Yes!! Finally a great UX community. So…
Where in the world are you?
Florence, Italy
What stage of your career are you at?
UX Designer conducting UX workshops and designing products
What are you current challenges?
I am delegated to create a UX team in my web agency
What aspect/s of UX are passionate about?
Lean UX
Cats or dogs?
Totally cats
Exciting! Will you be making new hires, or pulling existing employees into the team?
(And welcome – glad you’re here.)
Hi Sarah! Well UX situation in Italy is not much evolved: half of the UXD people claim that role but basically they are only drawing wireframes. I am not saying it to polemicize and I know that that’s the beginning point, I’m saying it because it’s really hard to find someone confident with real UX practices, so I think I am going to hire someone to train.
We are at an early stage and we are a little/medium agency so currently I am doing almost everything by my own (suffering a lack in UX research where I am not much prepared). As soon as we start running a wider selling of our UX services the team will grow. Goal for the team: 1 to 4 folks in two years.
hi @amirrr
If I think of myself as a designer, I like to think that I am a professional who describes his own point of views based on data and evaluated statements.
In Italy, the design culture is well evolved due to a law (4/2004) and a bunch of specific educational paths.
The problem, as usual, is in the execution of the guidelines and not on the guidelines itself.
I would like to ask you:
I am aware of the will of many companies to hire one girl/guy asking her/him to act as a unicorn.
I don’t have a suggestion how to react to this scenario. From my side, I decided some years ago, to be focused on specific topics (UI design, accessibility etc) keeping always an eye on the technology stacks. The outcome, so far, is that I can jump into the projects at an early stage allowing me (and my team) to be involved from several points of views (business logic, technology needs and marketing goals).
Hi @dopamino please to meet you! I am not getting the point of your post… 
help me explaining it better, I don’t want to misunderstand! 
So… looking for a unicorn? Is it a general comment about the Italian scenario? Personally I will look for very specific people to integrate into a UX working machine, no unicorns.
About educational paths: This is the only point I got, I understand your opinion. But personally the only well done courses I found in Italy is the ones of UXU in Milan. I don’t know any other courses, if you do, share them please! I’ll be glad to know that there are others.
About Italian UX scenario: I’ve been working with a lot of design agencies and currently with a very big one (considered one of the biggest in Italy, which I don’t want to name for respect), and sadly they all suffer a lack in Human-centered design practices. Even this big one, the only thing that gets near are some user interviews, but even in that case, results are not used human-centeredly.
In another hand I love Sketchin and some other UX Italian agencies, but there are a few ones, kind of the 2% of the total number of design agencies.
About your three questions I am super confused
I would like to ask you:
- on the typical project, how much time do u invest in testing (qualitative test and quantitative tests)?
- what is your strategy in terms of accessibility?
- what is your strategy in terms of product design (for instance MVP approach)?
I mean, I can easily answer but what’s the point?
Explanations please!!! 
Thanks
ps for your questions, if you are curious about our process I’ve just written a guide here.
hi @amirrr
nice to meet you too.
I will try to make a better point about the aim of my comment.
Generally speaking, I believe it’s not a good process to express statements about scenarios based on personal experiences and not validated by qualitative and quantitative data.
To be able to say “in Italy, the UX context is not well evolved” requires a strong validation.
I missed that in your post and my will was to highlight such gap.
The 3 questions I asked were a trigger to specify that, in my opinion, very often the problem is about the execution of the design tasks and about the lack of guidelines/laws/best practices.
To give a pragmatic example just think about this scenario:
In my opinion, these two points are covering a lot of UX topics.
Said that, if a customer and/or a stakeholder is not able to perceive the added value of the design process is a fault of the design team itself.
I’m curious by nature and I will be very happy to read your guide
Ok @dopamino I understand your point now. It’s right to have qual/quant data in hand before making a statement. I clearly precise that is an opinion of mine.
On the educational side, I think google is a great place to collect data on the fact that Italy provides very poor coverage of UX courses, in particular UX strategy and UX research, with exceptions of a little bunch of courses in Milan or something sporadic in Bologna. Just google it…
On the working side, the one I was claiming to be poor without having data, let’s hope it is just an impression of mine… but our agency (cantierecreativo.net) collaborates with many companies and organizes dev conferences and we have a good network in Italy, so it is easy for us to meet a lot of people in the field.
I really hope that UX designers are hiding when I walk 
(just joking) but my real impression is a great lack in our country. I am not saying we don’t have them, I’ve been in UX confs and we have also the IA summit in Rome, but I must repeat that my impression (no qual/quant data in demonstration) is that In Italy UX context is not so evolved. Again, in my opinion…
@amirrr
Let’s say that there’s room for improvement.
In my opinion, the most urgent issue is about the digital divide we have across the country.
Companies and public administration should find a strategy to drastically reduce it.
This topic has a huge impact on the feasibility to develop a good UX for products and services.
Check out some data
