What does your role involve?
I’m the User Experience Practice Lead at Catalyst. In my role, I sit within the BAUX team. Despite this being my title, I spend quite a bit of time doing typical business analysis tasks such as documentation and facilitation. There is a lot of overlap in human-centered design and business analysis (BA). Everyone in my team has skills in both areas to varying degrees and the overlap in skills enables us to have a cross-discipline view.
That mix of analysis and design is well suited to me because I like to have some creativity in my job. But I also want to know what is important to focus on, what the drivers are for something, and how people may use or respond to digital applications.
In my role, I:
- facilitate discussions,
- elicit requirements,
- create wireframes (a functional drawing of the layout of a website or webpage),
- architect the information hierarchy of a site,
- design interactions,
- write option papers,
- build a backlog of user stories,
- design and run user testing,
- and contribute to documentation.
What does your typical day look like?
My day is often full of meetings and workshops and talking to lots of people. Otherwise, it's head down getting through writing user stories or creating wireframes. However, I need to make sure I am always available to discuss requirements or anything that crops up. I'm here to help the developers and the testers understand what is needed.
One of my favourite sayings is, “No question is a stupid question”. If you’ve thought of it chances are someone else has wondered about it too.
So, sometimes I almost need to be the “stupidest” person in the room by asking a lot of basic questions. This can aid in coming to an understanding of an issue or a particular approach. At other times, I need to be the expert on the project. I do this by taking everyone on the journey with me so I can get their agreement and buy-in about what we’re doing, how we’ll break down the work, and how we'll build something.
Tell us about a recent problem you helped solve.
My whole day is helping to solve lots of problems. Sometimes it’s as big as figuring out how to digitise a 28-page paper form and analysing how we can make it a positive online experience where people feel supported. Other times, it can be subtle things, like how can we word this one question better?
Because a lot of our clients are government groups I’ve been able to work on a really rewarding set of projects with importance for most New Zealanders. From the birth of a child through to our nation’s commitments under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Something that we’ve recently started offering is usability audits. Usability audits are where we take our expertise and understanding of the best practices and the heuristics people use, and we evaluate existing websites, forms, and user journeys. We produce a report with a view of the things that can be improved and recommendations on how to do that.
What do you enjoy about working at Catalyst?
There are lots of smart and funny people at Catalyst, who are great to collaborate with. But I think the overarching thing is that Catalyst cares about their people.
For example, when I was pregnant with my second child our (then) office manager bought me lots of different office chairs to try because she was worried about the back pain I was having.
Through the pandemic, Catalyst management were really protective of us. They were well-prepared and good at communicating what their approach was and why. Plus, they always erred on the side of caution rather than worry about business factors, which I appreciated.
We have a culture where people can talk openly about their mental health or other struggles and are met with compassion from others. I think it's important that they manage to foster a culture that encourages balance.