Want to know what I do as a UX practitioner? First, let me clarify that I'm both a UX Researcher and a UX Designer. So, I facilitate user research and design the information architecture. Let me also point out that I work on enterprise intranet applications. At the time of this writing, I was working on two redesign projects: one for human resources and another for the training department.
Every day is different as I work on a team that supports several development projects. Some days, I have back-to-back meetings: internal meetings, customer meetings, presentations, or user engagement sessions. Other days, I'm at my desk most of the day: analyzing findings, working on plans for user engagement, creating wireflows and mockups, or providing guidance to the developers as they commit designs to code.
This particular day was a bit of a mix.
7:00 - 7:30 AM
For context, I go into the office every day; no remote work. It has its pros and cons but that's another story for another day. Like many, I start my day with a cup of coffee. I have a French press that I take to the office, so while my Italian dark roast steeps, I get caught up on email. I leave around 3pm but there's many people in the office who work later, so I often have plenty of email to address when I first get in.
7:30 - 9:00 AM
The previous day, I co-facilitated a stakeholder engagement session with people in the HR department to understand their current workflow and pain points. After these types of meetings, I like to translate my notes into visuals that organize my understanding of their current processes and problems to be solved. I annotate these early diagrams of user flows or task flows with lots of questions for future meetings. Since I support several projects, creating these visuals, starting from the first meeting, minimizes the impact of context-switching.
After each successive meeting, I update my diagrams and fill-in the blanks as questions get answered. Eventually, those high-level diagrams lead to sketches of wireframes and wireflows.
9:00 - 10:00 AM
Our team includes business analysts (BA) who document business processes and propose workflow improvements. Collaboration with them is important as they bring business needs to the table and I bring user needs and design recommendations to the table. During the analysis/discovery phase, the BAs and UXers tend to have a lot of discussions.
On this day, I had a detailed discussion with one of the BAs about ideas and challenges for meeting business and user needs for a particular workflow problem. We also talked about next steps and design concepts to test with users.
10:00 - 10:15 AM
Our Agile team follows the Scrum process, so every morning we have a stand-up meeting (max 15 minutes) where everyone shares "What I did yesterday, what I will do today, what impediments I have." This keeps us all aware of what's going on with everyone on the team. Sometimes it's annoying to have this interruption but it usually turns out to be informative. There are some team members where you would never know what they are working on or struggling with if we didn't have this daily check-in.
10:15 AM - 12ish PM
Our Agile process includes a UX Review (some call this a design review) as part of our "Definition of Done." Essentially, all user-facing functionality the developer codes, has to be reviewed (and approved) by the UX team before the code is peer-reviewed and sent to the test environment. This is my 2nd favorite thing to do. It's another opportunity for me to work with the developers and ensure the features they build look and behave as they need to for an optimal user experience.
Let me stress that not all teams integrate UX into the development process like this. In fact, for most teams I've worked with, I didn't see the feature until it was in a test environment and my "approval" was not necessary to move the feature to production. Requiring a UX Review has been a valuable aspect of our Agile + UX integration.
12ish - 12:30 PM
I actually bring my lunch every day and often eat lunch at my desk. While I eat, I usually respond to email or continue whatever I was already working on.
12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
This is the absolutely best part of my job. Contextual interviews! During these sessions, also referred to as contextual inquiry, I meet with employees at their desk and get to listen and observe them as they show-and-tell me how they do their job, their pain points and workarounds. This insight helps me (and the rest of the team) make informed, user-centered design decisions.
On this day, I had 3 separate one-on-one meetings to interview people in the training department. I took notes using the What-How-Why format. I asked each person a lot of open-ended "What" questions and they answer by sharing their stories, which organically let me know the "How" and "Why."
Side note: I dread public speaking, but I'm in my comfort zone when it comes to user engagement sessions. Why? For public speaking the spotlight is on me. Oof! When I meet with users, the spotlight is on them and I'm simply guiding the discussion to make sure I capture their stories as it relates to what we will be building for them. It's awesome!
2:30 PM - 3 PM
Back to my desk, I completed my timesheet and documented highlights to be included in my weekly status report at the end of the week. I also made notes to myself of things I need to tackle the next day. On this day, top of my list of tomorrow's to-dos... translate findings from the contextual interviews into visual artifacts (e.g., user flows).
I headed home to hubby to figure out what to eat for dinner. I also got caught up on Instagram, Twitter and drafted my next article.
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Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who would find this useful, please share. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me.
