Character Lab is a nonprofit founded by Angela Duckworth (Author of “Grit") to advance scientific insights that help kids thrive.
Role: Strategic UX Coach, Facilitator, Process Architect
Timeframe: 2018 - present
Contributions:
Led 2-day strategic workshop to address the organization’s siloed approach to innovation and architect a new process.
Spearheaded a UX culture and helped hire internal UX team.
Ongoing coaching / advisory meetings with a UX team to support UX research, prototyping and design.
1-on-1 executive coaching with team leadership.
Organized and facilitated design thinking training for teenage ambassadors from partner schools.
Orchestrated a fair vendor search to identify a partner organization to support large-scale technical projects.
“Jay helped us operationalize human-centered design into all aspects of our work and culture. His value is measured not only by his design expertise and creativity but his ability to connect with people. Jay took Character Lab to the next level and I'll always be grateful."
— Sean Talamas, Executive Director, Character Lab
The Full Story…
Consolidating Siloed, Reactive Innovation into the “Design Spine”
Character Lab’s mission is to connect researchers with educators to create greater knowledge about the conditions that lead to social, emotional, academic, and physical well-being for young people. This work speaks to a pressing need in our schools. When I first spoke with the leadership, the status quo was a lot of passionate, talented individuals innovating independently, often finding out too late that their work was unnecessary, redundant, or in conflict with other projects. By the end of the 30 minute call, we were already making travel plans. One month later, I was onsite in Philadelphia leading the team through a 2-day strategic workshop where we mapped all existing innovation processes and deconstructed them. By the end of the second day, we had collaboratively built a new framework for discovery research, collaborative prioritization, rapid prototyping, and iteration. We called it the “Design Spine”.
Changing the Culture and Building a UX Team
As the Design Spine process began to structure and influence the Character Lab team’s approach, the culture began to shift. People started talking about UX more. But despite the ‘U’ being for ‘user’, this wasn’t an organization making some new triviality for the app store. This was a team made up of researchers and educators trying to bring character development into American schools. Under my guidance, we were successfully seeding a culture prioritizing student experience, researcher experience, teacher experience, and even the experience of school administrators. After about a year of ongoing mentorship, I worked with leadership to create job requisitions and conduct interviews to help put together an in-house full-time UX team to focus on maintaining and developing human-centered design further at Character Lab.
Continuing to Serve as Part of the Team
With tireless efforts from the internal UX team, an empathic approach to design has continued to flourish at Character Lab. I continue to serve as part of the team I helped create, and have the wonderful opportunity to participate in other ways too. Increasing need for research capacity has seen me create an internal UX research moderator training program (affectionally referred to as the ‘Mod Club’). I performed meta-research, serving as an independent third party studying the experience of being a Character Lab employee and reporting anonymous insights to the People Ops team. I also had the chance to attend the org’s annual Educator’s Summit, where I taught design thinking to a group of 20 inspiring teenage high school students to help them serve as embedded interns in schools across the country.
Doubling Down through COVID-19
These are not easy problems to solve, so I’ve been especially inspired by how the Character Lab team’s warm, playful culture thrives along with their intense dedication to this vital mission. So I was not surprised when leadership doubled down on these initiatives as the pandemic hit in 2020. I’ve continued to support the growing UX team. Educator’s Summit 2020 migrated online, and I expanded to lead a whole week of training with almost 100 students over Zoom, teaching them about design and their role as ambassadors. During the 2020 election season, I also began 1-on-1 executive mindfulness coaching with leadership and led a mindfulness course for the team.
A Fair Approach to Finding a Vendor
After a few years of championing UX at Character Lab, the demand for human-centered design exceeded our capacity. This was perhaps the best sign that the culture was changing. As an external with a deep understanding of UX and of Character Lab’s internal needs, I was called upon by senior leadership to lead a vendor search. The goal was to find a partner organization to support large-scale technical projects in the long-term. I created a lean request for proposals and engaged in dialogue with 13 different vendor organizations, scoring their proposals on 10 key criteria. This process helped me narrow to the top 3 organizations which I then introduced to the Character Lab team. The outcome of this process was a strong partnership between Character Lab and the best partner for the short-term job and long-term need: a Philly design studio called P’unk Avenue.
