German UPA visits UX&I in Düsseldorf

At the end of October, the time had come: The German Professional Association for User Experience and Usability Professionals, German UPA for short, launched its new “UX on Site” series. The UX&I team was there to participate. During a 75-minute livestream on YouTube and LinkedIn, viewers gained insights into the “Purpose-Driven Organization.”

Office tour

The visit began with a virtual office tour led by Patrick Oselka, co-founder of UX&I. The Düsseldorf office is one of five hubs and points of connection in Germany. During the pandemic, the company has evolved into a hybrid organization. Employees plan to be in the office at least two days a month.

Interactive sessions

Help! We (don’t) make sense

Tobias Schlei, co-founder of UX&I, demonstrated how a sense of purpose can impact the entire ecosystem and bring clarity to recruiting, the team, and projects. “We wanted to work differently. To do things right. Not to stay naive, and to ask a lot of questions. But for a long time, we didn’t explicitly address the biggest question: the question of ‘why.’ The more self-organized the company became, the clearer it became that we needed to define our purpose.” Using the Japanese ikigai method, the team refined its purpose: “We empower people to shape technology for the benefit of humans.” Today, this statement influences the types of applications we receive, our personalized onboarding process, project evaluations using a purpose-fit indicator, the services we offer, and the decentralized organizational structure that has emerged as a result.

Socio-democracy in practice

In his session,
Christian Korff, Senior UX consultant, provided insights into how UX&I puts the human-centered approach into practice within its own organization. “We practice the human-centered approach with our clients, but to do so successfully, we have to start with ourselves. The way we think, the way we work, and the way we’re organized: all of this has an impact on our clients.” UX&I is a sociocratic company structured around a peach-circle model. To ensure that self-organization works, only 80% of available time is dedicated to clients. The remaining 20% is used for training and organizational work.

How does a human-centered approach become part of an organization’s DNA?

A human-centered approach to product development can only reach its full potential if people outside the product teams, that is, throughout the entire organization, also think and act in a human-centered way. Senior UX consultant Kay Spiegel and Product Coach Hias Wrba shared tips from their day-to-day project work and best practices that help foster an internal UX mindset. Their presentation was based on four dimensions of UX transformation: processes and structures, tools and methods, leadership and personal development, and culture and visibility of the topic.

Ready, set, go? Kicking off the project with the Product Ignition Workshop

In the final session, Senior UX consultant Nadine Pieper and Senior UX consultant Markus Brendel presented the second iteration of the internally developed Product Ignition Workshop. This is a team workshop designed to bring all participants up to the same level of knowledge and launch a product as quickly as possible. The different phases are: understanding scope and value, creating prototypes, testing and validating, developing, and releasing. “But we use a checklist beforehand to determine whether the workshop is even the right format,” explained Nadine Pieper.