New Beginnings with the User Experience Team
The Digital Corps and many of its teams have been around for years but since the beginning, the office and everything in it is constantly changing and growing. Among the biggest changes, in 2015, is when the Corps introduced and added students to its newest team: User Experience.
New teams don’t just happen by accident; the need for this major change was felt by students and staff alike. The User Experience team was created to fulfill the need to give more attention to the users of the applications and websites we create. This team, called UX for short, was brought in to represent the users of the Digital Corps’ projects, and has since become a team of researchers, testers, analyzers, and user advocates. But, a new team meant new responsibilities and new challenges for the students as well as the staff leading them, and this didn’t all happen overnight.
What the UX is this?
The main question, at first, was a big one: what exactly is User Experience, and what does it mean for the Digital Corps? Billy Barry, a Digital Corps alumnus and original UX team member, shared his own initial uncertainty about his team.
“During the interview process, they asked me to define UX and I think I rambled some sort of long-winded answer about logistics and research, but I was certain I had gotten that question wrong,” said Billy. To his pleasant surprise, Billy was hired, and he soon found he was not alone among the new UX hires.
“I discovered all of us had struggled with that question. We were all utterly clueless as to what our new jobs would actually entail, but excited nonetheless.”
As time progressed, the new team found their footing with the help of staff members Riley Paulsen and Stuart Sipagihil and the training they provided.
“One of the things that stuck with me from my training was that research isn’t about answering all of the questions,” said Billy. “It’s about figuring out what questions need to be answered to accomplish a specific goal.”
Through their training, the team that began as a motley crew of telecommunications, public relations, and computer science majors slowly started to become well-versed in their new user experience skills. They thrived on what they could do with their combined strengths.
“Though those of us who became specialists still had specialties, we started identifying what the UX skill set actually was, and little by little we each became experts in that,” Billy said.
Getting Corps-iented
Even with the UX Team members trained, they were left with the task of carving their place among the other four teams at the Digital Corps — Video, Communication, Development, and Design. We realized that the the UX Team needed to be involved in nearly every project, and therefore, all of our teams would work with them at one time or another. Billy used a gaming metaphor to help him explain the team’s responsibilities.
“If the Digital Corps was a Role-Playing Game, UX would be the healer — the support class. UX doesn’t make the designs or write the code or film the videos, but we help support all of those other disciplines,” Billy said.
Other teams, too, needed to learn what this new team was for, and what it could do for them. Billy recalls that he would try to explain User Experience in terms of existing teams.
“To Development [Team members], I’d mention we’re there to prevent scope creep and handle analytics for them. To Design [Team members], I tried to convey that we were a second set of eyes…but we’d have data to back up our claims.”
How Far We’ve Come
The process of joining the Corps and becoming a defined entity has not been easy for the User Experience Team, but they have come a long way since their start in 2015. Jolee Edge, a current User Experience Specialist who was hired a year after the team’s genesis, shares her perspective on the progress of the UX Team. The biggest change Jolee has seen since she was hired is other teams’ greater understanding of what her team can do.
“I’ve seen other teams reach out to us more. Before, no one really understood what we did, so I’ve seen the whole Corps kind of evolve with [the UX Team],” Jolee said. She feels that her team, though it is still new and growing, has become an integral part of the Digital Corps’ projects.
“We work to make sure that the projects that we are making for the clients work best for the users…They’re intuitive, they look correct, the words make sense, the design makes sense, and everything goes together,” Jolee said.
