. But it can be just as good to sit in the back of a room and listen in on meetings they attend, see what they discuss, and how the organization makes decisions.

Listen to Customer Complaints

The disclaimer “All our calls are monitored for quality assurance” means there is a way for you to listen in to the calls, so do that to get the voice of the customer right from your desk.

Observe Real Customers

Don’t take anyone’s word for what customers want. Observe them yourself. You’ll likely receive survey data, voice of the customer information, or other reports, but read their methodology and approach with a jaundiced eye, especially if the company had no UX or usability team before you.

Remember we barely care what people say, but really care only what actual users do with our products. Get out in the field and see real customers using your products in their day-to-day life. For an introduction to doing research in the field, read my column “Succeeding with Field Usability Testing and Lean Ethnography.” Yes, doing this sort of research remotely is harder, but it is possible.

Absorb Analytics

Find out who the analytics person is, and make friends. Start by just getting on the distribution list for the weekly reports, and move to having access so you can run your own reports to try to get top level answers to your questions.

Use Heuristics and Obtain Accounts and Devices

One of the best ways to get a glimpse into the organization’s products is to use them. But don’t just poke around—and don’t start by having someone walk you through it. Instead, perform an expert review or heuristic evaluation. Write down every issue and, even if you never share your findings, you’ll have a baseline understanding of them.

It is often inexplicably difficult to get test accounts, but they are also often disappointingly unrealistic. If possible and relevant, get your own account, go through the signup process and bill payment and actually use it.

And don’t forget to set aside device bias and Build a Mobile-Device Lab! instead of relying on what’s in your pocket.

Find Out Who Your Consumers Are

Who is absorbing the deliverables you create and how do they use them. Talk to them about process, what they expect, when and how you should deliver it.

Read More

Getting hired is just the first step. To be successful—and most of all happy—in many cases, you’ll be able to define the scope of your job and help improve the organization and the products you work on. Read the whole article at UXmatters.

https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2021/03/onboarding-yourself.php