Published 2015-06-11

Schibsted UX first gathering

For the first time ever, User Experience professionals and those working with UX from across Schibsted have gathered.

The Schibsted UX gathering took place in Barcelona earlier this spring, and participants included Interaction Designers, Researchers, and Visual Designers, as well as Product Managers, Data Scientists, Front-end Engineers, Business Developers and Product Owners. More than 100 people attended from all over Schibsted Media Group. 

The furthest travelled were participants from Yapo in Chile, who travelled more than 11 thousand kilometers to be at the SCM Superweek and the Schibsted UX Gathering. We also welcomed people from some of Schibsted’s biggest UX product teams (FINN, VG, and Aftonbladet) and some folks who are the only UX person on their team.

It was great to experience such a wide range of people, skills and knowledge from all over the company.

Two days of presentations and sharing

“Stepping up to the next level, we believe it’s important to get UX professionals and to meet, to share ideas and experiences. Many people are facing similar design and user challenges. If they can share their ideas they can approach these problems together and come up with more interesting, innovative solutions,” says Lidia Oshlyansky, Head of UX in Schibsted Products & Technology.

If people can meet each other and talk they are more likely to reach out to each other later to get ideas and work through challenges.

“We spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel because several teams work on the same problems – in silos. This is true for UX teams as it is true for any other team structure. By meeting, sharing, and learning from each other we may be able to do less re-inventing and more innovation,” says Oshlyansky.

By working as a larger UX community we can come up with more interesting, better informed ideas and better crafted solutions. We can also draw on each other’s expertise and previous learning.

Sharing expertise and experiences in a wider community means we can also take learnings from one team and grow them on another.

We’re planning to have smaller, more deep-dive sessions throughout the year. We’ll be taking onboard all the feedback from this year into the planning next year.