This is not about the "future mobility".
I won't share with you crazy interfaces the user can control with the mind or anything like this.
The reason for this: to build the future we have to fix the present.
I am talking about the trinity legacy here: legacy systems, legacy mindsets, legacy methods.
This is not a talk, this is a conversation.
Through sharing with you an intro to my journey, I want to open the conversation on this topic. I would like to hear from you about your pains, successes, goals, etc.
I have been a designer for more than 15 years. I started by coding and then moved to design tools. I worked in a lot of different setups, countries, structures, statuses, etc.
Three years ago I got really tired when I realised that creating great user experiences was not providing me as much joy. In the same time I was supporting non designers with design practices and this was providing me a fullfilling feeling. This is when I realised design could be an amazing driver of empowerement not only to individuals, to teams and companies as well. Naturally such enlightment called an existential crisis: could I still define myself as a designer?
Looking through my experiences, I decided to not thrive for the comfort of a label but to define a set of rules made clear to anyone working with me:
This is what I need to be happy and I need an environment that allows me to be like this. Even better I need an environment that encourages me to be like this.
In this part you'll read a lot of keywords such as balanced teams, agile, XP, pairing, etc. I am glad that those words are not buzzwords in our office but the core parts of our working culture.
Our Teams articulates themselves around 3 disciplines: product management, product design, and software engineering.
We all working together with a shared understanding and goal. We aim to deliver user and business value through each iteration. To enable us to work this way we are supported along the way by our leadership who is there to hear us but not to tell us what to do. Other key roles are here to help staying focus and not being blocked by things such as legal requirements, office life, hardware, technical choices. Therefore we also have a lawyer, a team of ambassadors, a happiness team, a team of office ops, and a SRE team.
We work with a flavour of Agile called XP (Extreme Programming). It helps us to focus on delivering great software quality. In term of practices, it translates itself by cross-disciplines pairing (yes even designers pair with engineers), small regular releases, test-driven development.
We work the Lean way. It helps us to focus on fast and regular user and business value delivery. It means that each team plans together, designs ahead, validates ideas with real users early on, builds each feature in-house, and releases regularly in small increments.
We craft MVP and we use design thinking methods. It helps us to build the right thing and to be confident. We use user-centric design, MVP thinking (building the malliest thing that can deliver the biggest value), and we try to avoid building waste.
Here is what you need to enable UX in your team
For my part I decided to focus on Opportunities and Knowledge sharing as it was the 2 weak points I identified.
So far the best way to share a practice and to help your pair into getting a lot of insights and of self-confidence. The issue is the 1:1 scale of it.
Giving presentations on an Office level works great to share theorical knowledge. Sadly it performs poorly to grow self-confidence and it has the effect on some people to see you as a Great Guru of the Domain, which is counter productive (and goes against rule #2 of my set of drivers).
I am very biased towards CoP: I love them! As our working style grants us the pleasure of having very little amount of meeting in a week (usually max. 4h) it is very hard to convince people to join a meeting without specific agenda every 2 weeks. It worked well with PM, it failed with designers.
Providing workshop on an Office level is pretty fun and generates a lot of empathy and curiosity. Sadly it is also a lot of effort to set it up, to plan it, and to keep the momentum going towards additional sessions.
Writing articles is an effective way to share knowledge. However it has 2 risks: first it is a solution waiting for a potential audience to have problem, and it can be perceived as a dogma and scare some potential new practionners to try things their own way. Also it is a cold way of sharing knowledge and it is not fitting with our working culture.
This is the next thing I want to try in the Lab :)
Start by accepting you can't fix everything. You might actually just fix very little and you have to kind towards yourself.
This is a constant need. It is also a sign that you are listening to the signals sent by your audience.
In the Lab we have a strong feedback culture so it is something we ask naturally for. We always say that negative feedback (when provided with kindness) is a gift because it is an amazing opportunity to improve. However, don't dismiss positive feedback, it feels good to receive compliments when walking people out of their comfort zone.
If I give you my favorite pen I have to accept the idea that you won't draw like me. It is hard sometimes but this is the only way we can be comfortable sharing with others.
This has been the hardest thing for me. As a very experienced designer I can achieve so much in one day. As a very experienced designer who focuses on sharing practices across teams I am much slower, much subject to doubt, much less like a tornado.
Making yourself available doesn't mean that you have to jump to the rescue of anyone who needs you. You have to be realistic about the time you have at hand, towards yourself, towards your team (especially your pair), and towards people who might need you. Transparency is always a good thing in this case.
Best advice ever given to me by my dear friend Ray
Get ready to very often remind talented people that they should be confident, they will eventually find out the answers they need
It can be striking but talented people taken outside of their comfort zone can really doubt themselves and their abilities. Keep it in mind and remind them often how great they are and that everything will be alright, even though it is absolutely obvious to you :)