Ladies that UX Florianópolis: acting in the city's UX maturity
The origin of the volunteer program that reached 47 female volunteers in less than 2 years.
Read original article, in Portuguese, on Medium.
Above, the second Ladies that UX Florianópolis meetup. The theme was: UX Culture + Remote UX.
What you'll find in this article
Context
Ladies That UX is a global initiative made by the community and for the community. Informal and friendly, its goal is to improve and increase female participation in the UX and technology market through representation, mutual support, encouragement and inspiration.
The organization is divided into chapters, and each chapter represents their cities. Today, it is present in over 80 cities around the world, spread across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Each chapter has its own dynamics and schedule according to the needs of the audience in the region and development maturity in UX. Overall the mutual activities offered are meetups, discussion panels and talking circles. The idea is to provide a relaxing and biasless atmosphere, so that people feel comfortable and free to share their questions and perspectives.
Origin in Florianópolis
Ladies That UX Florianópolis was the second Brazilian chapter of the organization, founded at the end of May 2019 by the chapter leaders Hannane Cherifi e Rafaela Cardoso. Not long after, Flávia Tavares joined us and contributed until June 2020, passing the baton to Amanda Silva, another woman dedicated and committed to our cause. Today, as chapter leaders, our mission is to organize the chapter and, to do so, we have set strategies for growth and relevance of the community in the city, as well as promoting women in the job market. This role is backed by a broad knowledge in areas such as advertising, design, architecture, project and media management. Added to this, we have the drive to spread the community's values and positively influence every woman we can reach.
When we held our first event, even though we didn't have any volunteers and LTUX wasn't known in the city, the available slots were filled quickly. This was great feedback, since it revealed the urgency of the community's existence.
The first volunteers
In November 2019, after three events held, we understood that it was the moment to accept volunteers. To help organize these events, we began to rely on Samanta Oliveira, who already had experience in the area. She was in charge of all the issues regarding capacity, dates, coffee breaks and everything related. With the structuring of the events consolidated, it was time to think about the post-events. Renata Feitosa arrived to edit our videos and help us promote the chapter on social media.
The chapter matured and we identified the need to have a fund reservation for events and unforeseen situations. That's when Nailana Lopes joined the team, being in charge of budgeting products that we could sell to the public to generate revenue. Then, when Ana Carolina Lima arrived, she was in charge of creating copy for social media publications and right after that she had Giulia Wendhausen's help to do the graphics and organize all the amazing content we were looking forward to sharing with our ladies. We believe that these contents are essential to our community, since women represent only 39% of the UX professionals in Brazil*.
The three pillars of LTUX FLN
Up until that moment our focus had always been on in-person events. When the pandemic knocked on our door, we had to think strategically and structure our goals accordingly. With the arrival of Amanda Silva in our chapter leaders' team, we started to plan our volunteering project as a company that had mission, vision and values, as described below:
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Mission: to provide a connection between the female audience, companies and content, promoting the diversification of UX Design professionals.
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Vision: to become the focal point of Florianópolis' job market in the search for female UX Design professionals.
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Values: Commitment, recognition of local professionals, proactivity, sorority.
We understood that one possible path to reach our vision goal would be through the UX process itself. To encourage, promote and keep women in the market it is not enough to only focus on them, but also to study the entire city job market. After all, how can you encourage someone to join the UX field if there are no open positions for beginners? How can you promote women who already are in the field if companies do not give them space to grow? And, finally, how can you keep women in the UX field if they do not have a support network nor representation?
With this in mind, we noticed that the chapter's touch points were the following three: the public (those who'd come to our events), the speakers (those who'd speak on our events) and the companies (that would allow us to host our events in their headquarters and, also, that were looking forward to hiring UX Designers). Each of these touch points needed to have a most favorable experience according to their needs and the needs of the chapter.
The volunteer squads were, therefore, created to achieve the ideal experience for each of these strands:
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Companies squad: Map out how to improve our contact with Florianópolis' companies.
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Speakers squad: Plan and look after the experience of the speakers in their journey, from the first contact and invitation to the post-participation.
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Public squad: Get to know our audience more deeply so as to design experiences that meet their needs.
Besides, we realized that, apart from the three mentioned pillars, there was another one that united them all: communication. This would then become the core of the three strands, since the content produced by all the squads is transmitted through our communication tools.
What also contributed to the formation of the squad was the understanding of how the content-consuming and event-going public was different - mainly because of the pandemic. More than 20% of our social media audience was from other cities.
In the image, our touch points.
From August 2020, already with 12 volunteers, we began to create monthly UX challenges that were synchronized in between the teams. Doing so, we would not only build ways to achieve each goal, but also offer women of different seniorities and areas an opportunity to teach and learn UX in practice.
Research steps
We had monthly meetings with our volunteers and, during it, each team would present the results from the challenge proposed in the previous month. The first step consisted in doing a research to define the target audience of each team.
In the image, part of the results found by the Communication Squad.
In the image, the survey and part of the results achieved by the Public Squad.
Each team had the freedom to define how they would accomplish these monthly deliveries. Many divided the delivery into small individual tasks, others held meetings at common hours. The only constant among the groups was the instruction about the subject to be discussed, which was recorded for eventual consultation, as well as the availability of the chapter leaders for questions.
In the image, one of the videos explaining the User Journey Mapping step.
The next step to be taken was to put together a hypothesis-based user journey map. Based on the initial research that the volunteers conducted they were instructed to identify actors, scenarios, actions, feelings and opportunities of a segment of their target audience. At first we asked them all to use the same journey template so that the focus would be on the content, since it would be (in)validated in the future. The template used was based on the User Journey Mapping course offered by Product Arena and taught by Paola Sales.
In the image, part of the initial user journey maps of the Companies and Speakers' squad.
Once having the target audience research done and a first version of the user journey map of each touch point, the next step was to validate the content of this journey. To do so, the volunteers had to assemble an interview script with questions that should avoid inducing a biased answer, as well as validate or invalidate the actions and feelings of each stage. In this same delivery another goal was to select and interview at least 5 people from each identified profile.
In the image, a user recruitment spreadsheet (top left), an interview screenshot (top right), a summary of the insights (bottom left), and user journey modifications (bottom right) from the Communication Squad.
It is important to point out that the volunteers' profile was not just made up of ladies that had experience in this job field. Most of them were in the process of career migration and the goal of this experience was to work on each step without worrying about mistakes. With each delivery the process evolved through exchange of experiences and feedback. When we received new volunteers, they were assigned to one of the four squads. From that moment on they were not only informed about everything that had been accomplished up to that point, but also what they should work on thereafter.
In November 2020, with 20 volunteers already, we moved on to the validation phase of the user journey maps created. Additionally, the volunteers would also have to create an empathy map and the final persona.
In the image, the empathy map from the Companies Squad (top left), the user journey map update from the Public Squad (top right), one of the final personas (bottom left) and the user journey map update (bottom right) from the Speakers Squad.
We kicked-off 2021 with the challenge of creating a future journey map for each squad. Much is said about the present user journey map, but UX teams rarely develop the future journey map, that is, the experiences and feelings that they want a user to have access to. The future journey mapping is an approach used when we want to innovate existing experiences or create new ones, focusing on new user segments or new product and/or service offerings. This is the time to be creative! To not only address pain points that have been identified by the research, but to think of possibilities to further improve the mundane experiences of such a journey.
Here are some examples of great ideas found using the future journey map: having mentoring booths at in-person events (Public Squad); providing a space for speakers to gather before an event (Speakers Squad); training recruiters and delivering useful content to help them better define job openings (Companies Squad); and offering a day for a specialist lady to answer questions about a specific topic on Instagram (Communication Squad).
In the image, the future journey map of the Public (top left), Companies (top right), Speakers (bottom left) and Communication (bottom right) Squads.
Once we understand where we are and where we want to channel the experiences of each of our pillars, we now need to understand the chapters' processes as a whole.
From the personas' point of view, our touch points are not differentiated as sectors of a company. They interact with one brand. In order for all the teams to be aware of the intersection of the initiatives, the creation of a Service Blueprint was the strategy adopted. A Blueprint allows the visualization of the interactions of multiple personas with the brand, from the perspective of the users and the company, and their flow and how they relate to each other. To guide the construction of this collaborative Service Blueprint we invited the designer (and service blueprint enthusiast) Mariana Medeiros.
In the image, the orientation meeting held about what a service blueprint is, by Mariana Medeiros.
Mariana put together a workshop and, in a session of three hours, our volunteers assembled a scope of these processes and how each persona interacts with the touch points.
In the image, the blueprint service workshop given by Mariana Medeiros.
Hands on
After a lot of research, understanding and planning experiences, what are the next steps?
Our volunteers will understand what an MVP is and how they can define the delivery stages of the experience building. In parallel, much of what has been done so far will be revisited, such as constant research and interviews with users, in order to gather feedback and evolve/adjust the future deliveries. As a spoiler, we can say that the product discovery step will be led by Mariana Estivalet, Product Manager at iFood.
The future of the chapter
In order to offer this UX learning and practice cycle for new chapter volunteers we started creating parallel projects, such as the development of our website. By doing so, incoming volunteers can both give support to the existing teams that are already prioritizing tasks, and participate in the UX development of a product from scratch.
The construction of our website won't be carried out by a particular team, as we consider it to be a means of communication for each squads' initiatives. Because of this, volunteers interested in the project will be part of a squad dedicated to it, while giving continuity to the activities of their own teams.
The stakeholders of this project are us, chapter leaders, and we'll invite several amazing ladies to instruct the teams in the process. One of the steps will be taught by Amanda Silva, one of our chapter leaders, about task management and prioritization.
Another parallel project to be developed is the construction of a classified jobs board. The idea is that we can advertise job openings according to our standards of transparency (description of activities, company name, among others), and generate interest and traffic data to intensify our relationship with local companies. These are just some of the ideas to continue sharing knowledge and opportunities for the UX practice.
The Ladies That UX Florianópolis chapter currently has 47 volunteers, which is the largest volunteer team of any existing chapter to date. We want to serve as inspiration for other chapters to structure their volunteer teams to go beyond just creating social media posts. Creating a volunteer program, in our opinion, is the best way to promote ladies and achieve, through the power of networking, a city with a more diverse UX field and fair opportunities.
This article was written by Amanda Silva, Hannane Cherifi and Rafaela Cardoso in March 2021. And translated from Portuguese to English by Rafaela Cardoso in October 2022.
You can read the full article in Portuguese at Ladies That UX PT's Medium.
*Source: Panorama UX Design 2019.