Being on a small yet mighty UX team means we try to do a lot with a little. To scale up and broaden our impact, my team has spent much of the past year prioritizing ResearchOps and DesignOps. Essentially, it’s about optimizing our “Operations.” Improving the “how” of what we do. Doing it better, faster, and with greater impact.
Since we act like an internal agency and consultancy, much of what we do is teach people how to do UX. We serve a 200-person library organization with just a handful of us, not to mention the 50,000-person university that also regularly approaches us for support.
The demand is too great for us to conduct all the research, write all the content, and curate all the design. We often find ourselves reinventing the wheel as we point clients to various articles, case studies, and the occasional template. So we realized that if we could create a playbook of UX practices, we could reduce our one-off efforts, empower our colleagues, and better build UX expertise campus-wide. So we did.
With the leadership of Bob Liu, our UX designer, we recently launched The UX Cookbook. A public website filled with 7 easy-to-read recipes so far covering:
We have many more recipes in the works, including ones focused on content planning and strategy, information architecture, and web analytics. It’s early days yet, but I’m pretty excited we now have this resource to share UX recipes with people at the University of Arizona and beyond.