The User Experience Team of One Blog

I’m very excited to announce that I’m starting work on a book that I wish had been on my bookshelf years ago. It’s called The UX Team of One.

Who am I?
I’m a practicing user experience designer based in San Francisco. I work with and learn every day from a team of stellar designers at Adaptive Path. But before that, I was a UX team of one. In this book I hope to share my experiences–what has worked for me, and what hasn’t.

What makes this book different?
When I first found user experience and knew I wanted to be a part of it, I was working as a front-end developer in a small organization. I looked at my job and decided that there was no better place to make it happen than right where I was. The importance of user experience was very clear to me.  How to make it take hold in my organization? Not so much.

So I looked for books to help me figure out how to do it. I found a lot of great resources that guided me in establishing a process, but none that helped me to prepare myself for the some of the subtler but no less important challenges of UX work. How to convince others of the potential of a user-centered approach? What to do when my co-workers disagreed with or undermined my design ideas? Through it all, how to improve my own skills as a designer? What I needed then, and what I hope to write now, was something to help user experience teams of one not just establish a process, but also see and create opportunities for UX and for themselves.

What will you learn?
This book will explain the common types of situations that teams of one find themselves in. It will take a practical second look at many of the methods and deliverables that we use, and suggest leaner, more efficient ways for achieving the same goals but with less effort. It will also cover the softer side of UX work: winning friends and allies, building support for UX, and growing professionally.

Following a process is important, but making sure your work gets adopted and builds a foundation for more and better UX work in the future is just as important. This is a book with an agenda: to help you figure out what outcomes you want, and how to make them happen.

You can help.
This is the first book specifically for people doing user experience work without the support of a UX team. At various points in our careers, that’s probably most of us.

If you’ve been in this situation, or are working as a UX team of one now, please share your story. If you would be interested in speaking with me about your experiences and possibly contributing your stories to this work in progress, I’d love it if you send me a note.