CASE STUDY: User Centered Design Capacity Building

The Challenge: As the organization increasingly saw the value and need for UX research to build more user-friendly and user-driven technology solutions, they also needed efficient and effective ways to spread the skills and knowledge of User Centered Design across regional and national teams. An organization-wide summit provided a window of opportunity for my team to help teach the principles and practices of Human Centered Design to hundreds of participants and my team was asked to design and facilitate a workshop.

The Approach: Leveraging best practices from IDEO, d.School, 4.0 Schools and more, my team created a UX-centered workshop similar to Google Venture's Design Sprint. We fine-tuned and tested the model in more than 6 different workshops with internal and external partners before the event. Interest in the workshop far outpaced our expectations and we had to figure out how to scale from an audience of 40 to 250. We recruited facilitators from current and former staff, trained them on how to facilitate the workshop at their tables, and within a month were ready to host hundreds of participants at the upcoming event.

The Impact:

My team developed a proven practice for leading UX-focused sessions that can take participants from a need statement to a testable digital prototype in a few hours. We also developed engaging methods for training our partners and colleagues in Human Centered Design to empower others with new skills and techniques.

The pinnacle of our work was a 250-person "Design-a-Thon" which brought together educators, entrepreneurs, students, and technologists together to tackle a series of design challenges sourced from the participants. It was rated as one of the top sessions at Teach For America's 15,000 person 3-day 25th Anniversary Summit.

The facilitator's guide on this page was designed to enable designers anywhere to lead their group through the design process and create prototypes that empower them to get real feedback and have meaningful connections with their users. It is available to the public domain to help others take advantage of the source material.