What is the “UX Horror Story Trilogy”？
Hello, I’m Hoteida from the Market Creation Office (MCO). As of January, I am also officially a part of the Marketing Division as well. The MCO has been slowly working towards marketing since October, and I myself have been supporting Fujii-kun in creating content for seminars as well.
Now, some of you may wonder why I call Fujii-kun with a “kun” instead of a “san”. The two of us actually joined beBit as new grads at the same time! When we work together, we often have flashbacks about when we were trained and the things we experienced together. We can speak honestly with each other without hesitating as well. Of course, Fujii-kun is a super YABAI person and the man of the hour, so there is a lot I can learn from him. For those who joined as new grads, I highly recommend treasuring those who joined with you.
Now, today I’m going to introduce you to one of the seminars we came up with - the “UX Horror Story Trilogy”!
日本語はこちらから！
It all started from a simple thought
This series with an extremely catchy title was born from a simple thought that came from Fujii-kun - “When I speak with clients, there are a lot of similarities in the negative occurrences that happen at their companies.”
While each client may think their problems only apply to their company, there are many similarities in the issues that clients face. If we take these issues and make suggestions as to how they can potentially be resolved from a UX professional’s perspective or from an outsider perspective of a consultant, we may be able to provide value to our customers.
That is how this seminar began.
The challenge of creating a catchy title
There are many levels to the issues that people face. They can vary from starting a new service to organizing teams and aligning everyone's perspective. Because of this, we decided to plan a trilogy separated into levels.
From here, Fujii-kun, who consumes a lot of content from movies to music to manga, became very committed to the idea of coming up with a single catchy title for the series. We believed that if we can get as many people as possible to see the seminar, we would be able to help as many people as possible.
As a result, the following titles were established.
UX Horror Story Trilogy
●Vol. 1 Common Mistakes Made by UX Beginners
●Vol. 2 Examples of UX Team Struggles
●Vol. 3 Common Causes for Agonizing Cries During New Business and Service Designing
“Agonizing cries”... while you may hear the term occasionally, it’s rarely used in the business scene.
If you’d like to learn more about the struggles of naming content, please check out Fujii-kun’s “After Digital Inspiration Letter Vol. 37” (It can be accessed through the PR portal site).
※For those who do not work at beBit: Check out the details on “After Digital Inspiration Letter” here.
The Content Created
While coming up with the content, we received valuable input from people who interact with clients on a daily basis, such as Hashimoto-san, Ikuta-san, Motoyama-kun, Satoshun, and Isono-kun.
Here are a few of the resulting content…
Vol. 1 Common Mistakes Made by UX Beginners
●Chimera Persona
●Don’t listen to the users’ opinions
●If a customer comes to mind, you’ve lost
●“Our clientele is unique and diverse”
●Don’t cry out about the importance of UX
Vol. 2 Examples of UX Team Struggles
●Common misconceptions about the term UX
●There is no freedom in teams working with users
●There are no young people in the UX team
●Teams that only look at data
●Setting a broken KPI
Vol. 3 Common Causes for Agonizing Cries During New Business and Service Designing
●Activities with ambiguous authorization
●Wrong allocation of investments in activities
●Mistaking what a service is
●The core experience is not questioned and provided as is
●Premature user expansion
When you look at these topics, you can’t help but think, “wait, that’s not OK?” or “what does that mean?” Thanks again to everyone who provided us with ideas.
3 Consecutive Weeks of Seminars
The UX Horror Story Trilogy ran for 3 weeks starting November 22, 2022. We ran the seminar offline with a limited number of participants with proper infection prevention measures in place and streamed it through Zoom as well.
The number of signups for the third session was almost double the first session. It seems that those who participated in the first and second sessions spread the word within their companies, and more than 650 people registered for the third session! Fujii-kun himself was approached by a client who said “I heard about an interesting event you're hosting!” so it seems to have become quite a hot topic of conversation in the scene.
Questions came pouring in during the Q&A session following the lecture as well! Compared to previous seminars, there was an increase in the number of very passionate discussions. We received many positive comments and opinions in the post-seminar questionnaire. Here are a few examples.
Hearing the horror stories that tend to happen at large companies, I felt like you might have been talking about our company! Failure stories felt much more helpful than success stories. (Department manager, telecommunications industry)
While they were stories about often occurrences, you introduced very practical ideas and made the time worthwhile. Thank you very much. (Freelance)
I feel like our DX department and product personnel should listen to all three seminars, including today’s. (Financial Services)
It was quite a challenge holding seminars with completely new content for three consecutive weeks, but thanks to the members who adapted quickly and demonstrated their specialties during the live events, the seminars went smoothly and the participants were satisfied. We can only hope that the knowledge shared during this event will be useful for the participants and their companies!
About the Reruns
So, the UX Horror Story Trilogy, which I dare say was a great success, is going to be rebroadcast due to popular demand!
Vol. 1: January 17th, 2023 (Tues) 6pm~7:30pm (That’s today!)
Vol. 2: January 31st, 2023 (Tues) 6pm~7:30pm
Vol. 3: February 7th, 2023 (Tues) 6pm~7:30pm
Employees are welcome, so please stop by if you can.
※For those outside of beBit, please sign up from the link below!
The Marketing Department will continue to plan upcoming events. If you have any ideas for new events, please let us know!