What happens when User Experience (UX) gets jammed into a day

On Friday 13 March, the User Experience (UX) Centre of Excellence hosted its first Oxford UX Jam, bringing together staff, students and external UX professionals. The event encouraged teams to demonstrate the value of early prototyping and user testing in practice. This reflects a wider goal to embed user-centred design in product and service development across the University.

What is a UX Jam?

A UX Jam is a fast-paced, collaborative design event where teams tackle a challenge in a short space of time, moving quickly through the key stages of the UX process: problem definition, idea generation, prototyping, and user testing.

The brief given on the day was deliberately vague. Teams were shown a short abstract video, inviting them to interpret and explore the theme, with discussion surrounding problems experienced in education and potential solutions. Within a few hours, people had moved from interpretation to tangible ideas and user testing. 

A highlight of the day was seeing how quickly people got stuck into the UX process. Problem definition, prototyping and user research can sometimes feel abstract when you talk about them, but seeing them happen in real time makes their value very clear, particularly for teams developing services where user needs are often assumed rather than tested.

As one participant reflected afterwards:

“Ended up having a lot of fun – if only real data management was this interesting… What was striking is how many of the teams built something analogue rather than digital. For all of the power of AI tools, there’s something about crafting that’s really compelling.”

You can catch up on the day with the Oxford UX Jam highlights video. 

If this sounds like something your team or department would enjoy, the UX Centre of Excellence be very happy to run something similar for you.