UX Awards system as an internal engagement tool

Increasing UX maturity within your organisation or team can be done in many ways depending on the angle you’re looking from. If we’re talking about internal collaboration, shared knowledge, and engagement with the UX design activities angle, the logical step would be to involve your colleagues and stakeholders in UX-related activities (e.g., workshops, creative sessions, research activities, usability tests participation/support and many more). So, how do we ensure the engagement is high in this matter and how do we make it transparent and effective?

From my previous experience, when involving people in UX design related activities, there is a good chance that you’ll get some people who are very much interested in taking part in these processes, others who kind of want to but are not able to manage themselves (or find time) doing the last step, and others who are not that interested. Also, in the professional setting, your colleagues will come and go, change jobs etc and on a regular and/or semi-regular basis you’ll have to communicate your approach from scratch (the internal approach that has been established towards the UX-related activities and rituals). This communication has to be repeated or streamlined, especially, with the colleagues who have recently joined the organisation and/or team.

In addition, when the Product Designer works in the cross-functional team, there can be different representatives coming from and doing different types of work (e.g, Front-end Developer, Back-end Developer, QA engineer, Data Analyst, Product Owner and others). Each of the roles has a different approach to work and have different touch-points with UX design discipline. We cannot expect that all the roles and especially individuals will be able to participate in all the UX design related activities. In this case there will always be people who collaborate and help the UX discipline more already strictly from the professional touch-points perspective.

To solve the puzzle of setting up this engagement in a rather informal way, visualising, streamlining it, and making it simple and understandable while also creating a sort of desire for others to get involved, I have developed and applied a UX Excellence Awards concept in a professional concept. Basically, it tracks all the involvement and engagement by your colleagues with the UX design related activities. For example, we have an Open-mic session where we generate discussion about our work, educate colleagues with our approach, share knowledge etc. All the colleagues from our organisation are welcome to attend the session on a voluntary basis. Of course, we want to spread UX awareness but are not able to push anyone engaging with it on mandatory conditions. Therefore, we hand out points for everyone attending the session which at the end of the year sums up and one can clearly see the people who have the highest interest and engagement in our sessions. The same pointing system (in a different weight) is also applied with the internal UX audit participation, workshops, ideation sessions, observation and participation in usability and research studies and so on.

As an inspiration, here’s a quick overview on how many points a subject gets for a single attendance/participation:

Certainly it’s an extra task to constantly track down all the interactions of participation but you should see how happy and grateful people are at the end of the year when the points are being summed up and when the colleagues with the most points receive all kinds of goodies and treats. In addition, if you can extract some cool stats such as the usability studies award for colleagues who got involved in these particular projects or any other types of categories, this will make the awards even richer. Make sure you also announce the awards in the local Slack channel or any other tool for internal communication to keep everyone up to date and engaged, especially, when it comes down to the awards announcement. Your colleagues will love it! However, the most important effect is the longer-term one. It’s an increased internal recognition and appreciation for the UX discipline within the professional setting. In addition, you’ll get richer discussions, more input, more alignment and set your department/chapter as a transparent and collaborative partner with the rest of the company.

Try it out and happy UX’ing!