Category: Quora

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The Occasional Mentor: On Making Decisions and Getting a Job During a Pandemic

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A semi-regular column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in November.

Why do some people randomly do things to upset and confuse you right before you have to make a significant decision?

November 15, 2020

Whether they are deliberately doing it or not, there is some basic psychology and behavioral economics traps that can get in the way of making a decision that is in your best interest. Not having the facts, irrelevant facts or even having too many facts or too many choices can affect your ability to make a reasonable decision.

A famous psychology experiment explores a concept known as the “paradox of choice.” Supermarket customers were offered to taste test a variety of jellies at a supermarket. Those who were presented with six choices were more likely to buy than those presented with 24. Why? Providing too many choices can obscure the value of each individual part and make it difficult to compare one choice to another. Airlines use this when they give you a base cost and nickel and dime you for everything else. Auto salesman have been doing this for decades. Sometimes an abundance of choices causes you to accept (and pay for) too many variables. Other times, it leaves you putting off the decision altogether.

There could also be what you call random things that have little to nothing to do with your decision or that are things you may have little control over. Think about the decision you are trying to make and who it affects, and how it affects them and you. Try to eliminate anything that comes from outside that circle, especially if you know reasonably that you have no control over these things.

Here is a good mind-mapping method that will help bring you closer to a decision:

Write everything down, in concentric circles from the most affected to the least. Begin make connections and start crossing things off as a factor if they don’t connect. Do the same with people who are part of or not part of the decision, especially if they are coming up as possible factors. It’s good to do this in concentric circles so that the most affected people (or things) are in the center and the next level is in a circle outside of the center and the next one another ring further. Draw connection lines and note where those connections are weak or nonexistent. Cross off anyone or anything who is way on the outside or part of a weak or broken connection. Take what remains and draw a new set of circles and examine it. Things should start to come clearer.

Will COVID-19 make entry-level web design jobs harder to get?

November 15, 2020

It’s going to take a lot of effort and network building to land an entry level job in these COVID times. My advice is to try to attend online design meetups and join design slacks (google the phrase, there are many) that make time for interaction, not just webinars that have speakers or panels with no interaction. With the entire world online and hosting events, you don’t need to stick to your local area right now. At the online events and discussions, take note of people who are working in areas you enjoy or want to develop more and reach out to them for a private conversation. Be sure to follow up!

Get creative. Look for start up organizations and incubators at local universities. Look for nonprofits that need to get their holiday funding message out. If you are a graduate of a university or Bootcamp, connect with the placement or alumni office. Alumni are often willing to go out of their way to help someone whose shoes they used to wear.

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The Occasional Mentor: On Computing Resources in Digital Humanities

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly-ish column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in July.

What Should I Learn About Computer Science for Studying History with Digital Humanities

Answered on July 25, 2018

I recommend visiting HASTAC.org. It is a group of academics and practitioners working in digital humanities. There are resources including local events, national conferences, blog posts, discussion lists and trainings.

You can look for digital humanities institutes and departments at local universities to see if they offer public programming. Many do. Where I live in NYC, Columbia and CUNY Graduate Center offer public programs. CUNY has an open access social media platform for digital humanities. Their digital humanities resource guide is pretty comprehensive: CUNY Academic Commons Wiki Archive.

I’ve seen some pretty interesting uses of text analysis, 3D printing and modeling to analyze historic texts and artifacts. Researchers at Rutgers used 3D imagery to scan Roman coins that they 3D printed. The scans offered a finer representation of the relief than the naked eye can see and the 3D prints (similar to photocopies of paper documents) allowed people to hold and examine the object without damaging the original. When I was in the Digital Humanities program at Pratt Institute School of Information I made a presentation on digital tools for archaeology. We learned about a professor at Indiana University who recreated an Ancient Greek archaeology site in Second Life, complete with a toga wearing avatar of himself as a guide. (I’ll add links if I can find them).

Text analytics and statistical/rendering software (like R) can help examine documents by displaying frequency of terms or associating phrases. Researchers have used these tools to render social networks or do sentiment analysis, for example one could study court decisions or news articles to see how action and opinion related to a social or political topic changes over time. Some basic Python, JSON and statistics are helpful.

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The Occasional Mentor: On UX Certificates vs Conferences

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly-ish column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May.

Is it helpful to get a UX certificate or go to a UX conference as a starting point for a college undergraduate who wants to work on UX later but has no experience yet?

May 26, 2018

I am going on be the contrarian and say absolutely go to a conference or a meetup that is aligned with your UX interest. A certificate program will probably get you some basic skills, but so would reading books and working on pro bono projects on your own. (See one of my previous answers on certificates). For someone just starting out, it’s the interaction with other attendees as much as the talks and workshops that help build your knowledge of what and who you need to know to get a job in the field. And most conferences offer student discounts or lower-cost workshops so you don’t necessarily have to pay full price to get a benefit. Depending on where you live, Meetups can be plentiful and free or cheap. Online interest groups like Designers Guild on Facebook or UX Mastery on Slack are also good ways to find a community. UX Mastery even has a mentoring program.

Keep in mind that the most valuable UX design skills are soft skills like communication, presentation and ability to make insights. Design tools are always evolving so what you learn at a boot camp may not be marketable in a few years.

Some positive things about taking a certificate course. You meet your competition and potential future coworkers. A formal program may be confidence-building if you fear you don’t have basic understanding of what UX designers do and how they do it and aren’t comfortable picking up these skills on your own. But do some research. Not all certificates or boot camps have a good reputation. Meetups and other UX events are good places to ask about programs in your area.

Even better if your university offers design courses that you can take as part of your degree. Also, look for intro level cognitive psychology and ethnography courses (typically anthropology classes that cover interviewing skills). If your school has business or entrepreneur programs, ask if they offer any design or customer discovery workshops. Sometimes these programs are open to students schoolwide.

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On Pricing Tables and Mysteriously Familiar Background Graphics

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 took a break in from posting in January. Following are selected questions I answered in February.

Should website homepages have a pricing table?

February 23, 2018

If your users come to your website specifically to see pricing, or if pricing is your main competitive differentiator and the value of your offering is well understood, then by all means, feel free to place a pricing table on the home page. A lot of web hosting sites will place their prices on the home page because they market themselves as a value option for what is essentially a commodity. However different users may have a different understanding of what a good value is for the product or service you offer.

Seeing prices immediately may turn some people off. It could seem tacky, or if the value of the offering is not clear, it could seem expensive, irrelevant or even confusing. You would need to test with users to know for sure.

What I tend to see most often for services and software websites is a “pricing” page in the main navigation, with the home page reserved for display or walkthrough of the product features. If the user is convinced the product does what they need, then they will look for prices. The pricing page would have the matrix showing various packages, but sometimes it will only have a link to contact the sales team, especially if you offer custom services or have a pricing plan that isn’t easily displayed on a grid. Again different users will respond differently depending on the kind of product and their needs and budget.

On the other hand, if the product is retail and you run regular sales, seeing these prices or a link to a sales circular would be expected. Having the sales prices on the home page could be a way to grab sales for the featured item and draw in the user for more purchases (with a link to similar or “customers also bought” items).

A User Test would be a way to figure out what your site visitors respond to.

Who creates the apparently similar background images for slack.com, gusto.com and lattice.com?

February 17, 2018

I think must be very easy to find these images. I recently hired a designer to produce a flyer and they used a blue background graphic that seemed off brand, but very familiar. So I opened Slack to ask my partner to check it out and there was the background in orange in the Slack interface. I’m not sure where the designer got the image, but needless to say, we didn’t accept the design.

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UX Portfolios, Awards, Priorities and Why Is the User Often “Female”

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 October.

What is the most important thing in UX design?

Answered October 31, 2017

The User.

As an in-house UX designer that is about to change a job, how do you update your portfolio? Do you add your in-house work/findings to it or work on other projects?

Answered October 25, 2017

Good advice so far on creating a portfolio and getting permission to include materials. And also a reminder that even if you are not considering a change in jobs it is always a good idea to keep up to date on portfolio projects as they are completed so you don’t have to scramble to remember what you did months or years later when you decide to look for something new.

You still need to ask permission to include work in a personal portfolio, but a smart design department will understand the value of keeping a record of quality work performed as an example for future projects, staff, clients or the public. Even better if you can get your manager to let you present your work at an industry conference. Often slide decks are made available publicly via Slidesharre or the conference library, offering an additional record of your (and your company’s) best work.

Why is the term “user” in most IT books a female (at least in the web design related literature)?

Answered October 24, 2017

One of the ways to develop empathy for your users when designing a product is to introduce stories, scenarios and personas that reflect a broad view of the types of users you are designing for, so that you can be sensitive to their needs within the category of users they represent. In writing, referring to the user with a female pronoun triggers empathy, not necessarily because it’s female but because it’s different, and therefore noticeable. We are rather used to the generic, male pronoun form in writing and even thinking about people in general, so when we see the female pronoun it strikes us as something noticeably different. We start to pay attention to “her” as a person and not just a generic “user.” It’s kind of a neat, and pretty subtle, psychological trick.

It seems weird that the same button initiates “publicly sharing” and ‘privately sending’ something on my phone. Is this a UX flaw?

Answered October 19, 2017

If what you are referring to is the Share icon, the little box with an arrow pointing up, then think of it more as a “Process This” button instead of Share or Send. What it does is pass information about the item you are starting on to a program that will process it in some way. If you select a social program it will share it, if you select a file drive it will save it, if you select a mail client it will send it, if you select a password manager, it will give you the password, etc. in other words “Take this and do something with it.”

Where can I find great, award winning examples of UI design for responsive websites that are heavy on data (lots of tables, charts, graphs, et cetera)?

Answered October 13, 2017

First, look at the awards. Here are some big ones:

UX Awards: The Premier Awards for Exceptional Digital Experience

The Webby Awards

Best Responsive Design Websites (Awwwards)
Next look at related awards that focus on info graphics, visualization or data science. (These may or may not be websites). Here are a couple:

Data & Analytics Excellence Awards (Gartner)

Tableau Awards

Data Impact Awards | Cloudera

AIGA Awards Archive

Then look at “Best of” articles. They may not be Awards but are curated lists to get you inspired. Here’s the first one that came up in my search. There are dozens like this.

20 Best Responsive Website Design Examples of 2016, Social Driver

As a UX designer, how do you balance what is best for the user and what can realistically be developed? Do you compromise UX and push towards a deadline or do you fight for the user?

Answered October 13, 2017

We do occasionally have deadlines or budget limitations that force a compromise among a list of needed UX improvements. You can prioritize improvements by applying a severity metric and choosing the ones that will have the most impact, saving others for later sprints. You can also prioritize the easier fixes, particularly those that provide data that support other improvements in a future sprint. If planned well, some of these fixes will improve traffic (or sales or flow) well enough to justify the next set of sprints. Ultimately as the UX designer, your influence may be limited to what you can convince the product team lead to decide. As long as you are advocating for the user, you are doing your job.

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The Occasional Mentor: Career Advice — College Degrees and the Long, Post-Interview Wait

I answer questions about Careers, Mentorship 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 October.

Are you going to be an unsuccessful person without a college degree?

Answered October 13, 2017

It depends, of course, on what success means to you. A lot of successful actors and artists don’t have degrees. All successful doctors and lawyers do. And while you can be quite successful as a plumber or electrician without a degree, the overwhelming majority of business leaders have one. The reason people keep trotting out the degree-less Zuckerberg, Jobs and Gates is because – try to name one more. It’s not that easy. And by the way, did you drop out of Harvard?

You may be tremendously rich and successful without a college degree, but if so you would also be very rare. A college degree will get you ahead faster in most professions that require it or some level of certification. With a degree, you qualify for any job that does or doesn’t require one, but without it you won’t qualify for any of the jobs that do, so you are limiting your options. Without a degree you will be competing not just for jobs but also for promotions or for clients. You will need to fight to stand out and suffer not even getting the call because it’s an easy way to narrow down a long list of applicants.

Not all jobs require degrees. I’ve seen many government jobs that require a masters degree that will accept a certain number of years of experience along with a lesser degree, say a BA with 5 years of experience, or no degree but ten years of supervisory experience. You would need to calculate the cost of the degree and potentially lost wages over 5–6 years of studying against starting at a lower salary class and working many more years to qualify.

It is true that in some fields, particularly trades, where a degree not required, having one may actually hold you back. In this case, your competition for jobs has already spent four years perfecting his craft while you were in school. It is also true that the significant level of student loan debt you may accumulate can hold back your financial future, especially if you end up in a job that doesn’t pay well or didn’t require a degree in the first place, or if you struggle (either to pay tuition or academically) and fail to graduate.

I went for a job interview over a week ago and have not heard anything. I forgot to ask what their timeline for the job was. Does this mean I probably didn’t get the job?

Answered October 3, 2017

A week or even a week and a half is the perfect time to call or email to follow up, ask about your standing, offer an update on anything you may have discussed that was in progress during the interview or to forward some interesting article or news that is relevant to the work.

Getting beyond two or three weeks is somewhat long but I would still follow up in the same tone as if it had only been a week. As others have said, sometime the process does take long depending on the number of applicants or uniqueness of the role.

Beyond a month or two, they may have passed on you because it seems that you have passed on them. But there still could be a chance at that point that they haven’t settled on a hire or have changed the need or requirements somewhat. At that point I would make a simple request for a decision, i.e., has one been made, so I can get feedback and move on.

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The Best Time to Bring in a UX Expert

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 is a question I answered in September.

When is the best time to bring in a UX expert, when you are first building a product or after you have user data?

September 28, 2017

I work as a UX consultant on a digital ID standard. One of the areas I am researching is usability of identity management products and services. Some of the companies I have interviewed are very small, one or two person startups that do not have budget for outside expertise and others are very large, nationally known brands that themselves have not allocated budget for UX testing. In some cases the product managers and developers are very interested in user experience of their products while others interpret “user” as an electronic agent rather than a human at a computer or device, so invest little to no dollars on UX.

Those who do understand the importance of UX, particularly products intended for the mass consumer market or those for purposes involving repetitive or multitasking/heavy attention load activity that may lead to potential worker injury, for example, will follow usability guidelines such as NNGroup/Jakob Nielsen/Don Norman’s research or actively seek outside UX expertise. At the very least, all user facing products should do some UX studies, sit with users and stakeholders who understand user needs, complaints and feedback and identify key user tasks and potential negative outcomes. Do these exercises at every step of development particularly pre launch and when introducing changes (even if they seem minor).

For our financial wellness tools at Decision Fish, we tested with dozens of prospective users very early, well before launching our first web app, when it was still just an Excel spreadsheet! We did surveys and interviews on how people manage their finances. We watched people use all kinds of personal finance tools from paper to software to just thinking it through. We surveyed them about their pain points. We observed individuals and couples as they walked through our alpha modules and asked them directly to tell us what we are doing wrong. We pivoted quite a bit based on user input.

We even offered financial coaching sessions to prospective users and partners to get deeper feedback into individual concerns. In doing so, we discovered underrepresented use categories that challenged some of the assumptions we made in our design. We collected contact info on interested users for a beta test once we launch and will be offering it as a pilot to companies and partners who are interested in providing it as an employee benefit.

All of the data and feedback we gathered in these sessions helped us to develop our product and adjust our assumptions of how to present information and guide our decision-making tool. All this has happened well before we had actual user data to analyze. That will be our next step, to create a plan for analyzing and learning from our users when we’ve launched and have data to look at. But we will continue to observe, coach and survey users, because we expect continual improvements and adjustments. Because we want our decision tool to be the best it can be for our users.

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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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On UX Deliverables, Hardware and Being a UX Designer and a Fine Artist

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 May.

What are the UX design deliverables?

Answered May 24

Early in the history is ASIST’s Information Architecture Summit, there was a Canadian company called Nform that created a deck of 26 cards with a different deliverable on each. Every attendee got a deck of 26 of the same cards and your job during the event was to find 25 people with the other cards to trade. They did it a couple years in a row, which means over 50 deliverables represented and counting.

There are so many UX deliverables, it would be difficult to list them all in a single post. Some deliverables are meant to be presented to clients and some are used internally and presented to teams to understand challenges, user segments and potential design treatments. As teams move toward agile, rather than waterfall design methods, clients are seeing fewer deliverables and more results.

Some of my favorite internal deliverables are user journey maps, user videos and good old wireframes.

  • User journey maps are great for identifying the motivations, touch points, and blocks. My latest favorite book on the subject is Donna Lichaw’s The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Lovefrom Rosenfeld Media. Story maps can help you outline minute processes within an application, all the way up to the basic human need your product is addressing. It is so simple but very powerful.
  • I like user research videos because they tell so much more than a hundred lines of findings in a spreadsheet. The passion and frustration that real users show in video are priceless.
  • Wireframes are so old school, but essential for communicating design layout. Even pencil sketches are pretty amazing communication tools. There is a reason one of the most popular tools out there today is called Sketch.

Want to dive in more? Check out the Deliverables and Documentation articles on on Boxesandarrows.com.

What is the best hardware option for a UX designer?

Answered May 21

I get by with my trusty MacBook Air and an iPad mini with retina screen for most design, draw and present functions.

Since I have a home business, I don’t have access to a lot of fancy equipment for production and testing, but I don’t really need fancy. I have an iPhone, but also test on my husband’s Google phone and my kid’s Androids. There are many good drawing and presentation programs that work well on iPad for my purposes. But you may want the larger screen for drawing. My MacBook Air is portable, light and travels well. My husband uses a Dell laptop with a touch screen, which is good for presentations and analytics. He’s more of the spreadsheet person. It works great with InDesign, Microsoft and Adobe products. We use a lot of cloud applications, like OneNote, Dropbox, InVision, Google Docs, Slack, etc to communicate with our team, which is international, and these work on all our devices. If any of the newer MacBooks have a touch screen it’s a nice feature. We have a few older model Macs and PCs with old versions of browsers which we use, very occasionally, for testing.

As for specific design programs, Sketch is a popular for UX design, but right now I believe it only runs on a Mac. There are other good programs for drawing but if you want to learn Sketch, you need a Mac at least for now. I don’t know a lot about motion graphics and don’t do a lot of processing, but am pretty sure my MacBook wouldn’t have the power of computers with better game engines. Someone else may be able to speak to that. My daughter is happy with her Alienware laptop for 3D rendering and game modding, but that’s more than most UX people do. I have a friend who renders massive amounts of Geospatial data and video processing and uses an enormous Alienware machine and 40 pounds of additional equipment that he wheels around in a cart. You probably won’t need that….

Can you be UX designer and fine artist at the same time?

Answered May 12

Yes. I have a friend, Amy Bassin, who is a UX designer and also exhibits fine art photography at shows in New York City and has worked in documentary film as well. One of her photographs was exhibited in a “show” curated for the space shuttle Endeavour and kept the astronauts company for the mission. My husband, a former banker, also has exhibited at galleries in NYC.

One doesn’t need to limit their work to their day job. If making art moves you, make art.