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Transcript: Design Decisions with Tom Greever

Matt: Welcome to the UX Mastery Podcast. My name is Matt Magain and my guest today is Tom Greever, author of the book Articulating Design Decisions. Welcome, Tom.

Tom: Thanks, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Matt: Why don’t we start with you telling us a bit about yourself and your journey to where you are today?

Tom: Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a designer and I have been my whole career, and started out in web design in a corporate setting and corporate environment. I’ve had a bunch of different jobs throughout the years. Now I am the UX Director at Bitovi. Bitovi is a frontend design and engineering consulting company. We help other companies design and build web applications and we’re fortunate enough to work with a bunch of big clients like Wal-Mart and T Mobile and kind of help them solve some really tough problems whether it’s design or engineering. I love what I do. I love solving problems with design and as you noted, I recently wrote a book called Articulating Design Decisions which is very much about, well honestly in some ways, it’s a little bit about me and career and sort of how I got to the place that I’m at now in UX. I think that I’ve realized that explaining design decisions to stakeholders or clients on a project is maybe more important than the designs that I create and it has taken me many, many years to realise the power and the importance of that. I’ve tried to distill all of my thoughts and advice for people about communicating design into the book.

Matt: That’s a really pretty big call to say that communicating the design is sometimes more important than the design itself. That’s a big call. I imagine you’ve—and I haven’t read the book, but perhaps you’ve captured them in there—you’ve encountered some hurdles and made some mistakes and learned along the way the hard way?

Tom: Oh yeah, absolutely. It actually doesn’t take a whole lot to make the case that the way you talk about your designs is more important than the designs themselves. Sometimes people tend to say things like, “Oh well, good design should speak for itself, right?” That could be kind of a comment. Good UX should be like a joke—if you have to explain it then it’s not very good, but the reality is that if we don’t have the skills necessary to convince the people who oversee our projects that our design solutions are the right solutions, then they are not going to agree with us, and they will change our design decisions for us. They will override those decisions or—in a worst case scenario—our designs will never even see the light of day. Even if I think I have the best possible design solution, what good is it if I can’t even put it into production? If the world never gets to see it, then it’s absolutely useless.

That’s why I would say that the ability to talk about design with people and convince them that you’re right is more important than the designs themselves. We see this—you see this—all the time. There are maybe what we would consider subpar designs or applications or user experiences out there that probably don’t deserve to be the #1 bestselling application. We could probably think of a dozen different examples right now of websites or apps that we think are just terrible but are the most popular ones out there. Well, I think that perhaps proves the point even more. It’s far more important that you’re able to convince someone that this is the right thing to do, rather than this is what you believe to be the best solution, because what wins in the marketplace is not necessarily the best design solution. A well-spoken but incorrect sales person in your meeting is much more likely to get their way if you are unable to defend those choices.

Matt: Interesting. Okay so for today’s chat, we put the call out to the UX Mastery community that we were chatting to Tom and we’ve got a few questions from our members of the community. So I’m going to read the first one out. The first question comes from jmarie673. It’s pretty long. I’ll read the whole thing out. It goes like this:

Question: Tom, I would love any advice you have on how to handle a HiPPO. [Matt: I’m guessing she’s referring to the acronym Highest Paid Person’s Opinion and in this case, it’s the chief engineer.] This person often stonewalls in the face of design logic. To clarify, often when I’m presenting designs, he might say something along the lines of, “This is not good. Change it!” When I offer solid reasons as to why it should not be changed to what he wants, he’ll leave reason behind in order to continue defending his point of view and resort to statements such as, “Your reasons don’t make sense. You are wrong” or “I don’t care. That’s not the way it should be done.” I already have my ringers who try to give me as much support as possible and help me when he stonewalls, but because he originally built and designed the product and he is quite attached to his work, it still continues to happen and it’s not helpful in terms of coming away from meetings with sound and actionable items. Any advice on additional tactics I might employ when faced with a stonewall or perhaps some ways to prevent the stonewalling from happening at all? Thank you.

Tom: So this is a very difficult situation for sure. That term HiPPO, it’s funny because I only came across that term just very recently and I would say that maybe one of the first things we need to do is stop calling these people HiPPOs. Even though I get the acronym and what it means and it’s kind of an amusing way to refer to people that we encounter in these situations, I think that this is part of our problem is that we view these people negatively. I’m going to say we don’t have justification for having a negative view of these kinds of situations because it’s absolutely frustrating, but I think we have to do our best to remain positive and to see these people in the best possible light. We have to believe the best about them and not assume the worst. Anyway, let me get to the question. I think when you have a person who holds the keys to the project and especially if they are the person that built it or designed it originally, then they can be very defensive. I mean, we could be defensive about our own solutions that we offer too and so I think it’s understandable that that person would be kind of defensive and not open to change.

The key here though I think is to remember to keep your wits about you. I always recommend practicing a couple of different things to get yourself in the right frame of mind before you even go in these situations. One of those things is to remember that this person is in control of the project. We have to learn to let go of that control, it’s not us. I think if we can let go of that and allow things to flow and recognise that this person holds the keys to our future, then we would be in a much better frame of mind to be able to respond to them because what could happen is when we think we’re in control and we sort of take that attitude, then we do the same thing to them that they are doing to us, which is to be defensive and kind of get upset. It’s going to be difficult to get through to them no matter what and you don’t want to create a fight for control.

Matt: Sorry to interrupt, but to play devil’s advocate, you’re not suggesting that you should just give up and let them have their own way though, right?

Tom: No, never. No, not at all, no. I think it’s just a mental shift. There’s just a switch we have to flip where we realise that we’re not the ones in control of our project. I mean, unless we own the company, we don’t have the final say. There is someone else outside of us and I think that that emotional release is really healthy in allowing us to see the other person’s perspective in a way that we wouldn’t be able to before when we see it as our thing. Sometimes we look at these situations as, “Well, I’m the expert. I have the data. I’m making a logical case. Why can’t this person possibly understand what I’m saying?” And yet that’s exactly the wrong kind of attitude to have. So absolutely, don’t just let go and let have them have their way, but instead, take a posture that allows you to be open to what they are saying so that they will be receptive to what you say because those attitudes and that body language is very easy to kind of communicate even unintentionally.

The next thing that I often suggest is to always lead with a yes. So this is the principle of the “Yes and…” which you may have heard of where every response that you give needs to start with the word “yes” even if you disagree with what they are saying. “Yes, I agree with you that we need to solve this problem.” I’m not saying that their solution is right. I’m pointing out where our common ground is so that their ears are open to being receptive to the solution that I do want to propose. So those two things – letting go of control, leading with a yes – are really fundamental in getting through to these people that are difficult to deal with. But if you’re doing these things and I think this person, it sounds like this person probably is already doing some of the stuff because they made reference to having ringers in the room with you, which is something else I would recommend.

I talk about it in the book but that’s the idea of having other people in the room with you who may be from disciplines or other departments or kind of other areas, not necessarily someone directly on your team that can agree with you and you’ve prepared them in advance. “Okay, I’m going to show this design. Do you believe this is the right thing? Yes, okay then I need you to try them at this point because if you can build that kind of momentum in a meeting like that, then it’s a lot harder for someone on the receiving end to disagree with you if, you know, nine out of 10 experts in the room agree. But it sounds like this person already doing that so when you’re presenting your case and you’re taking real data and you’ve got proven solutions or what you think is good logic and they are still not responding to you or at least they are stonewalling as this person was saying, I think I’d like to suggest that maybe there is something amiss. Maybe we’re misunderstanding the goals of the project, maybe there is something that has changed recently that we weren’t aware of. Maybe there’s just something else going on that we don’t know about. There could be something political going on where this person is just jockeying for the next race.

We’d like to think that people are more altruistic about our products and that everyone has the best interest to the product in mind but sometimes people don’t. So we have to be keen enough to look into these relationships and see if we can figure out what else is going on because if we can figure that out, it’s going to help us respond. Maybe even this person just misunderstands what your solution is. I actually had a client once who misunderstood the use of the term “carousel” and the kind of interface control that that was. She disagreed with what we were suggesting. It wasn’t until I explained it better and showed the difference between the two options we were considering that she realized what we were proposing. Sometimes, those simple misunderstandings can cause the situation.

Matt: So visualising…

Tom: Of course it’s…

Matt: … that everyone was just talking about.

Tom: Yeah. Right, exactly, exactly. Now, it’s also true that this person is just totally unreasonable and that does happen where no matter what you do, they are just not going to agree with your choices. That doesn’t happen as often as I think we think it does. I think it’s more often that there’s a misunderstanding, but in the book, I talked about painting a duck. I tell a story about a designer who was in a similar situation where he was working on a 3D chess game and it seemed like no matter what he did, the product owner on that company always had just one more change. Rather than have to make those changes every single time, he decided to approach the problem a little more creatively and so when it came time to do the animations for the queen, he did everything just like they had discussed, made all the changes with one addition. He gave the queen a pet duck and he was sure to make the duck a little bit out of the way but also kind of obnoxious and kind of flapping and quacking over in the corner. What he found was when it came time to show the designs to this product owner, he said, “Oh, it all looks really, really good. Just one thing, remove the duck and it will be done.” So he was able to remove the duck and kind of move on with the project.

Matt: Very amusing. All right, good. Well jmarie673, I hope that that answers your question. It was a big one but there’s a lot in there to unpack so let’s move on to the next question. It comes from the community member named MyCelestial. MyCelestial says:

Question: I’m a big fan of Tom’s book and love the techniques. I’d love Tom’s experience on getting the team, that’s development, design, production, and other stakeholders, on the same page as an ongoing process such as sharing work in progress, design critics, presentations to a board or team like an open meeting for anyone interested. I’d like some advice from Tom on how to get started on this, what to share. I feel that I have a hard time putting together interesting content.

Matt: What do you say to that, Tom?

Tom: Yeah, so I’m not exactly sure where this question is directed. I think that what this person is asking is like how to create a better culture of design thinking and to create a language around this time that everyone can kind of get on board. That’s how I kind of read this question and yeah, I think that that’s part of our jobs in organizations is to help other people outside of our own direct influence, outside of our design team understand and see the value of design if they don’t already. Fortunately, we’re living in a time now where a lot more companies are valuing design and that’s why we have people that are hired into UX in information architecture and content strategy roles now. We’ve really seen a big shift, I think, in terms of how companies think about design, but in this particular case, I think that you want to do whatever you can to create that energy and to create that moment so that other people can get excited and get on board.

All of the things that you listed there in the question whether it was creating an opportunity for design critics or allowing people to kind of practice for maybe some executive presentations, those are all valuable things that you can set up with your teams and invite people to come. I think where people get most excited about design thinking and seeing the value of design of the organization is when they see how your designs can change things and how they can actually have the intended effect. That’s not easy to do but what I’m suggesting is that I think the best way to build that momentum is to make some design decisions and to collect some data around how those decisions change things for your organization and present them. I think people get really excited, “Oh look, we saw a 10% increase in email newsletter signups because we made this one little change.”

Run some real quick A/B tests. Share articles that you think are relevant to your product or your organization about how you can do things better. You have to be the champion in your organization. It’s going to take some time and a lot of effort and energy initially to build that momentum, but once I think, once you get it going, I think it will continue and more people will pick up on it and more people will contribute better. At least initially, it’s just going to be a lot of hard work to get people on the same page. As far as design critics go by the way, I would also recommend the book, Discussing Design, which is also published by O’Reilly. It’s similar to the content of my book in terms of being able to create a culture for talking about design and how to do that, but it’s specifically centred around creating a process for design critics for your team. That book has a lot of very specific practices and exercises you can do with your teams to do better design critics.

Matt: What are your thoughts on the part of MyCelestial’s question which asks how do we get started? What I took away from the question was that they kind of know that there’s a bunch of stuff that he/she would like to try but lacks the confidence to kind of try them. Have you got some tips on how they can get over that initial hurdle and feel confident about grabbing the whiteboard marker and doing some stuff?

Tom: Yeah. Well, I think you just have to have that confidence. That’s maybe not the best answer because if this person is saying, “Hey, how do I have the confidence” and my answer is just, “Well, you just have to have confidence.” But here’s the thing and I actually mentioned this in the book. Confidence begets confidence, right? And what we find in psychology research—and I do reference this in the book—is that people who express confidence, even a fake confidence, eventually exhibit real confidence in themselves over the long term. So if you start out believing in yourself and having confidence in your designs, in the process, the things you want to recommend and propose and get started at your company, even if in the beginning that feels kind of fake, over time, that develops into real confidence and other people will pick up on that. If you’re just simply lacking that confidence, other people are also going to pick up on that and they are not going to excited.

You have to go into it believing 100%. “This is the right thing for us to do. I’m excited. Hey you guys, come on let’s go run into this conference room over here and I’ve got a discussion. We’re going to look at this product.” Maybe start a book discussion. That would be a great way of doing it. Find a book on design thinking. Do mine or Discussing Design or any other book that you think will be valuable and relevant to your product or industry. Use that as a starting point. That way, you’re not coming up with the content on your own. Actually as part of the book for O’Reilly, we also did a video series and there’s one like a 20-minute video for every chapter in the book. I did that specifically for teams that are looking to work together and kind of discuss this content together. It wouldn’t have to be my video but like in any sort of design thinking and kind of process video training course that you could find out there that you think would be valuable, conference talks that are available on YouTube and Vimeo, find stuff like that that you think would be relevant and just invite everyone to come in for lunch. “Bring a lunch and let’s watch this video together.” That way, you’re removing some of the pressure for yourself to come up with that content initially.

Matt: One of the things that came to mind for me would be if this person is interested in ironing out the kinks for how to run a design critique or if these kind of facilitation activities are kind of new, try them with some friends and some friendly colleagues that you know are okay with the idea that this is your first time running this activity and they can help you kind of adjust it and tweak it, and then when it really matters with key stakeholders, you’ve have kind of a bit of a dry run and then you’re feeling more confident that way.

Tom: Absolutely. So that is one of the things that people who often ask me, “Well, what’s the best way for me to get better at articulating design decisions?” The answer is just to practice. I say that practicing for a meeting before the meeting is the usability test of being articulate. We want to try out our ideas. We’re going to try out our ways of saying things and even if you don’t have the opportunity to gather together a group of friends to kind of practice a design critic as a dry run, you can just stand in front of the mirror and give your presentation to yourself. Just doing that, just hearing yourself talk out loud is going to reveal a lot of your thinking that you didn’t even know was there. It’s going to give you the opportunity to stop and rephrase it a different way and build that confidence that you need to be able to go in front of other people and do it.

Matt: Cool. Okay, the next question comes from Alli. Alli says:

Question: I really hope it’s not too late to address one topic during Tom’s interview and that’s transitioning into UX. [Matt: She is a huge fan of Tom. She owns the book. She owns the video. “He’s fantastic.” There you go.] After observing a strong tendency of teams to become self-organised communities, I took sabbatical from the enterprise where I manage front end management teams and I study user experience through subscriptions, meet ups, conferences, and got certified at NYU. It’s a tough call to find a UX job without a strong personal UX portfolio. There’s no way back. UX is my thing and a longtime passion. What would Tom’s advice be on UX best practices to get into the UX field if all that most hiring managers care about is having 3-5 years of experience and a strong portfolio? Thank you so much.

Matt: I nearly was going to leave this out because it’s kind of a bit off topic but then I thought about it and I realised what better way to make an impression when you’re in an interview than to exhibit confidence in articulating designs. So what would you say to Alli, Tom?

Tom: Yeah, so the challenge of not having a portfolio or of not thinking you have a strong portfolio, I mean, that’s a real thing. You have to be able to demonstrate that you’re able to kind of do some of this work. That’s important and so I think I would encourage anyone to, if you don’t have the opportunity to work on the UX of a specific product maybe because you’re not currently working in UX because you’re a developer or whatever your role is, look for opportunities to create that for yourself. Make up a product. Just be creative and just think of something that hasn’t been done before and write up a case study on what problems are being solved with this and what your design thinking is.

The truth is that all UX is articulating design decisions and I think this is something that we kind of fail to recognize. Design by itself can just be pretty and depending on the genre and depending on the business or where you are, it’s okay to have a design that is just aesthetically pleasing, but user experience naturally demands that we have these explanations for our designs. I think you’re right that the ability to articulate your design decisions, that’s what UX is all about. I think that’s what most people miss on their portfolios. They have a bunch of screenshots with some really glossy looking apps that they designed but I have no idea what their thinking was. I have no idea what the problem was that they were trying to solve or what the issue was that they were overcoming, what matrix they improved when it was all said and done, and I think that takes a lot of more thought and time.

As a hiring manager, I look at people’s portfolios initially. It’s important for me to look at that but it’s a lot more important for me to understand how they are thinking about design. While I want to always know that someone has a demonstrated quality of work in their portfolio, it’s almost always, for me, just kind of a cursory glance. You want to see that they have the basics covered. If they have an in depth case study, I’ll read the whole darn thing, but really what I look for is their answers to questions. Before I interview them, I send them a questionnaire where I ask them just several questions about their thoughts on design and I value their answers to those questions a lot more than I value their portfolio.

I would say that if getting into UX is really that important to you, as this person said, “There’s no way back. This is my passion,” well then you’re going to have to find the time for it. If you already have a full-time job and it’s not UX, well guess what, you’re going to be working late. You’re going to be doing stuff on the weekend trying to build that portfolio and bring yourself up to speed so that you can present yourself. Do freelance work. Go to a freelance website and just offer to do some work for cheap or free just to get that experience under your belt so that you can show people that you actually know what you’re doing.

Matt: Cool. The last question comes from Mark Seabridge. Mark says:

Question: Hi, Tom. Working agency side, one of my biggest challenges is being brought into a project at the last minute, often with very short deadlines to meet. This can mean lack of time for research, having to resort to questionable third party research and sometimes being unable to take any research out at all despite pushback, relying on hypothesizing solutions that are invalidated. Although the obvious answer here is to move on, I enjoy the challenge of making change in a tricky environment. What advice would you have for this situation?

Tom: Well, I mean first of all, I feel your pain. In fact, I think that this situation is probably more common than most of us would like to admit because even in my own client projects at Bitovi, it’s often the case that we just don’t have the time or the budget to do what we want. Research and user testing are sometimes the first thing to go when you’re pressed for time. I found though that the value of these disciplines in making our design decisions on projects is best demonstrated just simply by doing them to the best of your ability and with very real constraints. Just doing something and then bringing that knowledge with you to that next meeting. If time is really short, it might mean that you only have 30 minutes to go interview someone or grab some people in a coffee shop, right, and the first few tests like that are the partial data that you can glean from the analytics.
At first, it’s going to feel like a hack and it’s going to feel pretty fake and shaky, but it’s certainly better than basing your decisions on nothing at all. I believe that if you do that, if you do your best to just squeeze in whatever you can that your stakeholders are eventually going to start to get it. They are going to see that value because you’re demonstrating it. Don’t ask them permission to go do a weeklong user test. Just do it first and ask for forgiveness later because you want to be able to demonstrate that value. I think over time, you’ll be able to grow the amount of time and space, and maybe even the budget that you have to do that stuff, but there’s no doubt that many organisations, this is a daily uphill battle. Every day, you kind of have to wake up and decide that you’re going to make this a priority even when other people don’t. It takes time. It takes some proven experiments to really establish it as a regular practice on projects.

Matt: Yeah, I can definitely echo that sentiment in my own experiences where I’ve just realised that we just have to set expectations based on if it’s the first time engaging with a client and they are at a certain point in their journey to enlightenment about this stuff that there’s only so much you are able to do, but as you develop a relationship with them and like you said get some runs on the board for the first project, then the second, third, and fourth project, you’ll be surprised at how much easier it is to get what you want because you’ve proven that there’s value in this stuff.

Tom: Sometimes it’s about being purposeful about planning these things in advance enough that people know what to expect because I think what happens sometimes is we know that we should do some user tests or we know that we should comb through the analytics and kind of try to find the answers to some of these problems, but we don’t put it on the calendar we just kind of assume that we’ll be able to work it in and we never do. But we will never do that with our vacation time. We would never do that with a holiday or with our time off. That goes on the calendar in advance and our clients know what to expect. “Oh yeah, I’m taking Friday off.” Well, everyone adjusts. I think we need to get to a point where we can do the same thing with doing research. We need to just tell everyone, “Hey, I’m not working on your project this Friday because I’m doing research for your project. Just pretend that I have the day off. I’m going to shut off, Skype, and Slack or whatever. I’m not going to check my email. I’m going to spend the whole day just doing this one thing.” You know that they would adjust for you if you were sick or if you had to take some time off and I think we can develop that same habit. You do that a few times, you’ll start to create that value for them I think.

Matt: Cool. Well, Tom this has been a fascinating chat and some real nuggets of wisdom that you’ve shared today. I really appreciate that. If people are interested in keeping up with what you’re up to online, where should they go to follow you? Do you have a Twitter?

Tom: Yeah, I’m active on Twitter. My Twitter handle is just @Tomgreever, T-O-M-G-R-E-E-V-E-R, and also on LinkedIn, you can find me. The website for my company is Bitovi.com, B-I-T-O-V-I.com and I’d love to hear from you guys. If I didn’t quite answer your question or if you have an additional question based on something I said, please feel free to contact me. My email address is tom@bitovi.com.

Matt: If you post any more questions in the forum thread, I’m sure we can twist Tom’s arm to jump in and answer there as well. Make sure you check out his book, Articulating Design Decisions out through O’Reilly. Thank you very much for your time, Tom.

Tom: Yeah. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate it.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #10: Design Decisions with Tom Greever appeared first on UX Mastery.

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Transcript

Matt: Welcome to the next episode of the UX Mastery Podcast. I have the very good fortune to be speaking with Mr. Dave Gray. Welcome Dave.

Dave: Thank you. Good to be here Matt.

Matt: Why don’t we start by you telling our readers a little bit about yourself Dave.

Dave: Okay. I’m a designer by training. I became an entrepreneur in 1993 when I started my company. I’m a designer by training, I became a visual journalist. I did information graphics. Then I started the company in 1993 which has grown and sort of grew from being a designer into a business person, and now even a business consultancy where we sort of found a sweet spot within companies where visualization is extremely powerful for driving business strategy and moving people forward. My company is called XPLANE and we operate kind of like a personal trainer for organizations. In the same way that a high-performance athlete uses visualization to picture the next stage in their evolution, we’re doing that for companies every day. That’s my background. And I wrote a couple of books in there along the way.

Matt: I find that fascinating. I’m sure there’s lots of listeners out there who are designers but who are entrepreneurial and probably think that the pathway to entrepreneurship is getting strong business skills, which is true but your pathway’s really been focused around the visual stuff which is unique and interesting. What is visual thinking Dave? How do you define visual thinking and why does it matter?

Dave: I see visual thinking as a way of using your hands and your brain. Design is about making things. Visual thinking is about taking the ideas that exist in a lot of people’s heads and translating them into ideas that are visualized on paper. We’re all visual thinkers in the sense that the vast majority of our processing power, sensory information coming in, and the vast chunk of our processing power is visual. And the way that our brain’s work is very visual. And so people are able to very, very quickly comprehend something when they see it, when they can visualize it. Visual thinking is the process of… Let’s say any time you’re planning something that you haven’t done before, you visualize it in your head. You’re planning to go. You take a bike ride or you’re going to go to a new place. Before you do that you visualize it in your head. Athletes visualize themselves performing at a high level, the next higher level in order to get there. 

The reason that visual thinking is so powerful is that, number one, if it can’t be drawn then it can’t be done. If you can’t draw a picture of something then you will not be able to do it. And number two, if you can visualize something, if you can imagine doing it then you’ll have a far better chance of actually achieving that goal than if you cannot imagine it. Just try and think about the things that you’ve… 

I’ll give you an example. I was working with a group on time and asked them first of all, “What are your goals? What are some things that you like to achieve in the next era.” [Unintelligible 00:03:52] draw a picture of what it looked like if it had been achieved in the process for getting there. I think they were maybe being a little tongue and cheek about the exercise, but one group chose world peace. They were not able to visualize world peace. They were not even able to visualize even the first step towards world peace, they struggled. And I think one of the reasons that we’ve had as a world, trouble achieving that goal is because we can’t visualize it. And figuring out the first step to doing that is an important piece of that puzzle. 

If it can’t be drawn it can’t be done. They did admit to me they struggled with it. I think the fact is sometimes it’s more useful, rather than visualizing the ultimate goal just to try and visualize the next step along that path. What’s the next step in our evolution towards that? What would be the next phase of that? That’s a very long answer to your questions so I…

Matt: No, it’s very cool and I’ve never really made that connection, but it makes perfect sense. But we’re not talking about art here, are we? We’re not talking about being artistic. Do you consider yourself to be an artist?

Dave: I do, but I agree with you. I think that art and visual thinking are perhaps related but they’re not the same thing at all. I’m talking about something that anyone can do. I’m talking about something that will accelerate your evolution if you do it, and that people can do it. It’s achievable. Sometimes visual thinking is something that you just do in your head. Sometimes it’s something that you do on paper. The fact is that as an individual, high-performance athlete for example, you could do it in your head. You can imagine the ball going through the hoop over and over again. That’s what high-performance athletes will do. 

As an organization, as a team you cannot do it in your head because you have to align your picture with the picture of other people. And often in organizations that’s where communication breaks down, is because we are using the same words but we’re imagining different things. And so it’s only in the process of, “You draw what you mean by that, I’ll draw what I mean by that” or “We’ll have an artist in the room with us who’s talking to us both and trying to draw what we both mean by that”, and it’s in that process of looking at it, saying, “Yes, that’s kind of right. No, that’s wrong.” And we sort imagine asking the question, “We’re a high performance sales team. What does that look like? What are people doing every day? What is happening?” And in the course of answering that questions you’re going to have a lot of different pieces of the puzzle coming together. And at the end of the day you’re going to only get that shared picture by actually making it explicit outside the mind. It’s just like you can’t share a dream with somebody else. You can’t share a visualization unless you make it explicit on paper. 

That’s why we’re like a personal trainer before organizations because high-performance organizations are a lot like high-performance athletes, they know that there are certain things you cannot do for yourself as well as having someone come in and be your coach, or be your adviser, or your trainer, or whatever. The process of creating those visualizations of the future is extremely exciting, it’s energizing. Not only does it drive understanding it drives alignment, people getting aligned about stuff. It also drives commitment because you’re drawing pictures of things, only things that you are going to commit to do. 

The other thing that’s exciting about it is it also actually drives forward motion on whatever the strategy or the project is. Because by drawing a picture of it you’re already starting to move into that future space and you’re also creating any materials that you need to communicate that stuff or just naturally going to come out as a part of that process. Not only have you got your own team aligned but now you go out of it with some pictures to show other people, “Hey, here’s where we’re going. Here’s the next stage in our organization’s evolution. Here’s the kind of things that we need to be doing.” It takes kind of the abstract stuff that you might see in the spreadsheet and makes it very clear so people actually can do… It becomes a blueprint for action. 

Matt: You used some big words just then. You said, “accelerate your evolution” that’s a big call. As kids we confidence in sketching and we lose that confidence. Why is that and why is it tied to evolution?

Dave: I’m not sure I understand that question. 

Matt: Sorry, I probably confused a bunch of stuff because you got my mind firing.

Dave: No, it’s great. Why is it that we stop drawing?

Matt: I’ve got a kids book that I wrote and illustrated and read it in my daughter’s primary school. And I asked the kids in the class, “Hands up. Who’s an artist?” They all put their hands up. They’re all really proud of being able to communicate visually. And if you do that to my eldest daughter’s class between 9 and 10 then you’d probably get about half the kids that are proud to say, “Yeah, I’m an artist” or “Yeah, I can draw.”

Dave: Let me answer the first question about why we typically stop. And then I can answer this second question about how we can accelerate evolution because I think they’re two different things.

Matt: Fair enough.

Dave: All right. The first question, why do we stop doing it? I think this is actually a flaw in our education system. If you look at the way that our educational system is designed, it really has… Our educational system, at least in my country and I probably in yours, has not evolved that much since let’s say 1900, or maybe 1930’s or so when people started moving from farms to the cities. In the farmlands you have these rural school houses where all the kids were learning together. There was much more, actually probably creative and integrated, holistic thing. When we moved to the cities we took the same kind of approach that we did to building factories and industrializing the business economy into industrializing education. 

And so if you think about it made perfect sense at the time. We were building a world of standardized parts and standardized processes and procedures where people actually had to fit into that world. I can’t remember who said this. It was some famous educator or somebody who said, “There’s an over-curriculum and a covert curriculum in our school systems.” The over-curriculum, the obvious curriculum that’s spoken about is reading, writing, arithmetic. But the covert curriculum is what you’re also learning at the same time is stand in line, do what your told, don’t stand out, don’t do something that’s unpredictable, give the answer that the teacher wants. Basically, don’t be creative. There’s that covert curriculum then. We don’t even think about it that most kids are not sophisticated enough to actually understand. They’re just trying to conform to the expectations of the adults. And if you think about it, it’s not too soon after we get into that, industrialized system that the urge and the desire to be creative and draw starts to go away. So they’re tied together.

If you like conformity, you don’t want creativity, you don’t want people drawing. Think about the art teacher, how do you grade… what’s right and wrong as an answer to a drawing problem. Visualize world peace, how do you grade something like that? How do you fit that into a standard educational format where there’s a right answer and wrong answer. How do teachers even teach that? 

That was a good solution for the problem we had at the time. Now we have a different problem because what’s happened is that we’ve now got automation. Basically we’ve got software and robots who are going to be doing anything that can be predicted and anything that can be repeatable. And we’re still training people to be robots but we’re going to have actual robots. We’re not going to need people to be robots anymore. What we’re going to need from people is that creative thinking, that outside the box, for a lack of a better term, the getting better at asking questions, getting better at understanding other people, getting better at getting aligned, getting better at getting people committed to things, and getting them excited about creating new things, new business models, new ideas. 

I do believe that our educational system will inevitably transform. It’s going to happen faster in some places than in others. It’s interesting when you look at the percentage of super successful, high-powered, high-level, new economy CEO’s that were trained outside the typical educational system. There’s a lot. Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, I think possibly Reeve Hastings from Netflix, there is a number, a higher percentage of the general population of super successful tech entrepreneurs that were trained outside of that traditional and industrialized education system, a surprisingly large number. And so I think that’s pretty fascinating. I think it’s inevitable there’s going to be a shift. 

Unfortunately it’s not happening as fast as probably you or I would like. But I do think that what’s going to happen is as our educational system transforms you’re going to find that unless the kids are stopping drawing and you’re going to actually see the kids who are drawing are going to be more successful. They’re going to have more creative ideas, are going to be better aligned with their peers because they’re going to have those conversations about what things look like. They’re going to be better able to achieve results. I’ve been on a mission for probably about 10 years now to try and build a curriculum at schools, at least try to conceive a curriculum that schools could adopt and apply in the educational system.

Matt: Awesome. Evolution, that’s a big word.

Dave: Yeah.

Matt: How does visual thinking help us evolve and become better humans rather than just be more successful in business?

Dave: I guess I sort of did answer in a way, I think that as a species we’re moving from having to scale our activities by being consistent, predictable, and repeatable, and marching in order, and synchronizing our bodies and that kind of thing. A factory assembly line to actually a phase in our evolution where those things are going to be taken care of and we need to figure out what else we want to do. What is the next great business model? What’s the next Uber or the next Airbnb? What’s going to be the bank of the future going to look like? We now have kind of an open slate and the biggest constraint is not our ability to make things so much is our ability to get creative is just come up with the idea. 

People are talking about the internet of things, people have been talking about the future refrigerator or the future shopping cart for years. But the lack of progress is more about the lack of creativity and ideas than it is the lack of technological capability. We have the technological capability right now we just don’t have the creativity. We don’t have the creative capability.

So I think next phase in our evolution and visual thinking is going to be very handy for them because you’re thinking about our problems both politically and just the problems that the world faces. A lot of them are problems related to people not being able to come up with creative solutions, sinking back into either or, either we raise taxes or everybody starves. This dichotomies that are really false dichotomies and they’re due to a lack of creativity. We’re going to evolve when we start building shared understanding about what is and also building shared understanding about what could be and what we could create together. And I think visual thinking is absolutely a key part of that.

Matt: So playing devil’s advocate, there are a large number of people who are successful and who would not describe themselves as visual thinkers. And I’ve worked with people in organizations and they don’t want to engage in this kind of activity because I guess, like for whatever reason the way that their brain works or the way that they’ve been brought up or whatever. They feel like it’s not for them. How do you address individuals who are resistant to this kind of thing?

Dave: I don’t try to… There’s enough people who understand that I don’t spend a lot of time with people unless they have big budgets I guess. I’m trying to convince them. We work in large organizations where there’s all kinds of different people. Once we’re working with a client we will find sometimes people have issues or resistance. I think the easiest and quickest way to get that over is do a simple drawing exercise or something like that. It’s actually realizing, this isn’t something that I can’t do. I think the issue there is to get underneath whatever belief they’re expressing and figure out what need they have. Maybe some people have a need not to look foolish in front of their peers. Maybe some people have a need for power and authority and they feel very confident in their verbal authority in a meeting or business situation. But drawing puts them on the same playing field as everyone else and they’re going to lose status.

They’re worried about losing their status.  I think that’s a matter of understanding what is the underlying need that they have. Maybe some people feel that it’s going to create a lot of uncertainty for them. They don’t know what it’s going to look like. So in that case then you could show them what it’s going to look like. You can say, “Here’s what we’re going to kind of think we’re going to be working on, that kind of thing that we’re going to come out with.” I think it depends on the need. But one thing I spend a lot of time doing is not necessarily focusing on the belief that people are expressing, but I focus on the need and where that belief is coming from. And usually that belief is coming from some kind of a personal need. 

There’s a model that I really like called the SCARF Model. It comes from a guy named David Rock at the NeuroLeadership Institute. It’s a model that basically there are certain social needs that we have, and SCARF stands for those needs. I’ll go through them in a second. These social and emotional needs, the brain treats the same way. If you’re lacking at one of these emotional needs you’re not getting what you need. The brain reacts the same way as if you’re not getting enough oxygen, or if you’re not getting enough food. The brain reacts in a very strong fight or flight kind of a way. And you’ll see this in meetings and you’ll see this in people. Here are the needs, because I think the model’s very useful.

SCARF, S stands for status. Some people need to feel that they’re important. They need to feel that they’re not going to lose their status within the group based on your visual thinking activity. Another thing is see a certainty. People want to be able to feel that they can predict the future. So they want to know that if they go through your visual thinking activity, what’s that going to look like and what’s going to happen? What do I need to do? What are you going to ask me to do? 

A, autonomy, people need to have feeling of autonomy, they need to feel like they have control. Sometimes that means giving people the option to opt out, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it means giving the option of if you want to do this as part of a group, great. If you want to go off and draw your own picture that’s fine too, or whatever, giving some choices. 

R is for relatedness. People need to feel like they belong, like they’re part of the group. What if everybody else draws better than me? Maybe you reduce the barrier there. It’s often when I’m facilitating that I will draw a bad drawing on purpose just to reduce the level of… I can’t draw. What am I going to have to do? I’ll do something much lower quality than I might be capable of. I’ve noticed my friend Dan [Unintelligible 00:22:38] does the same thing. He went to design school but he never talks about that, and he’s always drawing stick figures. He’s capable of much more, but he’s always drawing stick figures. And he’s never send this to me explicitly but I believe pretty strongly that there’s an intentionality behind that. He wanted us to make this stuff very accessible.

The last one is F, fairness. I don’t think fairness is coming up that much in the lack of people’s fears about visual thinking. But if for some reason they feel that the world isn’t fair or they’re not going to be fairly treated if they draw that somehow someone else doesn’t have to do it, or I don’t know what that would be, but fairness is another one of those needs that I think is very valuable and important to be aware of, thinking about all those things. 

If you find that underlying need generally speaking somebody’s feeling choked. Someone’s feeling emotionally choked. They’re feeling emotionally cut off. I don’t think it’s skepticism about the power of visual thinking in most cases. I think it’s the fear thing. In that case the way you get around is to find a way to… It’s either a fear thing or they’re just busy, they don’t have time, and they don’t think that they need it. It’s like there are things you don’t feel like you need until you’re at end of your road. And those people who just don’t have time for it then move on. It’s a fear thing, I think it’s easier to get in there and try to understand it.

Matt: Dave, it’s always inspiring and a pleasure to talk to you about this stuff. I’ve got a bunch of things that I’m going to go away and thinking about it some more. And I’d love to do this again because I think you’re absolutely right, there’s a real grand swell of momentum around this stuff and it’s exciting. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate it.

Dave: My pleasure. 

Matt: If people want to track you down online where should they go?

Dave: I’ll give you my website and my company’s website. It’s going to be easy because they’re almost the same thing. My company is xplane.com and my websites xplaner.com. And it’s just because I’m very focused on my company and that’s pretty synonymous with who i am and what I do so you could find me at either or both those places. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Matt: Good stuff.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #9: Entrepreneurship with Dave Gray appeared first on UX Mastery.

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Transcript

Matt: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the UX Mastery Podcast. This is Matt and I’m very fortunate to have with me today David Trewern. David, welcome.

David: Thank you, good to be here.

Matt: David, you have a pretty interesting and inspiring story so perhaps we’ll kick things off, if you can tell us a bit about yourself and the journey that you’ve been on.

David: Okay, I’ll try and be concise. I studied graphic design back in the early 90’s. I finished up in ’94. As part of my final year in my design course I won an AGDA (which is the Australian Graphic Design Association) Travel Scholarship, which sent me off to the United States and the UK to visit some leading design businesses. When I sat down with AGDA and talked about where I wanted to go I just said, “I’m really interested in anything to do with technology, digital design, and so forth. It was very early days for that, so it was long before Facebook, Google, and those companies back in ’95. So I headed off to San Francisco, and I happened to be there in August ’95, which is the month that actually Netscape floated and launched. And that’s really, in my view, the birth of the visual internet as we know it now. I just happened to by coincidence be in San Francisco and that time, which is pretty exciting time. I visited a couple of businesses that I’d never heard of at the time, one of them was IDEO who some of the listeners might know well. I also visited a company called Vivid Studios. That was one of the very early web design businesses. There’s a guy called Nathan Shedroff who people may have heard of who was the founder of that business. And he offered me a job and I spent a fair bit of time talking to him. I didn’t actually end up working there, but he put together a book called Experience Design a couple of years later and I can come back to that. But it was a real influence. He was working on the early days of developing websites and moving them from really just a hypertext-based linking of information to more visual websites. I spent some time with him. I also visited Studio Archetype that is now Sapient. And they were working on early websites for Sony, Apple, and things like that. It was a pretty exciting time to be in San Francisco. So that had a huge influence on me. I came back to Australia, and I was already working as a multimedia partner for one of the early multimedia companies in Melbourne. I was working on CD-ROMS, so I was designing interfaces and things, and doing a bit of Lingo programming in Macromedia Director, which is what it was then. I suppose I had these crossover skills or I had design skills as well as technology and programming skills, which I really enjoyed, and I loved switching between the two. After my trip I became pretty inspired in my final role. I worked for about a year after I finished uni and my final role was working for a company called Gyro Interactive. Again, that was one of the first multimedia companies. I had a project there designing the interface of LookSmart, which is an Australian search engine that ended up floating on the NASDAQ, and a guy called Evan Thornley set that business up and it became quite successful again long before the search engines that we have today, Facebook, Google, etc. I was in there working with a whole lot of PhD Java programmers and I was the designer. We’re designing a completely new program for search engine where you weren’t actually searching you were stepping through categories. What these guys worked at is that from sort of 4 or 5 clicks you can go from any topic to a sensible list of search results very quickly. And back then it was actually faster than searching because of the way that the technology worked and so forth. And I suppose the unpredictability of the results from search algorithms back them. We were designing a completely new interface. It was interesting for me because I was really designing a product and combining my graphic design skills. I was designing the brand, the interface, the product, working with these Java designers to try and work out. I had a target of 8 kilobytes for the whole interface because we’re working with very slow modems back then. I was working out ways of combining the whole interface into one 16-color image that could be kept up by the programmers to create this 3-dimensional interface where you could very quickly navigate through categories of neat buttons and all the rest of it. We had people in there a couple of times a week that we’d be user testing things on and things like that. That was a real influence for me. I then left Gyro and set-up on my own as a freelance designer, but I kept LookSmart as a client because my previous business didn’t really know what to do with them. I was kind of the web guy. They said you can keep us as a client. I kept working for LookSmart, which gave me some good income. Within about 3 months of setting up my businesses is in September ’96 I set-up. I got the opportunity to design the first Mercedes Benz website for Clemenger, which was a pretty big deal. They didn’t have a website before that and I think Clemenger gone in and sold them the dream of this incredible website where owners could log on and they could remind them of when their car’s due to be serviced and all this sort of stuff. I think it was a $500,000 project for Clemenger at the time. It was a big undertaking for everybody involved and I ended up being the guy that then had to deliver the dream and design the look and feel ofthe interface and actually also do a lot of the coding as well. So that was a fantastic project for me to do and I think I was 23 at the time and I learned a lot through that. A lot of the things that I learned from Nathan Shedroff from Vivid, I marched up to San Francisco went into my proposal and I pitched, and it was all about the experience. Again, this is long before UX as we know it now, but from talking to Nathan way back then I really clicked on to this idea of particularly back then when you had these huge constraints around screen size, color depth, and color palettes, but most important bandwidth. So everything was really about how can you deliver an effective experience with these incredible constraints, where people are dialling up with 144K modems and waiting 3 minutes for a very, very simple page to download before they can click. Everything had to be very, very carefully considered. And even the best websites beck then were still incredibly frustrating things. Part of my proposal to Clemenger was all about that. I talked about a little bit like baking a cake where we’ve got to get the visual design right, we’ve got to get the functionality right, we’ve got to get the content right. It’s all going to deliver the right return on effort for the user that. If somebody’s going to click and wait for 45seconds what they’re going to get next better be what they were hoping for and it better work, and it better deliver some value to them.

That really shaped my thinking very early on particularly those constraints around the importance of just designing the experience beyond just looking at the way that a graphic designer would and thinking about what it looks like. And so it was a really interesting time back then and I went through the whole phase of the browser walls and the development of browsers. It all had different quirks. And I suppose with my coding side of things, there were very few people involved in this at that time that work from a design background too. Most of the people that were building websites were programmers and they have very little interest in the way that websites looked. And they almost had this religious fervour around this shouldn’t even be in the interface. What do you need an interface for? It’s already been designed. You have blue links that turn purple when you click on them and that’s the interface. From a graphic design background I knew that we needed to bring more to the experience than that and create drama, tension, and creating an interface that was seductive that people wanted to actually engage with.

For example, just typing in job terms and see how many results come up just to see what sort of demand there is for jobs. I did this a couple of weeks ago and I think graphic design, I think about 800 jobs came up across Australia with the terms graphic design in them. And this is a pretty loose search. Some of these jobs are overlapping and so forth. I did a search for digital design, web design, mobile design, and user experience design, and each of those had more in the order of 2,000 roles across Australia, so more than two times graphic design. And when you add all those other ones together you’re talking about 6,000 or 7,000 jobs compared to 700 or 800 jobs. That’s a good example of how in the last 15 years the demand has shifted to new roles that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. And when you look at where the money is in these roles it becomes even more extreme. I then filtered that search to say, show me the jobs with salaries more than $100,000, and the results have gotten incredibly extreme with user experiences being a clear standout in terms of the number of roles over $100,000 versus the other roles, and far more than graphic design by many multiples. I then changed the filter and I looked at jobs over $200,000 and what I found was I think it was 394 digital design jobs that covered… I’m talking very broadly here, UX mobile, web design, digital design terms in the role, and one graphic design job in the whole of Australia. So basically nearly 400 times as many jobs in that range. And I saw that and experience that running DT, we need people with these new skills, but the people coming out of colleges and universities are being trained using yesterday’s tools and they have yesterday skills. So that’s something that really got me interested in education and Tractor. We took over an existing graphic design school because we needed the structure, and the license, and the processes, and those sorts of things. And we set about really trying to make it the most digitally focused. Again, I’m talking more digital than UX but the most digitally focused course that we could, and so we built right into the core of all of the courses that we offer at Tractor. All the things that I thought are really important for a whole range of different roles, which are merging with UX related skills being right at the core of that and right upfront in the course. Because it’s just so important to be thinking about the things that UX designers think about at the start of all of these processes.

Matt: Great. There’s clearly demand there and we get a lot of people coming to us asking for advice on how can I get started in UX or how can I transition? So to play devil’s advocate what’s the advantage of going to a school like Tractor and getting some kind of certification there, formal training versus learning on the job and getting the experience by kind of being in the trenches?

David: Sure. I think certainly if you can get an opportunity to learn on the job with the right mentors in place and the right business then you’ll learn very quickly. But those opportunities are hard to come by. And it’s very hard to say to a group of a thousand students, let’s say, “Go out and get yourself a job and learn on the job.” It’s a bit hit and miss. And obviously the whole point of a structured and accredited education is the kind of standardized what’s being taught, what’s being learned, put it into a process, repeat it every year and improve it every year, fine tune it so that you can provide much more efficient learning whereby you’re teaching people the things that they need to know. And hopefully not wasting time doing the things that aren’t truly building that knowledge that they need to go into that role. I think there’s certainly huge advantages in structured education programs. Again, even the course that I did that was very unrelated to what I ended up doing as a job 3 years later was hugely influential and valuable. To the fact that I went into that course from year 12 at school and not really knowing anything about the design industry at all and I came out of it and I got off with a job before I finished. That’s usually beneficial. It’s also the discussions and the exposure that you get. You kind of learn what magazines should I be reading, who should I be talking to, what websites should I be looking at these days? Not when I was at uni because they weren’t websites. And you’re having 3 or 4 hours of conversation a day with other students, and tutors, and lecturers about issues. You just don’t get that opportunity again once you start work. And also you really get to control the projects that you’re working on for your portfolio.

When I did my course I went into the industry for 3rd year and did industry-based learning, which I found really beneficial. I worked in a pretty uninspiring graphic design business that was pretty old school. I spent a lot of time in the brown light room. I’m sure many of your listeners don’t know what a brown light is but we basically used to typeset annual reports, and brochures, and things in black and white, print them out in this super high resolution… Actually these days it’s probably not so super high resolution but print it on photographic paper and then we’d chop it all up, go into a dark room, and then re-photograph the positionals and things. And this is before we had digital direct to plate printing situations. I spent a year doing that, which had nothing to do with the career I was going to embark on a few years later. But learning about how to actually be an employee was hugely valuable. But the point I was going to make is to then go back to design school and go, “Okay, now I know what work’s all about. Now I know what I don’t want to do, and now I can focus on my final year on creating a portfolio.” I’m never going to get this chance again, to spend a year creating the work that I want to create that’s going to represent me as a designer. Completely self-indulgent, I don’t have real clients. But having the context of what real work is like I really enjoyed that. And that’s what then led to me doing a project. That led to me winning this scholarship and then getting jobs in these early multimedia businesses, which is great.

Matt: What about the accredited qualification itself, do you think that we’re entering an era where employers are going to start being discerning about requiring some kind of UX writer certification or is it really more about the learning and getting the runs on the board?

David: I personally don’t place… This is coming from somebody who runs an accredited design school. I actually don’t place a huge amount of value on the actual qualification. But I do place a lot of value on the qualification it represents in terms of student X went to this school and this particular school has this reputation, and it’s put out these particular types of students. And if I’ve been through that program and had that sort of experience then I put a lot of value on that, but not so much on the piece of paper itself. The piece of paper is still important I think because, again, Tractor’s really setting out to be the best design school in Australia that’s most focused on these new, emerging digital roles. And most employees will know who the top 2, 3, 4 design schools are. And it’s funny because those top schools, the piece of paper is not that important. You’ve been to the graduate exhibitions, you know the work, you know the students, and the piece of paper is not really what you’re hiring them for. However, as you move through the ranks, and there are many different cultures, and types, and everything else. That accreditation is important because it provides some accountability and adherence to standards, and processes, and things and without that it’s… As you move down from the top 2 or 3 schools you could start getting quite unregulated, kind of chaotic results. It could be a bit of waste of time for everybody. So I think the accreditation is important for that point of view but as an employer I put a whole lot of value on it. A good example is we have a graduate from Hyper Island come to us at DT and we hired him over an honest graduate from, I think it was Swinburne at the time, which is where I went. Hyper Island doesn’t actually have an accreditation whatsoever.

Matt: Where is Hyper Island?

David: Hyper Island is a digital university but it isn’t actually a university. It’s a digital… it’s based in Stockholm and it’s actually run out of an old jail on an island. It’s been running for about nearly 20 years now so it’s really set-up in sort of a multimedia school, but they teach digital strategy, digital design, responsive mobile, e-commerce. There’s whole range of courses that you can do. It has a fantastic reputation, it puts out fantastic students, but again they have no accreditation whatsoever. So other than to say, here’s a piece of paper that says you went to Hyper Island, but because they have that reputation the piece of paper’s less important. My brother studied graphic design, he went to RMIT. He then got a couple of jobs and ended up working for Emery Studio, which is probably… Gary Emery, he’s arguably the best graphic designer Australia has ever produced. He spent 10 years there. He never actually got his paper from RMIT because he didn’t finish the typing module. I remember when he was working at Emery a couple of years later they rang him up and said, “Why don’t you come in on a Saturday, do your typing module then we’ll give you your degree.” He said, “I’m doing something on Saturday. I don’t need the degree. What do I need a degree for?” And that’s probably a good example. He spent 3 or 4 years at university working his butt of to get this degree and all he had to do was go in for a few hours on a Saturday and get his piece of paper and it didn’t interest him, because he knew at that point, “I’ve got the portfolio, I’ve had the experience, I now got a job. It’s not really that important.” A bit of a mixed answer there.

Matt: Things are clearly very different today for people entering the world of UX. UX wasn’t even a term back when you started out. What if anything has remained constant about the industry?

David: My view on the reason why it’s become… I’ll come back to the question I suppose, why there’s been so much growth in this area is that if we go back 20 years 98% of the products and services that we bought as consumers were physical products and services. And then obviously the iPhone came out, whatever that was, 2007 was it? I can’t remember. All of a sudden there was this opportunity to create digital products and services that we could consume through these devices that started replacing physical products and services. If you think about things like music, you’ve got tapes going to CD’s, going to things like iTunes, and ending up with Apple Music, or Spotify, Pandora, whatever it might be. As these things become more complicated, these products and services, they’re unfamiliar experiences that need to be very carefully designed in order to be successful. If you look at maps, you’ve gone from paper maps to Tomtom devices to apps on iPhones. If you look at photography you’ve gone from film-based cameras, to digital cameras, to apps on an iPhone like Instagram.

There’s been a couple of generations of reinventions of many different products and services that have ended up as digital products and services. And they all have an interface, which is completely unfamiliar to human beings. Whether these products succeed or fail really comes down to UX, and so it’s become so important. And then when you look at corporates you’ve got banks, you’ve got insurance companies whose main interface with the customers is now through this human-computer interactions that, again, are completely foreign and need to be designed. UX has just become so important. So in terms of your question of what’s changed, that’s really what’s changed. When I think back to the work that I did andthe way it influenced from Nathan, back then it was actually marketing and trying to engage people. A lot of it was about trying to design that experience. I’ve got a bit of a background noise here.

Matt: Yes, bit of entertaining a construction in the next building over. We’ll persist anyway.

David: Okay. Sorry about that guys. So back then you are really trying to design the experience to create an emotional response to engage people so they actually want to spend time on this particular experience. And what you’re competing against was TV and other engaging mediums like that in film. And you have these incredible constraints like what we’re facing right now, that background noise. But you had these incredible constraints of bandwidth. So the goal of experience design was to create something that people could be bothered to interact with. Now, it’s a little bit different where you’ve got these products and services and that is the way if you want to access that product or service it’s through this interface. And so it’s more of a necessity and it either works or it doesn’t. People can use it all they can as opposed to it being kind of an engaging experience if that makes sense. It’s a lot more nuts and bolts and therefore that’s why I think the emergence of… There’s far more research and things that go into UX design now, a lot of the work we did back then. And this is some of the arguments that we have with people around UX. I never really did a whole heap of user testing and research throughout my career. I started off doing a bit like LookSmart and certainly DT does a lot of it. And some people will argue with me, “That’s not really UX design.” I said, it is but I used a lot of my experience and intuition, totally focused on designing the user experience but using a different process, which is more based upon my own intuition and bits and pieces of feedback from users as opposed to constantly testing everything. My experience early on doing that with LookSmart I’d spent hours sitting through these user sessions and I’d come out and go, I kind of knew 95% of that already and there was maybe two insights here that I didn’t know. But what I was finding was the value of getting from some of those sessions based on my own intuition and knowledge base was limited compared to me spending time just thinking about and putting myself in the shoes of the user and having empathy for them. And trying to create this frame of mind of their mindset and their knowledge base looking at this. So for me it was more user experience designed from within rather than… Which again, I know talking to a lot of other people they’ll say, “That’s not user experience.” Well, it has been for me for 20 years.

Matt: Yeah, empathy has been a part of what we preach and so it’s a balancing act of course. If you’re experienced and you are able to intuit a bunch of stuff and you have one session to validate this…

David: Yeah. I definitely think validating things are important. I’ve seen a lot of the things go through such a structured process where everything’s coming from the users and I’ll still see those projects, you know, file from a UX point of view. So I just think it’s important that people practicing in this area… It’s almost like you need to earn the right to be able to break the rules a little bit and you need to know when to use what tool to create the right outcome. Apple’s a good example. They’re famous as I’m sure a lot of people have heard for not doing a whole lot of research. I can’t imagine them not validating and testing products before they launch them. But a lot of their best experiences, and ideas, and things have come more through a human creativity process than through the research says, “We better do that.”

Matt: It’s good to hear that you don’t think users will be replacing the job of designers.

David: No, definitely not.

Matt: Cast your mind forward to the next 10-15 years. Do you think, A – we’ll be using this term user experience still and then what direction do you think the industry is headed?

David: It’s hard to know. I’ve spent a lot of time throughout my career trying to imagine the future. I think that’s one of the things I’m probably pretty good at. But one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s almost impossible to do. In terms of terminology, I don’t know… really who cares sort of thing. I think that’s probably more of a function of whether people will get bored of the term and want to create a new term. It’s almost like every generation has their own little trend. They ditched the flares and go for skinny jeans, and they go back… It’s almost to define themselves as being different from the boss or the generation before them. I wouldn’t be surprised if terminology changes more out of a function of that than anything else. And obviously service design is a different thing but it’s closely linked. People are always looking for a new term to coin. I think there’ll be more rigor and structure applied to… I think it’ll just continue to evolve the way that it has been. I think there might be more specialist roles emerge. I think we’ve certainly seen that for many industries over the last 100 years. A good example is the film industry where early on the one guy would write the script, shoot the film, edit the film, act in the film. These days you’re creating Star Wars and you’ve got the guy whose job it is just to hold the light and he’s got a job title and everything that go with it. I think as computing power continues to increase exponentially as it has since the 70’s Moore’s law and all of that. As that happens there are more, and this is the way that companies like Apple grow and operate. They increase the processing power of their chips and then they go, “Okay, now we can add video. Now we can do artificial intelligence, etc.” They’ll certainly be changed. I think as computer processing power increases and the functionality behind things increases I think that will lead to more complexity, which may lead to more specialized roles. I’ve been doing a bit of marking around, working on a commercial project with drones for example. When you think about the stuff going on there with deep learning and artificial intelligence, it’s quite staggering. I think we’ll see the role of a user experience designer become more multi-dimensional if that makes sense. What I’m saying there is I think we’ll be breaking out of the phone and designing for more complex and sophisticated technology. Cars is a good example. I’ve got a strong belief in where cars are going. From what I’ve heard 2/3 of Tesla’s workforce are software engineers. And all the focus in the automotive industry is going into automation and artificial intelligence, and those sorts of things. If you think about that, that user experience job might be actually to be designing functionality that’s sitting in a car, you can see the need for splinter roles. And within that broad term of user experience you’ve got people that might focus on different parts of a process or different industries in the same way that’s happening in other industries like film and so forth.

Matt: Our Community Manager Hawk is in San Francisco at the moment. I was jealous because she was reporting on Facebook that the Tesla self-driving car was taking her home after a night at the pub. I was kind of geeking out vicariously.

David: It’s pretty incredible. What’s going on with drones and what’s going on in the automotive sector, it just makes my head hurt really. When you think about it like that I think the design industry and the user experience design industry, we can’t stand still. That’s one thing I’ve learned through my life at DT is every year it’s going to bring new challenges and things. And I think the people that will succeed ultimately are the ones that jump on new things and go, “Wow, something new is here. Let’s work it out” and really try to master it quickly. And if you stop doing that you sort of break the chain and you could wake up 5 years later and you’re doing what you’re doing 5 years ago, and you might find that the work has changed into something else. There are other people in demand and you’re not. I think that kind of continuous evolution and improvement of y ourself, and just constantly learning and thinking about the different interfaces, experiences, and technologies. Again, with iPhones you think about the sensors in an iPhone. Initially it was a chip and a screen. Apple added an accelerometer and a GPS. And when you have multiple sensors it allows an infinite number of things to happen through software. And I think over time what we’re going to see, I suppose when I’m talking about the drones in cars is more and more functionality and sensors that lead to exponentially more complexity in the products that can be created, that then user experience designers are going to get their heads around it and work out what that means.

Matt: What about you personally? Do you still design stuff? Do you still get hands-on or are you really removed from that. And if you don’t do you miss it?

David: I do miss it. I don’t do a whole heap, no. I have input from more creative direction point of view. It’s funny because I really grapple with this 15 years ago when I was at DT. I was going out talking to clients and coming back. I’ve got to get back on the tools and design. I’d sit down to design and I get frustrated because it had taken too long. It’s like, “I can’t do this in half an hour. It takes days.” And then I think I became good at having ideas and communicating those ideas to other designers and having direction and input, and I found that by doing that I could actually create more than I could if I just tried to do it myself if that makes sense. So it was just a transition that went through. I’ve always got other creative pursuits on the go that fill that need. Again, I’m doing a bit at the moment with drones for a bit of fun. Some of that’s a purely creative outlet, doing a bit of movie making and stuff. And the other part of it is a commercial project I’m working on that’s sort of more of an industrial application of drone. That’s using my skills. I’m think about the way that that’s going to work, the interface, and product design I suppose. But again, I’m not doing it in a hands-on sense.

Matt: Sure. Lastly because I know that there are lots of designers who at some point in their career, the entrepreneurial cold strikes and they start harvesting plans for going out on their own or doing product or services agency or something like that. What tips have you got? Because a lot of people think about it and not a lot of people successfully manage to pull it off. And you are certainly like a bit of a hero for every entrepreneurial designer in Australia I think.

David: Thank you. I think certainly a couple of things, one, you’ve got to have the motivation and the passion because it’s not easy. It’s hard. And if it seems just like hard work and a drain, it’s going to be hard to just keep pushing through the difficult parts over the longer term. If you look at like it’s a bit of a game and it’s fun, you just get back up when you get smashed down then you’ll go far. I think the main tip that I would give is really around focus and knowing what you’re selling and offering something, which is unique. And knowing what your proposition is and why people would hire you or your business or service whatever it might be over somebody else. I think that’s just really important. And that can change over time too. I remember the early days of DT. What made it easy for me and potentially easier than it would be today is that there were really no other trained designers who had gone and taught himself coding and could then say “I can create a website in its entirety for you.” And I can think about it from a marketing point of view, from a high-end design point-of-view, I can also create the website for you. That became a very easy sell, an easy proposition because I was competing against graphic designers who had no interest in the programming. Let’s say, “Here’s my website designed for you in QuarkXPress.” That’s a bit like InDesign for those of you who don’t know what QuarkXPress is. And they’ll hand it over to somebody. I’d find a programmer and have them build a program and say, “I can build you a site but you got to tell me what it looks like” to the clients. Which seems crazy how people would believe that, but that’s really what it was like. Probably back in ’96 there would’ve been a handful of people that could actually design and program a website. I had a very clear proposition and point of difference. It was very easy being to… Every conversation I had would pretty quickly lead to some work. These days there’s obviously tens of thousands of people that have those skills. As the business grew I suppose my sales pitch changed because early on I was, “If I can work closely with you I can create all these myself.” I’m going to be thinking about it from design and from the technology point-of-view. I’ve got minimal overheads, I could be really efficient. As the business grew we spent a while there where we were the most… and we had more design and software development competitors. Our thing was that we were the most creative of the technology companies and the most technology literate of the design companies. And that’s still something that we talk about at DT to day and that’s worked really well for us. As the business grew we then incurred these overheads and the cost structure grew. We couldn’t say to people anymore “We’re young and hungry, and we’re efficient” so we just had to be really good. We had to produce the best work and we had to not stuff projects up. As we grew and today DT’s built Bunnings and that’s a huge project. It gets 10 million unique visitors a month. It’s got 400,000 products in the database. It’s all built on a marketing automation platform with almost unlimited iterations of the home page based upon a whole lot of different data that’s coming in about the user, location, browsing history, and everything else. And those projects is just about not stuffing it up, because there’s a lot of people and a lot of cost involved, and you just have to deliver every time. The pitch changes over time. I think having that focus today, just having a reason for people to hire you or go with your business or your offer, and it might be industry specific. I’ve got real expertise in automotive, or financial services, or travel. That’s my thing. “I’m the UX guy around travelling” for example. Just having something that’s going to differentiate you from your competitors. It might be a structure, or your team, or a process that you use. But it’s about standing out and having a reason for people to differentiate you. If everyone else is an apple you want to be a telephone. How do you really differentiate yourself and get very clear with your pitch in terms of what it is that you do. And that can be something that a one man show, a freelancer can have in their pitch as well, that you understand strategy in this sector as well UX so you’ve got a great network of people around you that can execute your work, or you work on site with clients, whatever happens to be. And then think about the clients who that unique pitch is going to work for. But the one thing that you just never want at any business is just to be lost in the sea of everybody doing the same stuff. Because then all you’re left to compete on is price, which becomes difficult in something like this because you’re selling the quality of your ideas. And what you don’t want to do is then be giving away these fantastic ideas at a low price.

Matt: David, you’re a busy man so I really appreciate your time and thank you so much for your patience with the acoustic challenges of the room today. Hopefully that’s not going to be too much of a distraction for our listeners but there’s some golden advice in there. If people want to follow along and keep up with what you’re up to, where should they go? Do you do the Twitter thing?

David: That’s a good question. I don’t do the Twitter so much any more. I’m sort of laying low a little bit at the moment. But certainly keep an eye out for Tractor. We’ve got a lot of information going out through Tractor, social media, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Matt: The URL?

David: Yes, tractor.edu.au is our website, and from there you can find all of our social media channels. And also DT, which is dt.com.au, and all the various social media channels off there.

Matt: We didn’t touch on this in our conversation but Tractor has online courses as well as the in-person training, don’t they?

David: Yeah, definitely. We’ve got many students all around Australia doing our online courses. We’ve got a graphic design course and a digital design course. They have those traditional names because we have to work within this accredited framework. We can’t just launch a UX course. But again, I think our graphic design course is the most digitally focused of the graphic design courses, but it’s still teaching a lot of the fundamentals of typography, color, and form, and all that sort of stuff, which is really important for a lot of people. And our digital design course is as much as we can make it. It’s very UX- focused as well.

Matt: Fantastic. Thanks for your time and we’ll catch up with you soon.

David: Great. Thank you.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #8: Studying UX with David Trewern appeared first on UX Mastery.

Marcel kindly agreed to continue this conversation with us on our podcast, and this episode is the result of that chat.

You can listen to this episode directly in your browser—just click the “play” button:

Here are some of the links mentioned in this episode:

• Marcel’s upcoming visual facilitation workshops in Sydney and Melbourne
• Marcel’s website, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles
• Visual Facilitators Melbourne Meetup
• Bikablo
• Chineasy

Note: If you’re interested in Marcel’s workshops, he has kindly offered UX Mastery readers an exclusive 10% off the workshop fees. Use the discount code uxmastery to receive your discount on checkout.

Transcript

Matt: So welcome to another UX Mastery podcast. I’m here with Marcel van Hove who is a visual facilitator. So Marcel, welcome

Marcel: Thanks very much Matt

Matt: Pleasure. Let’s start by hearing a little bit about yourself, what you’ve done and your background please.

Marcel: Umm yes, I’m definitely an I.T. geek. I have a background in I.T. for almost 20 years now. I started my first company in the first I.T. bubble, probably ‘97 or something like that; it’s not 20 years yet. Since then I developed software and through the world of software I came to working with people and through that I came to visual facilitation.

Matt: So, let’s start by hearing in your words what visual facilitation means.

Marcel: Ok. Visual facilitation is, for me, a way to facilitate meetings using visuals to keep the conversation running and to help people to collaborate better. So for me, the facilitation part is a very big one and the visual is a tool we use to help people to work together.

Matt: Right, and we met at the Melbourne visual facilitators meet up which you organised. And there have been some great numbers so there seems to be quite a lot of interest in the power of visuals to collaborate lately.

Marcel: Yeah, it definitely picks up more and more. I started this Meet-Up when I moved to Australia 3 years ago almost. Since then I run it monthly we were 2 or 3 people and now we are often up to 10 people. So yes, it’s picked up and I’m very happy that in Australia graphic facilitation, visual facilitation is picking up.

Matt: Now, you moved to Australia from Germany, which is your country of origin and on your website you talk about this German company called Bikablo. Can you tell us a little more about who they are and what they do?

Marcel: Yes sure. Many people wonder what the word Bikablo means, and it means the first two letters of the German word “builder carbon block” which roughly translates as “picture block”. And this relates to the first product, which was a visual dictionary where you had very iconic, symbolic drawings to express your ideas in pictures. So it was the first book from Bikablo, which came out more than 10 years ago now, and it started to become a drawing school. Today, as of last month, we have the Worldwide Bikablo Academy which is a training school.

Matt: Right, so our regular listeners and anyone who has been to a UX Mastery workshop will be very familiar with this idea of visual vocab, but Bikablo have taken that visual vocab and really formalised it haven’t they?

Marcel: Yes, there are a group of 25 trainers at the moment and we meet once a year at least. They meet in Europe often, like they run many trainings per month. At the moment I run one training per month in Australia. And we redefine the symbols over and over again, we prune out all the details that makes it complicated for people to draw them and we make it simpler and simpler and simpler—to make it even quicker on the whiteboard and on paper.

Matt: So, I’ve looked through some of these Bikablo visual vocab visual dictionaries and you’re right, they are very simple, very easy-to-draw objects. What’s the philosophy behind Bikablo and why is this such a useful tool?

Marcel: For us at the Bikablo Academy, it’s really this simple shape and to open – everyone can learn this technique, you don’t have to be an artist or you don’t have to be a crazy person to pick this up. As I said, for myself, I’m an I.T. guy who then figured out that drawing together is quite handy and quite useful. I learned this technique myself and I had this strong assumption that I had, that I couldn’t draw and I think many people have that problem in their head. They think “I can’t draw” and we get people drawing and reactivate actually the drawing skills of the people.

Matt: ‘Cause I know there are going to be people listening now who say “Ah, Matt says they’re really easy to draw but he can draw, so it’s easy for him to say that!” But they really are like basic squiggles on the page aren’t they?

Marcel: Absolutely. We run a fundamentals class and on the first day we start with relaxing your arm, using your whole body to basically manage to interact with the flip chart and then add a pen to it and then create a straight line, then we start drawing. So we really really start very basic. That’s the philosophy to enable it and of course it doesn’t stop there, it’s just the start. Many people start with Bikablo technique and then soon develop their own symbols to actually have on the second day of the training – the practitioner level – an exercise we have that’s called symbol safari where we combine symbols to create more complex symbols to make sense in your more abstract or more complex world; like user experience design or like when I do portfolio management in a company then I need more complex symbols – it’s not only the light bulb but it’s maybe the lightbulb with something combined with it.

Matt: You know, I don’t know if anyone has studied Chinese or Japanese but I lived in Japan for 3 years and the philosophy of learning the japanese Kanji characters is very similar. Like there’s a bunch of repeatable symbols and you combine them to make other symbols and you make stories in your head about how to remember. But the stories you’re making for these symbols for drawing aren’t going to be as elaborate because they make sense to you from the get-go. You don’t have to invent some story.

Marcel: Yes. There’s actually a website which is Chineasy and they explain the symbols in drawing – it’s a guy from Melbourne who did this, I heard about it, and they explain how the symbols in Chinese work.

Matt: There you go interesting. So, some people might be thinking “Well, this is all very interesting but how does it relate to user experience?” What role can a visual facilitator play in the UX world?

Marcel: Well, I don’t have a strong background in User Experience, but in my world, when I work, I have to bring people together. So we need to agree on the best practice or the best trade or best design for some way to come up with ideas and for me drawing together on the whiteboard is the way to go. It’s a bit like a hammer and you see all problems become a nail but it’s quite often the answer for many problems in knowledge work. So in user experience design – let’s, for example, say you want to have a customer journey through a whole software experience then I am using the second day of the training the visual story telling approach where we go through the story block and we apply the Bikablo emotion figures which are expressing the emotions. And we basically teach them how to tell a story on this emotional level with these emotional figures and that can be applied to your customer journey for example.

Matt: Absolutely.

Marcel: So I would say, if you’re a good… I don’t want to offend anyone with this… I’ll basically say User Experience Design is not only screen design, right?

Matt: Absolutely. I don’t think you’ll offend any of our audience. No, I agree.

Marcel: The thing is there, the more, to see the big picture, yeah? And how the screens maybe interact and what is strong in the storyline from let’s say this app or so. We can use the symbols like the emotional figures or the icons to express that.

Matt: And so, UX aside what other places are these visual facilitation skills useful? And what kind of roles or careers are there available for someone who chooses to pursue this visual facilitation stuff?

Marcel: Everywhere. I once used it with games at my child’s birthday and we drew together—like Pictionary or something. But for me drawing is really like learning a language and the question is then where is, let’s say, Spanish useful, if you learn it, or Chinese? The same question applies here—it’s everywhere where you have to find a way to communicate. So drawing, and this easy simple drawing technique, it’s just a lifelong skill that I’m absolutely sure it’s not a question whether you have to learn it; it’s just when, if you work in creative work.

And many people start drawing on the whiteboard and overcome this fear without Bikablo and it’s now, to come over this hump, towards this first mountain. But I think I missed your question. The question was where is it used as well. So I have also an agile coaching background, which means I work with teams as Team Coach and help them to organise their processes and in this complete coaching world it’s very applicable. Like visual coaching picks up; we have a great lady in Melbourne, Cristiana Anderson, who likes visual coaching and has a life coaching background. That’s something that I think is very valuable. And we’ve done this with people where we drew basically a landscape map of their career path and see where they want to go. So visual coaching is one.

For me then the whole idea of presenting your idea, leading a meeting and presenting the idea. There is this quote by Dan Roam: “The person you can present his idea on the whiteboard gets the funding”. So in the whole entrepreneurship world, if you can express your idea in a picture you’re very strong. So visual presentation is actually the goal of the first of the fundamentals training.

Matt: We’re also seeing roles for graphic recorders and workshop facilitators appearing more and more aren’t we? What is a graphic recorder?

Marcel: A graphic recorder is a bit like a fly on the wall; he is not interacting with the group, he’s just listening to the people, capturing it on the big screen, whiteboard or paper or digital even then re-projecting to the group with a data projector. And quite often at conferences I think in Germany, when I look at how much is going on there almost every conference now is facilitated with graphic recorders and visual facilitators to do that. The way you do that is just you capture, you bring it to the screen, people can watch what you do and through that they gain a new insight of that.

Matt: So just to be sure, it’s real time. As the conversation is happening.

Marcel: It’s real-time, as the conversations happen you capture this with your pen on the big screen and the people see what you do and even interact with that. When it comes to the interaction I would say that’s visual facilitation.

Matt: So graphic recording is just capturing … and then graphic or visual facilitation is more interactive, how does that work?

Marcel: Well I see myself as a visual facilitator because when I graphic record I want to go back from the wall and ask the people for more info and I want to interact with the people in a facilitator’s role. I think if you just focus on your drawing and create a nice piece of capturing the big picture than it’s more graphic recording. As soon as you interact with the people and use your facilitation or coaching skills then you step into visual facilitation. So for me graphic recording is the half picture of the whole graphic facilitation or visual facilitation.

Matt: So when you’re working as a visual facilitator, is there another facilitator there as well or are you doing both?

Marcel: Quite often it is split; one person is the facilitator for the group and the other person is the graphic recorder. If you combine it in one role, you become the visual facilitator. Many people see that differently, but that’s how I see it. And that setup works well: one person can focus on their drawing and create a very nifty nice drawing and the other person to access the group. So if you have one person for that pair I would say they are a visual facilitator.

Matt: And when you are working in that role as a graphic recorder or graphic facilitator I imagine there’s a kind of balance between making something that looks beautiful, and then being comprehensive and capturing everything. So where do you land on that spectrum, and how do you make decisions about balancing aesthetics with completeness?

Marcel: Yeah, absolutely. So this is the beauty of it, as there’s almost no competition because every visual facilitator or graphic recorder has their own style, and the client can choose which style they like. For me, where I land is the stick figure drawings—I want to get the message right. I want to have different layers in my drawing where I see this is, let’s say the question in one layer, the answer in another layer and then the reaction is in the third layer in the picture. So I want to have this structure; I have this I.T. background and for me this systematic approach which is like a drawing on an atlas where you have many many description layers in your world map. It’s what I aim for. So quite often when I start, I create my legend first, to have the backbone of what I will do, and then I add these layers as I go.

Matt: So it’s a very systematic approach. So does that mean, do you often have some kind of layout in mind from the beginning or does it just evolve organically?

Marcel: Quite often I know the outcome of the workshop or the background or let’s say in a conference it would have a theme and there I often have a layout which I can recommend if you are new to graphic recording. So stick figures is the way I like to go – and maybe the other reason I don’t have any illustrative background, so I can’t do that and I don’t want to do it. Because it’s the intention of the people and the content to get right.

Matt: But you still, I mean I’ve seen your work and it’s still lovely to look at and it’s full of colour and hierarchy and … it’s still visually interesting, right?

Marcel: Thanks for that, but that’s just the beauty of the Bikablo technique because what happens there is you get this cartoonish outline right? From there you just add shades, which is learned as well, and from there you add pastels or other techniques to make it have a consistent, nice look. So it’s a very systematic approach in the drawing itself and through that I think our eyes can relax and find their way through the picture. So if you have a – we teach templates as well – if you have a template there it makes it logical; let’s say there’s a road with a sun at the end of the mountain. So there is this classical way of reading it from…

Matt: So that’s bringing in metaphor isn’t it?

Marcel: Yes. So it looks like wow he can draw! But I can’t. But the thing is I’m not an artist but people assume that this would be the case.

Matt: So what are the key skills and personality traits that you think make a good visual facilitator?

Marcel: Yeah I would differentiate here between a graphic recorder and a visual facilitator. For a visual facilitator – this is classic people people like you really like people you like to interact with them you like to bring them to this collaborative mode. For me this is quite strong if you have a coaching background – or as well a domain specific background in the way you work. Let’s say you do this in Finance and you have a Finance background – if you start drawing there you will be much stronger than the average other graphic recorder or graphic facilitator on the market because you understand the people more. You are more in their mindset, so that’s something very specific. It’s like the long tail of the graph.

The graphic recorder, on the other hand, is more likely bring it to the paper, drawing a nice picture. So there is space for all kinds of people. And this is the beauty of it. When you meet at the international conference which is at the moment is on next week in Austin, Texas. When you go to this international conference the IFVP you see so many different kinds of people. They all have one thing in common: they draw. That’s really cool. That’s it.

Matt: Fantastic. Now, you mentioned you have some workshops coming up in Australia. Can you let us know some details about what’s on the horizon?

Marcel: Yes, so what’s on the horizon, just check the website around monthly trainings in Australia marcelvonhove.com. In terms of what’s coming next, next week I’ll be in Sydney for 2 days. For the first day is the Fundamentals level the second day is the Practitioner level. It’s July 13th & 14th together with Brainmates, they nicely gave me the room there it’s very good. Then in Melbourne on the 8th & 9th of September, this is locked in and I think I will soon put out the next dates for the rest of the year. So just stay tuned, check the website, check Eventbrite, it’s all on there.

Matt: Fantastic, so if anyone is interested in learning the Bikablo technique for visual facilitation that’s where they should go. And you’ve got your monthly visual facilitator’s meet-up in Melbourne.

Marcel: Yes absolutely. So, we have a monthly meet-up at The Cooper’s Inn it’s super nice to hang out there they are very friendly people and you just come around and ask questions and we draw together. We put actually a big paper like a napkin on the table and draw together on the back of the napkin.

Matt: And what day of the month is that again?

Marcel: It’s last Tuesday of the month.

Matt: We’ll put links to the workshops in the show notes.

Well Marcel thank you so much for your time we really appreciate you explaining to us about visual facilitation. If people want to keep track of what you’re up to where can they go, are you on Twitter?

Marcel: Yes I’m on Twitter. I’m on Twitter with @marcelvanhove. Just check my website marcelvanhove.com or add me on Facebook. But I’m more active on LinkedIn than I am on Facebook.

Matt: LinkedIn. Ok very good. Thank you very much Marcel.

Marcel: Thank you very much Matt.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #6: Visual Facilitation with Marcel Van Hove appeared first on UX Mastery.

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Transcript

Office Hours webinar transcript

Matt: Welcome to Office Hours with Luke and Matt, which is going to be a chat about all sorts of things user experience-related, as an exclusive for our Gold Members, which currently is a fairly small group of people.

We’ll chat about some of those interesting user experience-related problems and issues that folks have asked us.

We’ll start with the first question from Paddy, who’s very active in our forums. Paddy asks whether you have any good tips and techniques to get test subjects talking out loud and tips to avoid the ‘please the tester’ responses. Paddy is hoping to avoid influencing the participant to answer in a way that makes him happy. Luke, have you had this experience?

Luke: Yes, it’s something that happens in every test or every interview. The first thing I would say is that you shouldn’t ask leading questions. When you’re talking to someone you’ve got to be very aware of any bias that you might introduce by simply being there and that’s got to do with the language you use. It could be the way you frame your questions, whether it’s the look on your face when you’re asking a question, whatever. It’s important to develop enough of a rapport with the person you’re talking to that they feel like you’re friendly and open and they can openly share with you, honestly, without getting them to a stage where they feel like they have to please you or that you’re looking for a particular answer and they want to give it to you because that happens all the time, it’s a very easy mistake to make.

I would say don’t worry about silences. Let the silences sit there and they can feel mildly uncomfortable but know they’re in control of giving the answer, rather than trying to respond to you all the time.

Matt: I have, on occasion, pretended I wasn’t the designer when I was. For example, if I was moderating the usability test I’d go in and I’d say to them explicitly, “look, I’m an independent consultant from outside that they’ve just brought in to check whether this is going in the right direction or not, so if you say anything, I’m not going to get offended. I wasn’t involved in this; I’m just here to test it, so help me out and tell me your honest thoughts”. I guess that is lying but I think it can be forgiven because it’s a technique for getting honest feedback. I’m removing myself from the process so they don’t feel like they need to tread around their feedback if they’re being critical. That is a tip that I would recommend other people use and I can sleep at night and look in the mirror safely by doing that. Another tip is that using stakeholders as participants is a wildly successful way of getting people on side with making changes based on usability improvement. I’ve had the Chief Digital Officer of a very big university using his university’s website and failing and swearing. The entire time, I knew that he was becoming enlightened to how big a problem we had at the time and how important it was to fix it and so I had his backing on a bunch of stuff. That was a very powerful political move to get buy-in within a large organisation.

Something you learn over time is that communicating design and getting buy-in is just as important as doing it.

Matt: We have a question from Richard who wrote, “I’m researching migrating to Australia from the UK where I’m currently working as a senior designer with some UX/UI design experience but I want to learn more. Are there any courses that are recognised by Australian recruiters or establishments that I should pursue”? Luke, what are your thoughts on courses and recognised courses?

Luke: There are two takes on this. I’ve probably got a longer-term view on this than Matt. I’d say take the opportunity to do a university degree in interaction design or something similar in the long term. In the shorter term, there’s no reason not to start practicing UX design, even without a university degree.

Whether you’re in a design position where you can start putting these techniques into practice straight away or whether you’re moving across from some other field, whether it’s print design or development or whatever, you can still practice some of these things on the side or start working them into your work. Eventually, you might even be able to get a UX position. You may define that as becoming a UX professional, getting paid for being a UX designer or it may just be about starting to practice doing UX design.

In terms of courses, most universities have design, psychology or human computer interaction disciplines, but every course is different so it’s a good idea to do your research.

Matt: We list degrees across the world on the UX Mastery site. Because UX is so broad and many clients and recruiters don’t understand what it means, I think someone can get a great job without a university degree if they’ve got experience and can sell themselves well, though.

There’s never going to be the case where a recruiter says “sorry, you’re not going to be suitable for this UX role because you haven’t done this course.” I agree that some of the HCI and interaction design courses are useful for becoming better at what you do, but I think getting a degree in something closely-related, for example, design or engineering or computer science, or something that’s relatively close to the fire in terms of creating digital products, is a good start. On top of that, I would advise getting some experience and learn how to talk with authority about your process, do a bit of prototyping, do a bit of usability testing and all those techniques that we bang on about on our site. If you’ve ticked a bunch of those boxes and you’ve got a degree in something—I would say it needs to be a degree in something closely related but so many UXers come from wildly unrelated degrees – HR, fine arts, for example, so I think a degree in anything shows that you’re willing to learn.

Luke: I think that idea of passion being a driving force in UX at the moment is certainly true. Many experts have had backgrounds in other things or they’ve just got a sheer amount of experience that’s given them the knowledge. I think it’s a really good time to be starting in UX because not everyone expects that you’ve got a psychology degree or whatever. If you’ve got the passion and you go out there and do a bit of reading and live the life and practice UX then that’s going to go a long way.

Matt: And you do have to get that experience, there’s no excuse. I think that user experience roles are generally hard to come by, particularly roles such as an intern or a beginner. Most people who are looking for a UX designer want someone who has already done it. I don’t think you can expect to get that experience in your first role. You need to find the experience on your own, whether it’s within a community group, or a personal project. You need to be able to tick those boxes and then be able to talk about that experience. That’s how you can make that transition into your first UX role.

Luke: Developing a portfolio of work is important.

Hawk: Yeah. I’ve noticed recently, whilst researching UX jobs to put together our jobs board, that employers tend to ask for specific experience, rather than for specific education. So it would seem to me that you might be just as well-off doing some kind of specific software training or getting really good at a popular tools. Would that be the case?

Matt: Definitely.

Luke: Definitely, yep. Because it’s early days for UX as a mainstream practice, there’s this really broad range of expectations in roles, mainly because they’re either moving from an existing design role or a new company is starting to adopt user-centered design practices of whatever it might be. So there’s this full range of things, there are different types of software or whatever. So this idea of being a UX designer and being able to guarantee any position is not true. As with almost any job, I think it’s your background and your experience that’s going to dictate your suitability for a role, and that includes software experience or particular types of projects.

Matt: And people shouldn’t interpret that broad range of expectations as needing to be an expert in all of them. Most UX roles are generalist roles and so the first thing you need is to be able to talk about the process you follow and understand the user-centered process. And then you need to have dipped your toes in each of the phases along the way and I think, generally, it’s good advice to become T-shaped so that you become an expert in one particular area of that process. But you still need to be able to talk with authority at the top level of everything along the way.

Luke: Yeah those common things to do with UX, whether that’s grounding all your thinking in research, or the administrative process, that’s pretty standard across the board.

Hawk: From what I understand, it would seem that you need to be able to market UX as a concept, you need to be able to sell the important factors that surround UX as well as being able to do them yourself because it would seem that the stumbling block for lots of people is coming up against people who don’t see the value in it, so you’ve kind of got to be a …

Luke: Kind of an evangelist.

Matt: An evangelist, yeah.

Luke: UX has been around for a long time but a lot of companies are still creating positions for themselves, growing departments for this sort of stuff. Jobs will come up where there hasn’t been a UX designer dedicated to that role and you’ve still got to have passion and be quite infectious in being able to convert people to the idea of changing the company culture to adopt the user-centered design process rather than something that’s a bit more top-down.

Matt: That’s hard. I’ve been in that role. I was in a large bureaucratic organisation, where there was a lot of politics and silos and personal agendas with people in power and I think it was possibly naïve of me to think I’d be able to get a user-centered process in place to deliver the product we were working on because, really, the organization wasn’t ready. And I’m not an organisational change consultant and I didn’t have the authority to say people at the top needed to change their way of thinking or change their structure or whatever. So I was up against it there.

Luke: It’s a bit like approaching the whole team.

Matt: Yeah. We talk about UX being everyone’s role, everyone’s job and really I was going in there trying to get a better result. The end product was better than what they had. Was it as good as it could have been? Nowhere near, but at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do, so if you’re going into an organisation that is new to user-centered design, you need to manage your expectations about how ready they are to embrace doing user research. That’s the big hurdle; being prepared to invest in user research and user testing because most companies, especially if they’re coming from a technology background, don’t immediately see the value until it’s too late and they launch something that people hate.

Luke: Yeah, and it’s a good thing to be able to point at user research and say “look, this stuff is showing something different to what we as a team or leadership is actually expecting”. I was working with one particular client where, in order to be able to battle against the politics, you had to have some hard evidence. But you also need to be very careful that you’re not using the research as a crutch or you’re not trying to justify things with metrics. I think, even though UX is a pseudo-science, you can’t simply say, 30% of our respondents said this so therefore we’re not going to do it because 70% didn’t. You need to be very careful about relying on numbers or research too much; you’ve still got to make a judgement call. But balancing that in the face of strong opposition and being able to justify your decisions is a funny process.

Matt: Yeah I don’t know. I think having metrics to back up your decisions is vital. But, you’re right, getting buy-in and getting everyone on board with the idea rather than just fighting them with numbers is going to be a more fruitful outcome.

Luke: It’s very true. We wrote a blog post on this last year saying that if there’s one thing you do when you start at an organisation it should be based on principles rather than justifying your role as a UX designer. You should do your job only and let other people do their own job. The role of a UX designer is really to evangelise and sell this idea of UX being a process or a role that everyone in the design team should adopt.

Matt: The next question comes from Seshank in India. Seshank is really keen to start his career in UX design but he’s finding it tough to break in. He says most of the job requirements require 2 – 3 years of experience and most of the academic programs in India prefer students from an engineering or IT background. He’s got an architecture background, having done a Bachelor degree, and has been working in the field and he wants to transition to user experience. How can he make this happen? What are your thoughts on architecture as a foundation for a user experience career Luke?

Luke: I have a good mate who I often describe as doing user experience design in the physical space; he’s a landscape architect for Sydney/Melbourne and he’s responsible for the way spaces in the city are used or created. There are a whole bunch of similarities and crossovers that he and I enjoy discussing, whenever we catch up. And there are quite a few roles like that, whether it be film-making or architecture or psychology, there’s a lot of crossover with other things, which gets back to that idea of which degrees you might study. There are still many things you can borrow from other fields.

Matt: Do you think there’s much overlap in the process?

Luke: I think one of the reasons UX is coming of age is that it’s getting back to design fundamentals. For a long time web design, in particular, was either coming from a design or a development perspective and we managed to bring those together. For the last 5 years, it’s really been about delivering a better customer experience. I think that fields with a formal design process, whether that goes right back to Bauhaus stuff or whatever it might be, but fairly robust web design and interface design is getting there now.

Hawk: I have an opinion because I actually have an architecture degree.

Matt: I was about to segue to that but you beat me to it.

Hawk: Whilst I’m not a professional UX designer, I jumped from architecture to web design, and I found it really useful for several reasons. One was obviously the general design process, but also the ability to be able to communicate that design process and my thoughts behind the steps I had taken and being able to communicate to people why I had done certain things. It would seem to me that in a UX type design process, that’s even more important. And I still, today, come up against things I realise I have taken from that experience, that I wouldn’t, at the time, have realised was going to be so valuable.

Matt: I will preface all of this by saying that none of us have a lot of experience with the user experience field in India and, in different parts of the world the industry may differ somewhat but, that said, 2 – 3 years of experience, well, if you invest some time in getting 6 months of experience working on a community project or a personal project and then you milk that for all you can in terms of talking about the way that you think, the process you follow, the deliverables that you create along the way, and if you tell the story of that project you’ve worked on that’s going to be a feeling to a designer. And it’s not just about careers or user experience, it’s about human nature; that people love to hear a story and they love to see the inner workings of the creative process. Really, I think the questions is not “should I go and do an academic program or should I go and work for 2 or 3 years in a related field and try to migrate across?”, the goal should be to try and find an opportunity that you can make the most of and then tell that story really well. I think that’s good advice for any career, really.

Luke: Sometimes you see job advertisements for 5 years of UX experience, but UX as a popular label has probably only been around that long so what they are asking for is people that were practicing something before it was really mainstream. Of course, people have been doing this stuff for 20 years or more.

Matt: Totally. And if Seshank was to talk up the overlap between architecture and UX and talk about his experiences there, he can get some value out of saying “no, I don’t have 3 years of experience as a UXer, but I’ve got 12 months because I’ve worked on this community project and this is the outcome that came from that. Prior to that I had 5 years of architecture experience and this is what we did and look at how similar it is”. I think that’s going to be a good approach.

Luke: And demonstrating that passion will go a long way. It’s not a requirement that people must have 2 years of experience before they even get to interview but if you’ve got passion and they’ve got the benefit of your experience and you’ve listened to yourself and learnt from that, you’re going to be in a much better position than someone who’s been in a position for 2 years and doesn’t really care or doesn’t have that fire in them.

Matt: It’s also important to remember that when people fill jobs, it’s not just 100% about “do they match up on paper?” We talk a little bit about this in our ‘get started’ book but a lot of the best positions don’t come from a classified in the newspaper or on a jobs board, they come from your network. And if you go and attend a bunch of meet-ups and get to know a few people and they get to know you then that cultural fit of “he’d be a nice guy – or girl – to work with”, informs their decision when it comes to hiring if it’s something that you’re a good fit for. So don’t discount the peripheral, softer parts of the job-hunting process and just focus on “do I have the degree or don’t I?” because there’s a lot more to it. Humans are complex and humans hiring humans to do complex, interesting work is just as complex.

Luke: Absolutely. I did a public speaking course on trying to improve my public speaking skills a few weeks ago and they were talking about body language. They brought up an example of body language during job interviews and the idea of the job interview being, as Matt said, two humans coming together to see if they can work well together. There was a university study done in the United States where they got people to do certain exercises before going to the interview that would help them be a bit more expressive in their body language. And they used another group to do things that shut them down and make them a bit more insecure and the differences in those two groups, simply because of the way that confidence was inspired through your own personal body language and then the way that was communicated to the other person, had a huge difference, not insignificant. I’m not saying go in there acting confident and you’ll get the job even if you don’t have the skills, I’m saying those sort of soft things that you come across in an interview are really what interviews are about.

Matt: Have you got any stories to share, Hawk, about job interviews or applying for roles that were a good fit and they weren’t interested or vice versa?

Hawk: You’ve asked the wrong person. I have had one job interview in my life so I’ve been fortunate enough to jump from job to job basically…

Matt: So tell us why that’s the case.

Hawk: I think that’s the case for the reasons that you say; that I talk a good game.

Matt: Yes you do.

Hawk: I think you need to do what you do with confidence and honesty. I think you’re a fool if you go in pretending to do something that you can’t do but if you go into any situation with the attitude that you haven’t done it before but you’ve got the confidence and you’ve got the skills to give it a damn good try, then people are usually willing to give you a go on that. If it doesn’t work out it doesn’t work out but that’s a hell of a lot better than going into a situation feeling meek and unprepared and thinking “well, I’ll give it a shot and see what happens”. People sense that straight away and nobody actually wants somebody working for them, whether they’re good at a job or not, who doesn’t have that confidence. That’s part of a company culture as well—you want to surround yourself by people that are smart and are brave, I guess. That’s what you’d want in your business. I’m not necessarily saying I’m smart and I’m brave but I am definitely saying that I talk a good game and, for that reason, you’re an example. I did an interview with you so I’ve been fortunate in that regard.

Matt: Yeah I’ve done my fair share of hiring, mostly designers and developers, and it’s hard to be objective about it but 95% of my decision after the interview’s over about whether the person’s a good fit or not, relates to not how the numbers stack up and what their qualifications are and what’s on their resume, but about how good a cultural fit they were and how confident they were about the stuff that we were asking them to do in the role. Confidence is huge.

Hawk: Yeah, and I guess, also, there’s an aspect of either, in your field I guess portfolio, in my field reputation. I think these days, with the internet, everybody gets Googled before they walk into that interview room, so if you’ve got a good online presence, and if you’ve got a good portfolio or series of work or even just online reputation, that makes a huge difference as well. I guess my advice to anybody in any role is to make sure you’re really careful about the stuff that is online about you and be out there as much as you can. Get onto forums, ask questions, be seen to have a share offering and community type spirit across the board. And I’m not pushing, necessarily, our community but that is something that people see and that’s something that people want in an employee as well.

Luke: Mmm. Reputation precedes you, yeah.

Matt: Alrighty, let’s move onto the next question which is from Ben. Ben was asking about our book. He said, “Before I buy this book, how do I know if UX is for me?” I didn’t include this because I wanted to plug the book but because it’s a fair enough question. Someone hears this term UX, and they think it sounds interesting but how do they know it’s going to be something that’s worth investing their time in to find work and get a decent salary? What are your thoughts on tackling something you don’t know a lot about, Luke?

Luke: Personally, I am curious about a lot of different things so tackling things I don’t know anything about is part of how I operate. My attitude is that you can jump in the deep end with things, give it a go and you can go a long way. But having said that, my partner’s a teacher and last week she had a work experience person doing a tour of the school and this person hadn’t had many years of teaching experience but was a natural teacher. My partner ended up saying to her, “please become a teacher, we need more people like you in the field” just because there was a natural confidence, she was happy doing the job, got a lot of enjoyment out of interacting with the kids, naturally knew how to handle them, was confident, all that kind of stuff, she was a natural teacher. I think the same can be true for UX where if you’re into doing good design, problem solving, you’re passionate about taking problems or concepts or research and then forming that through a process to have a good outcome, along with passion and that kind of stuff, the hard skills will develop. It’s the soft skills that will probably determine whether you’re suited for that or not.

Matt: I’m going to be a little harsh on Ben because my response to his question, how do I know it’s for me? What does it take? And what are my chances of finding work and getting a decent salary? Stepping back from UX, is UX an in-demand skill at the moment? Yes, it is. Does it pay well? Yes, it does, as a general rule. But, stepping back from UX, this is a really risk-averse, conservative approach. It betrays a lack of curiosity. I would suggest, Ben, if you’re not sure if it’s for you then do a bunch of reading. You need to go and do some research, read some of the articles we have on the site. Do some networking, go along to some meet-ups and chat to some people there and find out for yourself. And if you’re basing your career decision on what’s going to pay really well then, I don’t know, I think if you’re interested in something, you genuinely have a curiosity about something, then you’re going to enjoy it a lot more and if you get really good at it then you can always get paid well to do it. That’s the fundamental approach that I have in life. I know artists – and generally art is not seen to be a profession that pays well – but I know artists that have found a way to make a great living out of their art by running workshops, teaching kids to do what they do and being a bit creative about how they market their services as well as being able to pursue their passion. If you’re curious about something, if you’re passionate about it and you become good at it, you’re always going to find a way to make a living out of it. Just park the worries about “if I do all this work, am I going to find a good job or not?” and just go and do something that you’re interested in. That’s my advice.

Luke: And to be honest, the reason Matt and I wrote that book is because a lot of people have those kinds of questions. So, fair enough, ask the question before you buy the book but the book will really answer those questions and if you find that it really doesn’t – I don’t want to set up an excuse for getting a refund – but if, honestly, the book doesn’t do what you want then let us know. We’ve got a 100% money-back guarantee on it so that will be very helpful.

Matt: Mmm, and that said, if you’re not prepared to drop $18 on something that might change your life from a professional point of view then I think, investing in yourself is always a good idea and you should be liberal in investing in yourself, is my advice.

Luke: And the book is jam-packed of stuff.

Matt: Yeah we’re proud of it, there’s plenty of value in there so hopefully you find it useful, Ben. The next question is from Kim. She asks whether someone can really get a career in information architecture or user experience design without any formal education? She’s reading job postings and she’s got this one particular job that she’s copied and pasted because it lists all these responsibilities about collaborating with stakeholders and defining user requirements and content strategies and wireframes and all of the stuff that a UX designer does. Is this going to be something that Kim is going to be able to do without getting a formal education? Luke, what do you think about this?

Luke: I wrote an article on UXmatters.com last week called “Beyond User Experience”. It’s more targeted at intermediate UX designers or people who have been working in similar roles. So, whether they might be business analysts or product managers or people not necessarily seeing UX as the end point in a career, there are a lot of shared skills around things that product managers do that UX designers also do.

I think that moving laterally across, whether you’re working in an organisation and you’ve got some skills you can use to move sideways into a different job. I myself don’t have a formal degree even in design. I studied film. In a couple of years’ there are probably going to be more and more people coming up into the industry who are going to have degrees so it will probably get a bit more expected but if you’ve got that passion and you’ve got solid experience and you know what you’re talking about I think that’s going to count for a lot. So, short answer to that question, no, you don’t need a formal degree.

Hawk: I think it’s also important to remember that every job uses jargon and if you read every single skill that was required of you in any job, even something that might be considered an easy job, there’s jargon that you won’t understand until you’re in the position. I think it’s important not to be put off by the type of things you read in job descriptions. They’re never going to pitch below what they want so that’s where that being brave comes in I think, just, take a punt.

Luke: Having written job descriptions myself, you’re writing for something ideal, you don’t know the people who are going to apply for it, unless you’ve already got someone in mind. You’re writing a wish list to try and make sure you’re going to get someone of quality. But I think your job coming into that interview is to communicate that suitability for a role or to inspire the person who’s interviewing you and demonstrate how you can contribute to the company and add to the culture and all of that stuff that Hawk was talking about before, so, not paying so much attention to requirements but, sell yourself.

Matt: There you go Kim. Go in there, charm them, get a bit of experience and talk about it with authority and be brave and you’ll go far. The next question comes from Alon. Alon says “do you have to be considered artistic to be a good UX designer?”

Luke: Alon, good question.

Matt: Yeah. Alon doesn’t sketch much but he does enjoy some of the more analytical aspects of user experience like usability testing, usability studies, analytics, AV testing and advocating. Is UX the correct career to be considering without sketching ability? I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this.

Luke: Matt and I both do a lot of sketching and those sketches get posted on the website so I’m wondering whether we’re influencing people to think they have to be sketch artists to be UX designers.

Matt: Mmm.

Luke: There are some strong cross-overs.

Hawk: I don’t do any sketching but what I would say to him is to check out Mike Rohde’s sketching handbook. There are just so many tips in there. I couldn’t sketch to save myself and there are some pretty clever little things in there.

Matt: So what did you learn from doing that course, Hawk?

Hawk: Simple tips like some really basic ways to draw people, some really smart ways to draw people’s faces. He’s got a clever grid system of drawing 9 different circles and they’re just slightly different angles of eyes and things like that to give people different expressions, just some really cool simple ways to do things like that. Ways to make headings look pretty, ways to do little curly bits and to take something that you wouldn’t have thought would work together on the page just makes something look like you know exactly what you’re doing. And I’ve noticed with you guys as well that you both have specific things that are kind of your signature and I think that if you figure out what that signature for yourself is then you don’t need to be able to draw everything in the world. If you’re really good at trees just make sure you put a lot of trees in there. There are lots of waysto make it work.

Matt: Alon’s question was about being artistic, and I think you need to be careful about aspiring to be artistic or to be an artist because art and design really are two very different things. Art is about self-expression and, maybe I’m being simplistic here, but design is about solving problems. And sketching – a lot of people see someone sketch and they think “oh, they’re really artistic” but actually sketching is just a language for communication. It’s a visual language. It’s a way of expressing ideas in a less ambiguous fashion than words, generally. And, as Hawk mentioned, quite rightly, it’s not that difficult to get to a point where you can have some basic visual literacy to communicate ideas. So the answer is no, you don’t have to be artistic but sketching is a great skill to have, it’s great for communication and we all sketched as kids. We didn’t have any inhibitions about sharing our drawings when we were younger and, for some reason, we lose that confidence in communicating visually as we grow older and that’s a real shame. So I would definitely encourage you to embrace sketching.

Luke: I certainly wouldn’t call myself a sketch artist but, like you say, I really enjoy sketching so it comes out in some of my work and I find it really useful for user experience design. Jared Spool who’s a usability expert and an early pioneer in UX, wrote an article in which he called sketching an indispensable skill for UX and I think it’s because of those things. To be a good sketcher you need to listen and process and analyse and then communicate that sort of stuff out and that’s really at the core of some of those soft skills for UX.

Hawk: I also think in every job, in every role, there’s a niche for somebody and I’m sure, just like there are architects that can’t draw but they’ve got amazing spatial awareness, I imagine the same goes for UX. Your strength might lie somewhere else but there’s somebody else in your team that does those aspects of it. I suppose it depends on the job and the size of the team but if you’re indispensable at one of these other skills then who knows.

Luke: Whether that’s naturally thinking, jumping on the whiteboard and doing a bit of sketching just to help people get a concept rather than writing endless bullet lists, whether that’s inspiring some vision in the design team by putting together a story board, or whether it’s simply sketching out a bit of a layout, the idea of thinking visually for what is essentially a visual discipline is important.

Matt: There you go, Alon. Don’t feel intimidated by sketching, embrace it and make it part of your workflow and part of your communication skills and you can still go on and be awesome at all of those analytical parts of UX. Sketching will definitely make you even more awesome.

Luke: Give yourself permission to have some fun with it.

Matt: Yeah. Christina wrote a great email to us and I’ve got you in mind here, in particular, Luke, because Christina has a film background. She used to be a visual effects artist and when she was preparing to enter that field she had a good understanding of what all the various roles within the field were. She knew what a texture artist was, what a modeler was, what an animator was, what a lighter was and the role that each of them played and the tasks expected of them and she doesn’t have a good feel for how that works in the UX space, because, as we were just saying, UX has this wonderful spectrum of all different specialties and roles within that space. What are the various specialties within UX? How many can we list?

Luke: I feel a blog post coming on! It’s a meaty subject and I suppose film, in particular, is driven as a collaborative process so you’ve certainly got a director and, even having been a director, I still wonder why the director gets all the credit for a film, really, it’s a huge teamwork process and whether that’s from cinematography or people running around making sure people don’t trip over electrical cables, whatever it is, those people are all there for a reason. I guess for anything that involves a lot of people working together, you’re going to have to understand what people’s roles are in order to work efficiently. In the UX space, as I say, it’ll be a great article to do, just looking at what particular job titles or roles or elements of a process and it’ll change for different companies and different approaches of course.

Matt: You’ve got a bit of a list in front of you, do you want to read out some of the roles that we’ve got there?

Luke: We’ve got User Researcher, which is obviously very focused on the early parts of the process, user interviews, behavior analysis, all that kind of stuff. User researchers might specialise in getting some of that context and then passing that onto other people who then do a lot of the design work. Information Architects obviously will be more around structuring information, helping to find information when you’re using an interface, probably the next step, menus, all that kind of stuff.

Matt: We do have an exciting announcement relating to information architecture coming up on the site, probably later this week. I won’t say any more about that but it’s very exciting. If you want to learn more about information architecture, definitely watch this space.

Luke: Content Specialists for particularly content-based websites. Having come from a web design experience in the last couple of years, I’ve looked at the amount of effort people put into a visual design and then just tack on content at the end. I think having someone whose job it is to do a really good job of content is pretty important—structuring the content, how it looks on different devices, all that kind of stuff, micro-copy even, you know, headings, buttons, that kind of stuff. Moving onto bigger tasks like interaction design, what screens go where and then how people flow through that process, transitions between screens, whether that’s real-life stuff so people understand what’s happening or whether it shifts slightly into visual design where there’s probably more emphasis on typography, colour, layout, graphics, visual effects, symmetry, all that kind of stuff. It kind of affects the mood of how people will be using the website. And then, of course, umbrella positions such Project Management. Just as you have a director for a film project to coordinate people and make sure the vision is strong, a Project Manager keeps those logistics clear and makes sure you hit the goals you are aiming for. There are development roles, front-end coders, writing HTML and CSS, JavaScript, that kind of stuff. Whether that’s in a position where you’re prototyping and getting something up and running or whether you’re actually producing the production code at the end that’s nice and clean and is going to be what’s released. Other roles too, like Online Marketing, it’s oriented around sales, so sales copy, conversion rates, planning landing pages and the way that connects as a process of getting people on board with a product or content you’re dealing with.

Matt: That’s a great snapshot of the different roles. What it highlights to me is that there are some roles where you are the UX designer and there are other roles where you are doing UX as part of your role and there’s no one best practice, or hard and fast rule about what that team structure should look like or what that makeup should be.

Luke: An important part of the project to start, when you’re doing a UX plan, is to understand who you’re going to be working with, whether you’re by yourself, whether you’re with a team, how do you harness all those skills? To look at all the various different elements of skills that need to be used, what stuff can you actually bring? Are you suitable for that job? Do you need to bring in outside help? The important part of putting that plan together is at the start.

Matt: I hope that’s answered your question, Christina and given you a snapshot of some of the roles within the UX spectrum. Many people work doing all of the above and are particularly good at one or two of those areas, but some people will specialise just in being an interaction designer or right down to just doing wireframes and prototypes. I’ve seen people whose job it is just to do the wireframes and prototypes and I think that’s possibly the case that people think that’s most of what UX designers do and that’s not necessarily true.

We have one more question we’re going to tackle and it’s from Lisa. Lisa emailed us today and she’s feeling hysterical. She’s in desperation mode. She’s losing her job that she’s been in for 19 years, which is in the graphic design and drafting space. She sees UX as possibly a path to salvation for saving her career and she’d like some information about migrating from graphic design to user experience. Any information would be helpful. Lisa, I think that you have a fantastic foundation, Lisa. We’ve touched on a bunch of stuff in this conversation today but, Luke, do you have any specific thoughts about whether graphic design is a good career to move from into UX?

Luke: Absolutely. We talked before about that idea of thinking visually being quite important for UX as a visual medium. I mean, it’s not critical, like you could be specialising in information architecture if you’re a bit more analytical but, in general, having had 19 years of design experience, that’s pretty hefty. I think a lot of those skills, in terms of familiarity of how content can be presented and the way people will read that, is going to be really important for understanding human behavior and the way humans interact with the design. Obviously print design or graphic design is quite different from an interactive medium but a lot of those skills are translatable. Having 19 years of experience, particularly if you can pull out those aspects that are directly translatable to a user experience position and then find any gaps you’ve got and have some passion and some fire there too with learning them, absolutely.

Matt: Yeah I’m going to go one step further and say that, Lisa, your visual background gives you an advantage over other people that are coming to UX because the design stuff will be second nature. The fundamental principles of layout when you’re sketching a wireframe or doing information design of a form, you know, button placement and copy and that sort of stuff, you’ve got the edge because you’ve got so much experience doing that stuff in the print world. What you need to do is tackle those things we’ve touched on in this conversation today about getting some experience, doing some networking, making it a personal project that you develop and then talk about possibly helping out a local community or sports team or not-for-profit or something where you can apply some of those techniques. We’ve got this big thing we call the UX techniques back on our site—it’s Uxmastery.com/resources/techniques and there’s a whole bunch of techniques that UX designers use when they’re working at various stages of a project. My advice would be to get a bit of experience in using a few of them. Usability testing should be where you start and then branch out and try doing some user interviews, try doing a content audit, try building an information architecture site map and arranging navigation for a site redesign. Ticking those boxes and then talking about that as a story, is going to make you a very appealing employee for doing UX in a space, so it’s definitely achievable. You can do it, but it’s going to take a bit of hard work to tick those boxes.

Hawk: It looks like Lisa has got some experience, probably management experience and that type of thing as well in a VP role so there’s that aspect of it as well.

Matt: Good luck Lisa. I hope that’s useful for you. Before we finish up, I did want to mention to any of our listeners who are out there and are Melbourne or Sydney-based, we have a couple of workshops coming up, not just in Australia but in Asia as well. We’re teaching workshops in Melbourne in a few weeks’ time on an introduction to user experience and, later, in Sydney in August. And we’re also teaching some workshops in the Philippines.

Luke and I are very excited to be able to travel to Manila and Kuala Lumpur to teach some user experience workshops to some folks over there. It’s going to be amazing. If you’re in any of those four cities, please go to uxmastery.com/training and all the information is there. They are still fleshing out the pages for the sign-up for the Asian workshops but for Sydney and Melbourne, those workshops you can sign up to right now. We’d love to have you in class and we love talking about this stuff so please come along.

We love connecting with people who are aware of the site and who follow us and to give them a chance to help them in their career and giving them some guidance in person is very rewarding so we love it. We also have an online forum.

Hawk: Our online forum is a really relaxed place to come and either ask questions of us or of each other and also to support each other or to bounce ideas off peers. We are looking to do portfolio reviews, we can discuss the types of things we’ve discussed today in a non-threatening way, so definitely encourage as many people as possible to come along and join that and it’s community.uxmastery.com.

Matt: And finally, we have a newsletter, Luke.

Luke: We do. I think you should subscribe, everybody subscribe to our newsletter. It comes out fortnightly. We try to put some juicy things in there, we’ve usually got a little tip in there, something practical that you can apply straight away, news about what we’re up to, as well as a bit of fun and games about what’s been going on around the UX Mastery headquarters.

Matt: We just passed 5000 subscribers to our newsletter the other week so that’s a fairly big milestone that we’re quite proud of, so if you’re not on our email newsletter list, you get the inside scoop on events like this, on new products we have coming out and other free events.

Hawk: Ask the UXperts.

Matt: That’s the mailing list to be a part of if you want to get the inside scoop on Ask the UXperts. Just quickly, Hawk, if people want to hunt you down on Twitter and connect with you, where do they go?

Hawk: @ilovetheHawk.

Matt: And what about yourself, Luke?

Luke: Yep, so you can find me on Twitter @lukcha.

Matt: And my name’s Matt and I am @mattymcg on Twitter and we’d love to have you connect with us if you do the Twitter thing. This has been Office Hours with Matt and Luke and Hawk. Thank you for joining us today, Hawk. We hope you guys have found it interesting and useful and we’ll do this again sometime, I think. This was fun.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #5: Office Hours with Luke & Matt appeared first on UX Mastery.

In this recording of last weekend’s webinar, readers asked questions about how to break into UX, create a portfolio, and manage your career.

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Video

Flying in the face of frustrating technical hurdles, we did manage to successfully capture a video recording of this webinar for your viewing pleasure. Complete with live sketchnotes!

Continue the Conversation…

There were some great questions asked of Patrick in our community forum ahead of this event. Thank you to everyone who submitted a comment, either in the forum thread or within the webinar. We weren’t able to answer every question, but they have triggered some great discussions—we’d love you to get involved and keep the conversation going.

Transcript

Luke: Welcome, everyone, to the fourth UX Mastery webinar. We’ve got people joining us from around the world. It’s great to have you all here, we’re glad you’ve made the time to come along.

Today we’re talking about ‘How to Get an Awesome UX Job’ – finding job opportunities, crossing over from another position, portfolios and job interviews, and generally how to get started in UX.

My name is Luke Chambers. I’m one of the co-founders of UX Mastery. We’re based in Melbourne, Australia, where it’s currently a cool, overcast 9am Sunday morning. I’ve got a little croak in my throat so apologies in advance about that. And sitting not too far away from me with his sketchpad and pen is my co-founder Matt Magain. How are you today, Matt?

Matt: I’m good. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got my sketchpad. We’re going to try this little experiment. I’m going to sketch out our webinar. If I’m a bit distracted in the conversation it’s because I’m trying to do several things at once but that’s okay. It’s all good, we’ll see how it goes, if it’s too hard we’ll can it for next time, but it should be fun.

Luke: Very good. And we’re also very lucky to have with us today Patrick Neeman, all the way from Seattle. How are you Patrick?

Patrick: Pretty good. Getting over a cold and enjoying the Seattle rainy weather but yeah, I’m fine.

Luke: Lovely. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Patrick: So my name is Patrick Neeman, I’m a Director of Product Design in a company called at Apptio. We help companies manage their IT spend – you know, companies like American Express, Starbucks, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft – pretty big companies. Before that I worked at a company, a couple of companies before, called Jobvite, I was Director of UX there and Jobvite is a company that provides an applicant tracking system so we interviewed over 100 recruiters and hiring managers during my time there, so we completely understand the hiring process, and I got to talk to a lot of really cool UX types while I was working there.

Luke: Very good, so you have a lot of good experience of both sides! You also run the uxdrinkinggame.com…

Patrick: That is correct, I actually run two things . I actually run something called Usability Counts, it’s a blog that has over 45,000 words of advice about being in the UX field, and I run the UX Drinking Game, which recently was featured in Pragmatic Marketing – which is a product management training webinar and event company.

Luke: Excellent. Alright, lets kick on into some questions now.

Just over a week ago UX Mastery launched community forums at community.uxmastery.com, and we’ve been having some great conversations in there, some people asking questions they’d like answered in today’s webinar. So a big thank you to all who submitted questions – there are some great questions in here. I’ve got the list in front of me and we’ll go through them with Patrick.
If you’ve got a question about landing a UX job you’d like Patrick to help with, then you should be able to submit it in your GoToWebinar control panel. We’ll see it and get to them after we’ve done these ones that have already been submitted.

So Patrick, the first one here we’ve got from Armen. Armen is asking:

“How can I increase my job opportunities when I live in an area where there is no study or work opportunities for a UX specialist? I’ve had some success writing on medium.com and some other sites, but what else can I do for my career?”

Patrick: Basically the first question I’ll ask is where do you live? The second question is there are a lot of areas in the US where they don’t have UX specialist roles and what I encourage designers to do, is do a lot of UX activities as part of their design process with customers.

If there’s nobody telling you that you can’t do personas, you can’t do usability research, you can’t run focus groups, you can’t do wireframes – you just go ahead and do it, and then when you get to the next client you say ‘hey, this is the work that I did for this one client’ and you actually use it as part of your portfolio.

One of the examples I use that is really relevant in my life is last weekend we participated in an event called Start-up Weekend here in Seattle and we actually went through the process of building a whole prototype, including an imminent, is there a place where I can type this URL? (I’m going to go ahead and put it in the chat window)

Matt: I’ll go ahead and write the URL in this window, Patrick

Patrick: Yeah, so we went through the whole process of doing a prototype, we did a presentation, we were competing against ten other start-ups and we won the design portion and all the designers that I brought along to the event they’re using it in their portfolio to say ‘hey this the UX work that I did, that we did. We did research, we did some usability testing it was a lot of fun’.

Luke: I think Armen is in Armenia.

Patrick: Yeah, do side projects too. Side projects are awesome for doing stuff like this.

Luke: Excellent, second question is from Carrie:

“I am currently working as the only developer on a web project. I’m finding the experience terribly lonely, isolating and becoming increasingly depressed especially as I do not have anyone to bounce ideas off and lack of understanding from fellow colleagues leads to the assumption that my work is easy or they could do better.”

Patrick: Our work is so easy…

Luke: Have you had a similar experience and how important do you think it is to be able to share ideas?

Patrick: Yeah it’s really, really important to share ideas, there’s this wonderful thing called Twitter where you can go ahead and follow a whole bunch of designers and they’re all over the world, and I actually do this a lot and they reach out to me for Skype calls and we share the work that we’re doing and we get feedback it’s like we’re using the usability test and it’s very, very powerful.

Most designers are very introverted because of the emotional needs of our jobs and that is one outlet they can do to kind of do that, another thing that you can do is once you get on Twitter, once you get a start point of meetups you can actually invite designers out for coffee. I actually lived right above a coffee place and so we’re there all the time probably like once a week. A couple of weeks I’m meeting with a designer, we’re talking about our work and really exploring the kind of design work that we’re doing.

Luke: Very good. Another question, this one from Cassandra:

“I’ve been attempting to break into a UX designer position for a few years now (I have a few years of web design and front-end dev). Available positions are for mid-level or senior UX designers. If I can’t afford UX schooling and have limited UX experience, what’s the best course to breaking into this career?”

Patrick: That’s a really, really tough one. I just recently hired a junior web at Apptio and he had a really-really good mind for UX and his vision on stuff was great, and we’re actually training him. He was lucky because he found an opportunity where he can get on to a bigger team and actually learn from some other people. That would be the first thing that I would say – look for companies that might have junior people or junior positions open. I know that’s kind of hard.

Another way that you could do it, you can reach out to other designers that are more senior than you, do side projects or do other work and then show them your work and it’s almost as good as working with them directly. And another thing is like, another way that you can do that is if you have web development, I was looking at the CF web design experience, what you can do is go somewhere and use those skills, go somewhere they already have a senior designer working, and say ‘hey, these are the skill sets that I have. I want to work with this designer, I’ll do this web development and design stuff for a while but I really want to pick up the interactions design’, that’s the way that most junior designers did and broke into the field.

Matt: So Patrick, kind of off the back of that, if you don’t have a visual design background is that a hurdle for people, do you think?

Patrick: I actually don’t. One of the prototypers I have at work, he has a background in infomatics which is basically the, and I’m doing some quotes here, “product management” degree at the University of Washington and so he’s a programmer and he has an interaction design background and so he’s been real instrumental in helping us create a prototype for the company. And I actually value that skill set a lot because he thinks of a lot of things that we don’t think of, because we’re designers and we don’t totally get involved in all the technology.

Matt: That’s a good point.

Luke: I’ve got a question here from Pietschy – he says:

“I started life in a BA role, and later moved into development. Recently I did a solo job designing and building an in-house system for a small business where I particularly enjoyed getting back into requirements analysis, wireframing etc. I’d like to do more of this kind of work, do you know if there’s much of a market in the UXD world for back-office business systems? Or does the money tend to go to customer facing products?”

Patrick: Oh this great, this is an awesome question!

Where I work at is heavy-heavy enterprise, it’s IT spend, it’s B2B, if you find the right companies it’s a huge market from two perspectives.

The first perspective is they’re always looking for people that understand this is the business system because they’re a lot more complex than developing say an iPhone app.

And the second thing is – and this is the story that I tell people just me being an enterprise it’s literally 20 years of job security. As technology improves and as the products improve, the younger generation is actually expecting more products that work like an iPhone or iPad and so having a great user experience designer on staff is very, very important.

Does that make sense? Basically like the upper management I work with they are basically saying we know that you have to have the backup thing, but they also realize that a great user experience also sells the product

Luke: Yeah…

Patrick: And that’s going to increase the demand for people like us, which is great. The pay is awesome.

Luke: Yes can be very good. And we’ve got a few more questions coming in now, we’ve got one from Tim, who says:

“I’m just starting out with UX conducting focus groups, doing usability testing and now creating personas, do you have any examples of a good portfolio design?”

Patrick: There’s actually… I’m going to type it into the window and you guys can move it across…

Matt: I can put it on the sketch here.

Patrick: Yeah, so there’s this one portfolio that I point people to Laura, she’s an assistant designer that I mentored, now working for Amazon Lab 126. One of her portfolio pieces tells this great story about how they went through all the research and she talked about personas, and she did all the stuff and it was a three-day project, and it tells an amazing story.

Luke: There’s a lot of information about UX portfolios online. UX Mastery has just published an eBook about Getting Started in UX, and part of the bundled bonus extras with the eBook is a portfolio template and a resume template. That resume template is actually Patrick’s one. Go head and tell us a little bit more about what went into that, Patrick.

Patrick: As for the resume template, that was something that I actually developed when I was working at Jobvite, about 6 years ago. We went through some layoffs and I realized that my resume was horribly out of date and so I had a copywriter re-write it, and so when I got to Jobvite – which is an applicant tracking system – I actually tested my template through Jobvite over and over and over again until I got to a format that I knew that worked perfectly in most applicant tracking systems. I also did, quote, usability testing, quote, on showing it to recruiters and everything and the template basically states ‘hey this what I did at a job and then these were the goals that I achieved’. For example, if you worked at a job like an e-commerce site and then you can talk about how you increased the shopping cart conversion by 5%, that’s the kind of stuff that recruiters are looking for.

Luke: Excellent, excellent. We’ve got a few more questions rolling in from the forums . ‘UXer’ asks:

“Why all of a sudden does everyone want to be in UX, is it because they want to be in technology, but don’t want to learn code?”

Patrick: Should we describe what UX is, to start the discussion?

Luke: Sure, let’s go!

Patrick: So the way that I interpret UX myself is it’s an overarching discipline that includes design, content strategy, visual design, front-end development and then the research. There’s a couple of others in there, like information architecture, so it covers a lot of ground so when you have a UX team and you look at the people in the room like at Apptio, ‘right, how did these people ever get into the same team?’ I have the most it’s not like a whole bunch of product managers sitting around, it’s like literally ‘wow, they all have very different skill sets’, it’s like ‘how do you manage that?’

I think the main reason why people got into it is because of Apple. The iPhone is a wonderful product, and people think: “Oh, I want to develop iPhone apps for that.” What they don’t realize when they get into UX, you don’t start off and get the creative product. You have to collaborate with a whole bunch of different groups of people and the right product managers and developers and they don’t realize and they think they’re going to be able to design a product on their own, what it really comes down to is you don’t actually design the product, you facilitate the design. Does that make sense?

Luke: I think that is exactly what this person is asking – they can make the connection between the business strategy and the design team to provide value to the customer. And hence the expression of “facilitation”, as you say.

Patrick: Yeah! On that note what I like is—a lot of the products I worked on in front of millions of people. Like, I was doing some work at Microsoft with the potential to affect half billion people, and that was a huge driver for why I like being in this field.

Matt: Jeff Gothelf, who wrote the Lean UX book, talks about that exact point too. He talks about how one thing we need to learn as designers is that we are design facilitators and that everybody has valid input to influence the design, and we need to be prepared to create and instill a process where that collaboration and that input is synthesized and you end up with the ‘synergy’ of the team you’re willing to use, to use a buzz word, yeah, to end up with a great result.

Patrick: Yeah it’s really hard to create a design culture. Creating the right environment where that collaboration actually respects our roles is really, really hard and what’s really hard about that is that a lot of other people think that, they think that everybody can be a designer and they don’t understand that a lot of us have spent years and years of beating our heads against the wall to really understand what UX is.

Matt: And so on that point, ‘cause that is something that I’ve really struggled a lot with in big enterprise clients and that’s the idea of championing and justifying and selling user experience as a valid focus.

What has been your experience with that problem and how did you overcome it?

Patrick: It really depends I mean having a design-influenced culture is really top down and what you do is you have to start pounding their head more with data. Like, where I work now we’re starting to get into data design. We’re collecting immense amounts of data on how our customers use the product but yet nobody had bothered to analyze it and so one of the things we’ve been working over the past two weeks hey we have all this amazing data once they saw it like the light bulb totally turned, where you illustrate a light bulb and now they realize it, instead of just doing a lot of guessing. Asking the customers what they want now, we know what they’re using, and that totally transforms the conversation. Many companies never get to a design influence culture and then it hurts their bottom line.

Matt: Sorry to hijack the question thread, it’s a little selfish of me, but I’m really interested in this stuff because I’ve had those jobs. So for your career is it best if you’re in that situation where you’re in an organization and you see they don’t get it and you’re not, you know, an organisational change consultant—you’re an UXer. Should you acknowledge there is only so much you can do at and cut your losses and find a work environment where you can thrive and learn? Part of the stubborn consultant in me wants to say “no, I can change this place, I can really make a different here”.

Patrick: That’s actually a really good point. I’ve been in places, I’ve been presented with situations fairly recently where we’ve had consultants in there and literally change doesn’t happen overnight, like they’re being a UX consultant but they’re like two different approaches. Being a UX consultant you’re there to say “hey, there are obviously things that are going wrong, there are some areas you can fix” (I’m moving my hands around) but when you’re in-house that change comes much slower because you have to put all these pieces in place. Yes for example many companies, I think it was Scott Berkun that had a book about this. You know: “A Year without Wearing Pants” or something like that. It talked about how change has to be slow and you have to do it one piece at a time and you have to involve a lot of people. A lot of people do understand what design-led means, but they don’t know how it changes their job and so you have to gradually educate them across the organization about hey this is what it really means. And it’s a very difficult conversation because it actually involves them sharing a piece of their … of where they find pride. A lot of people want to be involved in the wireframing but they don’t understand what the wireframing means and how it’s an expression of design thinking, for example.

Luke: Cool, it’s often said that ‘the best way to learn UX is to do it’, but what aspects of UX can’t be taught Patrick?

Patrick: System design and acknowledging patterns, I think patterns and information. I don’t think that can be taught. Like, any of the reasons why I’ve really enjoyed this job and I feel I’m successful at it, is that I’m able to distill systems into objects and patterns. I see patterns in everything I don’t think that’s something that can necessarily be taught at a very high level. Some of the soft skills are a little bit challenging for us because it involves a lot of times you have to disagree and commit. Where you disagree with the concept, but you still have to follow the business needs, and that’s actually a really hard skill to teach. The visual design step is really, really tough like, visual design is under UX and either you have it or you don’t. Does that make sense? Like spatial design, like information design. For example, there are a lot of illustrators out there that do visual design but they don’t understand the structure of a page for example.

Luke: You were talking before about how UX as a field had a very broad range of skillsets, but if people don’t necessarily have the visual skills what sort of things could they head towards?

Patrick: Content strategy, UX research, information design because they can still sketch that out on a page. Information architecture is an art form in itself and it’s one that a lot of teams are missing a component of which is taxonomy, which is understanding how information is structured (there you go) and what’s another one… prototyping. If you have a programmer background or interaction design that’s huge.

Luke: Jen asks:

“I find it difficult to overcome the hurdle of not having five plus years of experience in UX, how does one get their foot in the door without years of UX experience coming from a visual background having several uses in that field?”

Patrick: Yeah I’ll use the example of like one recruiter that I talked to, I actually wrote an article about it on my blog “How to get into UX” and it was Mary Guillen, I think her last name is, she gave me a call and we outlined what we thought the steps were to break into this field at a non-designer. She followed them step by step and now she is a web producer that does this experience where she directs a team at an interactive agency. And I didn’t actually write the article until after the call with her, but when I looked back it totally made sense. A lot of times what you can do is work at a company, and a web producer says, “Hey, I’m a project manager,” and as you work there you get more and more involved in the interactive process. Prototypers is another, account manager at an agency is a huge one, product managers—sometimes they can make the shift. If you’re a programmer and you can make the shift, it’s actually pretty easy.

Luke: Here’s a related question… Sorry, Matt?

Matt: I was just going to add to that and talk about my own experience that I came from, I did work as a programmer for a while and then as a visual designer and moved across and I think a lot of people get hung up on this idea, that I’m going to find a UX job, I’m going to be a UX specialist and that’s going to be the job that I get and I’ll do everything right and I’ll get that job … and I just think you need to work towards this stuff and you need to be working in a role that may not have UX in the title. Just kind of dip your toes in, and do bits and pieces along the way where you’re working on web projects. You’re involved with the team, and you can put your hand up as stuff appears and like Patrick was saying make your way and shift sideways. We talk about this a little bit in the book, right? There are a bunch of ways you can get exposure and experience working on a web project. You can volunteer, do some usability testing, and, you know, put your hand up to have a crack at wireframes and move across that way. I see a lot of people really hung up on getting that perfect UX job right out of the gate and I think you need to look at the long-term.

Patrick: Yeah this happens. Can I add to this too?

Luke: Please.

Patrick: So I’ll give you an example. The way that I broke into the field was I was a print designer. I actually volunteered to work for a political campaign doing all the direct mail and all their branding. At the time I didn’t know it but it turned into the most expensive U.S. congressional campaign in 1994. The guy that was the campaign manager went out and started an internet company and said, “Why don’t you join?” That was 95. I did a lot of side projects to learn more about the web and look where I am today. When I interviewed interns for Apptio, I’m frankly sick of seeing just school projects. Because I have not gotten anywhere easy, I need to see people that make the extra effort to do projects outside of school. We recently hired an intern, he not only did school projects but he also had illustration capabilities, kind of along the lines of what you’re doing right now Matt. He used to be an architect, and he went out and did a whole bunch of side projects being paid very little and illustrated his thinking and talked about personas, talked about how he dealt with clients, and he was by far the best candidate that we interviewed—because of the side work. There’s no easy way, you just can’t expect any body to say hey why don’t you come work here, we’re going to train you. That’s not the way this field works.

Matt: Totally agree.

Luke: What about internships? What if you offer yourself to a company as an intern?

Patrick: What I tell people to do is follow companies on Twitter, follow people on Twitter, and ask them “Hey, is there an internship?” The U.S. is a little bit tricky right now because there are a lot of questions marks about that. But there’s a lot of smaller start–ups that may ask, “Hey, will you intern for free?” You just got to have your spidey sense about if that’s useful or not. If you try that, or if you do the Startup Weekend stuff … there’s a lot of opportunities to learn more about the field. And a lot of it is kind of following the templates to show “this is how UX is done.”

Luke: Makes sense! We’ve got quite a few other questions coming in here, thanks every one for having questions. We’ll see if we can rip through a few.

Suma asks:

“I’m a service designer looking to work in UX who understands design process but I don’t have any portfolio which showcases my UX skills apart from my academic projects.”

Patrick: Is she working full time as a service designer?

Luke: I don’t know. Maybe Suma if you can clarify?

Patrick: Like the process and the personas and all the research … you could actually use that as your portfolio because there’s a lot of, I really like the field of service design and I think there’s a lot of value in showing your thought and how it applies to your company doing web projects.

Luke: Michael also asks a related question:

“I’m currently working in a full time role not directly in a UX area. How can I get the correct qualifications in order to land my next UX job?”

Patrick: What’s the full time job title?

Luke: Michael, what’s your full time job title?

Patrick: Yeah It really depends on the job title, how you would go about that.

Matt: He said ‘designer’.

Patrick: Web designer?

Luke: Graphic designer, yeah

Patrick: Graphic designer. Print?

Luke: Yes.

Patrick: So does he work at a place that’s doing web stuff?

Matt: Should we try unmuting Michael so he can join, actually come into the conversation if that’s okay to?

Luke: Are you with us now Michael?

Michael: Yes, hello!

Patrick: So if there’s another designer working on the web stuff, actually do some research and figuring out the persona, what are the scenarios for the website that you guys are doing and actually use that to develop your portfolio.

Luke: Are you with us now, Michael?

Michael: Yes, hi.

Matt: Does that answer your question or do you need to go deeper there?

Michael: Yeah, I’ve been working in the public sector, information design and information architecture

Patrick: Oh my, yeah so you shouldn’t have any problem then, because if you can show some of the taxonomy stuff and the side architectural stuff that your doing in your portfolio piece, that’s pretty powerful.

Luke: What about Michael’s qualifications?

Michael: Thank you.

Luke: So we recently published an article on UX Mastery listing a bunch of degrees, why is it that people can get some form of accreditation? What are your thoughts on academic qualifications in UX, Patrick?

Patrick: Being the college dropout three times, there are very few schools I look to like Carnegie Mellon where I think the value is absolutely there, like the University of Washington here. They’re actually trying to orient themselves, the problem they run into is that their education is good, but they don’t have the right profile for the kind of stuff I need. And so I actually look to the side work to see if they can develop the skills to be an interactive designer.

Luke: So Michael, have you had any experience where you’ve been asked for your qualifications and told it was a roadblock?

Michael: No not really, but for my future career path I’ve been looking towards a communication design post graduate.

Patrick: You know what you can do, you can email me on the side and contact me off my blog and I can probably answer you a little bit more directly.

Matt: I’m pretty sure that Luke and I can help you out there to because we actually know Jeremy who runs the communication design program at RMIT which is, I assume, the degree that you’re looking at so. I’m sure Jeremy would be more than happy to take a few minutes and have a coffee with you and chat about the course and see if it is a good fit for you or not.

Michael: Ok thank you.

Matt: No worries.

Luke: No worries, Michael.

Jeffrey asks:

“How did you manage your UX process in an agile environment for example.” [loud laughter]

Patrick: I get this asked a lot, I like Agile okay … so a little back story. I use to work for a magazine company as a print designer we had magazines going out, four magazines to five magazines a week. My whole life runs on weekly sprints cause I worked in a lot of publishing places. I just view Agile as a series of checkpoints, and always building to those checkpoints. So it’s okay to spread research out over four weeks, but the two week sprints, it says this is what it looks like now it just allows you to course-correct. I don’t get as fearful as Agile as most other designers because I don’t know what the problem is. I was doing Agile in 2001, actually I was doing it in 1995 before we knew it was Agile, so I don’t see the big deal.

Luke: Yeah, and can you make a quick comment how Lean UX relates to that?

Patrick: So I’ve actually done a few projects in Lean UX philosophies. I was doing Lean UX in 2001, basically you do a very minimal idea you start showing in front of users and you keep moving forward. There was a particular case study out of the Eric Ries book about Lean Startup where they’re actually doing the product process for the customer, totally non-tech. It was around let me think about this, they were helping consumers select menus to cook for their family, and they would actually go out to the home and ask the customer a whole bunch of questions and then go out shopping for them, and they learned a lot about the process and the pain points and it helped develop their product. It was totally by hand.

Luke: Very good. Rachel asks:

“What are the most important qualities you look for in a UX candidate?”

Patrick: There’s the soft skills, I’m actually looking for quieter designers. I’ve had the experience of hiring the extrovert designer to find that it’s actually detrimental to the process because they don’t listen enough. I look for people that listen, I look for people with soft skills. They’ll stand their ground on certain ideas but they know when they have to shift, they’ll back off of it. There’s this matrix of hard skills around seven different skills, and actually if I get three of them, then I’m pretty happy. And I look for system design—a lot of process. I want them to be able to adequately breakdown an idea into smaller pieces but can put that idea back together and show a larger concept.

Luke: Cassandra is asking a related question:

“Thinking about presenting that in a portfolio before a resume, how do we wow a recruiter or a hiring manager for a UX position?”

Patrick: It’s back to that rule … basically I’m looking for step-by-step thinking, having nice formatted wireframes helps, but what I’m looking for is a very methodical process of the way that they designed it, and I’m also looking for research. Like Mia tweeted this last night: “If you don’t understand the user goals, how can you design?”

Luke: So you’re putting those two together to tell the story of a project, wireframes, change in process.

Patrick: Yep, and a lot of it is a way to tell stories. One project that I did I use it as an example a friend of mine that runs a chiropractor practice out in Long Beach, California. I show the home page, I share the wireframes

Matt: This is Bob, right?

Patrick: Bob the chiropractor. Everybody is going to go to him. I set the home page, I talked about the persona, talked about some of the research we did. I did it all for beers and reduced rent on a condo he was renting to me and we put together the website and we were getting 8% conversion rate. We made one single change, or a couple of changes, and it went to 12% overnight. All I did was show the home page and tracking page and it’s an incredible story.

Luke: So that would be very interesting to see put together in a portfolio! It’s something I haven’t done in the past, but this last month or two as I have been researching all this stuff for UX Mastery, I’ve been getting my head around a lot of that, thinking about portfolios and the different ways people prove certain things, it’s fascinating!

Patrick: Yeah, it’s really fascinating.

Matt: I think that was the point that I felt I could justifiably promote to the world that my role was “UX designer” and not just “web designer” and that’s when I felt like I refined my process to something that I could rely on. So if you don’t have a process, then start thinking about it and start learning from other people’s process and start working on what you can rely on to be methodical in terms of getting a good result.

Patrick: Yeah a lot of the UX work I do, quite honestly, like you guys can see it behind me in my apartment like everything is at a 45° angle, like I have this certain UX process that I’ve done over and over again because I know it works, and it’s by getting data, getting validation, talking to users, understanding the different groups of users and designing against it and I just keep using it and it works. And I change it every once in a while but once you have that process and pattern down it actually makes it a lot easier to sign and commit on “this is what we need to do.”

Luke: We’ve got about 15 minutes to go—a few more questions and then we might have to continue the conversation in the forums. Britney asks:

“My background is user acquisitions, marketing and research I have a Master’s in sociology and I’m planning on getting a Master’s in human computer interaction starting this summer, do you think that it’s necessary because of my background? I don’t want to take on debt if I don’t have to.”

Patrick: Where does she live?

Luke: Britney do you want to chip in?

‘Chicago’

Patrick: You could probably get a job right now with your background doing research and some of that stuff. The HCD background might help you learn how to do wireframing and understand information architecture that might be the one area you’re missing.

Matt: Worth mentioning a bit about establishing a network too, we talked a little about Twitter, going along to a bunch of meetups and meeting other UXers in the industry, networking is going to be valuable or just as valuable than trolling job sites. So you want to open up as many job opportunities as possible and starting down this path to make sure you have that degree and then applying yourself is one way to go about it. But if you feel connected and you’ve got your finger on the pulse about what’s happening in your area and you know who’s who, that’s where the gold opportunities come from.

Patrick: I’m going to pump up my Twitter feed. If you go to my Twitter page @usabilitycounts on Twitter, I have a whole bunch of designers characterized in metropolitan areas and regions of the world that you can go follow, and I actually find that meetups are okay but I actually have built better relationships with people off of Twitter. I’ve gotten a lot more information and then when I was local to them, I would say “Hey, let’s have a coffee”. There’s actually a community that I’m involved with, I’m involved in it with Matt, I’ve met a lot of people out of the group and it’s awesome because you get to establish that personal connection which is better than a meetup.

There’s another thing I want to mention about the whole networking thing, there is a study by a sociologist by the name of Mark Granovetter and what it shows is that 60% of people got jobs in what they call a weak tie, for example I’m friends with Matt, Matt is friends with Luke. I ask Matt “Hey you know any good designers?” and Matt says “Luke is a great designer” and in my world, Luke is a weak tie. So if you network a lot and find people of different, not just designers, people of different skill sets, then you actually have a better chance of getting a job. A famous strategy for this is instead of going to meetups where the designers are at, go to meetups where developers and product managers are at, and I guarantee you that you be one of only a few designers there. Like, one of the interns that we brought into Apptio. I met her at a product camp, not at a UX event.

Luke: Patrick in Galway asks:

“I’m working graphic design and print, I want to move on to UX. I think he has one day per week working for a UX company to get some experience, should that be alright or should I try and do a longer bulk of time in graphic design skills?”

Patrick: Why don’t you start doing it now? Because I’m a former print designer, and see how it goes. I think it’s a good idea.

Luke: So, one day a week would be enough to get value from that?

Patrick: Yeah, and then you can start doing side projects too that kind of play around too.

Luke: Allison asks:

“My current job title is digital designer. During my work, I create wireframes and develop some user interface design for apps. Does this qualify as user experience work?”

Patrick: Yes, absolutely any day of the week and then what you can do is ask them to change your job title so it’s closer to interaction designer or product designer or UX designer.

Luke: Karemba asks:

“Do you think a background in psychology can be helpful in UX when dealing with highly political company cultures?”

Patrick: Every day of the week, yes.

Luke: Psychology is a big part of both designing a user experience, and facilitating and running things too, cause you have to understand how people learn, teach, and communicate.

Patrick: A little background on HCD—Human Computer Interaction—a lot of it is related to pilots that during WWI and WWII. They couldn’t figure out “Gee, why are they crashing?” and so the US Army and the US Air Force actually did a lot of work in that area and that was the beginning of work around HCD. Also there’s a lot of talk about how Henry Ford, for example, figured out how to make assembly lines more efficient, based on the work done with lithium processors, and looking at how people use technology, even though it’s not computers it’s very relevant to our field.

Matt: Have you ever worked with a psychologist on your team Patrick?

Patrick: One of the people I have on my team she has a researcher background, yes … she talks a lot about mental models and that kind of thing, yeah.

Matt: A friend of UX Mastery, Jodie at Symplicit, a Melbourne-based consultancy that is doing very well and Jodie is a former behavioral psychologist who tried to get into UX and they’re doing great work and that’s a bit of competitive advantage for those guys.

Patrick: Absolutely, and looking back I wish I knew more about this field. I’m a little bit older. I had a job before the internet but I wish I knew more about some of this in the more formal fields.

Luke: Very well I think we’ve got time for one or two more questions. Sorry to everyone who we’re not going to get to today.

Todd asks:

“I was previously a UX designer at my company but I realized I would add more value as a product owner so I’ve since transitioned my role into that direction. I’ve been a product owner for about four months now and do really enjoy it seems like a natural fit for a former UX designer, I’m still very passionate about UX though. If I was to look for a UX position in the future would my experience as a product owner be an advantage or a disadvantage?”

Patrick: As a former product manager and program manager, sure. I actually have toyed with the idea of going back over to product management because I think having a UX background over there is very powerful and there are many-many UX designers that are making the transition over to product management because we tend to identify better with the users than some of the people that have been in that role.

Matt: I’m giving a talk at a product manager meetup here in Melbourne. Later this month actually—it’s called Product Anonymous, so if anyone’s in Melbourne come along to Product Anonymous and the product mangers are interested in the UX. There’s a lot of product overlap between the two roles. There’s stuff we can learn about marketing and market validation, and there’s a lot that those guys can learn from UXers, like visual thinking and user research compared to market research. So I think there’s a lot of overlap, and I think there’s a lot to be learned from both fields. It’s going to help your UX career by being a product owner, definitely.

Luke: Very good! A final question from Ben, who asks:

“Thanks Patrick for spending time to chat. Do you think it’s more of an advantage being either a generalist or a specialist?”

Patrick: It really depends. I live in Seattle and Microsoft is here and Amazon is here, and one of the problems I have – not with Amazon so much but with Microsoft – is they have a lot of specialists. So I have a generalist UX team. (We can take a few more questions if you guys want to) I have a generalist UX team and so I find specialists a little hard to hire and it goes back to the seven disciplines that I hire against. I usually tend to look for people that have a least two maybe three skill sets. They call it a T-shaped skillset. For example I have a visual design background, and I tend to go more towards visual architecture and interaction and so I have more of a generalist skill set then some of the people and the area I’m actually weakest in is research. Real quickly if you’re in places like Seattle or San Francisco, specialist roles are harder to find in places like the Midwest and other areas of the world, then, outside of London then yeah it tends to be more of a generalist because most places can’t support that role, and once you really, really get your job then you’re a traveling consultant.

Luke: So there’s something in being hired for your soft skills, and your ability to learn deeper skills on the job?

Patrick: Yeah. It’s a little bit hard. I’ve worked with designers that were brought in without a lot of the hard skills, and it’s an uphill battle because a lot of managers come in and they’re like, “Why did they hire this person?” and it’s great that they have the soft skills, but then at one point or another you have to perform on the job so that’s kind of tricky.

Luke: We’ve got 2 more minutes. Maybe we’ll try to squeeze in one more question.

Patrick: You can keep me after 3, as long as we’re not getting out of here after 4.

Luke: Cool. Tyler is asking:

“If you could choose one book to be your UX bible what would it be?”

Matt: I have a suggestion…

Patrick: UX Bible for what part? For learning UX, or for breaking into the field?

Luke: I guess it would have to include everything to be a UX bible of everything!

Matt: Learning, he said.

Patrick: Well the Get Started in UX book gives a really good overview. The one book that I have been recommending lately has been Russ Unger’s UX Project Guide. And another one, Kelly Goto has this wonderful book called Web Design 2.0 that was published in 2004 that I actually still recommend today. It has a really generalist view of how to do web projects in the end, and it actually includes a little product management stuff, and I’m not saying that because she bought me a drink, but, you know, I actually like the book a lot.

Luke: Well we’ll dig that out and provide a link somewhere for that.

I think we’re out of time.
Well, thank you very much, Patrick. That was an amazing set of responses to those questions. Thanks also very much to all the webinar attendees for great questions and for joining us here today.
Just quickly, Patrick, can you let us know where we can find you online?

Patrick: So, again, I run a blog called usabilityaccounts.com which is where I have a UX career guide about 45,000 words. You can also find me in your guys’ book ‘Get Started in UX’ out from UX Mastery. I also run a Twitter account called @usabilitycounts—big surprise. I run the uxdrinkinggame.com, and you can find me on Facebook at usabilitycounts (you’re seeing a trend) and if you’re actually in the Pacific Northwest I’m generally available for coffee when I can find the time.

Luke: That’s very generous of you!

How about you, Matt?

Matt: My name is Matt, and along with Luke we contribute to UX Mastery. As we’ve mentioned a couple of times throughout the webinar we do have an eBook out called ‘Get Started in UX’ which we’re very proud of, and Patrick is one of our feature interviewees and we think that it’s a very good overview on how to launch and shape a career, so please go and check that out. And I’m on Twitter as @mattymcg, which is a nickname I’ve had for Years even though my real name doesn’t have a ‘Mc’ in it, but please hit me up on Twitter.

Luke: And you can find me – Luke Chambers – posting articles on the UX Mastery blog (uxmastery.com). I also hang around in the UX Mastery community forums at community.uxcommunity.com, and my Twitter handle is @lukcha. I’d love to help by answering any questions you may have about today’s webinar.

If you’re looking for more practical advice about getting started in UX, like Matt said, our latest eBook is going to be excellent for you. There are links on the website for that now, and come and ask us in the forums.

And finally, we’re going to email all of you a link to the audio/video of today’s webinar. We’ll see if we can chase up a transcript as well. I think that is about it. We’re two minutes over.

Thank you again everyone for joining us.

Patrick: Hey can I give a shout out to some people that tweeted during the event?

Luke: Sure, please.

Patrick: So Jen Blatt, Jolly Zhou, Brittany Vanheuten was there , Simon Cratford, Chris Klasser, I think he was in the event thank you all and Oscar, and Clare thank you for all the interesting questions during the event.

Matt: And thanks everybody for getting up on the weekend too. Know that your personal time is very important and we really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to join us on this chat and thank you to Patrick for giving up your Saturday afternoon.
Patrick: Yeah you’re interrupting my whiskey time!

Matt: Thank you everyone. See you guys.

Luke: See you in the forums!

Patrick: See you.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #4: UX Careers with Patrick Neeman appeared first on UX Mastery.

During the interview, David and Matt discuss why the field of user experience is in such demand, the pros and cons of training that is delivered in an online format, how newcomers to the field can gain the experience they need to break into the user experience industry, and the most important quality of a good user experience designer.

• Read Matt’s review of David’s first course, User Experience: The Ultimate Guide To Usability or register for this course now.
• Check out David’s new course, How To Carry Out A Usability Expert Review.

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Transcript

Matt: Lovely to chat to you, David Travis. Welcome to the show.

David: It’s great to be here, Matt.

Matt: So David … you came on our radar when we here at UX Mastery were thinking about creating some sort of online course. And all of a sudden this thing popped up on udemy, which we bought and reviewed and thought was fantastic. Tell us about the experience of creating that course and how it’s worked out for you.

David: Yeah, it’s interesting really. Some people look at it and think, ooh—he’s had an overnight success with this particular course on udemy. But it’s one of those overnight successes that’s taken about 10 or 15 years in the making.

That particular course that’s on udemy is one that I’ve given as an in-house course, and as a public course in the UK, for about 10 years or so. And obviously over that 10 years it’s been changed and modified and updated. It’s a bit like—you know when you get an old car, an old Ford Cortina would be a good example of an old car in Britain.

Matt: I had one of them!

David: And what happens is, after a few years, bits fall off, and you start replacing it, and then at the end of 10 years you’ve got a Ford Cortina which looks in fairly good condition, but actually there’s nothing on that car that was there when you bought it originally, because everything’s been replaced. And the training course was a bit like that—it was continually updated, and everything in there was quite new.

And what was happening was people would contact me and say they wanted to attend the course, but they were coming from far afield. In fact, we tended to have a lot of people that came from Europe to attend anyway. They’d fly into London from France, or Holland, or whatever. But there were people in the US that wanted to attend, and there were people further afield that wanted to attend—even Australia, believe it or not. And it was clear that we didn’t have an online version of it. So I looked into various platforms for producing an online version, and came across udemy.

One of the things that concerned me initially is that, on the training course we give, and I’m sure on courses that you teach Matt, you have lots of exercises and activities that teach people how to do this stuff, because UX is inherently a very practical discipline, and I was a bit anxious that I wouldn’t be able to do that. But I came up with the idea of getting people to play along with a design activity they were working on. So the way the course runs is, I talk about a particular stage in user-centered design, and basically the course stops, and the onus is on the student to go off and apply it to a project that they’re working on.

That was my idea originally, and I thought maybe I’d get 20 or 30 people signing up. But I checked this morning, and there are 1,365 subscribers. So it clearly resonates with people, and I think the reason for that is that UX has become more important now than ever before. It’s always been of interest to people. But I think nowadays … there are two reasons.

One is people realise that it’s a great way to make your product successful. It’s like the one area you can focus on which doesn’t cost an awful lot of money. It’s not like developing a new kind of technology which can be exorbitantly expensive. In fact, focus on the user experience comparatively is quite cheap.

The other reason as well is: stuff is so complicated these days! I remember, many many years ago I was working with Bill Buxton, a Canadian expert in Human-Computer Interaction, and he had this graph had two axes. One axis was “Time”— that was the x-axis. And the y-axis was “Difficulty of Technology”.

Now I know this is a podcast, and it’s not a good place to describe graphs. But bear with me because it’s a very simple graph.

So you’ve got these two axes: Time along the bottom, and the vertical axis is Difficult of Technology. And he kind of drew this upward line on it, starting basically at the origin and moving up at about 45 degrees.

And he pointed out that, you know: initially, we had things like “the wheel.” That was technology. It needs a little bit of learning, the wheel—you need to know where to put your axle, and so on. But basically, most people get it. Like most people get a pencil. You know how to hold a pencil. People don’t tend to hold a pencil upside down, and try to draw with the eraser.

But as we get a bit more complicated … things like VCRs, things like mobile phones. And I remember when Bill Buxton showed this graph, I thought: “Ha, not a problem for me. I don’t have any difficulty with mobile phones, or VCRs. I can appreciate there might be a few people in this world who are a bit clueless and might struggle—but not me!” But basically he was saying there was a threshold of frustration that we would reach, where beyond that it becomes too complex. There’s like a complexity barrier.

And as I said at the time, I thought, well, I’m a long way from that. I love technology, I know how to use it, not a problem at all.

This week I got a new Mac. And I had to transfer stuff from one Mac to another. All of my files are in the cloud. I’ve got an iPhone that I need to sync with it. And I suddenly realised that I was at this barrier. It’s not that any particularly question I was being asked was difficult for me to answer, but the sheer number of decisions I was needing to make, suddenly made me realise that I am at that point now, where even technology which is mass market technology, like a Mac … there are so many things going on, and so many points at which you can make a disastrous error—like delete all your files on Dropbox, because you’ve taken them off another machine by mistake—that we’re really at that point now.

So UX has become, I think, so critical for businesses, that that’s why it’s resonated.

Matt: That’s an astounding number, so congratulations. I do recall a conversation happening on UX Magazine, that you chimed in: an article by Jon Kolko about manipulation and design—and udemy specifically, some of the practices that go on in order to pump up subscriber numbers on courses … I’m not surprised at all though. I gave your course 10 out of 10 when I reviewed it, and I was reluctant to go out on a limb and say “this is online education at its best.” But I think you’ve done an amazing job at collating all of that information, and I think it shows that clearly this was an iterative process for you, funnily enough, to develop this core material. But my big question for you, and it’s partly selfish, is how you go translating an in-person workshop to something that’s online. I’ve taught some workshops, and a big part of that is being able to circle the classroom and gauge how people are tracking and interact with them, and have a bit of a conversation and guide them, which is something you can’t do in the online space. How did you tackle coming up with exercises and activities to address that issue?

David: So that was my first ever online course, Matt. And I don’t wish to suggest that I got it exactly right. What I was doing was dipping my toe in the water, to  basically see whether or not there was a demand for it; whether or not the style of training would transfer. And even when you do a real life course, there’s an element of lecture. It doesn’t matter how interactive your courses are, and I like to think the courses I teach are interactive. But there’s always a bit where you stop, and you have a plenary session, where you say to people, “OK, let me teach you something now. Let me teach you how to do an expert review or a usability test. And after that, I’ll give the opportunity to practice it.” But there needs to be a point where you’re effectively lecturing. And as much as I hate to be a lecturer, because I want to be a workshop facilitator, inevitably there is still this element of time where you’re teaching people.

So that element transfers perfectly to the udemy system, because you video yourself giving the lectures, showing the same kind of slides, and for me the only difficult thing there was not getting feedback from people. Because when I train, I train in small groups, and I look at people’s faces, and I can see if people are getting it or not. And with a udemy course, you don’t know—it’s just you and the microphone, really. You’re never really sure if people are understanding it.

When I first put the course together, one way I thought I could achieve that was I could included quizzes within the system. And they’re only for fun—it’s not like people are going to be assessed on their answers to the quiz afterwards. But by including those quizzes, that was one way for me to do two things. One: getting people to test out their own knowledge—have they really understood the stuff that I’ve said. But secondly, I can go in and have a look at the aggregate scores, so I can see particular questions where people are struggling on. For example if there’s one particular question which people are consistently getting wrong, then that means I’ve not really covered that part of the course well, and so I’ve gone back in and made some changes to the course accordingly.

Matt: Fancy that—user feedback!

David: Exactly, yeah! And another way of achieving that as well Matt is, one thing I ran recently was an online webinar. So I announced to all the students on the course that I’d be running a webinar, I got them to submit questions in advance, and then me and a colleague sat there. The questions came in, and I was asked questions, and I could provide feedback. So there’s another area where traditionally you’d think, “Well how do I manage that with online training?” Well one way you can get that interaction going is to run online webinars. And another is to put together the forums within the udemy course. People can ask questions at any time, and I tend to visit the udemy site two or three times a day, and I tend to answer them within 24 hours. And when people see that the trainer is on the course, and he’s answering questions, they ask more questions, and that increases the engagement the students are having.

So for me, it’s very much dipping my toe in the water, and there are ways of improving it. I’ve got a new course out, and I think I’ve addressed some of those ways, I think I can make it even better. But it’s kind of a new field for me, the field of online training. And I’m trying to learn new techniques for making it better and better, really.

Matt: Your new course has been out for a few days—do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about it?

David: So at the end of the course I have a questionnaire that I give to people—to ask them what it was like for them, and any ways of improving it. And also if there’s anything else they want to learn. And one message that came across loud and clear is that people were after more in-depth training in specific areas. So that course on udemy that I’ve got at the moment is a very good overview of the field of user experience. But inevitably it doesn’t go into incredible depth in specific areas, because some people aren’t interested in that depth in every area.

So people have asked for some in-depth training, and one of the areas that I already had a another course in, that I’ve been delivering for a few years, is on usability expert reviews. So that covers things like: Niesen’s heuristic evaluation; it also covers other sets of guidelines, such as ISO (the International Standards Organisation)’s set of guidelines you can use to evaluate user interfaces. Ben Schneidermann had his own set. So it covers, on the one hand, these heuristics that people use to evaluate user interfaces, and it also covers another technique for doing user interface evaluation called a cognitive walkthrough. Which sounds jargon, and in fact it is, but it’s a very prescribed method for how you can test out the way new users will encounter your product or service, and how they’ll behave with it.

So that new course covers that in a bit more depth. And there’s also a third course that I’m actually in the process of developing, on usability testing. So expert reviews: what makes those unique is that users aren’t involved in the evaluation—it’s an expert who uses guidelines to do the evaluation. Usability testing, on the other hand: you get real users involved, and ask them to carry out particular tasks. So that will be the second in-depth course that I’m currently working on. And the reason for mentioning that is: one thing I’m doing in that course is to include interviews with people who have moderated tests in the past, or who have data-logged in usability test; with people who recruit participants for usability test, to give people a feel for what that’s like.

And that’s another one of those things that, when you start doing these courses, you start thinking: Hey, hold on! This is a video course. With a video course you can interview other people and include those interviews. It makes people aware of the fact that there’s a bigger community of people out there. It’s not just me, as the expert, standing up and saying “this is how it is.” It’s a case of bringing people together—people like yourself, for example, with a wide breadth of expertise, that can understand what the consensus is in the field.

So it’s a really challenging platform, I think, to deliver training courses on. But it’s really fascinating at the same time.

Matt: So let me play devil’s advocate a little bit. We get lots of enquiries at UX Mastery about getting a job as a UX designer, breaking into the field, how to get started … and there are a lot of questions about tertiary courses—what university course should I enrol in, should I study interaction design at university? You’ve got all this fantastic educational material coming out that’s pretty affordable, relatively speaking. You can take it in your own time, in the comfort of your own home—what would you say to someone who was weighing up the idea of self-study online vs going and getting some form of formal qualification, which a lot of employers do place some value on?

David: I’d say neither of those are good enough. In the field we work in, nothing beats practice. So you need to actually do this stuff. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an online course you’re taking, or a university course you’re taking. If that’s all you do, you will not be a user experience designer at the end of it. You may have a course that you’ve completed—you may have a certificate. But that’s not enough.

All of the people I know that work in this field that are good at this, they got good at it because they do it all day. They practice it, they sketch out user interfaces, they prototype user interfaces, they test user interfaces with users, and they understand the practical side of it. And I think UX is quite unique in that respect, because it’s not like many other things that you can do at university, where you can basically leave with your degree, and, OK, you need to get used to the world of work and so on, but you’ve got all of the intellectual ammunition you need to do a job.

I think UX is different, because it’s not just about having intellectual chops. It’s also about having the practical chops. The field that we work in is so complicated—it’s so complex. Each design problem is unique, and complicated, and you can’t just apply a series of steps that you’ve learned on a training course, and know that you’ll end up with a guaranteed right result. It doesn’t work that way. Every project is different, and you need to know that on some projects you might need to do, for example, more user research, much more user research than on another. And there might other projects you work on where you can be a bit lighter with the user research, but you need to spend more time prototyping and designing, and perhaps usability testing. You only get the feel for that when you start doing these jobs for real.

I’m not dodging the question, because I feel that there are areas where a university course will obviously go into a lot more depth—a one-year course, a one-year MSc in user-centered design, will go into a lot more depth than I do in my seven-and-a-half hour training course online. But neither of those are sufficient. They’ll both give you a good grounding, but neither of them are going to be enough for you to be a UX Designer.

So if you want career advice, you’ve got to go on training. Training’s a good first step, but nothing beats practice.

Matt: And what advice would you give someone who was looking to get some experience under their belt? I had a chat with a young woman in Canada earlier today who was quite exasperated about the fact that she had donated some time to a friend’s startup, and to another small business, in order to try and get some runs on the board. And then had this interview with a digital agency for a UX internship, and basically everyone in the room had a different view of what UX meant, and they were really looking for a UI designer, and she had all this research and prototypes that she presented, and it was a poor fit, and ended badly. The poor thing.

What do you tell people when they say, “How do I get some experience?”

David: To be honest, I hate the concept of internship, because I feel it’s a bit like indentured slavery. But it’s certainly one way to get practice, to find a user experience company, and then say, “Can I work with you as an intern?”

Another technique that is surprisingly easy to do, but you need to be quite self-motivated to do it, is to start applying these techniques on your own. Because User Experience is a great field in that we’re exposed to it every day.

So my own particular favourites, and you would have noticed this on the training course, Matt, is car park machines. Whenever I park my car, the car park machine I use is always different, and in different places—there seems to be no standard for car park machines. And they’re universally difficult to use. One exercise you could set yourself is to design a car park machine that would meet the business requirements that car park owners have, but at the same time it would meet the user requirements that people have that are using that.

Because if you do that, you’re going to have to do things like: well, I’ll need to do some user research, I may have to build a prototype, I may need to run a usability test, in order to test it out. This is useful, not just because it’s giving you practice in those techniques, which we’ve talked about as being important, but because it’s a useful way of building up a portfolio. So that then you can put a portfolio together, so when you apply for a job, you can say, “These are examples of jobs that I’ve done.” And they don’t need to know that it wasn’t for a real client. If they ask you explicitly, you’ll have to say “Well, OK, I did it for myself.” But generally people are just interested in the experience that you’ve had. And what you’re able to do is to start building up a portfolio of assignments that you’ve set yourself, because you’re not able to produce those assignments because you may not have a job at the moment.

So working as an intern may be one, and then there’s this other one where you set yourself your own assignments.

Matt: What kind of stuff would you recommend someone who’s trying to break into that field include in that portfolio? Because if you’re a visual designer, it’s very straightforward that you put your icon designs or your user interface mockups, or nice big A3 colourful wow-factor … a lot of the stuff we do is a bit less tangible—what do you think is the best way to present that to someone who is looking to employ you?

David: I wonder if I’m a particularly good person to ask that question of, really, Matt. Because when I started out in the field, there was no such thing as a UX portfolio. In the jobs I’ve applied for in the past—I’ve been with User Focus now for about 14 years, but before that, the jobs I applied for, I never really needed to show a portfolio. However, people do come to User Focus, and present portfolios. And the ones I see that really impress me are ones where people have shown their working.

For example, let’s say you’re not a visual designer, so you don’t draw or sketch out interfaces—or you’re embarrassed by your sketching ability, because your focus might be around user requirements. What you might be good at it is going out, doing design research, speaking with users, describing who those users are, producing task descriptions of what they carry out, maybe task analyses.

But all of those things have got artefacts. So for example, if you go out and do design research, and speak with users, one thing you’ll do is build personas—or at least some kind of pen portrait of who your users are. So you could include the personas within your portfolio. But not just the personas, not just the final artefact, but also the working you did. For example, you might include a sheet that said: I went out and observed 15 different users, from 5 different sites, these are some outlined demographic information about them. I then came back and did some analysis to identify where the main groups were, to identify their different goals, and so on. From this analysis these groups came out, and here’s an example of one persona.

Because then it shows the working and the thought processes you went through. And for me that’s more important than the final artefact. People don’t come up with a fantastic design from nothing. They come up with a fantastic design because they’ve understood their users, they’ve iterated the design, they’ve built prototypes and so on, and a good portfolio is evidence of that. So show your working, would be my advice.

Matt: I often tell people also that it should be a launchpad for the conversation about a project that you can speak with authority on, rather than just being, like you said the deliverables.

David: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Matt: Earlier in our chat you mentioned that user experience for companies is a relatively cheap investment. I’m keen to get your thoughts a bit more on that, because it’s not always the case that it’s easy to sell research at the start of a project. It’s quite often very difficult to convince management that you should spend time going and interviewing users, doing all of the due diligence that we’d love to have a big budget for at the start of a project.

What kinds of techniques and experience do you have around selling research as a valuable proposition?

David: There’s a basic technique in sales that’s to do with qualifying prospects. And the way I qualify clients who contact us, is to first of all find out whether or not they just want someone to design a new website for them, or if they want an agency that will help them understand their users better. And if it’s that first one, if they just want someone who can design a Flash website with nice icons, and so on, then I’m not interested. We won’t work with them. That’s not the kind of work that we do. So the only work that we’ll do is work that requires a substantial amount of user research up front.

So that means we probably turn away a lot of the enquiries we get. But it means the ones we’re left with are still substantial enough to run a business around. Now there are so many organisations that realise that user experience is important, and they’re not so clueless … OK, well, some are that clueless that they think it’s about the colours you use on the home page, or the icons you use on your mobile phone app. But they represent a relatively small percentage. And then there’s the other group of people who realise you do need to do this research. And the question then becomes, not a case of if you should do it, but how much of it you should do.

Which is a good question, because it may well be, as we’ve said earlier, it may not need an awful amount of up-front research. What it may require is a case of you prototyping some stuff, and then testing it out. Maybe you’re coming up with some very new kind of system—for example, it may be Twitter. I’m not sure how much user research they did … I know they did some, but I don’t know what they did, when they developed Twitter. But it was such a new product. People had never done anything like it before. The closest might have been updating your status on Facebook, but other than that I’m not sure—maybe text messaging as well. But even then, it’s different, isn’t it? Because it’s more of a broadcast, rather than a one-to-one.

With a project like that, there may not be a lot of benefit in doing a lot of user research into how people write short messages describing their status, because it doesn’t happen. What we could do instead, is design prototypes and test them out with people, and see whether or not this is something that will fit into their working day, whether or not it’s something they’re going to be using, what kind of adaptations do they make to it? Such as the notion of retweeting, for example, when they see somebody else’s message. And it might be that you want to put more of a focus there.

So really it’s not a case of if, when I speak with clients, it’s a case of finding out “well where’s the best place to invest the research dollars.”

Matt: We’re fortunate that the climate is such at the moment that we can pick and choose clients that are interested in investing in doing a decent amount of research. Perhaps newcomers to the field may not have that luxury. But there’s always going to be a case for selling user experience, and user research, and that’s where your communication skills come in … and that’s the kind of stuff that comes with experience as well—you can’t really teach the ability to qualify clients in an academic course, unfortunately.

David: Absolutely, yeah.

Matt: Tell us a little bit about User Focus. You said you’d been there 14 years?

David: It was set up in 1999, but I didn’t actually start work there full-time until about 2001. What happened was, at the time I was working for another consultancy in London, doing the same kind of work, although then it was called “Human Factors and Ergonomics”. And the company I was working for—this was back in 1999, and I could see this “user experience” thing happening at the time. The internet had been going for a while … I think the dot com bust was about 1999 … And to me, when I looked at UX, it was a bit like Adam’s first words to Eve. “Stand back—I don’t know how big this thing’s going to get!”

Matt: Ha ha ha!

David: So there was this definitely feeling that this thing was going to grow. So I spoke to the company that I was working with at the time, and said “Why don’t we set up another company, to specialise only in user experience?” And they said: “OK, write a business plan, and we’ll see whether or not it’s worth investing in.” So I spent some time writing a business plan, but they didn’t think it was worth subscribing to—maybe just because it was my own idea. Maybe I wrote a very poor business plan. Anyway, I was convinced that it was going to work, so I thought, OK, I’ll put my money where my mouth is, so I set up User Focus based on that business plan, and haven’t looked back since, really.

We’re still a small company, there are only six of us. We’re deliberately small—I’ve noticed when I’ve worked for other organisations, when they get to more than about a dozen people, they start becoming a bit more faceless and a bit more bureaucratic, and I wanted an organisation which was basically a loose affiliation of people working independently, and I think that’s what we’ve achieved with User Focus.

So we’re small, and—what’s the word? Boutique. We’re a boutique agency—a metaphor for tiny. It means we all do interesting work, we like the stuff that we do, we’re not too bureaucratic, and as we know it’s a great field to work in at the moment.

Matt: Yeah, if you’re small enough to not need an HR department, that’s a good thing in my book.

David: Absolutely, yeah

Matt: Are we likely to see you pop down to Australia any time for UX Australia or any other kind of speaking engagement? I know you like to get around…

David: Do you know what, I’d love to. The closest I’ve got is, I went to Singapore recently for some client work, maybe that was my opportunity. But I would love to go to Australia. It’s on my to-do list, it’s one of those places that I’m determined to spend some time in. And I get along very well with Australians, as you know we get a lot of Australians over in the UK. I think we share a common sense of humour, which is always a good thing. So I’m definitely up for it. I guess what I’d like to do is combine it with some kind of work, so I can then put it against the cost of the flight out there. But hopefully that will happen.

Matt: The UX Australia conference does pay its presenters—you might want to keep an eye on that one. It’s actually a terrific conference, the guys that put it together do a fantastic job, and the content, the speakers for the conference, is always very community driven. There’s a process where everybody submits stuff, and Luke and I were fortunate enough this year to have our proposal get up, so we’ll be getting up on stage in about three weeks’ time to talk about a project that we’ve been working on. So we’re looking forward to that.

David: Would that be in September next year, Matt?

Matt: Yeah, August, I think, usually.

David: August, OK.

Matt: And they rotate the city that it’s held in, so I think it goes Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane. So it’s in Melbourne this year, fortunately. That’s where I’m based. But yeah, it’s a fantastic conference. It’s sold out, so it’s going to be a hoot.

David: Maybe I’ll look into that next year then.

Matt: Please do! I won’t take any more of your time, but I do want to say thank you for all that you do. I’m sure that there are, well there are literally thousands of people out there who are, no doubt, grateful for the time and effort that you’ve put into creating that course. So, well done for getting it out there and empowering the next generation of user experience designers.

David: Matt it’s a job I enjoy.

Actually, there’s one question that I want you to ask me, that I thought you might ask me and you haven’t!

Matt: Aha! Is it not on my list?

David: The question I thought you might ask is, “What’s the most important quality of a user experience designer?” Can I answer that?

Matt: David—what’s the most important quality of a user experience designer?

David: This is one of the ones I’ve thought through a bit, really. Because I think it’s a tough question. Because I think it really depends on what you do in your job as a UX person. So, are you doing UX research, or information architecture, or interaction design, or visual design, or technical writing, or prototyping.

Now, I know that many people are UX teams of one. But even they tend to specialise, so it’s very difficult to think of a quality of all of those, at least a skill-based quality. So I think you need to go up a level, and instead of thinking about skills, which is one of the things you get from training courses, I think you need to start thinking about values, and behaviours beyond that. And when I do that, I think the important value is to be able to really see the world through the eyes of another person. I think that’s what distinguishes good user experience designers from bad ones.

I mean, there’s this word “grok”—it’s a word coined by the author Robert Hindine in a sci-fi novel he wrote called Stranger In A Strange Land. And in the novel, grok is a Martian word that doesn’t have an Earthling equivalent, but kind of conceptually at least, what it means is to really understand something, but to understand it so thoroughly that you become a part of it.

So for example, to say that you know your users, is simply to say that you know a few facts about them. But to say that you grok your users, is to claim that you’ve deeply entered into their world view of things. And to me, that’s the important quality of a good user experience designer. And it’s tough, because it means acknowledging that it doesn’t matter what you like. What matters is what’s right for your users. And for many people that are schooled in traditional design, that’s tough. Because they want to create stuff that they like to use, and not necessarily stuff that’s right for their users. So I think the most important quality of a good user experience designer is more of thinking in terms of their values, which is this notion of, I guess, empathy at some level as well. And not really in terms of their skills. Which is a drag, given that I sell training courses that teach you skills rather than values, but there you go.

Matt: Do you think that empathy is something that can be taught?

David: It’s interesting, you know, because there are people that have psychological conditions, where they’re not able to empathise with people. People with—oh, the word is escaping me, but it’s a particular condition that some people have, and it means that they tend to come across as fairly cold people, and they don’t really consider other people’s feelings.

Matt: Some people with Autistic Spectral Disorder—Asperger’s.

David: Exactly, a form of autism. Asperger’s is exactly the condition I was thinking of. And there are training courses for people with Asperger’s. And they’ll train them to look at things like people’s facial expressions. And although they don’t understand at a gut level what that facial expression means, they can understand at an intellectual level by being trained in it.

Now, I’m not saying that someone with Asperger’s would necessarily make a good user experience designer, and that perhaps you need to have some level of empathy. But if you can train people with Asperger’s in how to empathise with people, I think you can train people that don’t necessarily have a particular level of empathy, to understand how to take their user’s perspective.

In fact, on these face-to-face training courses that I run, I’ve got some courses which help people understand what it’s like to take the user’s perspective.  And sometimes that’s all it needs—a forehead-slapping moment. “Oh, of course! Now I get it!” It’s that kind of thing that helps people understand that they just need to take somebody else’s point of view.

So I do think that you can teach people, at least, the principles behind empathy. And once you’ve got those, you’re on your journey to being a good user experience designer.

Matt: Very good. I think that’s a lovely note to finish on. David if people would like to track you down online, where should they go?

David: On Twitter, they’ll find me @userfocus. And they can also visit the User Focus website, which is userfocus.co.uk.

Matt: David, thank you again for your time, for chatting. And I look forward to doing this again one time soon. Perhaps we’ll get you out to Australia one day?

David: Yeah I look forward to that. Good speaking to you Matt.

Matt: Thanks David!

David: Cheers, bye bye.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #3: Interview with David Travis appeared first on UX Mastery.

Christine, an HR Administrator from Toronto, is looking to change careers and become a UX Designer. What she may lack in experience, she makes up for with enthusiasm, communication skills, and a good understanding of theory. She has a portfolio, built up from time she has volunteered to various projects, has found a mentor, and is actively networking to find suitable roles—including unpaid internships—but is still hitting hurdles. Christine opens up to Matt about the job application process, reflects on how the term “user experience” is often misunderstood by employers, and shares some of the frustrations she’s encountered.

Somebody give this girl a job. Seriously.

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Transcript

Christine: Hello?

Matt: Good morning Christine!

Christine: Good evening Matthew!

Matt: How are you?

Christine: I’m very well, thank you. How are you?

Matt: Fantastic. Thank you for taking some time to chat.

Christine: No, thank you so much. What time is it over there right now?

Matt: It’s 10.00 in the morning.

Christine: Oh, good. So it’s not too early.

Matt: No. I have my two-year-old daughter with me today. She’s just happily sitting on the couch watching a little bit of TV while Dad makes a phone call. So it’s all good …

Christine: Awesome!

Matt: You left an interesting comment on our blog recently, and I just wanted to chat to you about that, and hear a little bit more. So did you want to explain your experience? Feel free to omit any incriminating names!

Christine: OK. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. It was a bit of a rant, right?

Matt: Yeah, you had an interview for an internship, and it didn’t quite work out as you were expecting it to.

Christine: How detailed did you want?

Matt: Give us the full back story! I think this is something that probably happens a lot, so I’m keen to pick apart what’s going on and what the issues are and how we can help other people in a similar situation.

Christine: OK, to start from the very beginning, I emailed this company. I was emailing a bunch of digital media companies—small web shops, even the really big ones. I was just emailing them, saying, “Hey, I really want a UX internship. I’m willing to work for free. If you need any assistance, with user testing, or small bits of wireframing here and there, I am here to offer you my services. I sent them my resume, I sent them my website.

And the woman actually replied back. A few of them did, actually. I got a handful of replies.

Matt: Sorry to butt in there—so you’re background is … have you just graduated from university, or do you have a bit of work experience?

Christine: No, I’ve been working in Human Resources since I graduated. I’ve been doing that for 3-4 years now, and I don’t like it! I’m thinking of a career change. And I’ve been diligently trying to get into UX since April. So it’s been a few months. And I feel like the more I read, the less I know. So I feel extremely green.

I have a mentor named Elisabeth Hubert, and she’s a UX designer in New York.

Matt: Ah, I’m a big fan of Lis’s writing.

Christine: Oh, yeah her blogs are awesome. She’s so down to earth. When you speak to her, she’s even more down to earth than on her blog.

Matt: She popped up as having followed me on Twitter the other day, and I tried not to get too excited about it, but it was a big moment for me, what can I say? Ha ha.

Christine: Well I actually told her that I was speaking with you. Because I was nervous, and I just wanted to share with her that you wanted to speak. And she said “I know UX Mastery. That’s really big for you!” And I was like, “Yeah, it’ll be a fun conversation.” And she said, “Yeah, just have fun with it.”

So I have a mentor now, and I’m reading books, and learning about UX. But she told me that the best way to learn is really on the job. Reading is a good support, but really I’m going to absorb way more information if I just start working in it. So that’s why I started to apply for internships, because I know the demand is there, and I know there’s a very little supply. So I did it, and I got a good response rate.

Anyhoo, so this one is actually the second digital media company to contact me. The first one didn’t work out, because it wasn’t really what I was looking for. No sorry, this is the third place—there were two other ones. One’s a big mobile shop in Toronto, but they wanted me to do recruiting as well. And I wasn’t really keen on doing 50% recruiting and 50% learning UX, cos I wanted to just jump right into the UX thing.

Matt: And are these internships advertised? Or is it just you being proactive and thinking, “I’d like to work for these guys, I’ll reach out to them” …?

Christine: Yeah! I’m in HR. Job postings are the tip of the iceberg for openings, and they’re the least effective way to apply for a job. So really: networking, and prioritising your networking is the best way, from my professional experience, to get a job. So I decided to do that and be proactive.

So there were no job postings whatsoever. And I made it super clear in my email that I was really looking for a UX internship—nothing more, nothing less.

So these guys call me up—and it’s the Vice President of Communications. So she’s not in design, and she doesn’t do any of the delivery stuff. She’s doing more on the marketing side. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

And she got a meeting together with me and the Director of User Experience. And this company’s another pretty well established shop in Toronto. They hosted the AndroidTO—the Android Toronto conference—last year, I think.

So I went in, and we just had a chat. He was a really nice guy, very casual. He didn’t actually look at any of my work before we spoke. I think he liked me, because he showed me around the office, and he seemed really keen on meeting up again. So he said he’d take a look at my work.

A week later I got an email with a test. They said “we want you to look at this brief—it’s a real client brief.” They made me sign a non-disclosure agreement, and they also omitted a lot of the confidential information. I looked over it—it was a Canadian Photograph Company. And the door was wide open for me to make any app I wanted based on it, or any sub-brand.

So in my mind, I still thought at this point that it was a UX position. So 90% of my efforts were in the strategy, concept and wireframing stages. 90%! And 50% of that was up to the concept. For the presentation, they gave me a list. They told me you need to provide your concept, your wireframes, and a few pages to showcase your user interface design skills.

So I spent one day doing the UI. Because in my mind, this position wasn’t for a visual designer. It’s not my strength, it’s certainly not my education, even though I do know how to use Photoshop, and I am artistic by nature. So I spent one day on UI, and the rest of the week doing everything else.

Matt: And this is for an unpaid position?

Christine: Yeah.

Matt: Just checking!

Christine: Yup! So the whole time I was thinking, “this is quite a lot of work for a UX internship, but it’s going to be worth it!” So I’m busting my butt, seven days straight, for hours and hours. I made an entire mobile app. It’s 100% interactive, on Axure. And I made the UI, and a Powerpoint presentation, 70% of which was describing my process—What’s the business strategy? What are the user goals? Really walking them through how I came up with the concept, so that when I did show them the wireframe, they would see why I did what I did.

So half way through the presentation, I’m seeing that the Director of UX is looking a little impatient. I get the sense that he really just wants me to jump to the UI. Because the minute I said, “OK, now I’m going to show you my UI,” he got really, really excited.

And I showed it to him, and he said, “Oh, that’s not really showcasing your visual design skills.” And I was like, “Visual design skills? Sorry, I thought this was for a UX internship.” And he said, “No, it’s for a user interface designer position.”

I was like, “Oh my god, I have no experience. Why are you interviewing me for a position that requires experience?” And the VP of Communications was in the room. Three other designers from the company were there. And it was so uncomfortable, because I got really panicky at that point. He and the VP of Communications had a discussion right in front of me, where they basically were saying, “I think we’ve been having miscommunications, because this isn’t the first time a candidate has misunderstood the role.” And at that point, I thought, you know what? I’m just going to speak my mind. And I told the UX Director, “In my mind I don’t think UX is just about visual design. It’s definitely something I can pick up, but I really want to go deep into all the processes that come before then, because you can have a dedicated visual designer on your team to make it look pretty, but everything that happens before that point, that’s where the real thinking happens. That’s where 90% of the problems are going to be nipped in the bud. And visual design is kind of where you finalise everything.

So I told him that, and I gave him my 2c. And I really did want to tell him, “You know, you of all people should understand just how critical and how crucial those steps are, and not to just glaze over them.” But then I spoke to a few people afterwards, who told me: “It’s a digital media company. They have their projects, and they probably are just making things look pretty.”

So he and the VP of Communications were like, “Your presentation skills were amazing, this was a really wonderful presentation. We just want to see more of your visual design.” And they showed me what they did with the client, and they basically had a sub-brand which is a product where you can build a greeting card with photos from Facebook. Then a week later, they sent me another test, where they said: “OK. Now you can prove your visual design skills by redesigning the marketing splash page …

At that point I got frustrated, and asked: “OK. What are you looking for? What is the position? Send me the role description.”

She sends me the role description, it’s for a user interface designer—90% of the job duties and responsibilities are visual design, and nothing to do with UX. So I answered, “I’m getting confused—are you looking for a UX intern position? Or are you looking for a full-time designer? Because this role looks like someone needs to have 3-5 years experience.” And she says, “Well it depends on your skill level. It could be an internship, or it could be full-time.” And then a minute later, she said, “But it seems like we need someone with more experience than you for this position.” And I was like: “But you knew from the beginning … I applied for a UX internship position, and you saw my resume, that I had no experience, and everything I’ve been doing has been independent projects and independent learning!” So I politely declined and said, “I don’t think this is a good match, but I really love your company, I love the culture, so if you guys come up with a spot for a UX internship, give me a call.” And she was like, “Yeah, for sure.” And she tried to enrol me in this training session that her UX lead was doing on wireframing or prototyping or something. She tried to get me in there, couldn’t get me in there, so our relationship ended there.

Ultimately, to sum it up, it was a massive communication error between her and the director of UX. They totally misunderstood each other on what they were looking for. And then ended up with a lot of confusion on what happened with me. So that was kind of a red flag for me—for a VP team to have that much discord or misunderstanding between each other. That was a little bit weird. Especially for a small company that only has 50 people. That shouldn’t be happening.

So I’m not as impressed as I was before. And it was frustrating to go through that experience with the other company, where they only wanted me because of my recruiting skills, and they were just offering the UX thing to try and entice me, to get free labour, essentially.

And my mentor was like, “Yeah, that was sketchy. It’s a good thing you didn’t go with them.” But they also won the Webby award for their app! I think I could have learned a lot!

Matt: Here’s my take on all of that. I think you are definitely right to be sceptical if the UX Director of a company clearly has a misunderstanding of what UX means. I think it was actually Lis Hubert who wrote an article a while back around this whole “UX/UI” misunderstanding.

So good on you, for speaking your mind and trying to get that clarification. I wonder if they’re going to go and use your ideas themselves! I do think that making you do much work for a free role is borderline spec work, essentially. It sounds like you put a huge amount of effort into that. So good on you for standing your ground!

By the same token I do think that finding your perfect role off the bat is probably something you need to work towards. In any job—for example, there are aspects that I’m not as passionate about as others. For me, that’s the finance, and the business management stuff, invoicing. I don’t get too inspired by that, but because I’m a freelancer, it’s part of the deal and something I need to accept and find a way to … I use some tools to make it a bit easier. But I think there is always going to be some aspect of a role that you need to accept isn’t going to make you wake up in the morning and jump for joy.

But if overall you’re getting some good experience and you’re doing things that you’re passionate about … maybe 50% recruiting might be pushing the friendship in terms of that split. It sounds to me like you’re going with the right attitude and the right approach. The amount of effort you put into all that preparation … you’ve clearly got a good handle on user-centred design process, and having a portfolio to use as a launch pad to talk about your process and defend your design decisions. So all I would see is: just keep at it. There’s a big demand for this kind of skill, and there are companies out there that are looking for these people, and I have no concerns that you’re not going to find something soon. Because it sounds like you would bring some amazing insight to companies that aren’t enlightened about this stuff. Keep your chin up, keep doing what you’re doing, and it’s going to happen!

Christine: I hope so! It’s getting to the point where, you know when you run hot for so long, and you’re living and breathing it, and you’ve done a few interviews … and then you start feeling that discouraging part. That’s why I met up with Lis, and she sympathises with the plight of no-one being really willing to invest in real UX design. Companies thinking that if it looks pretty, it’ll work well. So that was nice. And I love that Lis is an information architect, she doesn’t touch visual design. I love that. Because I don’t want to be a work horse. I don’t want someone to say: “Here are 10 websites. Make them look nice.” And essentially that’s what they do.

Matt: By the same token, visual design skills are clearly what a lot of people latch on to. So if you can work on them and find a way to add that to your skillset, then it’s definitely going to give you an edge over people that are looking for a pure research role or just want to do interaction design.

Christine: Yeah, I’ve thought about that. Learning just the UX part is so incredibly time-consuming. I have seven books. I’ve read through three. I did a course that took several weeks to finish. And reading all the blogs that you guys write, keeping abreast of everything that’s happening. Responsive design is out now—oh my gosh. So I’m really overwhelmed already. So I thought about it, and thought, “If I could add that to my skillset—if I could say “hey, I can make this look awesome.” That would make me a thousand times more marketable. And I could probably morph into a full UX role … you know what I mean? It would open up a lot of doors.

Matt: I think there are a lot of parts to it though. Finding a role that just gets you involved in a project, whether it’s in a content capacity, or … a lot of UXers were previously developers, writing front-end code, and they transitioned by taking it upon themselves to do some user testing, even thought it wasn’t part of the project plan. And all of a sudden the insights that come from that become invaluable, and they end up, by necessity, morphing into a usability and a UX role.

Christine: I definitely see that it’s a lot easier for people already in IT to get to that path. I have a good design eye—when I was little, I painted, I drew. I have an artistic nature. But I’m not going to lie—university killed it! I studied political science and sociology. All I did for six years was read, read, read, and write. And I didn’t touch a pencil since I was a teenager. Even then, website design is very different from painting a picture. So I know what colours look good. I know typography, and what fonts look good. If you give me a hideous site, I could definitely do a better job of it. But I don’t think I’m confident enough to say, “Yeah, I can handle this by myself.” If anything, a creative director would be telling me “this is what I need you to do.” Because it’s like a muscle, and it’s dead right now, you know what I mean?

And my philosophy is—it’s my personal preference that the simpler it looks, the more I like it. The fewer colours, the same font … I’m like that, and everything I do is very simple, and I don’t think that really showcases very much talent. I don’t have a lot of confidence that I can go into a UI design position…

Matt: Neither do I! I don’t think it’s fair to try and aspire to the kind of photorealistic polish that you see on sites like dribbble. I used to browse dribbble every day, and get inspired, and then I started getting depressed that I’d never be able to achieve the same level of polish. But I would really recommend trying to tick the box without trying to be the most awesome UI designer in the world. A UX designer is, by definition, a generalist role. And I think you just need to tick that box and prove that you’ve got that skill, without trying to pretend you’re the best designer in the world.

I don’t think that’s what people are looking for. It’s really just about “Is that box ticked? Is the research box ticked? Is the prototyping and user testing box ticked?” If you’ve got that full suite of understanding of the big picture… that’s what I’ve discovered makes someone marketable. That would be my advice. Don’t be precious about showing what your skills are right now. It’s easy for me to say, but don’t get scared about putting them out there and showing what you can do. Knowing that you’ve got a certain style, or you do “simplicity” and that’s what your style is … that’s OK! Get it out there. People like seeing visuals—if they can see the full process, from start to finish, and that’s one part of it, great. That makes you marketable.

But I get it. It can be scary when you see these amazing visual designers.

Christine: Right. It’s so easy to copy. But to come up with that on your own—that’s a true talent.

Matt: Like I said, unless you want to go and become the most amazing visual designer, you just need to tick the box. It’s OK to just be OK at visual design. That’s how I would describe myself.

Christine: That does make sense, because some projects aren’t going to require a crazy, amazing design. I look at the most popular apps, and it’s not so much visual design as it is really good IA with some nice colours. Like, if you look at Facebook or Yelp, they’re so simple.

Matt: And there are some sites out there … we’re working with a non-profit at the moment, and they haven’t really had anyone, even with an IT base, working in-house. They just have a couple of developers that have done stuff over the years. And the experience of their site is awful. And to bring them up to the bare basics of best-practice conventions is an amazing leap forward. We don’t need to make this site win awards and blow people away when they launch it, you know? We just need to give them best practice and make it tailored to their users. Delight can come from giving people a usable experience that empowers them. It doesn’t need to be an award-winning visual feast.

Christine: Yeah, right. I know it’s a lot easier to get in that route. But these days I’m working 40 hours a week, and when I come home I just want to learn more about UX. And I don’t know if I should put a hold on my job search and just keep working at new projects and keep doing my own thing, or if I should keep emailing people and networking and finding people on LinkedIn and meeting up with them … I’ve met up with a handful of people already. Do you think I should just keep meeting people, and keep applying? Or do you think I need to be a little more knowledgeable about stuff. I know the basic theories of things, but if you ask me: name me all the situations where an icon would be used better than a text link … I could probably give you two or three, but I’m not totally all there right now.

Matt: It sounds to me like you have a pretty good handle on the big picture and the process. I’m not saying you shouldn’t keep learning, because this is an industry where we can always keep learning, there is always something new to get your head around. But networking is always going to pay dividends.

Your online presence—have you thought about maybe starting a blog and documenting your journey, and clarifying your own thoughts by writing about them? Is that something that you’d consider?

Christine: I have a blog, but I was mostly using it for self-reflection. I was just writing down what I’ve been learning in class, and what I find useful. Because I like to go back to them and read what I wrote in case I forgot something. But I’m not focussing at all on SEO. I don’t have any hits on my page; frankly I haven’t had the time. My primary goal isn’t to get a web presence right now as it is to just get a job. But I also see the value of having a brand, and having people know you. So mostly my website has been to showcase articles I’ve written. I can write, I can think. And I did learn these UX things, so I did want to write it to show prospective employers that I have actually done the legwork. And then I use my site to just put the wireframes I’ve been working on.

Matt: And those projects you’ve been creating wireframes for. Are they hypothetical projects? What have you based them on?

Christine: One of them is a startup—a side-project that some colleagues of mine have been doing. One is a BA, the other is a developer. They’re creating a mobile application to attend sporting events around the city. So that one was me working as the UX designer, going all the way up to low-fidelity wireframes. And the second I did, we talked about before. And then I want to do another app for people with eczema. My friend is starting a business, and she has a website, and she’s doing some ecommerce with some products relating to helping people with eczema. So I’m starting the strategy phase of that one. But she’s getting married now! So she’s very busy. It’s difficult to sit down with her and get that part hashed out.

Matt: It sounds like you’re doing everything right, and you just need to be patient. Having an online presence, networking with people, continuing to learn, getting some experience by donating your time … these are all the things that I advocate and recommend. You’re putting yourself out there, open to a bunch of opportunities, and one of them is going to bear fruit, I’m sure of it. So keep doing what you’re doing! Keep being excited. Keep meeting people. The rewards will come, I’m positive.

Christine: I hope so! Because I’m so excited about this industry, and I think it’s only going to get more and more interesting.

Matt: Well I would love to stay in touch and hear more about your journey and how it pans out.

Christine: Yeah! I’m always visiting your site. It’s in my bookmarks. I’m always reading your articles—I love the articles where you ask people to share their experiences. I love that. The UX community is pretty tight-knit, I find.

Matt: It is very supportive.

Christine: And your site was the first one that I really read almost as much as I could on it.

Matt: Well that’s just made my day, haha!

Christine: Seriously! Your video on why you like UX, and a day in the life of a UX designer, with you biking to work, and putting the kids to bed. I was like, “This makes it so much less daunting.” And it was encouraging to see ordinary people just really loving their jobs, that’s what I want.

Matt: Well Christine if there are any employers out there listening to our conversation, we’ll make sure that your contact details are available so that they can reach out to you. I think you’ve got a lot to bring to them.

Christine: Haha, sure!

Matt: Well thankyou so much for your time and for chatting. Keep us posted we’ll stay in touch.

Christine: Yeah, it’s been fun! Take care Matthew.

Matt: Take care. See you Christine.

Christine: Bye!

The post UX Mastery Podcast #2: It’s A Jungle Out There appeared first on UX Mastery.

While we couldn’t answer every question that was asked, we did cover a lot of ground during the one-hour session. It was a lot of fun, and we’ll definitely do it again in the future. In the meantime, here’s a recording and transcript of the audio from the webinar.

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Transcript

MATT: Hello everybody that’s dialed in so far and welcome to the UX Mastery Q&A. We’ve got Matt and Luke on the line. We’re just going to wait for a few minutes for all of the attendees to join in before we kick things off. How’s everybody doing this morning? It’s morning in Australia anyway. Not sure if you guys are familiar with the GoToWebinar control panel, but there’s a “chat” and there’s a “question”. It’s all a bit confusing actually. Can you guys hear me okay? Silence!

LUKE: [laughs] They can’t talk back to us.

MATT: They can’t. They can chat though. If anybody wants to chat … aha, Dex can hear us fine. That’s wonderful. Luke and I haven’t done anything like this before so there may be little bumps along the road. We appreciate your patience as we iron out the kinks. It should be fun though. We’re very appreciative of anyone who has joined us in a time zone that’s not very convenient. It’s pretty hard to find a time that suits absolutely everybody. It’s currently 10:00 am in Melbourne, Australia for Luke and myself. But I know that some people are staying up late to join us and we hope to make that worth your while. A behind-the-scenes look at how organized or disorganized we are. [laughter]

Well, it’s 10 o’clock so we’ll kick things off and I’ll say once again, welcome to everybody and thank you for joining us. We’ve got Luke and Matt on the line from UX Mastery. What we’re going to do today is hopefully answer a bunch of the questions that we had come through from attendees to this webinar. We’ve had almost 60 – so we’ve got 60 minutes and 60 questions. I’m not sure if we’re going to get through the entire list, but we’ll see how we go.

Very quickly, if you’re not familiar with UX Mastery then I’m surprised that you’re here, but hopefully you’ve all seen our website, uxmastery.com. We like to think of UX Mastery of being more than just the website. We’re quite proud of the fact that we’re building a community around user experience design and user experience training. We do have a Twitter account where we like to tweet interesting links; both to articles that we’ve written as well as stuff that we find on the web that we like. And we try and do the same thing through the other channels: Facebook and our email newsletter that comes out every two weeks as well.

Hopefully a bunch of you guys are at least already subscribed to at least one of those channels. We’re trying to find our way with doing some training. Both Luke and I are quite passionate about not only user experience design but about helping others develop as designers, so we do have an eBook that’s in the works, which we’ll tell you a little bit more about at the end of the session.

We started dabbling with doing some in-person workshops. I taught one in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and I’ve got another one coming up later in the year in Sydney. But we do want to try and take those workshops and convert them into an online format, basically so that we can reach as many people as possible rather than just making it an Australia-only thing. So watch this space on that.

Very quickly a bit about Luke and myself. I’m just including this information not because we’re trying to big-note ourselves or because we’re looking for a job or anything, but just so that you guys have some context about the answers to the questions. For a lot of the questions there is no one right answer or black and white answer, but we’re going to try and answer based on our experience. This is our experience.

I work as a freelance user experience designer and I started UX Mastery last year with Luke. Some of the clients that I’ve done work for include Australia Post, SitePoint, which is like a start-up incubator here in Melbourne that launched a couple of well-known start-up companies; 99designs is one of them, which has done quite well. We’ve done some work for the Australian Labor Party and then a handful of other clients.

And the thing that I’m most passionate about is communicating visually – so the sketch notes on the site is one example about that. I’ve always been a visual thinker, and communicating using visuals is really what I’m most passionate about. I’ll let Luke introduce himself.

LUKE: Good morning everyone. Similar to Matt, I’ve got a background in web user experience design. I currently do some work for Penguin Books; a couple of days a week there, working in their marketing department, working with designers and developers to do eBooks and apps and some of their main websites. I’ve been working with a few other clients as well, including the Australian Open and the Blake Prize. I’ve been doing UX-related things for probably about ten years.

Stuff that I’m very passionate about is design with soul or design with some of that human meaning behind it. That’s the kind of stuff that I like writing about and talking about.

MATT: Very good. And you might have just picked up on the fact that Luke’s come down with a bit of a sniffle overnight, so if his voice doesn’t hold out then … I have no problem with talking. [laughter] So we do have a rough agenda for today. Thank you to everybody who included a question when you registered for the webinar. We had nearly 60 questions come through. What we did was we sorted through them all, we looked for duplicates, we grouped them, and we’re going to tackle them in order of the most popular groups of questions that came through.

The number one category of questions was career-related so we’ll tackle the career questions first. Then we’ll look at questions related to education and training. There were quite a few questions about how to evangelise and champion and sell user experience within an organization. Then we’ll tackle UX processes and UX techniques—there were a few specific questions in there. We’ll talk about roles, the role of UXer and the different roles within a team. And lastly: tools, resources and other miscellaneous questions that have come through.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to hand control of the webinar over to Luke, who has the question list. And doing that should mean that you guys can see the questions in advance and you can see what’s coming up. And that should hopefully reduce any other questions that come through as being duplicates. Have you got that spreadsheet there, Luke?

LUKE: Here’s the list of questions everyone. You can look ahead. Off we go.

MATT: Cool, so we’ll keep the highlight on the question that we’re talking about at the time that we’re talking about it. Number one question and definitely a question that people ask on the website quite a bit: how do I get started in the UX field? Well, conveniently there is an article on UX Mastery that tackles this. You guys might have seen it. Maybe you haven’t but basically, I believe there are a bunch of ways that are really useful for getting started.

I’ve broken them up into six sections. The first section is about getting educated, about learning stuff. We have become a big fan of the online course that David Travis has published over at udemy. It’s called User Experience: The Ultimate Guide To Usability and I said in the article that we hate this course because we wish that we’d created it. It really is a remarkable achievement, what David’s put together in this video course. There is seven and a half hours of video and it covers everything; primarily usability related. He touched on visual principles; he talks about really everything related to the user experience spectrum and primarily usability.

The thing I love about this course is that he’s really anchored all of the advice in solid theory. So he starts off talking about the ISO standard for usability, which I didn’t know existed before I reviewed this course, so that was interesting for me. And yeah, it’s a great course. It’s about $200. If you use the discount code on your UX Mastery, which you can find on the site—we’ll include it in the notes at the end of this webinar as well—you can get 20% off.

But in terms of getting educated, yes there are a ton of books out there that we love and recommend but that course … it’s a remarkable achievement, what he’s pulled together, and will certainly be a great place for anyone who’s looking to get a good grounding in user experience. The next thing that I recommend you do is get the right tools. Sorry, did you want to add anything to the education stuff, Luke? I know we have a few other education-related questions but …

LUKE: No, I mean, there’s things like books for beginners that we’ve got in our resources section that I think would be an excellent introduction too, but I totally agree that David’s course would be my first port of call if I was looking at getting started.

MATT: Yeah, when we started UX Mastery we had grand plans to create a similar course and then we saw it and we were like [groans]. He beat us to it! And that’s not to say that there isn’t room for other online courses but we’re kind of busy at the moment and haven’t gotten around to pulling together something that comprehensive. Maybe that will happen at some point down the track. But in the meantime we’re more than happy to recommend David’s course. He’s a nice bloke, he knows his stuff and he’s been teaching this stuff for years as well as being a practitioner.

So in terms of an education point of view he’s done a great job. I talk about the tools—specifically I talk about prototyping and user testing tools. Balsamiq Mockups is the prototyping tool that I’m a fan of. There’s a ton out there that are all excellent, it just happens to be the one that I’ve latched onto and used the most. But in terms of putting together a prototype of a web app or a mobile app, I’m a big fan.

Then user testing software, screen recording software – I use Silverback. It’s a Mac-only app but there are plenty of other tools out there for doing screen capture and recording the audio. So what that software does is it captures the screen while the user is using it. It also uses the computer’s in-built mic to record their voice. If you’re facilitating the user testing session, what you want to do is encourage the participant to talk out loud, tell you what’s going on in their head, tell you why they’re confused when they get confused, tell you what they make of the page when they’re looking at it for the first time.

Really get them to explain and help you get inside their head and then that records that audio. And some of the tools, like Silverback, also use the computer’s built-in camera to record their face. I don’t think this is necessarily vital to a good user testing session but it can be useful to have, in the little bottom right corner, the person’s facial expressions and a bit more body language about what’s going on as they’re interacting with the app.

The reason I say, “Get the right tools,” as the number two point for getting started, is because once you’re armed with these two tools you can go and do user testing just using your laptop. You don’t need expensive labs; you don’t need to hire out a venue to set up the equipment; you’ve just got this portable user-testing lab in your backpack, in your shoulder bag, and you can set up anywhere and do user testing.

So once you’ve got those tools in place, you can do user testing within your organization, maybe you want to help out a friend who’s got a website – you can do user testing for him, you can do it in a café, you can do it in an office, you can do it anywhere. And the more user testing you do the more insights you get into how people interact with your software and the more you learn about usability.

Number three: get some experience. Once you’ve got those tools in place, you’re well positioned to go and actually do some user testing. And I think that education is fantastic, whether it’s a formal degree or whether it’s a course like David’s, but really, for me, the most I’ve done in terms of learning about user experience is from doing it. If you’ve got the tools and you’ve got a client who is partial to having you help them usability test their software, then that’s the best way to get started and get some experience. Any thoughts or anything you wanted to add there Luke? I’m going on a bit here.

LUKE: I’d totally reiterate that. Just jump in the deep end and start applying the principles if you can on work you’re already doing, or, like Matt says, work for some friends or a local charity or community group or something like that. Jumping in that deep end and just getting started will teach you more than learning off a course or out of a book.

MATT: Yeah, because David’s course is excellent, but the one thing that it’s lacking is actual experience. So you can actually watch a video about how to do something, you can understand the theory, you can know it all – but it doesn’t give you the confidence to apply it. And that’s the key here because being a good UX designer, I believe, is a lot to do with confidence: whether you’re facilitating a session, whether you’re conducting a user testing session – it’s all good to know what to do but you need to be comfortable and have those people skills and that confidence to actually pull it off. So this is how you get that experience.

And I think that’s a great idea Luke; working for a non-profit, a charity that’s close to home, that you believe in, that you’re passionate about. Luke and I have got a non-profit organization that we’re using as a test bed for trying out some UX stuff so we’re working for free for those guys and it’s been invaluable. Next point is …

LUKE: I was just going to say, before you went on Matt: one of the advantages of building up some experience is, when you are getting started, maybe applying for some jobs and being able to demonstrate your experience by showing a portfolio or something like that is also very useful. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but having had that experience, getting it all under your belt and being able to communicate that by explaining to a potential employer: “Here’s what I did in this particular case,” or, “Here are some examples of the type of work I’ve done,” would certainly be very helpful in getting a job.

MATT: That’s so true. And we’ll talk a little bit about portfolios later in this section I think, but certainly what Luke said, in terms of being able to talk about your process – if you know all the theory you can’t really answer the question: “When was the time that you applied this or that you did that?” So getting that experience … And whether it’s a paid client or whether it’s time that you’ve volunteered, that doesn’t matter because if you’ve got the experience in doing it, you can talk about it, you can explain your process. And that’s what people are looking for when they’re looking for a UX designer.

Next one is to get connected. Certainly by participating in the UX Mastery community. I hope that you’ve felt more connected to some of the thought leaders out there in the user experience space; on Twitter but also in person. There is a lot of value to be had in connecting with like-minded souls. Luke and I had a chat, I remember, it must have been six months ago – we were talking about how user experience is such a broad umbrella term and we were trying to work out what it was that meant that when you went along to a UX Melbourne meet-up, we felt connected to these people even though they had various different backgrounds.

And the one thing that we settled on was this concept of empathy. Good UXers have good empathy for their users and for their stakeholders and it’s that warm, fuzzy feeling that makes you feel good about your job – for me – and for the same reason it makes you relate to other UXers in the field. Agreed?

LUKE: Definitely. Like you say, getting connected – the soft skills part of the job is a large portion of that. Being able to facilitate meetings and be friendly, be transparent in what you’re doing – all that kind of stuff is certainly in the mix when you’re networking with people, for sure.

MATT: And it’s such a different world these days, where you can connect one-on-one with thought leaders that have written books that are presented at conferences and just hit them up, have a chat. And I feel really privileged to have interviewed folks like Jeff Gothelf and Donna Spencer from UX Australia, just because with the technology these days it’s really easy to connect one-on-one with these people.

The next point I suggest in getting started is to get a mentor. A lot of people struggle with this; they find it really hard. There is always lots of reasons why: “I can’t find the right person,” or, “I live in a remote location so it’s really hard for me to connect with someone.” And I think that you need to push through that and find a way. I mentioned that technology has changed the way that we connect with people and there’s really no excuse to not put yourself out there and connect with someone.

For me, find a mentor has been crucial in terms of how I look at my career. If I look back and look at various stages where I felt I really achieved a milestone or put myself out of my comfort zone to take it to the next level, that was as a result of my mentor pushing me, encouraging me to not be complacent and take the easy option. So I’ve been very fortunate that my mentor – even though we don’t catch up all that often; it’s been months since I’ve seen him and we actually haven’t spoken that much about specific process or techniques.

I had this vision of a mentor explaining to me the details of how to tackle a complex design problem, but actually, the conversations we’ve had have been more about career and more about … he’s the one who encouraged me to leave my salaried role and go freelance. He’s the one who encouraged me to get up and do some public speaking and put myself out there a bit. So you’d be surprised sometimes if you find the right person, how the conversations travel. Have you got a mentor, Luke?

LUKE: It’s important to get that … I don’t have a mentor at the moment. I’m certainly interested in learning off anyone that I can. I have a few colleagues and I go along to a few events. I think that somewhat goes towards getting some of that input and learning from somewhere that isn’t my own experience, which is think is the important thing – you obviously can’t design in a vacuum but you can’t develop your skills and things purely by experience; you’re going to reinventing the wheel.

I think having that personal feedback from someone who knows you or can see you and what you’re doing, means that if you don’t have that awareness of yourself, they can certainly suggest some things for you. I went through a stage of looking for a mentor and the Information Architecture Institute had a few things and I had a few enquiries going there, but unfortunately I didn’t push through and I wish that I had.

MATT: Yeah, and I suppose the other thing to remember is that your mentor can be valuable in terms of connections; both for jobs or for clients, if you’re freelancing. I’ve had a little bit of work come through my mentor and I’ve sent him a little bit of work, so it’s another valuable connection, if anything. Then the last point is to get hired, and we talked about portfolios a little bit, earlier.

Lots of questions that I’ve had have been about, “What shall I include in my portfolio?” So very quickly – portfolio in a summary, I believe should be different from a visual designer’s portfolio, because the stuff that we create isn’t necessarily as “pretty” or “colourfully compelling” to look at. The important thing about your portfolio should be that it shows you have a process and it is the Launchpad for you to talk about that process.

LUKE: It’s true. I think it’s also about the story of the development of the product that you’ve been working on. So rather than a visual design artefact that’s the end result, a lot of user experience work is the process of design and being able to tell the story of how things changed or how you made a bit of a difference. And being able to demonstrate that stuff by showing before and after or points where you had particular insights into the work that you’re working on.

MATT: Yeah, the before and after is definitely going to be compelling if you’ve got hard data. So if you’ve got conversion rates before you redesigned the checkout page and then conversion rates after, and assuming that you do a good job and those conversion rates go up, then there’s some hard data that you can say: “Hey, this is the process I followed for this page, this is what it looked like first. After it looked like this. And this is how much it helped and how much money it made the business.” That’s the way to make a compelling case for being hired as a UX designer.

But also, in terms of triggering conversations about your process, stuff like photographs of you facilitating a session or perhaps doing some affinity diagraming or showing the messy workspace that you’ve created, so that people can get an insight into how you think and how you work. Okay, so we’ve just spent 20 minutes on the first question, so hopefully …

LUKE: [laughter] We’ve covered a few other things as well.

MATT: That’s right. Hopefully we’ve spoken to a few of the points in the questions ahead. But let’s take a look at the next list. Making the leap from web to UX. Really, it’s a similar path I believe, and one that I’d recommend. You need to get an understanding about usability and about the user experience field. So following those same steps is definitely recommended.

In terms of the web, I think if you’re a designer or a developer or maybe a content person or a project manager in the web space, you’ve got an advantage because the terminology and the challenges that are unique to the web—it’s stuff that you’ve already covered off. You don’t need to learn the basics of that. You’re probably all over responsive design and really it’s just about getting that understanding of human behaviour and finding a process that works for you, that is user-centred. So yeah, the same advice applied. Anything else to add there?

LUKE: I would just say that yeah, probably as a web designer there are some things that you’re already doing that are possibly more UX related; design research, talking to people who might be using the product, or talking to stakeholders is certainly a big part of the input. And if you’re already doing that already then it’s not such a daunting prospect. So making that jump across is probably more a definition of your priorities in doing user-centred design rather than a totally new field.

MATT: Yeah. For me, it was a big deal for me to come to terms with the idea that I was being arrogant in the design process I was following. I wasn’t being transparent. I was expected to go away and make magic and come back and present it, and that’s what I would do. I would put my headphones on and I’d go into the creative zone and I would create a couple of designs and then pick my favourite and show all three to the stakeholders and we’d talk about one or two and we’d launch one of them. And there was no explicit user involvement at all. We just thought we knew best. Because I guess it was embarrassing to consider the prospect that we didn’t know who our users were. Or maybe it was … I’m not sure. I think I’ve blogged about it. Sorry, go …

LUKE: I was just going to say, detaching the ownership of the design – if you’re a designer then you think that your expertise is being employed to be able to provide those artefacts or the end results, whereas I think detaching your ownership from the design is relaxing your thinking as a design expert and listening to the opinions of the people; your users, who may not necessarily have design skills. And that’s a very challenging thing to do; to take what they say and make it work. But it results in a better result. [laughs]

MATT: And it’s interesting to see if I look at my role over the last couple of years, I’ve become more of a design facilitator than a hands-on designer. The idea of being collaborative and involving stakeholders and staff and users in the design process, letting them drive it and being just the conduit to make it happen – that’s made for better outcomes.

I’m loathed to say it’s made me a better designer because that sounds like my skills at designing have gotten better, but I think it’s more about becoming that design facilitator, owning the process and getting everyone involved. Then the outcome is better and like you said, the ownership is detached but it’s for the best. And if you can accept that I think that you’ll be a better UXer as a result.

LUKE: Totally. That’s very true.

MATT: There’s a question there that says: “How can I make the jump from QA to UX. I assume QA means quality assurance. I’m not going to speak about quality assurance specifically because I don’t know much about that industry, but I will say that UX has come from a very diverse range of backgrounds and I think that regardless of the industry that you’ve been in, there’s going to be some stuff that you have learnt that will be valuable and that you can leverage in the UX space.

So whether it’s as a QA person, whether you’re an industrial designer or a developer or a project manager or … I’ll even say something non-digital. There are things like communications skills, like collaboration skills, people skills – these kinds of core business skills that sound like soft skills that are really peripheral to doing a job. They are a core part of being a UX designer. So could you make the jump? Absolutely. Leverage that stuff that is going to come in handy for dealing with people, for being transparent and for championing user-centred design and you’ll be well on your way.

“How do I break into the UX field?” I think we’ve covered. Preparing to apply for a job. We’ve talked about portfolios. Did you have anything to add to portfolios or connection there, Luke?

LUKE: No, I think I mentioned it before. Portfolios, as I say, aren’t the be all and end all, but they certainly are a useful tool in being able to communicate your experience. And as Matt talked about, the personal networking; if there have been people that you’ve worked with in the past or who you’ve been colleagues with for a while then they will obviously be able to advocate for you too.

So as you said, being able to get those opportunities and hear about the jobs going – and usually, because it’s a fairly trusted role I think people don’t necessarily put someone in cold into a position of responsibility. Some might come in via a reference of someone who can actually vouch for you. So portfolios certainly help in terms of demonstrating and giving some surety about your process and previous results you’ve been able to achieve. But there are a lot more things to consider in there too.

MATT: I’m sure that you guys have heard the statistic that 90% of jobs aren’t advertised. And I think it’s pretty hard to measure that, but in terms of my experience, I think that it’s probably bang on. Most of the jobs that I have been fortunate to get over the years haven’t come because they were advertised on a jobs board, they’ve come because somebody spoke to me about something or got wind of a project that they liked and then asked who the designer was and that person said, “It was this guy.”

So in terms of those connections, it’s kind of invaluable. Next step for a career in UX after some training?

LUKE: That really depends on the position or the context that you’re in. You might be working in-house, maybe you’ve got a team around you. You’re probably going to look at developing some skills to compliment the people around you or introducing what you’ve learnt in training and getting a bit of culture change happening if you need to, or encouraging the team in a certain direction. That’s going to be a bit different to if you’re working freelance, where you’ve got a little bit more control over your process or your approach. But it’s really going to depend. I don’t think you ever really stop training. You do more training.

MATT: Yeah, assuming that this person asking this question has for example completed David’s course but hasn’t got any experience under their belt, then really, getting that experience is going to be the next big thing that you should focus on. Whether that’s with a local charity or a friend’s website, or whether it’s you having a chat to your boss and saying, “Look, I really think user testing on this software that we’re working on.” Explain that it doesn’t need to be a week of your time; it can be an afternoon.

And with your portable usability lab, with the software that I mentioned earlier, you can pull in a few people, put the product in front of some participants and start that user feedback loop. Then your foot is in the door. And when people start seeing the value of that – especially if you show them the videos; recently at a client I had a hard time convincing people that usability was a big issue with the products we were working on, so I recorded some users struggling in front of it.

And these people were just struggling; they were all over the place. They couldn’t find any of the information; they’d just go down these rabbit warrens and get stuck and frustrated. And all of that frustration I captured on video and then I showed management and said, “This is someone using your website.” And it’s pretty hard to not empathize with someone who is struggling that bad and are failing in the task that has been given to them.

And I won a lot of people over. I think I put a lot of noses out of joint as well, but I also won a lot of backing on focus on usability. I like to think I planted the seeds for almost a form of culture change about organization, because usability is getting more and more prioritized as a result of those user testing videos. So those videos can be very powerful, politically, if you need to get people on board.

All right. What question are we up to? Where are we?

LUKE: We seem to be making slow progress. Maybe pick and choose a few things out of here? The internships, as we’ve mentioned, there are lots of opportunities around if you’re networking with people. Internships … You need to be brave about finding someone who you would like to do some work with or an internship with and then reaching out and saying: “Look, I’m really passionate about stuff. Is it possible for me to come in and meet you guys and see how you work, or co-work, or come and help you do some things.” Creating your own opportunities like that has certainly been something that I’ve found helpful too.

MATT: I should mention that we had a gentleman in Melbourne, a young guy approach us – I’m not sure if Ben is on the line or not – but Ben was really keen to find a mentor and asked me if I would mentor him. And I agreed. So we’ve actually been getting Ben involved in some of the not-for-profit work that we’ve been doing here in Melbourne. And it’s been great to have him help us out because we have paying clients that are competing with our time, so having an extra helper has been terrific. But for him, it’s been some experiences that he wouldn’t have otherwise had. But it works both ways.

LUKE: Yeah, get in touch with the Interaction Design Association – IxDA – or any other groups around. Or just reach out to whoever you’ve got on your horizon.

MATT: “How can I become a better designer without a mentor?” I would really recommend getting a mentor. I think that this is a strange question because the value of having someone who you can confide in, who can give you some guidance and perspective, can’t be understated. So while I empathise with the fact that it can be hard to find the right person to play that role in your life, I certainly believe that it’s worth pursuing.

“Visual design background. What should I be focusing on to become a UX designer?” Firstly, I’ll suggest that if you come from a visual design background I think you do have an advantage. While I do believe that having a visual background is not necessary to be a successful UXer, because tasks like conducting user interviews and doing user testing don’t require you to have those visual skills, but in terms of being able to communicate visually, I think it’s a real advantage.

What should you be focusing on? The behaviour stuff. The process. Getting that user feedback loop and divorcing ownership from the design. So whatever design process you used previously, I’m sure there’s value in it. But becoming more transparent and involving the team and involving users is really what you should be focusing on next.

And perhaps the final question for the career, we’ll jump to the last one, which asks how to source and hire talented UX designers. Luke, if you had to hire a UX designer, what would you do?

LUKE: Well, I’d be attending some of the UX events, I guess; getting to know people personally or being able to hear them pitch their work. That kind of thing. So back into the personal networking kind of things. I might be looking up projects that I’ve heard about and looking at who’s been behind that work. That’s probably where I’d start. I’d put the word out, ask people … Yeah, maybe that’s something we need to look at at UX Mastery, connecting people with those opportunities.

MATT: Yeah. You guys may be familiar with meetup.com, but I’m sure that if you’re in a small or medium-sized city, there is going to be a UX meet-up of some description near you. And it’s probably on meetup.com. There’s a great community here in Melbourne called UX Melbourne, which has a Google Group and have regular meet-ups where they show videos of UX-related presentations, where they have a book club and everyone reads the same book and then we chat about it and it’s a great community and it’s a great way to meet people. And it’s possibly a great way to hire people.

So yes, those connections are valuable. I guess trawling LinkedIn is probably what recruiters spend a bunch of time doing. And I’m sure there’s value in looking at people’s online profiles, but certainly a trusted referral, someone that you’ve met or someone that you trust has recommended is going to get you a long way there. All right – the training questions.

The first question here says: “What are the best self-guided learning resources/books/references or tutorials?”

LUKE: It’s a good question. It’s something we get asked a lot. So much in fact that we’ve got some great stuff on the website. There are books and things. If you come to the resources section there are some good books; in particular an introduction to UX stuff.

MATT: Yeah, and it is our grand vision to filter this list a bit more because we’re conscious that the list of tools, the list of books, the list of courses is just a big brain-dump. So very slowly we are working our way through filtering that list. So we’ve reviewed at least three of the courses, I think, so far. And we hope to review some of the books as well and give you guys a bit more expert recommendations of what we think is good rather than just the comprehensive, “Here’s everything! Blah blah!”

LUKE: And to be able to unpack that stuff. Particularly if you guys have questions about: “I’m in this particular situation, where should I start?” then certainly let us know and we can point you in the right direction. Or we might end up writing a blog post about it.

MATT: That’s right. If there’s not something on that resources section of the site that answers your question then please email us so that we can add it. Definitely.

LUKE: The two books that I’d particularly pull out of that list would be this one by Cennydd: Undercover User Experience Design. I’ve found this very useful for being able to explain key concepts. And the other one is a project guide to UX design, which is very practical, it walks you through, it’s got bits and pieces that you can apply fairly easily and immediately to what you’re working on. They are two very practical books. Probably Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience is a foundational one but it’s a bit more abstract and theoretical, I guess. It certainly explains user experience and the origins well, but it’s not necessarily as practical as these other ones.

MATT: It can be good for getting someone who has no idea about user experience at all, on board with the concept.

LUKE: Totally, yeah.

MATT: Cool. Next question?

LUKE: So. courses. There is a courses section of the website where we’ve listed all the online courses that we’ve found here and put David’s at the top, because we think that’s the best one. There are quite a few other ones. All these other ones down here … Some are paid, some are free. We haven’t included the university courses yet because we’re sticking to online at the moment. Have a dig around in there, find something that might be useful for you.

MATT: Yeah, and if you take one of those courses and love it, write to us and let us know. We’d love to know how you found it.

LUKE: So this is the next question. Learning UX as a soloist is a very interesting question that I talked to Matt about last night, and it conjures up pictures of user experience designers as musicians – we had that article a while ago that referred to the idea of conducting an orchestra to produce a symphony as sounds as a UX designer; working with designers and developers in a team. So it’s an interesting concept also because user experience is a very collaborative role.

Working as a soloist doesn’t quite fit with that picture but I guess talking about UX as a team of one is probably what was behind the question. I think you can never really work by yourself. You certainly need to be relying on users and if you’re doing design and development as well then, sure, you can roll up some things into one. But it’s an interesting question – I’ll do a bit more thinking about that. What do you think Matt?

MATT: I did publish an article on UX Mastery last year about being a remote UX designer, because sometimes the reality is that you’re not onsite with the client – they might be in another city or in another country, even. So there are certainly some techniques and things that you can do to get a user centred process happening for a project even if you’re working remotely. So I’d recommend you go and check out that article and read about some of those techniques.

But I agree with Luke in terms of the metaphor being a bit broken because the best design projects happen through collaboration, I believe, and technology is good but it’s never the same as being in person with your team, with the stakeholders, with the users. So I would certainly say, don’t aspire to be a soloist, aspire to be a collaborator and someone who is at the core of the organization and develop those relationships and develop those connections with people inside and outside your team, because that’s how you’re going to be effective. I hope that answers the question.

LUKE: Yeah, if we’re not giving you the right feedback there, feel free to chat in the comments and let us know if we need to cover a bit more stuff. We’ll push on though. There’s a question here: “Should I pursue a formal education in UX?” That’s also another one I think that pops up quite often. There hasn’t been a lot of tertiary education courses offered in UX specifically, but it does mean the field of user experience is related to human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology and a whole bunch of other stuff; deeper foundations like that.

And those courses have been around for a while and the people that … I know plenty of people that have studied those and moved into user experience design as well. So at the moment, I think it would be an advantage to get a tertiary qualification, but it’s certainly not required. I think experience is still fairly the sought-after factors; being able to prove the work that you’ve done in the past. Perhaps in five or ten years as the user experience design role changes, maybe there will be more of us. I think the differentiator might be the form of education that you might have picked up from courses.

There are a few places you can get this – whether it be … Some of the larger universities have interaction courses. Here in Australia open universities have some good courses too. So I wouldn’t say it was required but it certainly might be something to consider, if you’ve got the time and inclination.

MATT: I’m going to go ahead and disagree with Luke on this one. I’m having a hard time being convinced that a formal education in UX is going to be worthwhile. The value I see from getting some experience and taking a course like David’s and getting out there and doing it, using user testing as a starter point to then build more experience in different areas is such a powerful way to make progress and to progress your career. I think that a formal education in UX, investing three years in learning about how to do this stuff, or just getting three year’s experience in actually doing it – for me I’ll take the latter every time.

LUKE: That is a good point. I’ll stick to my original one but yeah, Matt’s got a point that it’s an industry that’s changing often and being able to learn on the run is going to put you ahead of people who are learning … If a course was designed a couple of years ago you’re still going to be behind a bit.

MATT: Cool. Okay, let’s get onto the selling UX questions. “What’s the cheapest way you can make potential customers understand the need for UX testing?” Logic doesn’t work sometimes. Well, I did mention earlier the power of a good user testing video, and while I would never suggest presenting selective findings, it’s important to be independent and tell the true story. Certainly choosing snippets from your user testing video to show people can be a very powerful way to get them on board with the idea.

So if you’ve got someone who doesn’t believe that the page that you’re redesigning needs work, that they think is fine, and you show them a video of someone struggling to work out where the button is, because they just can’t see it, then they’re going to be pretty convinced by a real customer having a real problem. Another good thing that I like to do is actually involve stakeholders as user testing participants: getting them to be the user tester, giving them some tasks, asking them to complete the tasks. And it forces them to take their owner hat off and be a user and realise the value of this process and realise that there are probably usability issues that need fixing.

So there are two tips. Have you got any other tips to add?

LUKE: Just looking at the selling UX section here, there are a few similarities in the questions. This idea of having to convince people of UX testing is certainly one that I’ve come up against myself time and time again. So I understand where the person who is asking the question is coming from, but what I would suggest is, don’t let it be an optional extra, don’t necessarily even negotiate it. I think the user feedback cycle that Matt was mentioning before is essential to the type of work we do.

So don’t let talking to the users be your first or second or even third thing that gets taken off the table when time and budget it tight. It’s easier to say and harder to do, I know, but similarly, if you did need to pitch it a bit more, I think you need to show some quick examples, as Matt said, about how previous projects have been improved by taking on board feedback from user testing. Or borrow from other people – so if there have been some other websites you know of that have benefited from it, and you can show some before and after, or a bit of process …

So I suppose that’s still the logic; that the person asking the question said didn’t work, but openly I’d say just do it. If you believe in it, you’re probably already going to know that you can do a better job with it than without it. Testing it doesn’t have to be with 50 paid participants, it can be a bit on the run, maybe you can include some customers of the client and pay them in kind with the client’s products, or even use your own contacts or something like that.

There is a good article that we wrote on the website last year, talking about low-budget UX. That would probably give you a few tips. I think you should just include it and if you don’t have the budget then you just need to be able to squeeze it in there.

MATT: I’m guessing, Luke, that you’re referring to Cameron Roger’s article on No Time, No Excuses?

LUKE: There is that one, No Time, No excuses and then there’s also the one I wrote in August, A Time-Poor, Small-Budget Approach to UX.

MATT: Yeah. Cameron’s was a little bit controversial. He was basically advocating “take a sickie and do it on your own even though you’ve been told not to”. Now, it depends on how much you value your job and what the organizational culture is and whether you’re in a position to take matters into your own hands or not like that. But certainly I agree with the sentiment that if your organization needs to be enlightened, you might need to be a bit unconventional to enlighten them. If you’ve got an afternoon where you can squeeze in some user testing, even though you’ve not told anyone about it, and then demonstrate the value of it; I think people are going to have a hard time telling you off for it.

LUKE: If you don’t ask permission they’re not going to say no either.

MATT: [laughter] And then there’s another question in that group which you can flip back, Luke. No, no, that’s right. I was going to mention case studies. There is a very famous case study that gets used, I’m sure, to make the case for user experience design, and that’s Jared Spool’s $300 Dollar Button.

And we’ll link to that case study in the webinar notes at the end of this, but basically there’s a case study for an organization where they changed the button on the page and it resulted in increased conversions that meant an extra $300 million revenue for that organization for that year, and that’s … If we could find more case studies like that then we’d have an easier time championing user-centred design. So if anyone knows of any case studies where the design process made that big an impact then we want to hear about it right now.

LUKE: Definitely. We’d love to hear that stuff.

MATT: Cool, all righty. Process and techniques. “Do you practice Lean UX and how do you apply it at work?” Do you want to explain to the attendee list what Lean UX is, Luke?

LUKE: Sure. So Lean UX is something that’s come out of … It’s a reaction to a whole bunch of things that have been happening over the last couple of decades in development. We often go through these different phases where there’s a bit of a take of things where this is a better way of doing things, or whatever, and a little bit of Lean UX has been wandering around lately, but the distinct advantages are, as I mentioned before, that idea of not confusing user experience design with the deliverables or the actual artefacts – it’s more about the process.

I think Lean UX certainly takes that and runs with it by saying, to be able to run a lean, efficient project, you can cut back on the documentation and actually do the learning and the explaining with your team as you go along – just focus on the core bits and pieces and work quickly. And it’s a bit of a design application of the more development-oriented, agile environment. In a nutshell, that’s kind of what it is. I’ve probably explained it really badly, but that’s essentially what it is.

MATT: Yeah, and I think, well … Sorry, go.

LUKE: Sorry, I was going to say Matt did an interview with Jeff Gothelf a couple of weeks ago, and Jeff’s a leading voice on Lean UX and that sort of industry, so definitely check out that article as well.

MATT: Yeah, and Jeff wrote an article for us recently too called Beyond the Basics UX Skills For an Agile World where he talks about some of the premises of Lean UX and how that relates to working in an agile environment. Agile development processes traditionally aren’t a good fit for user-centred design and Jeff believes that if we become design facilitators and we buy a bunch of principles of transparency and letting go of owning the design and applying these lean [start-up? 00:56:45], validate your idea, validate your learning process, then it is a good fit.

And I’m in wholehearted agreement because the more transparent we are about what we do, it takes away the mystique of design being this black magic that we do behind closed walls and then present, “voila!” this masterpiece at the end of it. It needs to be a team process and in order to work with developers we need to involve developers. And you’d be surprised at how many good ideas people have if you just ask them.

If they feel that they’ve been involved then they become a champion for the design and you’ll have less of a hard time getting by and getting take-up within the organization. If you go and do something on your own and present it then you’re likely to hit a bunch of hurdles before everybody’s on board with it; regardless of how good it is. Just because people don’t like change and everyone has an opinion about design and so you need to involve them.

“How can UX principles be used to reduce cognitive complexity in educational products?” That’s a tricky question.

LUKE: I’d love to learn more about that too. [laughs]

MATT: Yeah, well, I guess simplicity is a good goal to aim for when you’re designing something. So cognitive complexity is often the result of something being complex. So simplicity is hard, but really, following a user-centred design process where you test stuff, where you have that user feedback loop and you iterate and you prototype and eventually you’re going to get there. But if you just think you can do it on your own, you’re probably not. You need to involve others: stakeholders, team members.

LUKE: Yeah. And that’s a good point about the cognitive load. I think using psychological principles to improve an interface, especially in order to clearly communicate and educate. Education in particular I think is really interesting for that because you can do a lot of stimulating by getting active involvement, rather than passive consumption.

But certainly UX should be able to help you identify where the unnecessary stuff is, to simplify it, what the useful stuff is to keep. And like Matt says, observing users, using a system and testing proposed designs. All those help explicitly in being able to find what that is; reduce that unnecessary cognitive complexity.

MATT: All right. The next question says: “How do you balance SEO, CRO and UX?” So search engine optimisation, conversion rate optimisation and user experience. And this is actually a great question because as UX designers, we’re really focused on, is the product usable, is it useful, is it the right product? And conversion rate optimisation is really at the end of that pipeline. So we’re all about making sure that things work well and do the right job for the right people.

But then, what colour should the button be at the end of it? I think that you need to test that stuff at the end. So how do we balance it? Well, what we do is we get 90% of the way there using user-centred design techniques and then if you’re a large organization and a 5% or a 6% conversion rate makes a big difference to your profit, then you test that stuff at the end to fine-tune it.

SEO – it’s funny, if you think about the user experience of someone finding information, really, search engines are a part of that touch point. Someone types in a query in Google and then they end up on your website and then they find their answer, SEO is part of that experience. So I don’t think they’re at odds. I think that if you make sure that your website ranks well for the key words that you want it to rank for, but you do it in a way that is going to help the customer answer their question, then you’re ticking all the boxes. And I don’t think they necessarily need to be either/or. We’ve only got a couple more minutes left.

LUKE: I was just going to say quickly on that – I’m a little bit wary of the association with UX and over-optimising or that sort of really tight end. I know user experience design is certainly about optimizing and streamlining a process, particularly for a user. What I always come back to is the fact that I’m within that business team; the business team obviously wanting to make money for the business and that’s part of that whole value of equation of business exists to provide value to the customer.

But I think my role as a user experience designer is very much to advocate for that user. People ask me, when I’m talking about user research, they often confuse that with market research. I think they’re very different things. Market research might be taken a bit more as finding some opportunities to exploit within the market or to understand the customer base, whereas I think user research is a lot more personal and it’s a lot more about working with the user in order to help them achieve their goals and ultimately for that to be of value for the customer and the business.

MATT: Very good. We have time for a couple more questions so I’m just going to jump down. There are a couple of questions at the end about: “Can you share some of your challenges or frustrations?” so the question is: “What was your most frustrating project?” – we won’t name any clients. “Why was is frustrating and what was the outcome and how did you resolve the issue?” I do have a project that comes to mind that was frustrating, and that was many years ago, before I was enlightened to the value of user-centred design. I was working as a designer and I would go away and be creative, come up with a few different versions of the design and come back and present it and then we’d pick one and we’d launch it.

And there were some real tensions – not really to do with me but to do with other stakeholders, where the company owner and the CEO, who was a bit territorial because each of them thought that they had the best opinion on what the design would be. And I could just see that it was nothing to do with me but the fact that this process wasn’t speaking to everyone’s need to be involved. It created some real tension and some real nasty stand-offs in the office.

In hindsight, if I’d explained to everyone there that, hey, this is a process we’re going to follow, if I’d done some collaborative sketching workshops where everybody got a change to contribute and if I made it very clear and transparent what the process was that I was going to be following and how they’d be involved, everyone would be so much happier and they would be much less argy-bargy and arguing and passion about, “But I haven’t been involved in…”, “But I know best…”.

So the outcome was that we launched the front page and all of the users hated it because they weren’t involved either. And I don’t think the issue was resolved, I think there are still underlying tensions with that product, where people resent having not been included. And people don’t like change. Whether that’s stakeholders, users or anyone.

So I learnt from that. I didn’t know at the time what the solution was but it was my mentor who really enlightened me about user-centred design many years ago. And I haven’t had that same problem since because I’ve deliberately followed a process that speaks to those challenges. Did you have a project you wanted to talk about, Luke?

LUKE: Just generally too – I think that a lot of the frustrations come particularly out of the need to define what UX is a little bit, and obviously people are still learning what that is a bit too. But it means … I had some similar experiences too. One particular client had hired me perhaps hearing that UX is a bit of a … Could help them solve some of their problems. But once I’d been working there for a little while it turned out that their biggest problems were more about the workplace culture, rather than particular projects they were working on.

So it was always a bit of an uphill battle to advocate for user above all the rest of that noise of the business that was intent on doing it’s own thing. So I had to get a lot better at convincing people about the importance of things or having a bit of a stronger voice. But I still felt that the role was a bit token. So that was one of the most frustrating things for me.

Stepping back from that a little, I think looking at my early forays into user-centred design, the two things that I internally felt frustrated about were the documents, and probably spending a little bit too much energy in making the documents look good, as a details-person with a design background, I fell really easily into spending a lot of time on the documents and making them communicate well, rather than involving people in my activities and flying more by the seat of my pants.

And the other thing was probably trying to understand when to test and when not to. Initially I used to test all my early design concepts as well. I didn’t realise that I was focusing on interactions that didn’t even exist. I was just going through the motions, doing testing because everyone was telling me to do it. But I didn’t actually make the connection that wasn’t the best use of my time and that a lot of that extra data to process didn’t necessarily have much benefit.

And I needed to focus on only testing because we’ve got a particular question that we need an answer to. I think that applies to user research as well. They were probably the two biggest things that, once I had a bit more of an understanding of, a lot of things got a bit easier.

MATT: Very good. Well, we’ve come to the end of the webinar. Unfortunately we don’t have time to answer any more questions but we’re really appreciative of everyone who’s dialled in and we apologise to those of you whose questions we didn’t get to. We would like to do this again. This is actually really valuable for us and hopefully it’s been …

LUKE: It’s been great being able to talk to you guys and hear you asking questions back in the chat. I really appreciate that.

MATT: Totally. Sometimes the newsletter and the website can feel very one-way and we much prefer it to be a conversation. So keep emailing your questions, keep the conversation going. If you’ve got any specific feedback on this webinar, we’d love to hear from you.

LUKE: We’d certainly love to hear from you.

MATT: Yeah, so just email feedback@uxmastery.com and let us know if you loved it, if you hated it, if you’re indifferent, if you wish that we’d answered your question and we didn’t – we can do our best to try and do that offline or perhaps in a future webinar. I did mention that we’ve got an eBook in the works and we’re going to be working very hard to get that out of the door soon. You’ll certainly be haring from us about that hopefully pretty soon.

I won’t tell you a timeframe because clients get in the way and this stuff is hard to do in our spare time. But we do our best. So thank you everyone for attending, especially those of you in time zones where it wasn’t easy. We do appreciate your time and for listening to us. And hopefully we’ll see you on a future UX Mastery webinar.

LUKE: Very good. Take care everyone.

MATT: See you guys.

LUKE: Bye bye.

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