Working with your users… literally

Epiphanies about user research gleaned from 24 hours at the office

We just had a hackathon where we broke into teams and in 24 hours built actual things with value for our company. From ideation to functioning apps. It was awesome.

Every team needs UX so we bounced from team to team as consultants.

For the users, by the users

I ended up spending most of my time with a team of engineers building an internal tool for engineers. It was fascinating. I learned so much about their workflow — people I work with every day but until the recent rebranded voice and tone implementation, knew nothing about how they work, and even afterwards, didn’t know nearly as much as I know now. The best part though, was that we were literally working WITH our users to build FOR our users.

A designer and I sat next to the engineers building the backend for our hack while we designed the frontend literally right next to them. User research meant tapping one of them on the shoulder and simply asking questions. It was the BEST.

“Do you call microservices “microservices”, “services” or something else? What is more natural and conversational for you?”

“Would you use a filter feature that allows you to filter by component and PR at the same time? Or would you only use one at a time? What about being able to filter by more than one PR at a time? Is that something you would do?”

We were able to separate between POC/MVP features and nice-to-have’s on the spot. We were able to design our voice around user language with the highest possibly fidelity. It was like “move fast and break things” without breaking anything.

It was so revolutionary that I suggested the Fundbox UX team work on-site at a different customer’s actual business for a month at a time, rotating between the thousands of companies we are helping to grow. Other than the fact that the UX team has families and stuff and can’t really live in a different city every month… everyone agreed it was a fabulous idea.

P.S. We won!