UX Boot Camp

Hands on design facilitation and empowerment.

What is a UX Boot Camp?

As part of Emerson's commitment to design autonomy amongst scrum teams, I created a series of hands-on courses aimed at empowering developers' use of design tools. These free courses were a mix of lecture-style presentations and interactive activities centered around improving Emerson's line of DeltaV applications. These courses were based in both LUMA and Nielsen Norman design techniques frequently used by our UX team.

Each course ranged from 1.5-3 hours and focused on single themed covering multiple design tools. Some of these themes included, Empathizing with Users, Rapid Prototyping, Remote User Testing, and Impactful Ideating. To ensure our target audience got the most from these sessions, themes were voted on by scrum team members and tailored to be repeatable by non-designers using frameworks and templates.

Who was involved in these courses?

My role in these courses was all-encompassing in that I created the content slides, synthesized how-to guides, lead the main discussion, facilitated breakout sessions, and handled enrollment logistics. My fellow UX teammates aided in editing content and presiding over individual breakout groups. Over the course of 15 months, we were able to reach over 100 internal stakeholders both from our technology department as well as members of executive and administrative staff! We chose to limit our sessions to a max of 30 people in an effort to provide 1:1 attention to all participants. Later in 2020 when most staff members worked remotely, we shifted these session to live, online training over Microsoft teams.

How did I create these events?

The process for designing these courses started with an abstraction laddering exercise to get to the root of why these courses were needed. It was determined that enhancing developers' understanding of UX principles and practical applications, flaws in software would be recognized quicker and resolved without the need for UX consultation. We called this new, self-reliant process "Design Autonomy." It was then determined by the team that Rapid Prototyping and Impactful Ideation would be the most appropriate themes to kickstart this new design autonomy initiative.

Making learning fun.

One of the hallmarks of a great design session is hearing that my participants not only understood the content, but had fun doing it. As an incentive for stakeholders to attend a set number of boot camps, tracker sheets were handed out

What was the outcome of these events?

Over the course of several months following these boot camps, independent design work from scrum teams increased 350% and collaborative work between UX and scrum teams increased over 500%! It was main mission to lend agency to our stakeholders by showing them that one doesn't need to be a certified designer to think like a designer. Making these design tools understandable by showing them in context prover