The highlights of what we have learned and what it can bring you.

The Nielsen Norman Group, known as one of the best worldwide UX Trainee corporations, landed in Amsterdam end of June. We, as the User Experience team of McCoy, got the opportunity to attend full day workshops to learn new and improve on our skills.

We attended various courses around strategy, processes and practical user experience.

Facilitating Workshops

One of the most used formats of a User Experience Designers way of working is to facilitate workshops. Are you in the need to solve a problem, gather user insights, requirements and/or ideate on ideas? User Experience Consultants are trained to prepare and give workshops.

We’ve got even better in:

When and what kind of workshop to use for high quality outcomes.
How to plan and prepare for a workshop.
Ins and outs of how to facilitate workshops to increase joy, commitment and quality of outcomes.

Service Design Blueprints

In traditional economics we make a distinction between companies delivering goods and services. Goods are very tangible such as: cars, pens and sunglasses whereas services are instantaneous exchanges without real ownership such as: medical treatment and public transport.

Most companies nowadays deliver both products and services or move from being a goods supplier towards a service provider. With service blueprinting we provide insights in the relationships between different service components that are tied in a customer journey and improve the user experience for your organization.

During the workshop we’ve gained skills to:

Start with an optimal scope and zoom out from there
Always start with a customer journey
Incorporate front-stage, backstage and support processes within an organization
Help defining the roadmap from a service design perspective

One-person UX team

Sometimes you are the only UX designer in a team with limited resources, but still want to make sure you deliver on time and meet the expectations set. This training shared tips and tricks on how to get most out of your time and set the right expectations when you are a ‘UX team of one’.

During the session we learned about:

How to be efficient in both your user research and design when you have less resources and time available.
How to recognize ‘quick wins’ in projects.
How to help organizations understand what the return on investment can be for more UX resources by providing metrics and reasoning.

Other

Make solid decisions by making use of a framework which you can measure possible design directions against. Not only for the designer but the whole project team.
Stay up to date on trends in web design, but don’t follow them blindly. Always think about what is best for your users.

We, as the User Experience team of McCoy, are constantly aware and active on improving and broaden our skillset to keep delivering high quality and good perceived user experiences for our customers and their end-users.

Do you want to know more about one of the topics mentioned above or curious about our services that will bring your user experience to a next level, contact us.