Llorin Keashly on Teams & Best Practices @FCV

As a user experience / usability specialist at FCV I am learning lots and having fun, which is great. Through the first few weeks about 30% of my time was spent researching. I would be looking up how to do things or doing competitive analysis for other UX team members. About 20% of my time has been spent writing up documents, but that changes from week to week. Some weeks it is mainly writing and others it is mainly research. The remaining 50% is spent making wireframes and finding solutions to usability issues.

There are many teams here at FCV. Generally people are split up into pods. There is a group for UX, QA, development, .NET development, design, and Project Management. These pods are then split up into teams who work on different projects. Usually there will be a developer or two, a designer, a PM, and a UX person on each team.

Currently I am on three teams, one for a travel site and the other is working on re organizing the main navigation for a transportation site, and an FCV internal team that is creating a new FCV mobile site. The team PM will schedule all the meetings; there is usually a kick off meeting and a few client meetings and review meetings. Between these meeting the team will generally work on their separate parts and will come together to ask questions or on a scheduled meeting time.

I am learning a lot about the best practices of UX/IA. For the most part so far it has been what the good things to do in usability and IA are, and what things should be avoided in your wireframes. Some company/team best practices I have noticed involve document formatting, making sure you have everything correct and using the right fonts.

All in all so far my experiences here at FCV have been great and I hope everything continues to go well for the rest of my time here.

Tags: FCV Technologies, Llorin Keashly