The trainers Susanna Lindkvist and Nina Boljang took turns helping us through the first half of the Visma UX Value Loop and the phases Understand, Explore and Prototype. Each day of the training offered different themes based on the phases. Throughout the training, I collaborated with my colleague Cecilia Lööv who works as a Business analyst. It was really good to pair up and make use of our different perspectives.
On day one we learned about the basics of UX and the importance of understanding our users. We learned about active and reflective listening and then got hands on experience with remote field studies where we studied users doing selected tasks. This was something I had never done before and it blew my mind. With just 3 to 5 users we could find maybe 60 to 80% of the problems in our product. How useful wouldn’t it be to have this method implemented in my team?
The biggest takeaway from all of this is that we can never correctly guess what our users think and do, and how they will choose to perform their tasks.
Day two was all about visualising ideas. We learned about ideation and how to create concepts, different types of prototyping, how to figure out if we are solving the right problem and the importance of failing early and cheaply. We made good use of the collaboration tool Mural to collect our thoughts and findings from the interviews we held the day before. We started big and then narrowed it down to a few focus areas. Then we used our creativity to make a simple prototype.
On day three we learned about usability testing and how to prepare and perform a user test without asking leading questions. We then had new interviews with our users where they tested and commented on our prototype. The biggest takeaway from all of this is that we can never correctly guess what our users think and do, and how they will choose to perform their tasks. I can safely say that we learned a lot. Some iteration of this process and our prototype would have been the best!
In conclusion, I just want to say that if you work with coding, then this is one of the best things you can learn. So keep your fingers crossed that your manager agrees and lets you take the time – it’s worth it!
