UX management courses from NN/g — 2022
After getting certified in UX research in September, I decided to revisit the conference in December and attended 5 more courses in UX management.
If you are interested in the general feedback about the event read My previous article about the NN/g UX conference
The decision to participate this time was influenced by my promotion to Lead experience designer. Some of you in the field might relate to the pressure and nervousness about not being competent enough in a certain subject. So I felt responsible to the team to be prepared and to have the necessary training for leading the team in the right direction.
The courses I decided to take were: Design Ops: Scaling UX Design and User Research, Being a UX Leader: Essential Skills for Any UX Practitioner, Design Tradeoffs and UX Decision Frameworks, UX Roadmaps, and Service Blueprinting.
Each course was structured well as always and involved well-curated group exercises to sink everything in. Instead of analyzing the structure of the courses, I want to focus on each one of them and break down how they might help us, beginners in design leadership, be better in our roles. 🚀
Design Ops: Scaling UX design and User Research
DesignOps is the mindset or set of actions and frameworks, that focuses on optimization of people, processes, and craft to help scale design and enhance its value.
Understanding the basics and not-so-basics of DesignOps mindset and practice can be extremely helpful for design leaders as the knowledge will help the team with the organization, creating a team structure, defining the roles, making collaboration easy, and creating an environment for knowledge sharing. What is more, it will affect the way the work is done in the team: creating principles, a process that works for the team, choosing the correct toolset, creating design systems, and balancing workflow. And finally to measure success and recognize achievement.
In my personal experience, most of my frustration at work was caused not by creative block, non-constructive feedback, or an annoying co-worker, but by neglected processes, design chaos, no communication, and lack of structure and clarity about the role. So the most visible impact for the design team member from a design lead is an effort put into improving processes and letting designers focus on the design.
For some big organizations, DesignOps is considered a separate role and might have a team of people who are responsible for the practices involved in DesignOps, but for the majority of others, DesignOps is a mindset, and the mindset must be spread and advocated by the design lead. Because that’s the person who should be thinking about growing and building the team, managing an increasing amount of work and pressure, and finally getting really involved in measuring the impact of design.
Design tradeoffs and UX decision frameworks
A huge part of leading anything in the company is to make decisions and decision-making can sometimes be one of the hardest things for a beginner in the position.
To give us an idea of how to approach making decisions, the Design Tradeoffs and UX Decision Frameworks course includes topics such as Decision types, Quick decisions, Long deliberations, and Cross-domain tradeoffs. As a universal decision-making strategy suggests, we start by identifying options — Gathering information about the problem and identifying possible solutions, then moving on to gathering information about past experiences, and research analytics, then evaluating each option against each other, deciding, acting on it and finally reviewing the results of your actions for the future decisions.
The thing is, not all problems and situations are the same, and they require different approaches. They can be high impact or low impact, high reversibility or low reversibility, tactical or strategic, so before freaking out about every problem, as beginners tend to do, we should focus on analyzing the characteristics of the problem and the tradeoffs we are up against, this way, you can adjust effort and steps within a universal decision-making strategy.
UX Roadmaps
A strategic, living artifact that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a UX team’s future work and problems to solve — NN/g
UX roadmaps can be for a Product, Field, or Specialty. I don’t think, we, as UX leaders or managers will ever have to create a product road map, more likely we’ll be dealing with a field roadmap and most likely with the Specialty roadmap. The field roadmap includes design, research, and content. Specialty roadmap includes a specific specialty, for example, only design or only research. I’ve used the knowledge from the course to create Specialty roadmaps to identify dependencies, and opportunities to collaborate and avoid overlap and redundant work. But in small UX teams, Field roadmaps can help UX teams stay focused and ensure UX work is not diminished or downplayed.
What can the road map bring to our teams?
- Team alignment and visibility — The whole team can understand the vision and see the goals we are working towards.
- Educate and communicate the UX process and steps
- Stakeholder visibility — showing stakeholders what our priorities are, and communicating what the timelines are. Making them involved and aware of the processes in the teams.
The course covers the purpose of the roadmaps, the structure and components, the creation process, and tools and distribution. Gives a lot of tips and examples and also some great group exercises to let you sink the information in.
Service Blueprinting
An artifact that visualizes the relationships between different service components that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey. A framework to analyze and improve an existing service. — NN/g
As a leader or a manager, you are expected to go beyond the surface of the processes and be more involved in underlying, supporting actions. Think not only about UX design but also service design and ask a broader question: How is the experience created? By having a broader view of people, processes, and props needed to perform the service, we might have a better understanding of the overall experience and approach design aspect with more knowledge.
The course focuses on every building block of service blueprinting: Customer Actions, Frontstage Actions, Backstage Actions, and Support Processes. Also on the process of defining the scope and goal, engaging stakeholders, gathering research, covering the basic elements, refining, and digitizing.
Being a UX Leader: Essential Skills for Any UX Practitioner
This course was more general and focused on the qualities and skills UX leaders should aim for. Topics covered include leadership basics, defining and creating a vision, building a business case for UX, communicating ideas, managing feedback, creating a shared culture, and evaluating UX.
A big part of being a good leader is to understand the definition and value of leadership and not to confuse it with management. It is necessary to understand what are your leadership strengths and what you lack. Are you an Architect? Maybe an Interpreter, Orator, or a Foreperson? Each one of these types has a specific set of strengths that influence the team of the leader greatly.
As a leader, you should create a shared vision, put the vision into action, be able to translate UX to business value, track, and measure improvements, communicate ideas and insights, and manage feedback well. Sounds terrific? The course covers multiple frameworks and methods for each of the responsibilities, but it is overwhelming for me as a newbie in this position to try and excel in everything to prove to be a worthy leader. Instead, I think, if you are at the same stage as me, we should focus on understanding our weaknesses and which qualities and skills we lack the most, to focus on each one at a time and learn through our experiences. Meanwhile, focusing on building and developing a team and on advocating for the user.
So to sum up, these were the courses I chose for the conference, but there are multiple other courses you can take in UX management and also other specialties. I would recommend the conference for people like me, who are new to UX leadership and need guidance and help in navigating the new position and starting working towards making an impact in their teams.
Thank you for reading 🙏
