UX Boost

Delft, Exact 2017

Background

During my role as a Product Designer at Exact, I discovered the main obstacles and triggers to scale Design at Exact. With a ratio of around 1 designer every 10 developers, there was a clear need for user-centered design skills, beyond the capacity of the UXer in the team.
Simultaneously, the board of the company had initiated a transformation program to ensure Exact would continue to be successful in an exponential and rapidly changing environment. One of the main goals of the program was to create and implement new ideas that empower Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

UX Boost program

In this context, I started an initiative to develop Design Thinking practices across one Business Unit. Main acitivties of this program are described below.

Vision
Innovative culture in which teams inherently design meaningful products and services.
We envisioned a transformed culture at Exact, where teams have a user-centered mindset that leads them to design products and services that people value, and therefore, bring value to our business too.

Mission
To drive teams towards innovation by empowering their Design Thinking & Doing mindset.
We partnered with teams to unleash their Design Thinking and Doing capabilities. We guided them through the Design Thinking process to achieve incremental and radical innovation when improving or creating new Exact products and services.

Design Guide

UX Boost released a Design Thinking Guide (internal website) to grow the user-centered and design-driven culture in the organization. The guide provides information on the design process, principles and hands-on methods teams can use to practice and develop their Design Thinking capabilities.

Inspirational talks and workshops

To make Design Thinking practices familiar and inspire teams to use them, I trained and supported the designers in the company to run workshops and ideation sessions. To attract external talent, I gave presentations showcasing how we developed our research and design skills in UX events.

• Developing Design Thinking capabilities of a well-established IT company. Daanen, Emma; Palumbo, Carina; Calabretta, Giulia; Cankurtaran, Pinar . ADMC18, August 2018, London, UK.

• Design Thinking and research for empathy. UX Research Meetup, October 2017, Delft, The Netherlands.

• Climbing the mountain: Maturing UX in a corporate environment. Carina Palumbo and Murat Akyol. UXCampAMS17, April 2017 Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Check out the spotloght interview.

• Climbing the mountain. Carina Palumbo and Joline Boschman. Ladies that UX, March 2017, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Partnerships

My team temporarily partnered wit­h strategic project teams in the Technology Department to boost and develop their Design Thinking capabilities.
I started a collaboration project with Delft University of Technology to develop the strategic potential of design at Exact. In this collaboration we measured design maturity identifying main obstacles and triggers to define the next action points for the UX Boost program.

Coaching

In this role, I coached 12 product designers in becoming Design Thinking and Doing ambassadors in their teams. Besides individual coaching sessions, my team run group activities to boost knowledge sharing, data analysis, methodic user research, and empathy in design.

Outcomes

Beyond the awareness created around Design practices, the UX Boost initiative achieved an increased maturity on the user-centricity of team practices in the focus Business Unit. A paper on the initiative and the impact on practices and project outcomes was published in the ADMI conference. Proceedings will be published soon.

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