UX Hand-Offs: Questions to Ask as the Receiver

I recently picked up a project from a UX colleague. Here are a list of questions I asked (or wish that I had asked her).

People

Who are the key people? What are their workstyles like?

Who are your resources? Who are your best friends? Who might have opposing views from UX?

What are people's expectations from UX?

Project

Is there a project charter? (Goals, stakeholders, schedules, milestones, risks, etc.)

What does the project schedule look like? What are the milestones?

What's the overall project strategy?

How is success measured?

What are the important assumptions?

Are there any risks you are aware of?

User

Who are the users? What are their roles and goals?

What motivates them?

What are their primary tasks or workflows?

What are some of the tips for working with these users?

UX work

Where are we in terms of UX research and design?

What UX work has been done?
  • Explain materials/artifacts.
  • Explain process for arriving at the materials/artifacts?
  • What are your take-aways?

What UX work remains to be done?
  • What were your immediately next steps based on what has been done?

What are the open questions in UX research and design?

What do users like/dislike the most about the current systems? What are the biggest pain points?

Processes

What project management/engineering processes is the team following? For example, do they follow SCRUM?

How proficient is the team with these processes?

What are the regular meetings (stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives, deliverable reviews etc.) to attend?

Cross-functional team and UX

How much does the team buy into UX?

Team participation in UX
  • What activities have they participated in?
  • What was the level of participation? For example, who participated and what did they do?
  • What were the outcomes from the participation? What were the artifacts? Did the team view the participation positively or not?

Team's UX fluency 
  • Where are they in the UX Funnel?
  • Are they Receptive ("Let's try that.") vs. Resistant ("No time for that")

What are some of the tips for working with the team?

What else?

What else do you think would be good to know?

Consultation going forward

How long will you be available to consult this project?
  • For that period, what percentage of your time will be dedicated to the project?

Plan next steps

Some tips

  • Meet stakeholder and conduct interviews.
  • Do some sort of user interviews or observations or usability testing immediately to really understand the users and their work.
  • Play with existing systems and/or ask for demos and/or go through training materials.
  • Review existing UX artifacts and materials. Plan for meeting with UX person and cross-functional team to go over these in detail.
  • Plan activities that pick up from where the previous UX person left.
  • Keep your questions organized, refer back often to see if they have been answered.
  • What has the previous UX person done that works well that I would like to continue?
    What would I do differently?
  • Don’t be afraid to change things. You're new on the project.

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