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The week of a UX Designer at StudyPortals

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StudyPortals UX Designer

by Xeï Hulshoff

Monday:

After the weekend it always takes some time to continue with the sprint. I start by taking a look at the scrum board to see what the team worked on last week so I can discuss and review it with them when they come in.

This week we will be focusing on implementing new, standardized, banner sizes. For this I am creating wire-frames where all the banners will be shown, designing new banners and reviewing both the front- and back-end with the developers.

At 12.00 we do a stand-up with the scrum team to share what we are working on. Right after that I have the weekly kick off with the Student Value team. Here we share what our 3 most important points for this week are, for which KPI and what others should know.

In the afternoon I dive in deeper in my activities for the week together with Toon, the UX-manager. During this sync we discuss how and what I want to achieve for my most important activities, so we can reflect on it next week. We also discuss my personal improvement points and think of actions that I can do to improve upon them to increase my value for the company.

banner wireframes

Tuesday:

In the morning I meet with our graduate UX intern to sync on the research we did last week about the process students go through when looking for a programme abroad. We walk each other through the different timelines of the students and discuss how we are going to present the results. We agree that she is going to make a proposal for this and that we sync on it later during the week.

After that I join the development team to take a look where we will be placing all the new banners and how it matches my expectations from the wire-frames I made before. With the back-end developers I check the new flow for setting-up a banner to see how we can make it as clear and easy as possible. Since we work with an incremental process, scrum, it will be too time consuming to create the most optimal solution right away. Therefore I write down some improvement points which I can discuss with the PO, so we can pick them up in the coming sprints.

Just after lunch I take a look at our product backlog, which shows the epics and stories we will be picking up in the coming sprints. Together with another team member and the PO we check if the user stories are clear and written from the user point of view. If not we take some time to improve them before the backlog refinement this afternoon, because we want to solve the issue the user has, not a ‘random’ other problem. During the backlog refinement we discuss the user stories with the team and estimate how much effort we expect it to be to solve the user’s problem.

Wednesday:

Today is a special day, the end of the year is near and therefore it is time to reflect on 2015 and look ahead to 2016; we have the Student Value Strategy Day. Since I had to arrange the location and lunch I enter Business School Notenboom with 2 bags full of food and drinks.

With a full room of 15 people in Eindhoven and 2 joining remotely from Bucharest we start writing down what we should stop doing, continue doing and start doing next year. Luckily there are a lot of ideas what we should start doing and not so much what we should stop, so we are already heading in the right direction. At StudyPortals we work with a bonus system, therefore we also spend some time discussing our year targets for 2015 and what still needs to be done to reach them.

After lunch everybody starts to write post-its again about what they each think should be the focus for next year. After clustering the topics, we go through them to see what we think of it and what kind of target can be related to it. We round up by discussing in smaller groups what we think we can reach for these targets with the current capacity, a medium increase in capacity and a large increase in capacity.

By doing this with the whole team, management can have a good view on what their colleagues think is important to support their decisions in focus for 2016. We end the day grabbing a bite and drink together with the whole team, because we are serious about fun too!

StudyPortals brainstorming

Thursday:

At the end of the day the development environment will be frozen. This means that during this day I will do a lot of testing and reviewing together with the developers. We check our work on different devices and write tasks for the issues that still need to be solved, for example not showing a leaderboard banner on mobile. Today I also set-up an A/B experiment together with one of the developers to see if we can improve the conversion with a small text change.

In the afternoon I start preparing the test sessions I always do on the last Friday of the sprint. I take a look at the 3 scrum boards together with the other UX designers or scrum-masters to see what their team build this sprint. From this I create a test script to put the user stories in a logical flow and not hint too much to what we newly build. This way we will get the best input possible as if the students were using the website from the comfort of their own home. At the end of the day I send a reminder to the students who agreed to drop by for the test session.

Friday:

Today is the last day of our 2-week sprint. Which means all the user stories of the 3 development teams will be finished and showcased to the rest of the company. To see the value of the work done I always invite 2 students over for a usability test session. When I come in I make sure everything is prepared before the first student arrives at 9.30; print the script, print the consent forms, prepare the incentive and start the screen recording software. Today I will take 30-45 minutes to walk the students through some improvements to the account flow with a new comparison functionality, some new pages on LanguageLearningPortal and their experiences on the clarity of acceptance criteria.

When the second test session is finished I take a look at my notes to mark the most interesting shots and export these in smaller movies. These shots I use at the end of the demo to show the whole company what the user likes and what we can improve on our website. At 14.30 the developers start with the demo, where we invite 3 colleagues to look ‘through the eyes of the student’ and provide the teams with specific feedback after the demo. When the developers have shown their work I take the stage to show the shots of the students that used our newly build functionalities this morning. After I’ve shown the videos I point out to the audience that people always expect something blue to be clickable – even if it’s not, one of the things we just witnessed in the video.

screenshot test session

At the end of the day we do a retrospective with the development team to round up our sprint. Here we reflect on what went well and what can be improved on our process. We openly discuss where we think we went wrong and what we should improve next time to make sure we keep growing as a development team. This week one of the improvement points is to do a kick-off with the whole team when somebody is ready to start with a new user story, to make sure everybody knows what is going on and how we will solve the user issue.

Also, if you’ve liked what a week in the life of a StudyPortals UX Designer looks like, check out our vacancies to be part of our great team!

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