Come Mingle With the Ottawa UX Community at UXmas

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UXmas is coming! 

UXmas, by UXCamp Ottawa and IxDA Ottawa

Next Tuesday, December 16, UXCamp Ottawa and IxDA Ottawa are hosting a holiday UX meetup. Join us at PHI Bistro at the Indigo Hotel at 6pm for some cheer and great prizes.

Hope to see you there!

More info abut UXmas

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UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You're Doing User-Centered Design?

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Back in January, I wrote a Twitter thread about projects that pay lip service to user-centered design (UCD) and what we can do about it as designers. Here's an expanded write-up of the topic, for those of you who requested some additional context. (The original tweets are in italics.)

A few projects I've come across recently are doing UX theatre, not actual user-centered design. Sadly, it's becoming more prevalent as execs learn the term UX but their teams aren't empowered to do all the work that UX entails.
Organizations have latched on to "user-centered design" as a buzzword. In many cases, executives seem to misinterpret it as a euphemism for "thinking from a user's perspective." They don't fund user research or provide project owners the latitude to create teams that include UX and service designers. For all the talk about users, there is no consideration given to including them in the design and delivery process.

People pepper their pres…
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Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding (Slides from PPPConf, Chicago 2018)

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On Thursday, August 9, 2018, I delivered a presentation on team culture at the Prototypes, Process and Play conference in Chicago.

My presentation was a case study of an enterprise project where onboarding was not a priority and the project was a giant mess. Meanwhile, the little sub-team that I was on paid a lot of attention to designing the team member experience, including onboarding, and in turn ended up developing a reusable process for designing the team member experience.

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Your team is an element of your project that needs to be designed. If you don’t build onboarding into your processes, people can get lost along the way.In UX, when you don't design the team member experience, you sacrifice the experience of your people for the experience of your users.Help new hires become part of the team and set them up to be productive contributors. Create a ramp-up process to show new hires how their work will make an impact.Establish and share your project folklore e…
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The Unstuck Meeting: A safe failure space

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GIF of a teammate turning the water bottle of another teammate so they can drink out of the right endvia GIPHY
I tweeted about my team's Unstuck Meetings earlier this year:
On my team, we have "unstuck" meetings. When anyone gets stuck on a task, rather than fester they book the rest of us for 30 minutes to talk through their problem. Using "unstuck" in the title immediately tells the rest of us that we have no prep to do and we're there to help. pic.twitter.com/VcI7LQBIfd — spydergrrl🕷️ (@spydergrrl) April 4, 2019
And I received a lot of great feedback, as well as questions about exactly how these meetings work. A friend asked me to document the process and its origins, so I decided to throw it up on my blog in case it could be of use to anyone. So here you go:
The Unstuck Meeting On my team, calling on teammates to help when you’re stuck is expected. Unstuck meetings are a quick, focused and fun opportunity for the rest of the team to support a colleague…
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