User Centered Design Canvas — 1st year in review
From a nebulous idea to shout-outs from Adobe and NASA
User Centered Design Canvas celebrates its 1st birthday this week. Although the early concept of UCDC was introduced to the students of University of Wrocław in early 2015, its official premiere took place one year later, in the last days of April 2016.
In this short summary, I’d like to recall the most important moments from the tool’s debut year. Additionally, a small braggadocio about a few highlights (like the one mentioned in the subtitle ↑).
Gathering feedback from UX design students
Before making UCDC available to everyone, the tool was tested in the academic environment — as a part of a UX design course at the said University of Wrocław. Over 1 year, and 2 editions of the course we gathered very positive feedback from a group of ca. 100 students. Seeing the still-a-prototype tool in real-user action was absolutely great and probably if it hadn’t been for this experiment, User Centered Design Canvas wouldn’t be published at all.
So, my dearest UX design students, once again — thank you for your help!
The UX Magazine intro article
The process of unveiling UCDC was iterative and lean per se. So we didn’t started with something big, like a website, but instead — we wanted to validate the canvas concept with the wider UX community. So the first thing we did was writing an introductory UCDC article. It was in February. Our first (and to be honest, the only) contact regarding publishing the post was UX Magazine. I sent the draft and a few days after submitting it, I received this email from Gigi, one of the editors.
It made us all extremely happy. Eventually, the article was published sooner than the initial backlog-caused predictions, but anyway we had enough time to build the proper UCDC website.
By the way, if you are reading this, Gigi —wielkie dzięki!
The UCDC website
Our another experiment was the said landing page. We (the UCDC creators, Alina and I) decided not to build it our own, but to leave it in the hands of our friends, teammates, and at the same time most trusted UX designers, Anna and Filip. They did great research/content/design job, then guys at Chop-Chop delivered splendid code and a few days before the UX Magazine premiere, the website was ready.
Here’s the link to the current version of it. (There’s been only one semi-major update of the website since the launch)
The “Introducing the User Centered Design Canvas” publication
Finally, the day had come, and exactly on 29th of April the introductory article went online.
A few days later I published a short post scriptum. You can read it here.
What was the UX community reaction? Well, it must have been good 😊:
UCDC learning/subscription list
A few weeks after UX Magazine publication, we decided to launch the official UCDC subscription list for those who want to learn how to use the tool. We’re sending new materials, use cases, links to UCDC-related articles almost every 2–3 weeks. The list was created on the 13th of June 2016 and until now, nearly 1K of user-centered design enthusiasts have subscribed. Additionally, some of the subscribers have opt-in for a dedicated learning email series (which includes fantastic Natalia’s illustrations).
If you’re not one of them, you can catch up now ↓:
Other, noteworthy UCDC publications
Over this last 12 months we published other, targeted to different audiences UCDC-related articles. Below there’s a list of some of them:
User Centered Design Canvas Deconstructed
(on UX Planet)
How to Make Use of the User Centered Design Canvas
(on uxdesign.cc)
Develop Your Startup with User Centered Design Canvas
(on Startup Grind)
Mastering Freelance UX Design Work: Research, Design, and Efficiency
(on Adobe Creative Cloud blog)
The most rewarding thing: feedback
Over this first year, UCDC was used by thousands of UX designers from many different environments: from individuals, freelancers, small teams, to large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Blizzard or… NASA. I can’t express how grateful we are for all the amazing feedback we received from such a great community. And there’s one thing I can say for sure — it all makes us extremely happy, but it also makes us want to work harder in future!
So here’s the promised braggadocio. 😉
We’d like to thank the following people for making it all possible:
Caio Braga, Fabricio Teixeira, Nick Babich, Lindsay Munro, Silvia Li Sam
Want to give UCDC a birthday gift, go ahead → ❤︎
Cheers!
