Portfolio of Christina Fowler

Once I was promoted to Lead UX at BCA I began to work with the Head of UX on defining the culture and ways of working we had at the time. The aim of the this activity was to look at the issues that currently existed and to find areas of improvement.

We started to plot out a map looking at the People, Potential, Practices and Purpose of the team. However, once we started to do this it became apparent that the map felt very generic and could apply to any UX team or company.

In order to to understand the specifics of working in UX at BCA, or at the wider Constellation Automotive Group, I designed a set of four retro activtites to do with the whole UX team over Miro.

People

Thinking about the roles, skills and relationships that affect a UX designer, I led the whole UX team in gathering their feedback. Firstly the Good, what positive things have happened? The Bad, what problems have happened? Then the Ugly, what could have been better? Finally, I facilitated some idea generation or the Treasure, what ideas could we work towards?

Purpose

Trying to understand why the UX team exist, I set the scene for the UX designers to imagine a time five years in the future when we have acheived everything we had ever hoped. I set a challenge to describe this future and then worked together with the team to group the ideas into themes. Finally, I set a task to write a vision statement for the team based on the themes we had just created. A final vote from the team chose two statements for us to focus on and these were sent to the senior management team to approve.

Potential

Thinking the vision statements we had defined at the previous workshop, the next retro focused on the desired outcomes and impact. Using a hot air balloon analogy, we looked at the Hot Air, what is pushing us along? The Sunny SKies, the positive things that are coming up? The Storm clouds, the problems or obstacles that are coming up? Then, the Sandbags, the things that are slowing us down or holding us back? Based on this feedback we generated a list of ideas that we would like to see changed or improved to help us get to the vision statement.

Practices

Thinking about our process, rituals and culture, I created a workshop based on a Jurgen Appelo’s Moving Motivators. I explained each motivator while everyone in the team plotted its importance to them on a scale from Not Important to Very Important. Once we had completed each spoke of the wheel we moved on to more specific definitions. Each member of the team placed a marker on a scale to show the importance of curiosity, purpose, power, and more. Finally, I captured feedback on each of these areas on any specific positives or negatives affecting the culture.

Based on the results of all of these retros we were able to get more specific on the map and also identified a number of actions we could take to improve the culture and ways of working.

One of the key outcomes was a set of workshop templates that anyone in the team could use. I took my own set of templates and gathered more to sort them according to our UX process. Each template was designed in a signature BCA style and could be copied and pasted by any designer to use in their own projects.