UX lunches and why you should start one!

Are your responsible or eager to grow the design presence, knowledge and understanding in your the company. Are you trying to grow design support and the understanding for user centered project development?

UX lunches are a great opportunity to bond with the design team, grow interested in others and add a design string to your companies DNA.

Together with two of my colleagues, I organise our monthly UX lunch at Schibsted (in Oslo). Where we get our colleagues from the different companies together to share their experiences like project cases, new methods, conference learnings and more. We aim to get designers and those interested to grow their UX knowledge, broaden their skill set and share our design DNA. We also aim to challenge our designers on expanding their secondary knowledge of copywriting, programming, business development and more.

How to get started

1. Get a partner (or two) in crime and have a bi-weekly committee to plan the UX lunches.
2. Organise once every 2nd month is a good way to get started without over doing it, remember you need to work as well ;) .
3. Decide on a format & structure to get started, for us 3 talks of 15 minutes works with a 30 minute mingle works great.
4. Get some budget from you company to provide the lunch, it helps with setting the right mood and lowers the bar for people to join.
5. Collect feedback to understand which topics people want to learn about, who has something interesting to share and what to improve on the format. (We’re using Google forms and Mailchimp for this).

Our learnings (so far)

1. It takes time to get the lunches off the ground. People might be super excited about the idea, but remember they are really busy. Show value by getting the first one of the ground and a snowball effect will follow. Don’t let a small showing get you down, people will start inviting others and soon you will need a bigger room.
2. Define the format I first tried to start a once a week casual meet & greet with like minded people. It worked ok, but.. When we team-up, shared experiences and focused on more structure, having 3 speakers with provided lunch, it really took of.
3. Tweak the format we learned it is better to have one lighting talk less, so each talk could have 15 instead of 10 minutes. We are also considering moving the mingle after the talks so we can discuss them after.
4. Frequency of the lunches are different per group and company, try and find the right balance of need and frequency over time.
5. Allergies are serious, ask around to see if you need to provide allergy ingredient free food, some examples are nut-, gluten- or lactose-free food. You don’t want these people to feel left out.

Wrap up

UX & design lunches can help you grow the design and user focused mentality in the company in a natural fun way. Remember start small and structured and you’ll be fine.

If you have any questions about UX lunches or looking for a speaker, ping me on twitter @usermoments or http://www.robinkleinschiphorst.nl .