Finding the Void

And then ‘UX-ers’ were hired. In two years, we’ve grown from one UX practitioner to a team of seven. We’ve been trying to understand our added value at Nedap Healthcare. What is the role of a UX-er in a user minded and technological advanced business unit? Which void is there for the UX team to fill?

As UX practitioners, we worked both as a hands-on researcher/designer in our product team and as a UX ambassador, sharing our UX skills and knowledge with others. After a year, we had three UX-ers working like this, one being quite okay, one whose contract ended and one close to a burn-out. We felt we hardly made an impact. A negative atmosphere had crept in during the UX team meetings. Something had to change.

In this session, I like to elaborate on the transformation process we went through and how it resulted in finding our added value as UX-ers. How it went hand in hand with the transformation of our rapid growing business unit and its eagerness to stay connected. I’ll briefly talk about my personal transformation from UX researcher/designer in a product team to UX strategist for the whole business unit. I’ll discuss how we moved forward, creating an internal UX strategy plan and executing it, using different design methods. We talked with our Nedap Healthcare colleagues, launched a business unit wide survey to find out the UX needs of our co-workers. We renamed ourselves to UX Designers and the UX Design team. Collaboration and knowledge sharing became our main themes, both for the UX Design team as the other teams we work with. It laid the groundwork for UX Designers as facilitators: supporting and enabling.