An introduction to UCD

I was initially sat with the dev team, who at this time were not familiar with User Centred Design. The organisation was split into two parts. The core operation was located in Shaftesbury Avenue, Covent Garden, and their development team were in the Johnson Building, Chancery Lane. My primary challenge was to go to the Shaftesbury Avenue site and observe users in order to conduct ethnographic and contextual studies.
Initially this was not received well. The idea was that I would sit with dev and rapidly build wires that came out of the user stories already in backlog.

When I fist visited users in the operations site, they were surprised to see me also! Though when I showed them examples of the work that had been marked as 'done' it became clear that something had gotten lost in translation. Building relationships is key in UX, and I met with a great business analyst call Luis Bustos, who had already mapped out a raft of process maps which articulated very complex operational processes. I then took these, and started sketching then wire framing various journeys, and interactive prototypes, which allowed me to validate his documentation with real users. This validation took the form of Axure prototypes.

This demonstration of value built credibility and I found I was now accompanying the Product Owner to conduct the same tasks - contextuals, ethnographic studies with external clients who were also to use this sophisticated workflow management application.