Digital Catapult is a tech-driven company with the prime focus on Blockchain, Cybersecurity, IOT, AR/VR and Machine learning. A typical team for a project consists of a UX designer, two or three developers, a technologist and a project manager. To enhance the understanding of User Experience Design in the company, I introduced bi-monthly UX Appreciation workshops to facilitate better engagement of diverse teams and to build a culture around User Experience Design. The participants in these workshops consisted of three UX designers, four developers, three project managers and two technologists.

The UX Appreciation workshops included an introduction to best UX practices, a discussion about good and bad UX examples and copywriting for UX. After the initial introduction to user experience principles, I held a series of workshops exploring the four main technologies that Digital Catapult focuses on from a users point of view (Blockchain, Internet of Things, AR/VR and Cyber-security). Each workshop lasted one hour. We formed four teams of five participants and each team picked one technology to explore.

The first workshop focused on exploring the technologies and what could be the potential use-cases. We brainstormed in groups to answer what the technologies meant and could do. We then proceeded to find out relevant use-cases and how the technology could help solve users problem.

We sketched different scenarios. After discussing we voted on a problem that we wanted to explore more.

In the second workshop, we created proto-personas of our potential users. We did this by interviewing each other within the groups by taking the role of users. The goal of this exercise was to understand how to interview a user and that as designers we are not the users of the product.

After that, we explored the current journey. This exercise gave us the chance to understand if there were any problems or barriers in this journey and if we could turn them into opportunities.

In the third workshop, we created a new user journey which would solve the problems that arose in the current journey. At this point, we could understand if the technology we had selected could solve the identified problems. There were two groups that changed their directions in the projects at this moment as they realised they couldn't validate their assumptions and refocused on a different angle of the problem.

The fourth workshop was all about ideation and trying to see how those journeys could be brought to life. We did the Crazy Eights exercise to generate design ideas. We came up with a few rough concepts of app/web applications and how they could work and look like.

It was interesting to see how in four hours, the twenty participants could come up with some interesting use-cases for these new technologies. But more than that it was great to see how everyone was taking the user point of view into account and finally empathising with the user.

By leading these workshops, I felt it was easier for me to work across the organization and have a bigger buy-in from different teams. These workshops were not held with the goal of transforming the participants into UX experts, but to understand the users' point of view, which I think it did achieve.