Background
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is on a mission to make their organisation more user-centric. This effort is being spearheaded by their digital team that are working hard to ensure that user experience is considered at all levels of the business. From their external website, to the internal staff HR systems all the way to visitors experiences at events and within their stores.
In order to achieve this CRUK recognised that their staff needed a common understanding of what user experience was and how to apply it to their projects. With this in mind CRUK contacted City Interaction Lab and asked us to develop training courses for stakeholders across their business.

What we did
Following conversations with the Cancer Research UK team we produced tailored training workshops on topics such as ‘Introduction to User Experience’ and ‘Evaluating your System’. So far we have run these workshops for members joining the digital team as well as internal systems developers and project and product managers.

These were practical hands on sessions that complimented the theoretical underpinnings of user experience with lots of individual and group activities. The ‘Introduction to User Experience’ session provided attendees with the opportunity to prepare recruitment screeners and test scripts, create hypothesis personas, conduct an expert review and storyboards and wireframes. The content and activities for each session were tailored to attendees in order to keep them interesting and relevant, with most activities revolving around a recurring theme such as a ‘Race for Life’ app or the redesign of the CRUK Intranet.

The ‘Evaluating your System’ workshop spent more time on how to prepare for and conduct user research with the latter half the day dedicated to groups putting the theory into practice by conducting guerrilla testing on an existing CRUK product within the local area then returning to practice lab based user testing within City Interaction Lab.

Outcomes
Following the initial workshops in early 2015 the CRUK digital team has been able to apply the skills learnt on the course by facilitating their own user testing sessions and applying a broader range of techniques to their projects. Wider stakeholders within the organisation have benefited as they have been able to better articulate their requirements for projects and have more informed conversations with their colleagues from the digital team.

What the clients said

‘The whole team were really impressed with the UX workshops run for us by City Interaction Lab. We were hoping for a broad look at UX skills but with enough practical content for people to take back into their day to day roles as digital professionals, and that was exactly what we got. I’d recommend the course to anyone looking to make sure that their users are at the heart of what they do.’

– James Gadsby-Peet – Senior Digital Services Manager