UX Workshops and User Engagement
Ashley facilitates a custom heuristic evaluation UX workshop activity.
“As I lead designer, I find joy in exercising my diverse skillsets to solve user experience, visual design, and team process challenges.”
Planning
Planning is critical when it comes to preparing for user engagement events. As part of my UX skillset, I’ve planned for multiple different kinds of user engagements including in-person multiple-day workshops, virtual activity-based engagements, individual user testing events, and variations within that spectrum. Identifying target user personas, key objectives, and logistical factors drives the determination of engagement format and design thinking activities.
A warfighter asks Ashley questions about a user interface.
Warfighters working together to complete a UX workshop activity.
Facilitating
Facilitation is the method of bringing the plan into action. As a facilitator, I focus on providing clear background context and direction, ensuring that all participants feel encouraged to participate, think critically, and share their ideas, and maintaining a timely forward progression.
Ashley identifies areas of consensus on a whiteboard to conclude a UX workshop activity.
Warfighters review the sticky notes posted-up during a UX workshop activity.
Analyzing and Reporting
Internalizing gathered information, communicating results, and recommending UI/UX actions after conducting a user engagement is critical to the design process and increasing product value. After each warfighter engagement, I revisit and become deeply familiar with the information gathered, analyze it to identify themes, and derive key insights. It is an important part of my process and design team strategy to create historical records that can be shared with both internal team members and external parties. By maintaining documentation vigilance, the team’s current and future members can easily identify and recommend change based upon repeated requests that come from different users and different engagements over time that would otherwise be missed.