The LEGO® UX Academy — Evangelizing UX at Enterprise Level
As UX consultants and researchers from the User Experience, Mobile and Portals team in LEGO® Business Technology, we have numerous big and small IT initiatives that need our support. We don’t have the manpower to be as involved in all the initiatives as we would like. We are also facing the challenge of continuously pushing and lifting the UX maturity of the IT organization in LEGO®, while doing regular work in product teams.
But how might we do that, without being preachy?
The Problem
· How do we raise the UX maturity in LEGO® Business Technology and get a more user- and evidence-based approach to software design?
· How do we as UX designers support as many different product teams as possible, at a satisfactory level?
· Our current team structure (something somewhat similar to the Spotify model), can make the UX team seem like outsiders, bezzerwizzers coming from outside and telling other teams how to do their work.
This is where we came up with the initiative that was later named the LEGO® UX Academy. A bottom-up approach to raising the UX maturity level of the IT organization, as well as giving individual product teams the tools to carry out certain user centric design tasks themselves.
UX Partnerships
As a step one, each of our UX’ers were assigned as a UX partner to a director, senior director, or vice president, in Business Technology. The goal of this being regular check-ins and supporting their part of the organization with UX knowledge and hands-on work. My colleague Vasileios has written an article about this specific initiative:
https://medium.com/@xanthopoulosv/lego-partnership-program-ux-mindset-at-scale-a-top-down-approach-8f5a1ce9c61e
Finding our future ambassadors
After each partner had gotten to know their area and the product teams within them, we started looking for individual people in the product teams who had the mindset to think more user centric and had the will to learn.
With the blessing of their leaders, we asked them, if they were interested in us teaching them UX skills and if they would be willing to join our UX academy initiative.
The LEGO® UX Academy
Through various discussions and workshops, we put together a list of the minimum skills that we want to teach our coming ambassadors. Since the teams and departments they are in are very diverse, we want to go with skills that are useful to as many as possible, but also give them a taste of the full UX process. The intention is not to make them full-time UX’ers, but to give them the tools to carry out smaller day to day activities and spread the user centric mindset. This is our take on how to teach UX to a broad audience, instead of sending our colleagues on a 5-day UX certification course. Instead we seek to create a mini university semester, with a mix of classroom teaching, regular check-ins with mentors, and hands-on work.
The list of top level skills we want to teach, are based on what is usually included in a design sprint:
- Research skills
- Ideation skills
- Prototyping (low fidelity)
- Testing skills
- Presentation skills
Kickoff Meeting
After deciding upon the curriculum, we invited all the participants to a one hour kickoff meeting, to tell them a bit more about the initiative, what we expected from it, and to notify them about the Microsoft teams channel we had created, to communicate, share ideas, articles and create a sense of community.
Offsite Workshop
To get the initiative started for real and give all the participants a good base understanding of a user centric design process, we invited them to a two-day workshop outside of the normal office. This workshop was both meant as a way to teach some basic skills, crash-course style, but also to build the community and excitement for the initiative.
The agenda for the workshop was focused on being very hands on and as devoid of PowerPoint presentations as possible.
At the end of the two days, all participants had done observations, interviews, desk research, built some sort of low fidelity prototype, done user testing and had a 5-minute presentation ready.
Feedback on the workshop was good. Some people liked that we went straight into an assignment without prior knowledge, others would have preferred more teaching to begin with. The participants told us they had a lot of fun, and that they had learned a lot of new things. A success in our eyes.
We also had a few points for improvement, especially about our communication leading up to the event. They liked working on a real case too, that was relevant to LEGO®.
My most valuable learning is without any doubt, that my end users interviewed are very willing to talk about their everyday work, what tools they are using, on and offline, their process, which help us tremendously in a new design. The more quiet I was, the more they were sharing :)
— Feedback from a UX Ambassador
The UX Academy Sprints
We put together a 25 week curriculum, divided into 11 sprints.
We picked the different themes and topics to be something that would be useful to the team members regardless of what team they were part of. While UI design skills are useful, it was out of scope for what we thought was possible within these 25 weeks.
Each sprint starts with a 60-minute introduction to the topic and a chance for the ambassadors to ask clarifying questions. We then give them a small assignment related to the topic, that they have to work on in their chosen project. During the sprints, they are encouraged to reach out to each other and to their mentor for assistance or feedback.
As of writing this, we are in the ideation techniques sprint. There are currently 18 ambassadors in the academy, with four mentors teaching and giving feedback.
Learnings so far
As with everything new, we are still learning how to run an academy like this one, and we are of course interested in how we can improve, for a future run of the UX Academy.
Even though the ambassadors have all agreed to spend the required time to do the assignments, as well as having their leader’s acceptance of them spending the time on it, it does seem that some ambassadors struggle to find the time to do their academy work, in between their regular work tasks. This is something we can solve with better communication with their leaders and product owners, making sure that they have time blocked in the calendar for UX Academy work.
A few of the cases chosen by the ambassadors, have proven to be hard to work with in the academy setting. Some projects in LEGO are moving too slow to fit with the curriculum of the academy, while some other chosen projects have either been too solution-focused or too obscure to work with. Finding that balance of a project that is just right for the academy setting, is something we will pay more attention to in the next run of the academy.
As word of the academy is spreading, more people and team leaders have come out of the woodwork to ask if it is possible to join the academy, which is a good thing, but also poses a problem. So far, we have accepted people into the academy, but as we get longer into the sprints, should we wait until the next semester for more applicants?
But… In general, the ambassadors express that they learn a lot, and many of them have already started applying their new knowledge in the teams and initiatives they are part of. Some of them are already pushing their team leaders to do more research to get a better understanding of their users, which is great! They actively participate in discussions on UX and share articles with each other. Currently they are gathering in groups, to help each other with ideation activities.
Conclusion
Overall, the UX Academy has been a success this far, but with obvious points for improvement. We will continue the sprints as planned, and later on evaluate with both the ambassadors, but also their team members on what change if any, they have noticed. To be continued!
Thanks for reading.
