UXDI - Week 5

Walking across the Thames to catch the late train home

Hello October!  Hello week 5!  Where did September go?!

I think this has been the most difficult week so far of UXDI.  Second week of project 3 and everyone is feeling the pressure. 
Project 3 is a team project and so while learning more new UX methods we have also been learning how to work with each other as a team.  
Teams are tricky things at the best of times and can take a while to really gel, so expecting perfection in 2 weeks is a bit silly but I’ve worked in teams for the past 15 years and never had problems like this!  
I have thought about this a lot over the last week or so and have come to the conclusion it is mostly because no-one on this project had a job title and so no clearly defined set of tasks to do.  The fact we also had 4 strong personalities probably didn’t help either.

Redesigning a remote control - not as easy as you might think

The week was mostly workshop time letting us work on prototypes of our design and test them, before putting together the presentation for Friday.
We did have a lecture on Interface Design and one on how to use Axure but I think we all agreed that we’d maybe leave Axure to another project.  It’s an amazing programme but looks like you could get pretty complex pretty quick.

Pin up of all our work so far

On Wednesday we had a guest speaker Jo Phillips from BlackRock.  I found her very inspiring.  It was so nice to hear someone being so honest about the challenges of working in a large business and trying not only to bring UX in but Lean too.  Some of the things she said really rang true from where we tried some of these things at the University.

Anyway, we got there in the end and I’ve learnt a hell of a lot about how  teams work.  The Friday presentation went really well and we got some good feedback.

Next week we’re back working on our own and onto Visual Design week which should be very interesting.

Read about why I left my job and Week 1, 2, 3 and 4 on UXDI.