"I have to leave. My girlfriend's students are putting on a performance of The Little Mermaid in Harlem. It's gonna be so cute, I'm gonna have to go home and punch a pillow after."
Many of you might be familiar with 52 Weeks of UX. Written by Senior UX Designers, Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer, 52WUX (which I giggled at after typing) is a really delightful website.
I'd read about the site a number of times in preparation for UXDI but I'd never taken a look at it. With some free time before bed, I decided to check it out and before I knew it, I was five weeks deep in just twenty minutes.
The site is composed of 52 "weeks" of articles, with each week comprised of two very brief UX articles. Each article takes no more than five minutes to read. In fact, they're hardly 'articles'; abstracts might be a better word.
Regardless, 52WUX solves a real problem for me as a aspiring UX Designer. I haven't found a great resource that provides quick-hitting, high-level information in such a concise (and aesthetically pleasant) way.
While I'm sure I'd find an article about the latest interaction design trends in Chinese mobile apps interesting, I benefit much more from Porter and Brewer's conceptual pieces about forgiveness or utility.
I believe it was the great Luke Miller who once said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution.
Or maybe that was Einstein.
My memory fails me.
I've now completed a full week of UXDI, and although Thursday night felt something like this,
I live to see another week.
Here are some of the key things I took away from the first full week:
1. Focus feverishly on the problem: The better you understand the problem, the easier it is to craft an appropriate solution. Make cars, not faster horses. Also, anything Einstein and Lincoln are down with, I can get behind.
2. Understand your users: You are not the user. I imagine that this simple concept is one of the things executives struggle with most. Being so close to a product, one assumes that they know exactly how and why it's used. But until that research is done, we're building a product on assumptions.
3. "If you're not involving your users, you're not practicing User Centered Design. If you're not involving your users, you're not crafting a user experience." Yup.
4. The Four Lists Model: By understanding our users' context, behaviors, pains, and pleasures, we can more easily empathize and understand their problems. Understanding problems = good.
5. "Why?" : Asking why over, and over, and over, we arrive at a much different problem than we were originally tasked with. We arrive at a much more fundamental problem- hopefully the root cause of the initially perceived problem.
6. User interviewing is an art: that I haven't perfected. In user interviewing, I find myself inclined to have a casual conversation with the user. "Yeah, totally! Me too! I mean, uh, tell me more about that." I really enjoy the exploratory aspect of interviews, I just need to make sure I remain unbiased and allow the user to guide the conversation.
7. User flows as a journey: For our first projects, our user flows were all clean and well-mapped out. Still, I can't help but want to the see the flow of a user who gets lost on a site. I imagine seeing an 80-item flowchart for a simple, core functionality of a product might change a stakeholder's view on a specific feature.
8. Storyboarding: It's a lot more humanizing than I imagined it would be. Painting a tangible narrative around a behavior is quite powerful. But I can't draw. Oh well.
9. "Enlightened trial and error triumphs over the planning of a lone genius." Yup.
10. Fidelity is tied to recruiting: Lower fidelity sketches require lower fidelity users. The greater the fidelity, the more legitimate the testing demographic should be.
11. Shortcuts for power users: Not the biggest issue in the UX field, but something I find very interesting. Offering advanced users special functionality: a simple, nice user experience for your most regular users.
Here are some of my favorite takeaways from today's class:
1. UX as a philosophy: Technical requirements are important. Wireframing, prototyping, and coding are compulsory. However, thinking and theorizing as a UX designer is paramount.
2. Lifting as you climb: Not specific to UX, but a valuable ground rule for life. Supporting others is rewarding and the right thing to do. UX Designers should be empathetic and cooperative. Lift as you climb.
3. Feedback as a dialogue: Feedback is not a one-way street. By making sure that feedback is clarifying discourse, more refined feedback can be reached.
4. Feedback as a vehicle for understanding your own work: In a similar vein, providing feedback (and making sure that it's a dialogue) can lead to insights about your own processes and products. Again, empathy.
5. Teaching intuition: Certain products simply require a learning curve before they can become explicitly intuitive. As a Blackberry to Apple convert, the inability of others to identify the different "share" buttons was notable.
6. The innate vs. learned brain: There are certain symbols, shapes, sizes, and visual cues that require no explanation. Larger items stand out. Shadow represents depth. Implicit emotions are felt without thought. However, much of what we know and accept as universally understood is actually learned. To paraphrase Luke, "All of your names for trees are bullshit."
7. Google is complex: We accept that the Google Overlords know all, but until you stop and think about the complexity of their data-driven systems, it doesn't totally sink in.
8. Spotify's clever UX: Framed by the UX shortcomings of Shazam and Pandora, the use of sponsored playlists represents an ideal culmination of User Needs and Business Goals early on in my understanding of the field.
9. Grounded theory: Something I stressed at my past job. If you set out to prove something, you'll find ways to prove it. Don't be self serving. Be exploratory and open to data. Kill your darlings.
10. Look at behaviors, not opinions: Another tenet I tried to apply in the past. Naturally, people want to answer things "correctly" and give opinions that logically make sense given their understanding of a situation. However, people are chronically bad at self-report. Actions speak louder than words.
11. UX Designers "live at the top": The best UX designers can do everything well, but also have the ability to dive deeply into specific tasks.
We finished up the day with our first official User Experience assignment. Scott Harris, Mike Rembach, and I headed down to the Union Square subway and watched people use the Metro Card machine.
In our brief observations, there appeared to be two fairly distinct sets of users: those who knew what they were doing and those who had no idea what they were doing. Clearly, purchasing a Metro Card requires a learned intuitiveness.
Pain points included long lines for the machines caused by inability to perform tasks as well as technical interface issues. Users did not always know the difference between "adding value" and "adding time." Users did not always know when to insert their card and money, trying before the machine prompted. The touch screen information kiosk went completely unused, which we hypothesized was due to it's lack of affordances or signifiers as an outlet for information. I believe that a very large, simply explained poster could alleviate some of these problems and keep people off of the line until they're prepared to get what they need. Additionally, further explanation and better language on the interface itself could prove beneficial.
Fun Question: What is the user persona of a subway-rider? It's such an incredibly diverse demographic.
This "research" was quite fun and really got me thinking. As a lifer in New York, the purchasing of a Metro Card is such an understood transaction. Watching people flail with it like a child equipped with a Rubiks Cube really emphasized the importance of understanding how people with different backgrounds approach similar problems. Talking through the process with Mike, who's been in New York City for less than a week, and Scott (three years) was also an enlightening collaborative experience.
I imagined I'd get a tumblr at some point. I've already moved to Brooklyn and take pictures of my food so really, it felt like the logical next step.
I could already see it: Humorous cat GIFs and trite sayings about life juxtaposed with photos of mountains. Kurt Cobain quotes and cryptic pictures of art. The possibilities were endless; I'd have the interwebs in the palm of my hand.
However, Monday night was UXDI Orientation. We were asked to create tumblr accounts to document our process of becoming UX Designers. It was a harsh reality, but at that point I knew I'd have to delay my scheme for digital ascendancy. "Best laid plans," as they say.
Notwithstanding, this tumblr-journal project sounds like a fantastic idea. I look forward to tracking my development and using a fun medium to navigate what will surely be a hectic and fulfilling three months.
So... me, right. Well, my name is Jesse and I'm 23 years old. I like long walks on the beach and a well-aged cabernet. I was born and raised in New York, recently moving from Bayside, Queens to Bushwick, Brooklyn. I'm a self-deprecating Knicks fan and lover of most things sports. I captain and play for a club Ultimate Frisbee team that plays competitively around the country.
Upon graduating from Connecticut College in 2013, I got a job with a social media start-up where I worked on content creation and marketing. However, I always found myself most drawn to hearing and implementing user feedback alongside our product manager. And so, I decided to throw myself into it at GA.
I expect UXDI to be challenging and time consuming. To loosely quote James Cobb, a UXDI alum who spoke at a info session last month, "You just have to accept that you're not really gonna see your friends for three months." Oh, uh, well. Less, money to spend on Christmas gifts?
I also expect the course to be transformative and rewarding. Even just the prework texts have changed the way I examine objects, experiences, and to some extent, the everyday folks in my life.
I'm predictably anxious but many of these nerves were calmed at orientation when, to my surprise, I found out that all of my classmates were not, in fact, seasoned graphic designers with 15 years of coding experience as I'd come to believe through a series of recurring nightmarish daydreams.
Anyway! That's all I got. But just for good measure.
Jesse
Experiencing Experience @jessemoskowitz-blog - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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