I have been fortunate to have learned from excellent, informed UX specialists in the fields of Information Architecture, User Research & Testing and Interface Design over the course of my career, especially at the outset.
In recent years I have also undertaken formal training in the more advanced and higher-level aspects of integrating UX within organisations to accompany my practical experience.
For this I sought out formalised training and invested in myself from the most respected organisation within the industry:
I gained a certificate for completing 7 full-day courses (with a specialism in UX Management) and the related exams with a 90% plus score in the following fields:
- UX Director/Vice President
- Managing the UX Strategy
- Leading Highly Effective UX Teams
- Analytics and the User Experience
- Design Trade-Offs & Decision Making Frameworks
- Service Design – Blue Printing
- Product and UX: Building Partnerships for Better Outcomes
View the details below of what I learnt in each of these courses, taught by recognised and extensively experienced industry trainers.
UX Director / Vice President
Targeted training for those looking to lead UX across the organisation at the Executive Level.
What I Learned
- Communicate UX in ways executives understand, appreciate, and support
- Strengthen your business acumen and UX rationale
- Assess and navigate corporate cultures
- Secure champions and build key partnerships
- Succeed as an “agent of change” at the highest levels of the organization
- Avoid common mistakes UX professionals make in managing expectations, delivering results, and building credibility at the executive level
Topics Covered
- The role of UX directors and VPs across different industries and companies
- UX executives as catalysts for the creation of user-centered organizations
- Emerging UX success measures and key performance indicators, (KPIs), that guide successful UX companies
- Best practices for communicating UX at the executive level
- Tips for becoming a UX executive
Managing the UX Strategy
This course will helped me:
- Target who to involve in the creation and execution of your UX Strategy
- Get started in putting your UX Strategy ideas into action
- Learnt how to measure and promote the success of your UX Strategy
Topics Covered
- Defining UX vision and mission
- Targeting and delivering a UX roadmap that demonstrates the power of UX to drive organizational results, along with cultural change
- Aligning user insights and business objectives
- Getting buy in for utilizing UX Strategy across Agile and/or Lean development teams
- Breaking down silos through orienting organizations around customers
- Influencing across the enterprise to remove roadblocks and increase the effectiveness of UX teams
- Raising the bar for all UX Team members through mentoring, coaching, and training on UX Strategy
- Synthesizing customer data from many sources to identify strategic opportunities and recommend innovative products and/or services
- Connecting UX strategy to business results
Leading Highly Effective UX Teams
What I Learned
I learnt how to find the right talent, where to position the department, how to leverage resources, how to introduce UX methods into the product lifecycle, which activities to prioritize, and more.
I learnt the pitfalls to avoid and tips on how to position your business for success. Learned how to make my organisations more effective, as well as be recognized as integral to the company’s success.
Topics Covered
- Make UX fit within the organization’s culture
- Assess the business goals and how UX can help meet them
- Perform a “skills gap” analysis to determine how to bolster UX
- Justify UX budget to best meet goals
- Position both local and global teams for impactful work
- Create job levels, descriptions, and pay scales to structure job expectations and growth
- Hire a top team, including full-time staff, contractors, and consultants
- Mentor, develop, and review the team to ensure positive communication, met expectations, high performance, job satisfaction, and high retention
- Build internal and external customer relationships
- Develop processes that ensure a solid and viable infrastructure for UX
- Optimize UX within different development approaches, including Agile
- Plan the physical environment, including office layout, design rooms, and usability labs
- Prioritize the work to best meet goals given the available resources
- Measure the impact of UX work
- Practice public relations to nurture goodwill and expectations about UX
- Make UX an expected and lasting part of the development process
- Build influence
- Top pitfalls to avoid
- Top activities to perform