Category: career advice

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Lorem Ipsum, UX Portfolios, Thought Leaders and Designing for a Customer Niche

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. Following are selected questions I answered in August.

In a UX Portfolio, can I use lorem ipsum or do I have to use the real text from a website?

Answered August 5, 2017

Lorem ipsum will likely be read by reviewers as a stage in an unfinished site. That’s fine. Your UX Portfolio should include artifacts showing the process you went through to solve a design problem. If you only show screen shots of completed sites, it is difficult for a reviewer to understand exactly what part of the design solution you worked on.

Notice I am using words like “problem,” “artifacts,” “process” and “solution.” These are terms that direct the reviewer to consider your role in the completed work. What problem did you solve? What design artifacts (like screenshots, wireframes, journey maps) did you create? What other team roles did you work with? What processes did you use as a team or individually? How did you negotiate and advocate for your work with the team or the client? Your portfolio should be more than the pretty results of your work, but give a description of the messy problems and creative solutions you brought to the table.

Another thing that I wonder when you mention Lorem ipsum is whether you are using it because you have an NDA. This can be tricky. Read the agreement thoroughly and have a lawyer explain anything that doesn’t make sense. Simply obscuring text may not be enough if there are branding elements that are recognizable in the completed design. Often wireframes make sense, since they are very lo-fi and don’t need to show branding elements. That said, some NDAs will prevent you from sharing any artifacts at all, especially if the intellectual property is particularly sensitive, so a general description of your role and processes may be all you can put into a portfolio.

Hope that helps.

What is the best way to do customer research to decide what product I should build in a specific niche?

Answered August 5, 2017

If you have already decided what that niche is, you can start to think about the activities that group is involved in and the types of problems they are trying to solve. Meet with them and observe how they are currently performing these activities or solving these problems. How do they perform the activity? Is their solution or task analog or digital? What are their pain points? What do they struggle with? What do they wish was different? Have them speak to you aloud about the steps of their task: what are they doing, feeling at each point in the process? Are there solutions or tools they have tried and abandoned? What made them abandon something that was not satisfactory? What made them keep using something that is perhaps subpar? Are there solutions they have heard or read about that they would like to try? What are they and what might be keeping them from trying?

All of this will give you insight to an underlying problem that could use a designed solution. More questions to ask during the ideation stage: Can their tasks be supported by a digital solution? What are the external roadblocks? Is there a cognitive or behavioral issue that may be involved? Is there a bias? (I remember when wheely bags were derided as something only for the weak or the female. Now most urban mail carriers use them and most other people couldn’t imagine getting to their gate on time without one).

Is cost an issue? Regulation? What external factors might be affecting the market for your solution?

Map out some ideas, prototype your solution (paper mockups or quick digital prototypes are OK) and go back to your users to see how they use it. Does the solution address their problem? Does it make sense? What would they add? What would they remove? Would they suggest it to a friend or colleague?

Then back again. Keep iterating and testing. Read about the problem space in the media. What other companies are working on products like yours? What are investors buying into? What larger groups, associations, affinity markets are interested in solutions like yours? Meet them for coffee or go to Meetups and conferences on topics related to your niche group. Meetups are good places to find your user test participants as well as to learn generally how the industry or affinity group understands the problem space and what other solutions are out there.

Be sure when you start to approach designers, developers and partners that they really get your niche and the problems they are dealing with. Decision Fish has been very lucky to find people who understand and are excited enough about our product that they want it for themselves. When your team really gets it and they are excited about coming up with a solution, investors and customers can feel it and will be more likely to want to help you to succeed.

Hope that helps.

Who Are the Thought Leaders of UX Writers?

Answered August 5, 2017

Most of the authors at Rosenfeld Media and the speakers at UIE conferences can be considered thought leaders in their area of UX. Writers I follow in particular include Peter Morville for IA, Kristina Halvorson for Content Management, Donna Lichaw for UX Storytelling, Steve Krug and Don Norman for Usability, Dana Chisnell for Government/Participatory Design, Steve Portigal for UX Research (I’m currently reading Doorbells, Danger and Dead Batteries), Thomas Wendt for service design (I’m also reading Design for Dasein, which is highly philosophical/academic, but fascinating if you are up on your Heidegger and terms like phenomenology and hermeneutics). Peter Merholz has done writing on service design that is a bit more accessible. Jonathan Kolko and Nathan Shedroff have written on Design for “wicked problems” and sustainability, respectively. Nathan also has a fun one at Rosenfeld Media, called Make It So, on what designers can learn from sci fi.

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On UX Deliverables, Accessibility, Education and Portfolios

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. I answered the following questions in June.

Is it worth learning UI or UX design? Do you actually use it to build a product?

Answered Jun 30

UX is used to design, strategize and build a product. UI is a part of UX. UI is used to give the product something a user can interact with (buttons, controls, calls to action, a familiar and comfortable layout). Studying users is an important part of product development. One of the biggest values of User Experience research is learning how people solve a particular problem and whether your product, or idea or inkling, is an effective solution. What problem does your product solve? How do people go about solving this problem today, before they know about your product? What are their pain points, either with an alternate solution or with one you already provide? In fact, a project may be abandoned due to what was learned during the research phase and that is a good, valuable result, versus spending millions of dollars on a product no one wants or needs. UX research will show you if you have product/market fit.

Is learning UX or UI worth it? Yes, if you are involved with designing a product, understanding the user’s needs and motivations is important. Are you the best person to learn it? Maybe. It depends on your role with product development. If you are starting with a small MVP or not funded enough to hire staff, you may be required to serve in more than one role in developing the product. These roles may include product management, design, research, coding, data management, account management, sales, security, AI, accessibility, vendor management, partnerships, etc. If you are working on a larger design team, you may specialize in an area of UX such as research, information design, information architecture, data visualization, interaction design, visual design, animation, etc. There are other Quora threads that explore the skills and deliverables for the various aspects of UX, so I won’t go into them here, but you can read a few of my prior responses:

What are the UX design deliverables?

What is UI testing?

Is 38 too old to start a UX/UI career?

Even if you are not specializing in an area of UX, any product development role can benefit from understanding the UX discipline and the insights and methods that inform product design. With these insights, a product manager can focus on aspects of the product that users truly want and need. A developer will understand what is being created and can code in a way that optimizes the design as well as the needs and abilities of the users. Business stakeholders will understand that they are investing in the right approach to serving their market. And that ensures success for the whole team.

What’s the most effective way for a nonprofit to determine UX strategy, design UI and develop pages, within a limited budget and time?

Answered Jun 30

Look for a university with a user experience design, product design or library and information science program and offer to be a test case for a student project. The department office will know if any of their professors are seeking projects for students to work on for a semester long course. Because they are teaching design and strategy skills you can be sure their processes and methodologies will be state of the art and well tested.

If you need faster turnaround than a semester course, prepare to either pay a lot more than you normally would for good work, or be willing to accept lower quality product. Good UX strategy, design and the research that informs the best fit and process takes time.

Is a UX design bootcamp such as RED Academy worth the time and money? Can I get a job if I self-teach UX Design on Coursera, edX or Udacity?

Answered Jun 16

I have heard mixed reports from UX hiring managers about design and coding academies. I guess it really depends on what you expect to learn and whether you are using the training as skills development or a replacement for a degree. Generally academies are great for learning new skills and developing a portfolio. What you get out of a six to twelve week course can vary. I have seen some concern that people who take courses at places like General Assembly are being encouraged to apply for senior design roles that they aren’t actually ready for. Or attendees who pass off student projects as if they were paid work. But other hiring managers may really appreciate the way a program ramps up an employees skills. (When I was at PwC long ago, I was encouraged to take design courses from NYU’s continuing ed department). At the other end, courses from Cooper U or IDEO are well regarded, but expensive and somewhat senior level.

I have also heard concern that a tools based training program is not a substitute for the kind of fundamental design education one would get in a degree program. However, UX designers are paid well even on a junior level, and with the way tuition prices are going at traditional colleges, I find I’m routing for the boot camps to become more like design guilds with apprenticeships and some kind of accredited certification. Center Centre offers a good model for a “master class” style of education. I would argue that if you do have a degree that is not in design (I have a BA in psychology and a MSLIS) and some work experience, all of that experience could be applicable to UX since UX is as much about understanding a business or consumer problem as it is about the solution design.

I don’t know the reputation of RED as it appears to be only in Toronto and Vancouver. So I would probably ask around at local Meetups or see if you can find out what kind of jobs graduates are getting. See if people in your LinkedIn network list the RED program have interesting jobs and contact a few for an informational interview.

As for self-teaching, I find courses at edX, Coursera and audacity to be a mixed bag. Some very good institutions and teachers produce good courses and some are not quite up to their name. Programs like the Interaction Design Foundation and UIE’s All You Can Learn Library are good because of the people behind the productions. And it’s much less expensive than attending a conference or workshop where the novelty of the experience and sheer volume of information can be overwhelming (though they are excellent networking opportunities. Our field is very welcoming).

How does a UX designer ask user groups to test their product?

Answered Jun 15

There are participant recruiting firms and online services that will help you vet and focus users for testing.

A client may have a department or group of employees they would like you to test the product on.

Guerilla testing is when you send teams out into the world and pull people aside to interview or try out a product.

For smaller questions you can pull someone aside at work or take a friend for coffee to get feedback.

I’ve also seen people recruit via social media, friends of friends, Meetup groups. I’ve turned a few Meetups into focus groups before.

You will usually want to offer an incentive to compensate users for their time. A small monetary stipend like $25–100 per session, depending on the length of time, or something smaller like Starbucks cards, sneak peek downloads, etc. Recruiting agencies can help with incentives.

Update: I wanted to add that I have a friend who also had good success with Mechanical Turk. I’ve never used them, but thought I’d add that since I’ve heard similar crowdsourcing methods can work for certain types of questions.

What are the ideal deliverables of a user interview?

Answered Jun 15

Pain points. What is it about the problem you are trying to solve or they way you approach your solution that users have the most trouble or frustration with? This can be issues with the solutions you are designing, those of a competitor or any other ways a user might be solpving problem or a need on their own.

Discovery. How are users finding solutions today? How are they finding your solution or solutions like yours? What are they reading, watching, who are they talking to? Where are ideal touchpoints where you can access that potential market?

Feedback. When you are interviewing users about your product or solution, what do they like and dislike about it? What is tolerable but could be better?

As for the format of the deliverable, video is very popular because it exposes nonverbal communication, such as body language, pitch, expressions, etc., that you don’t necessarily capture well in a written report. When delivering to the design team or stakeholders, you can pull out clips from interviews to illustrate a finding. Visualizations are also a good way to show a lot of data in a single artifact. Can you graph information, such as cost against another parameter like emotion? User research software and analytics companies have a lot of ways to visualize user research data.

What is the difference between UX and UI designer and web designer?

Answered Jun 12

A UX designer is concerned with the entire user experience. What motivates a user to use a product? What needs does the user have that causes them to try your product? What about the available solutions does the user find frustrating or incomplete? What about the product experience engages a user to use it again and again or to share it with others. They may create wireframe layouts, page flows, prototypes or focus on information architecture, UI design or more strategic documentation like user journeys and personas.

A UI designer is focused on the interface, specifically graphic controls (buttons, sliders, links), indicators, layout, error messaging, etc. and ensuring that they are visible, understandable, usable and accessible.

Web designer is somewhat of an archaic term. One might assume a web designer focuses specifically on browser based products, or that it is someone who does everything from design to development.

Are there any usability studies on alt text that people with visual disabilities find useful?

Answered Jun 9

The classic is Nielsen Norman’s 2001 study Beyond Alt Text: https://media.nngroup.com/media/reports/free/Usability_Guidelines_for_Accessible_Web_Design.pdf

This year Facebook released a study on Developing automatic-alt text for Facebook screen reader users

McEwan and Weerts did a meta study for British Computer Society in 2007 that mentions several alt-text accessibility studies http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hc07_sppaper18.pdf

How would you start UX in a company with no design culture if you’re the only designer?

Answered Jun 8

Read Leah Buley’s The User Experience Team of One – from Rosenfeld Media. She covers how to set up a UX practice in a company and methods of evangelizing the benefits of UX design and building culture. She also has a few virtual lectures at UIE’s All You Can Learn Library.

I’m a freelance front-end web developer and digital artist/designer. Should I keep my portfolios separate?

Answered Jun 5

I treat portfolios in a similar way as resumes. Do I have one resume that I use for every job I apply for? No. Unless you are applying for a cookie-cutter, entry level position, you need a different resume and possibly a different portfolio for each application. Every company faces a unique set of challenges. Each job is an opportunity to solve a different problem, and each application needs a different sales pitch tailored to that problem. If the job requires someone with strictly design skills, highlight design projects in your resume and your portfolio. If it is a mix of design and development, include a mix in your portfolio.

By “portfolio,” I am referring to the document you send to the hiring manager. It can be something you send in an email or attach to an application system. It might be a PDF, a video, animated graphic, or link to Dropbox or your website, but it is tailored specifically to that job application. Your public website (or LinkedIn or Dribbble page) should showcase your best work in the areas that you most want to work, and ideally on projects where your client or boss would recommend you. If your ideal job is strictly design, these should be the projects on your public website. You can always have a link to other types of work more deeply in your site.

There are certainly skeptics who believe that Da Vincis and unicorns don’t exist, and most people tend to excel more in one than the other. I’ve known people who do quite well with both, but you probably have a natural leaning. Go with that. There is always an opportunity to show more if the hiring manager is interested in seeing more.

Is it possible to have functional requirements if you’re working in UX?

Updated Jun 3

Gathering user requirements is an essential part of User Experience research for most projects. Discovering how a someone uses a tool, whether it fits all of the user’s needs for a given process, where there may be functional gaps, etc. help to determine if planned functions meet these needs, if current functions need tweaking or whether new functions should be added. The document you produce may not be quite as formal or detailed as in traditional engineering or software development projects. It depends on the team, what role you hand off your work to, and how complex the function is. It could be a written report, a flow diagram, a user journey map, an infographic, an animated video or a combination.

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The Occasional Mentor: How to Advance as a UX Professional

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. 

One of the things that makes a very good UX designer is developing empathy not just for the user but also for your entire team. Knowing what the user and your teammates can and cannot do, what frustrates them and how you as the designer can make their experience easier or more enjoyable is a key part of UX. What I have been doing to advance in the field is start to expand my professional development beyond the usual design conference or Agile sprint Meetup. I have started to attend conferences and networking meetings outside my specific field of IA/UX. With a mentor’s encouragement, I have even begun going to the kinds of events that may seem a little scary to the average designer, like cybersecurity, cloud computing and semiotics/philosophy groups.

My approach to these events going in is understanding that much of what I will see be gibberish at first. I once attended a “search engine usability” event at Columbia Business School that was literally Greek to me: slide after slide of computational algorithms peppered with Greek letters. At first I admit I felt way out place, but I decided to just absorb the atmosphere and observe the people in the classroom. A different feeling washed over me as I stepped into that observer role. These were people who quite literally speak a different language than me and who may have a similarl, “fish out of water” experience at a design-oriented Meetup. I once met a female programmer at a design sprint event who claimed to “think in code” and admitted that the sketching part of an exercise was difficult for her. I think she was doing a similar observation technique as the one I used at the Columbia lecture. That kind of self-reflection about your own experience versus the experience of those who are more (or less) comfortable in a given context can be useful when working with team members or users whose context may be equally foreign to you as a designer.

I’ve had similar experiences attending financial and human resources related events in my role as COO for a financial wellness startup (although these were at least usually in English). Being able to step into the role of an ethnographer or anthropologist without entirely objectifying the experience and humanity of the subject group–in this case fellow conference attendees–is a great way to develop as an advanced UX professional.

Another thing you can do to develop as an advanced UX professional is to mentor another designer. I started mentoring in my local UXPA program after having been a mentee in the same program last year, which has been very valuable and rewarding. I don’t believe I was consciously trying to experience mentoring as a user of mentoring services when I joined as a mentee. I had real needs for which a mentor would be valuable. But the experience allowed me to feel empathy for the mentee when I became a mentor myself.

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The Best User Experience Education Programs in NYC

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity.

What are the best User Experience education programs based in New York? Are there any college accredited programs?

NYU has a degree in its Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) which I believe is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Masters program in the field.

School of Visual Arts has a highly regarded MFA program in Interaction Design. The founder Liz Danzico is now head of UX at NPR.

Pratt School of Information just started offering a masters in Information Experience Design (M.S.). I took the courses for a UX concentration for my MSLIS degree before the program was formalized in 2015. The teaching staff is quite good, with many industry leaders in adjunct roles. Pratt also offers a design BFA and MFA that includes UX.

Parsons School of Design at the New School offers undergraduate and graduate programs that cover UX but are along more traditional disciplines (communications design, product design, industrial design, design and technology, transdisciplinary design). The idea is that UX is necessary within all these areas.

There are several professional programs that offer Certificate/boot camp courses. Recruiters are mixed on the value of the programs, but they are good continuing education options or for transferring into the field. They are not highly regarded as a replacement for a BA, though could be an alternative to a Masters degree.

An alternative might be to enter into a traditional Library and Information Science program. There are a few accredited LIS programs in the NYC area, including Pratt Institute, Queens College, St. Johns University and Long Island University in New York City and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. These programs teach the fundamentals of knowledge organization, information seeking behavior, taxonomic theory and related technologies, and have a growing interest in providing courses in user experience topics.

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Is 38 Too Old to Start a Career as a UX Designer?

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity.

A lot of what makes a good UX designer/researcher/architect are the soft skills that you only really develop having been in the working world for a while, so a 38 year old is at an advantage in that respect. Ability to listen, communicate, sketch out ideas (you don’t even need to draw well), and understand the goal of a user and how it aligns with the needs of a product or business. Ability to prioritize user needs against the goals of the business and the technical feasibility of developing the product. You don’t need to be able to code, but it helps to understand some core capabilities of the development team to get a sense of whether what you are asking them to do is feasible within the project’s budget and time constraints.

As for technical skills, products and platforms change, but it’s good to have a strong foundational understanding of UX and general design principles. UX Matters and Boxes and Arrows are good online resources. Books like Morville/Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think and Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things are classics. There are many more titles at Rosenfeld Media and O’Reilly Media on more specific topics like mental models, story mapping, enterprise UX, design critique, etc. and many other publishers in that space. There are dozens of meetups and organizations like User Experience Professionals Association, IA Institute and Interaction Design Association that have local and international conferences and dozens of local Meetups.

Look at job ads for specific tools they are using in positions that interest you. It used to be they were always requiring Visio and Omnigraffle skiils, sometimes Axure, but now Sketch, Balsamiq and InVision are very popular, along with good old Adobe Creative Suite. But there is always going to be another tool, and once you know a few, the learning curve gets less and less steep. There are probably a half dozen new, “essential” tools that came out just while I am typing this. Richard Saul Wurman noted in his plenary at the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix that the UX designer’s penchant for focusing too much on tools is problematic. Tools change but Understanding the User’s experience is more important.

Public speaking ability is often described in job posts as a plus, and I know tons of self-described introverts who do this and well. A lot of good speaking comes from good listening skills. Persuasion skills are also good for getting buy in around an idea.

You should have a portfolio that highlights some of the above, including design samples/mockups/UI graphics if you’ve done some, whether for work or pro bono/fun side projects. It doesn’t need to be a lot. (I know I have way too many on mine). Include descriptions of projects that highlight evidence of your soft skills, because that will set you and your experience apart.