My experience as a UX Generalist at Caravel Labs & Microsoft (NDA)
UX Generalist in a design team of 5
Experience, Consulting, Contract
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Figma, Microsoft Fluent UI
In February 2023, I had the honor of joining Caravel Labs (a Microsoft partner) as a UX Generalist to provide UX consulting to Microsoft. Together, we worked on a confidential federal government project over a few months.
The material at hand was unfamiliar to me and required me to do a lot of background research with scanning through handbooks and tuning into the many Microsoft Teams meetings. Me and my Design Lead worked on a sprint ahead of the developer's within a two week period, so things went by fast. It was important for me to make sure I was managing my time wisely throught the work week.
My typical day working with Microsoft consisted of tuning into both the UX design daily standup as well as the dev's daily standup. I came into the scene with the mindset of making sure that I was constantly up to date on what the devs were working on and if they had any issues or new designs mocked up. I would then design and discuss design decisions with my Design Lead.
“The problem with developer handoff mentality, is that it does not foster collaboration and communications between design and development.”
Through Caravel Labs, I learned that being involved with the developers creates a more efficient, agile environment. This included annotating my designs and addressing all case-scenarios and answering any dev questions to prevent any miscommunication.
If there were any issues the devs faced as far as designs and interactions go, I would prioritize addressing and solving those tickets. I'd also attend their weekly backlog refinement as well for prioritization and bug issues.
One of the most intimidating things was presenting my designs and prototypes to our client. With almost 100 people in a Microsoft Teams meeting, I was able to demonstrate a flow for my client. I walked them through my prototype, explained user scenarios, and answered any questions that they had. My heart was definitely racing, but it was a proud moment for me that I was able to go through with it!
My role mainly consisted on UI designs. I followed the existing design system put in place by our visual designers and followed the Microsoft Fluent UI guidelines. I created flows and mades sure to annotate clearly for the Dev team and design for all kind of scenarios like overflow of text/content to making empty states.
One of the more challenging things about this experience was the lack of UX research and testing. Unfortunately, the subject matter was extremely niche. That's why it was on me to make sure that we made a good use of our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to get them involved in the process.
Before I had joined the team, there was no trace of usability testing. The design team themselves did not have much expertise in testing, so I was able to come in and advocate the importance of usability testing and how that could help us build more efficiently.
With me, the Dev Lead, and our UX Researcher, we were able to conduct usability sessions with SMEs and collect feedback and also address any bugs as well. It was a win-win for the design and dev teams!
This was my first real experience working with a team of designers and a team of developers. I learned a lot of many things like the following:
