BDLA16 Unpacking UX - Understanding how your skill sets fit together

Editor's Notes

• #2: There’s a guy, let’s call him Luis. He has a food cart. He get’s up early in the morning to get the ingredients he uses every day. He has a good relationship with the guy at the market so he knows he’s getting the best quality. He keeps his cart clean organized and working properly. When he greets a customer, he’s always polite and friendly. He has skills, he doesn’t just prepare the food, he’s turned it into a show. He has flair, he asks questions to make sure he serves his creations-up exactly the way people want them and makes sure they have napkins and everything else they need to enjoy their meal. Luis is a UX professional. He doesn’t know what that is and would laugh if you compared him to some of the people sitting in this room but he is a UX professional.
• #3: Luis fits this description, he has researched the best ingredients and how to get them. He deliberately designed what happens from the moment someone comes-up to his cart. He creates something that people not only expect but enjoy. How closely do you compare to Luis? No he isn’t designing web-sites or mobile applications but he does offer a product. So do you. Even if you’re offering thoughts.
• #4: This is you isn’t it? Within the life of a project, somewhere along the way , you are researching, designing or developing aspects of a product that result in an experience. If you can do a good job, it’s a good experience, if you can do a great job, it’s a great experience. Notice I say “can”. Sometimes it’s not up to you but we’ll talk about that later.
• #5: Let’s get to this first. People spend a lot of time worrying about titles. I don’t. I’ve had too many to count. The funny thing is, my job never really changed that much. I’m okay with most titles I’ve been given. A title can be important but within limits. Let me explain…
• #6: A title is most important when it communicates an expectation about what you do. Who needs to know that the most? Your project team. It really doesn’t matter what that title is as long as it carries meaning for the people you work with most closely. Strategist, Information Architect, Interaction Designer, UX Designer, Art Director all have general meanings but they are worn differently from company to company and even project to project. You may even need to establish those expectations at the beginning of every project. Next is the company. What you actually do may not matter as long as the HR department has a description and they can hire for the position and determine the rate of pay that can come with it. Community. Your title gives you a way to make broad comparisons between roles and activities that help determine who participates in the community. That decision may be your own. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. We’d like to be able to explain it to our parents. We’d like to tell someone what we do and get the same recognition as, say a teacher or doctor or even a software developer but does it really matter if people don’t recognize it?
• #7: As I mentioned before, there are challenges when it comes to getting a business to understand that you do more than just make pretty pictures or wireframes but UX defies titles in a way because there are so many things that happen between an idea and the things necessary to make that idea real. The truth is, your title doesn’t make it any easier.
• #8: Everyone take a single index card. Look at this topic: Employee Training and Education. Write one idea you have for that topic. Pass your card to a person next to you. Write another idea. Repeat 2-3 times Tape the cards on the wall and have everyone put a mark on the ideas they like the best. My purpose for this is to give everyone a chance to see how the others in the room think about the same thing. What did you observe? This is a good tool for brainstorming because it gives everyone an equal chance to voice their ideas.
• #9: Before you try to establish your place in a company, you have to establish a place with yourself. In the simplest terms, whether you use an Agile or Lean process of doing just enough to keep a project moving in the right direction, if you follow a waterfall method of finishing each piece of work before it’s handed-off to the next person, every project goes through some continuum between an idea and reality. Your contributions take place somewhere along that continuum. You have to figure-out where.
• #10: Where does your best work happen – when ideas are being formed? Where they are expanded and qualified? Where they are matched-up with the laws of physics? Or, where are they put into production? You probably work across most of these areas to some degree but there’s always a place where you are most at-home.
• #11: This is a matrix created by Nathanial Davis. Rather than worrying about what a title says you do. Take a look at what you actually do. Where are you an expert? Where are you proficient? Where do you have a basic understanding and what is completely foreign to you? Using this graphic will help you see where you are best positioned to solve problems.
• #12: UX work is usually what we call front-loaded; most of the work happens in the early stages. You may be very active when people are trying to figure-out the best concepts to use, You may be more involved in making those concepts understandable or testing them to see if they work with users. You may work very closely with developers to make sure that they can build the concepts or refactoring if they can’t.
• #13: Where is that place? You know where you are happiest. Does it match the area where you have the most skill? If so, go deep. Become the best you can be at that.
• #14: I get asked this question a lot. It usually begins with someone telling me they’re a designer and they want to know what code platform they should learn. I ask them if being a developer is what interests them and they say not really but it seems like I have to know how to code to get a job. NOT TRUE! Let me explain something about companies. When there’s a project that requires more skills than there are employees, a manager requests to hire people to do different jobs – let’s say 2; a graphic designer and a front-end developer. The company only gives the manager enough funding for one person so she smashes the two job descriptions together. It seeks a person who can come-up with a concept, plan the organization of all the content, design the final artwork and develop the code. There are a few people who can do that. They are called unicorns because they are rarely seen and thought to be mythological.
• #15: Here’s the truth. You don’t have to be a unicorn because the job requirements say so. That’s just business being tight with the funding. I once had both the budget and the instructions to hire unicorns. I found a couple of people claiming to be able to do “all the things” but it became obvious that they had specific areas where they were experts and other areas where they were adequate. I eventually reclassified them both. You want to know something, They were happier. Because their more specialized roles concentrated on the areas they enjoyed the most. They went from being adequate generalists to being outstanding specialists. I hired great people to fill the gaps they couldn’t cover so I got much better results from the collaboration of talented, happy people than I did from a single stressed-out one.
• #16: There are some challenges with being a UX professional. For one thing, businesses don’t always get the value of UX which isn’t hard to understand since many people in UX have trouble explaining it. Don’t talk about UX. Talk about Quality because that’s where the UX has the greatest impact. That doesn’t make it easy though. Quality has to fight with time and money for attention from product owners. Time and money cause them immediate pain. Poor quality is a pain for later so quality is often the first thing to go when product owners start to cut scope in order to make better time or save money. That simply means that people in charge will push quality away when time or money is causing them pain. When I still considered myself an artist, people would look at my work. If they understood anything about creativity or design, they would ask questions like “What was your inspiration?” or “Why did you choose that perspective?”. If they weren’t visually creative, they would always ask one question – the same question. “How long did that take?” I USED TO HATE THOSE PEOPLE!! For one thing, some of my best work took no time at all while some of worst stuff took forever probably because I just wasn’t inspired so I was trying to force a concept. Time was irrelevant to how good or bad a piece was. I would roll my eyes and disregard whatever that person had to say after that until…I realized something. People who aren’t considered creative often look at the world through spreadsheets – this is a vicious generalization but think of the finance people you know. When they are looking at things through that lens of Time, Cost and Quality, they can’t see the qualitative or creative aspects of a project but they can see how the money is being spent. So... Show them a piece of artwork and what are they faced with? They want to say something nice. They don’t get the creative part so they’re left with time and money. It’s probably rude to ask how much it costs so they’re only left with time. If it took a long time it must be good right? I realized they weren’t trying to insult me or be stupid, They were trying their best to be polite. Misguided, yes, but still polite. When you’re talking with these people who are often in charge of the budget, you have to frame what you’re doing in terms of time saved or money saved or earned. One technique is to look down the road and use that fact that they don’t know what the costs of re-design wil lbe if the product doesn’t perform well over quality issues or usability issues but here will be a cost and it will be higher later than it will be today. Sometimes the objectives are set without being informed; 6-8 weeks! Why? It sounds good? It’s even worse for UX if the time is determined by developers who aren’t yet sure what they’re beung asked to do. 6-8 Weeks? We’ll take 7 please and it took them a week to decide that. You have to magically produce all the thinking and the deliverables a week before they asked for them because we all know “Real work isn’t happening until someone is writing code” right? You may be in for some ugly conversations because regardless of what the timeline says, the laws of physics will win every time and they’re still being enforced. You can either try to get the time-line altered or start working and have that talk when people start asking for your work. Sometimes even if you can see the train-wreck coming, you have to step aside and let it crash before anyone will understand. Even then, you never say “I told you so. That’s your cue to offer solutions not to point or wag your finger. Always offer a way forward.
• #17: Challenges also exist within other disciplines, Marketing may feel like they know their customers better than they know themselves. They don’t need you telling them what will work best. Product owners may only see you as the wireframe person and if you really want to help, shut-up and color like a good designer. A project manager may see you as just adding more time to the project plan. If the people who work on projects every day don’t believe in your value, you’ll just be annoying to them. Again, position yourself as someone who is there to make them into a hero or make pain go away.
• #18: The last time I was on a job search, I heard from many companies that said, “We need UX!” “We want you to build a UX practice here.” I only had two questions: “Are the executives behind this?” “Do the project leads believe this is necessary?” Often, I got responses that were not very precise about how they hoped I could make that change. Or I could get them to believe; in other words – No. If the answer was no to either question, I was finished with the interview. Because the third question has to do with having the freedom to make the decisions on projects. IF I had no cover on the first two requirements, then the answer to number 3 was already no. Do you have a champion? Do you have peer support? Do you have the freedom to make decisions?
• #19: You may have a resume that will give you credibility but it’s trust that gives you the freedom to work the way you need to. My dad used to say Trust is like a bank account, you have to invest in it over time. You can withdraw from that account too and lose trust. You may be lucky and someone will give it to you to lose but that’s like an audition. The benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t usually survive under pressure. Lasting trust shows itself when the pressure is on; when there’s no evidence that you can deliver other than your track record and the trust you’ve built in those around you. There’s no quick way to build lasting trust.
• #20: Start with yourself. How would you rate your trustworthiness? You should look back through your annual/bi-annual reviews, look for anything that suggests people trust you especially if they are higher in the organization than you and more especially if they are people of influence in the company. The broader their influence the more they can empower you. Having trust means that people are giving you something they value, something that needs protection. What do stakeholders have that you can protect for them? Usually it’s their ass. You can keep them out of trouble. It’s their reputation, you can make them heroes given the opportunity
• #21: Your stakeholders. It doesn’t matter if it’s the CEO or the product manager, Everyone considered to “own” a project is going to have to answer to someone from the board of directors, public shareholders, the Executive VP of something or other. They usually are being measured against Key Productivity Indicators that were established the previous year or quarter. It may be a dollar amount - either revenue or profitability. It may be a C-Sat score, market share or some measurement of cost savings. Those KPIs may be reasonable or not. Often, you may not know what they are. Ask. There might be a way for you to influence those measurements.
• #22: The designer may be you or it may be someone levels above you. How do they feel about their impact. Are they in the same boat you are: “just shut-up and make stuff pretty”? Or, are they responsible for design across channels; print, video, events and digital. What’s their digital IQ and how well are you supported? Do they place any value on internal applications that are both functional and elegant? How is their success measured and how can you contribute?
• #23: Bless their hearts! These folks carry to world on their backs. On one hand, they have the kind of skillset that doesn’t breed the kind of back-seat driving that UX does on the other hand, they are often asked how long it takes to develop something without knowledge of the systems they have to use or outcomes they have to meet. Tell them the project will last 9 weeks and they will tell you they’ll need eight of them. Maybe they do have the systems understanding but maybe that system is flawed and they’re reluctant to open the hood. Let’s face it, when the project runs over, they’re the ones who take the beating not you. Can you convince someone that front-loading, due-diligence and UX will lighten the load for Dev and more importantly, mitigate potential costs of re-development?
• #24: Remember them? At an enterprise level they can be an interesting bunch. You could be working on an app that will be used by 5 experts or 2000 suppliers. What do you know about the environment they occupy, what drives them, what work-arounds are they using? How is their success measured can you talk to them – maybe even sit with them for a day?
• #26: Make a list with three columns In the first column list the people or positions that have the most influence over what you do. Start with yourself. In the second column write down the thing they do, need to understand or do differently to realize success.
• #27: In the third column write down if you can influence the second column, if not, who can?
• #28: As a group you are employees of a expensive restaurant. Owner, Chef, Bartenders, Waiters, Maitre’D. The restaurant once had a great reputation but something has changed. What is it? Location? Food Quality? Service? Pricing? What big idea would set things on the path to success? Decide on one big idea. Create a map to show how you’ll get from here to there. Choose one spokesperson to explain it to the room.
• #29: You may not have ever worked in UX but you may have been doing UX all along because that’s how you solve problems. You may be hearing about certain concepts and terms for the first time this week but you might understand them perfectly because that’s how you think. Take a look at the problems you have solved in the past. Apply the context of UX to the solutions you found and you’ll find it easy to hold yourself out as a UX professional. UX is how you think. It’s not your title. It’s not your deliverables. It’s what you do to inform those things You don’t have to be a unicorn. A team of happy very skilled specialists can do more than one stressed-out generalist Trust is the the thing that gives you room to work. Earn it. Protect it.