Intervision for UX consultants

Being a UX consultant within the technical software domain is often challenging. Most UX professionals like me are people that like to be part of a team or tribe. Their creative minds do work at best when they are stimulated and inspired by other UX-minded people. But as UX consultant in the technical software domain, you’re often on your own at a client or within a project. This correlates to the often none- to low level UX-maturity of the companies and development teams in this hi-tech domain.

Especially for consultants with less experience in our field of work it can be challenging to feel confident and proud of their approach and outcomes at first. During their studies, they’re trained and used to work in teams with other designers and researchers to complete tasks. But in small R&D teams with all technical profiles, they’re on their own to show off their value to the team and get valued accordingly by team members and management who lack experience with UX-ers and therefore unaware of what to expect. As the UX role for a consultant in such an environment is broad, they need to obtain understanding of a lot of different topics in many contexts and operate at many organisational levels.

To support our UX consultants at ALTEN we combine coaching in the first year with intervision sessions. The 1:1 coaching allows to help out on a detailed project level at the client and during the intervision sessions we allow them to share their issues and topics with their colleagues. As UX-ers have curiosity in their nature, they start to pop questions to each other when you put them together in a room. These sessions allow us to monitor the questions and issues that live within the group and act on them. It also enable us to show off our work to fellow designers/researchers and get feedback or critiques. Even more important: it allows to celebrate our successes.

In addition to the intervision, we also facilitate knowledge sessions that are open to anyone. This helps to showcase the work field of UX-ers but also connect to and learn from people with other competencies.

Our clients also benefit from this approach. They get help directly from a single consultant that is backed by a team of all kinds of experts as our consultant gets to discuss approach, research results or designs with a team of experts.

I’m really proud of our team of consultants, especially about the way they’re all engaged to contribute and weight in during discussions and exercises. Every session I obtain new insights from them on the way they look at their problems and challenges.