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While at Allscripts, I worked with the Director of UX to create a comprehensive UCD training. The goal of the training was to elevate UX maturity across the organization. Several modalities were developed to accommodate different teams. Some teams benefited more from an overview e.g., developers, while others benefited from more in-depth how-to instructions e.g., business analysts, product managers, etc. The more in-depth offering was generally given in person over two days, while the overview only took about 4 hours.
One of the key points we made in training was that User-Centered Design is not new or something new or that we created. It's an established practice used in many industries and companies. We created a parody slide that makes it look like my co-presenter, Ross Teague, and I wrote the book on user-centered design to draw attention to this point.
Since my time at Allscripts, I've used variations of this highly effective training at Oracle and Citrix in similar ways.
Along with the UCD training at Allscripts, I incentivized non-UX teams to engage in UX by creating a "UX Hero Award." The award was 3d printed in the recipient's likeness and given out once a quarter to employees who went above and beyond to take a stand for UX at Allscripts. The award came with a featured story on the Allscripts' intranet and was emailed to all employees. Overall, it was a very visible and unique award that really stood out and was highly desired. It's one of many techniques I used to help more people become aware of the value of UX.
Another initiative that I led involved helping Allscripts employees empathize with our end-users. To accomplish this, I led a small team that created empathy posters which were loosely based on the UX concept of an empathy map. The idea of the posters is that the viewer can learn all the things that the end-user is seeing, hearing, and thinking. The content of these posters was generated by interviewing 3-4 people of each user group (i.e., nurses, surgeons, etc.). The posters were well received and are hanging in nearly all of Allscripts' corporate offices worldwide.
Our empathy campaign also folded into our World Usability Day activities. As part of World Usability Day, the Allscripts team created interactive exhibits. Employees from Allscripts could choose from a variety of activities that helped them learn and even feel what it was like to be one of our users.
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