My review of year three at NICTA is a bit overdue.
Team growth
In 2014 I was alone, now mid into 2015 we have a team of six user experience designers at NICTA. There are four seniors, one mid-level and my self (Principal). Four of us are in Sydney, one in Canberra and one in Melbourne.
We are strong end-to-end designers capable of running a project from inception through to front end solution and handover. Mostly the work is a mix of hypothesis and insight derived, and we walk a line between pitch and user informed.
We are comfortable with failure and mistakes, and everything is as lean as possible. We don’t bother trying to define what ‘lean ux’ is, we get it and get on with it. In fact, none of us have been documentation people, have always been collaborative and are very comfortable with the shifting frontier we are faced with daily, understanding we take the teams with us on our exploration rather than direct. I have really enjoyed hiring the people we now have and selected them for this attitude along with their complimentary skills to round out the team.
Successes in 2015
Design is notoriously hard to measure, even more so when working on the high number of experimental projects we do. In review I see the successes as outlined below.
- Increasing the requests for assistance, involvement earlier and earlier in engagements
- Acceptance of pushback on front-end solution design deliverables (aka “can we get a mockup of…”) as an appropriate measure when projects have high levels of uncertainty in research findings, users and value proposition which allows more time for investigation and validation set ups.
- Designing and facilitating”discovery workshops” to evaluate business opportunities within an industry or government services sector.
- Direct contribution to descriptions of design approaches and outcomes for schedules of work in contracts and term sheets.
- Increasing involvement in “non-core funded” projects (ie billable projects)
- UX and design being used as a key to accessing high profile projects within key digital government activities (yes this is deliberately cryptic) that are non-core funded.
- Significant contribution to the creation of two platforms upon which we can swiftly create instances to support projects without constant reinvention of the wheel. This is not a product suite, a style guide or a pattern library. They are true platforms with deeply engaging content, APIs and using open data. They deliver (and showcase) NICTA research, business, engineering and design. One is now live – terria.io, the other is still under wraps.
- Placement of UX as a prominent capability at the annual technology showcase Techfest 2015, with workshops for startups, kids and a working wall to discuss digital design methods.
- UX designers featured on the new NICTA website home hero module.
Along with this are the large number of compliments and experiences that reinforce our worth within the business. Larry Marshall CEO of CSIRO has mentioned user experience on several occasions when presenting the future of NICTA with CSIRO.
Learnings
Along with the team growth and successes, it’s been really great to reflect on what I’ve observed and learned in the last 18 months.
- We have room to experiment and explore with adapted and new approaches. Frameworks have emerged but there is never a set process. We constantly review and improve them as we go. For a long time I felt I was the only person at NICTA not experimenting and exploring but during some time spent reflecting (and not obsessing about the negatives during my annual leave at the end of 2014) I realised, actually, it’s always been that way. I am now passionate about promoting and defending that culture.
- Space and time think deeply is really important. Which is directly related to the next point…
- Saying “no” to requests for help is really hard. Every new project sounds cool from the outset. But I think we can do a better job at choosing what to work on… Being that most of the work we do is similar, if not the same as startup incubation my philosophy is it’s ok to leave folks to their own devices and act as educators/consultants during the valleys between intensive ux/design activity peaks and/or the reassess if our involvement is needed as we go.
- Expectation management is a fluid landscape that requires constant vigilance. Never assume anyone in the room is in the same place as you – customers, stakeholders, team members, business or communications/marketing. Context setting needs to be done each and every time; open team communication is needed at all times. It’s everyone’s responsibility to talk and confirm where they’re at.
- Constant context switching and learning new domains is exhausting. EXHAUSTING. At NICTA we designers need to deeply understand the users and domains and these are usually highly technical and very specific. People do PhD’s on these domains so we are faced with a mountain of learning at the start of any project and a lot of time in parallel with another intense project. (see comment above about saying “no” more…) I’m not sure how to mitigate this… I’m open for suggestions! Dr Adam Fraser’s The Third Space is helping me to put a reference together to monitor and head off burnout threats.
I’m unsure what lies ahead with the proposed merger. Its nerve wracking and the chance to devise new strategies to engage with it is both tricky and exciting. The team are directly contributing and I look forward to seeing how it plays out. Tell you next year!