When you're shaping projects and eliciting requirements, whose perspectives do you take into account? Is it mainly the people with a high level of power and influence inside your organisation?
Engaging with those individuals through workshops and interviews is great. But are you doing enough to understand the needs of the people who will actually be the hands-on users of your solution - whether they are internal operational staff, or external customers? And what would be the implications of focusing more on those people?
You may have taken on board some techniques such as personas, customer journey maps and empathy maps. But are you getting the full benefit of them, or is this just UX theatre?
In this session, Nick will give advice on how to make your projects more genuinely user-centred, based on his many years of experience with public sector organisations, investment banks and internet startups. You'll find out:
- The difference between UX theatre and a genuinely user-centred approach
- What skills are required
- What the implications are for your project process
- Helpful recent developments in thinking about users
- How international standards can help.
Nick will also add some thoughts about the use or non-use of AI in this context.
About the speaker
Nick de Voil is on a mission to make systems more people-oriented. He has been promoting user-centred design among the business analysis community for the last 15 years, through speaking, writing and running training courses.
You may have read some of Nick’s articles in BA Digest about Group Construct Analysis, an approach to understanding people in organisations which draws on sociology, anthropology and linguistics as well as psychology.
Nick was a director of IIBA’s UK Chapter for eight years and was the principal designer of the IIBA UK website from 2014 to 2024. He is the author of the BCS book "User Experience Foundations". You can find out more about Nick by connecting with him on LinkedIn.
Session recording
Cover image created by Freepik (www.freepik.com)