It’s just over a year since we trialled our first user experience training package. We’ve run the sessions 4 times now, receiving excellent feedback from attendees and refining the provision each time to better meet staff needs.

In this post I’ll cover what the training consists of, and why I believe it’s a critical element of the University delivering better, more user-centric services and software. I’ll also provide a flavour of what participants have been saying and how we’ve improved things over the year.

• Why we need UX training
• About the course and its sessions
• Feedback to date
  • Session ratings
  • Participant quotes

Why we need UX training

I believe that our users’ experience is everybody’s responsibility. Having a UX professional is a great addition to a project team, but it will not necessarily guarantee the project will deliver a useful, usable and desirable product or service.

Expertise on the project team is obviously a huge benefit, but it’s also about a mindset across the team and stakeholders; it’s about ways of working together.

This training exposes the project team to key techniques used by a UX research and design practitioner, and gives them the knowledge and experience to undertake them themselves.

When project managers, business analysts, designers, developers and subject matter experts better understand what the UX professional is doing, they can better contribute to user-centered research and design work and take on responsibilities themselves when their project doesn’t have a designated UX lead.

UX in an immature organisation today is similar to how we dealt with word processing 25+ years ago. Image source: Flickr

I liken UX today to how businesses dealt with (what we now call) word processing in the pre-personal computer days. Back in the 1980s and earlier, there were different professional disciplines working together in businesses but when they wanted a letter they would take their requirements to the typing pool or the specialist in their team. And the specialist task of typing would get done. Imagine that today. Typing is so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even appear on your job description even though it’s fundamental to almost every office job.

The same needs to happen for user experience research and design. It needs to be ubiquitous too. That doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t have UX professionals. There will always be new and different challenges; complicated edge cases of research and design. There will always be the projects that are too big, too expensive, too important to risk errors occurring. We will always need the UX equivalent of the 300 words per minute, super-efficient, super-accurate, super-reliable secretary.

It’s like Jakob Nielsen said in his 2009 article, ‘Anybody can do usability’:

Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.

Jakob Nielsen

About the course

Our UX and Design Thinking training is 3 days, made up of six 3-hour modules.

All sessions can be run as stand-alone half day courses, but have been designed to run in sequence with each technique and practical exercise contributing to the next.

• Usability testing
• Collaborative usability testing review
• Workshop collaboration essentials
• Persona development
• Experience mapping
• Prototyping concepts

Find out about each half-day course on the UX Service website

Feedback to date

Some parts of this training are very mature; I’ve been delivering them for over 10 years. But it was only last year that I pulled them together with some new elements to create a coherent package.

We ran our first pilot of the training for staff at the University of Aberdeen in autumn 2016. Following on from this our first run through with Edinburgh staff took place just before Christmas, and the latest in-house group participated over summer and winter 2017. Most recently, I visited the University of Essex to deliver the sessions.

Aberdeen UX training write up: Helping Aberdeen University become more user focused

Essex UX training write up: The only way is user centred

Course ratings

In total, almost 70 staff have taken part with 45 completing feedback forms.

Average feedback scores have been excellent. For each session we ask participants to rate:

• Usefulness of the session overall
• Quality of the presentations
• Usefulness of the activities
• Expertise of the trainer

In all categories, for all sessions, the lowest average score was 1.69 and the median was 1.15 (where 1 is most positive and 5 least positive).

What attendees said

The following quotes are from staff who attended sessions at the University of Edinburgh.

Worshopping

“I’ve been pinching ideas from your blog for ages and running workshops on that basis, so fantastic to get practical teaching to learn how to do this in depth”

“The workshop techniques were excellent. I spent time engaging in my group, but at the same time thinking how I could implement them in my business area.”

Usability testing

“I will hopefully be reinvigorating my project board with these techniques. They are behind the process but could be even more involved.”

“Simple, relevant exercises which make sense of how to put the methodology into practice in the workplace.”

Personas

“I will definitely be putting this into practice to focus colleagues on the needs of users…”

“The practical elements [of prototype-persona creation] were fun and informative…”

Mapping

“Nice mixture of seminar and solo/group work”

“I found it useful to interview people on their experiences and can see how useful this would be for finding goals, pain points etc”

“Great activities; really enjoyable as well as useful for learning…”

Prototyping

“The iterative collaborative sketching technique was really useful.”

“The session gave me loads of useful information and resources”

UPDATE: Video interviews with training attendees

What we’ve improved

Over the course of delivering the sessions, we’ve listened to feedback both during and after the sessions, and refined things to make the programme of sessions even more relevant and useful.

These are the key things we’ve evolved based on feedback and observation:

• Made more time for hands-on practice of usability testing, by shortening seminar segments and refining the collaborative review session.
• Developed a new scenario for the practical activities that continues through the second and third days. Now our workshopping activities lead directly into persona creation, we use these to support experience mapping exercises and finally pick an identified pain point from the mapping to focus on in the prototyping exercises.
• Provided a better overview of the whole user-centered design process and where the techniques we practice fit in, as well as aligning with complimentary online materials available to Edinburgh staff on Lynda.com.

Read more about the UX training resources available on Lynda.com

Interested in our UX and Design Thinking training?

Sessions are run regularly for Edinburgh staff. Join the UX mailing list to receive notifications of available dates.

Join the University of Edinburgh UX mailing list (EASE login required)

If you’re interested in all or parts of the training just for your team or business unit, get in touch.

All sessions can be amended to focus on your specific requirements.

Contact details for Neil Allison, User Experience Manager