seeKing UX

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time. >Leonard Bernstein

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"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard"

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"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard"

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#cricketbar did not sleep, so Vanessa did not sleep. Instead we watched the sun rise and listened to #portugaltheman. Now Vanessa is punch drunk - possibly drunk drunk - it's tough to tell. #realtalk (at Scott Circle)

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Late nights, hard work, so many ideas, these hoodlums were the best team for #project3 #UXDI #uxdi5 #UX #mightydUX (at General Assembly Washington DC)

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They let us draw on the walls. I like it mucho. Project #3 #uxdi5 #mightydUX (at General Assembly Washington DC)

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#networking or something #startupgrind @1776dc (at 1776)

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Be Brave @ CHIEF (at Agency CHIEF)

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UXDI Project #2 Insights

Yesterday I presented the project I’ve been consumed with for the past two weeks. Bed Bath & Beyond doesn’t know it yet, but I spent an unreal amount of brain power deliberating their business model and website usability functions. I even built them a shiny new Polyvore-like project planning tool. For real. I’m pretty sure that they will find my process write-up and my microsite prototype and thank me profusely for having spent sleepless nights considering their confusing navigation and busy home page so closely.

I learned so much over the last two weeks - most of it hasn’t really marinated into tangible knowledge - but I’ve been told that’s normal and that continuing to use these new skills will cement them into my psyche for decades to come. My UX lessons, however, paled in comparison to what I learned about myself. Yesterday, it was disheartening to finish my 9 minute presentation and feel like I didn’t meet the basic requirements outlined in the project brief. Especially on the other side of a number of sleepless nights. 

I’ve always thought that if I focused on something wholeheartedly, I could be excellent at it. What did I learn, oh Internet land?

I learned that I have time management breakdowns. Before, my time management breakdowns were that I procrastinated, and then used my formidable bullshit skills to save the day. I’m pretty decent at bullshit. But this experience was new: I wasn’t procrastinating, I was staying up until 4am obsessing about my navigation layout and if the homepage was usable. But effort says nothing about the quality and intelligence of where that effort is directed. I got lost in all of the information that was being thrown my way, and I didn’t piece out what was critical and what was secondary before diving in way deeper than I had time for. I was tinkering around on things that weren’t crucial for functionality. Which, you know, is an important thing for a User Experience Designer to focus on. Or so I hear.

In the grand scheme of my User Experience Design Immersive, learning about my time management breakdowns was not a waste of time. Quite the opposite. An insight like this is an opportunity to behave differently and try something new. Monday we dive into Project #3, and I’m excited to have a fresh start and try this again! Now, to sleep.

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E-Commerce & Usable Style Features

This past week I’ve been trying to understand how an e-commerce site effectively offers a feature (or multiple features) to help customers shop based on a style or a look. I’m working on a project to create a mock microsite for Bed Bath & Beyond. It will enable a customer to browse based on style and to create shopping lists and budgets for decorating a room or an entire home (which in my case would be a room - heyo studio apartment living!). Initially, I didn’t think it would be quite the undertaking that it has become. My viewpoint was one of a user, one that hadn’t considered how much thought and intention sites like One King’s Lane had put into developing features.

One King’s Lane was an obvious initial research point. While this brand has a slightly different business model and a substantially more wealthy client base than Bed Bath & Beyond, the design of the content is pretty well done. The landing page says a few things to me:

Shopping here is safe - you can return things.

You could easily spend hours browsing different looks that OKL has curated. The image above is a truncated version of the “Events” offered on the home page, with the option to see more Events on another page.

I liked the way the top menu was designed to keep track of my favorites. You can easily see that there’s a number next to the heart icon, and that I have something in my cart. When you hover over either of those, you get more information displayed in a clear way.

Upon scrolling down, there are a few more ways to shop.

You can shop by room or Our Shops, and then you can also shop by category. OKL also establishes itself as a thought leader in the high end home decor industry with their blog and their social media accounts. 

I found this helpful for a number of reasons. I’m in the beginning stages of putting my microsite together, and the task of designing something from scratch was overwhelming me with ideas. One King’s Lane does have some differences from Bed Bath & Beyond which will make some parts of their design irrelevant (they have a large number of one-of-a-kind items, for example), but they are extremely effective in letting a customer pick how they want to shop. A challenge I’m seeing now is the one of accounting for budget shoppers. One of Bed Bath & Beyond’s key customers is the college student looking to decorate a dorm room. To them, budget is paramount. Despite this discrepancy in target demographics, taking a look at One King’s Lane has been a helpful starting point for my comparative research.

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Sleep deprived celebrations last night {Up to no good} #uxdi5 #mightydUX

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The look of four immensely relieved idiots. Project #2 is for the books! #crushedit #nosleep #needbednow #hakunanapata #UX #UXDI #uxdi5 #mightydUX (at General Assembly Washington DC)

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Crunch time on project 2. Send help. #mightydUX #uxdi5 #UXDI @1776dc #UX (at 1776)

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Tuesday vibes. Still obsessed with my @toastmade cover #UXDI #uxdi5 #mightydUX (at General Assembly Washington DC)

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The First Rule of UX

“You cannot not communicate. Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate.”—Paul Watzlawick’s First Axiom of Communication

This is the first rule of UX. Everything a designer does affects the user experience. From the purposeful addition of a design element to the negligent omission of crucial messaging, every decision is molding the future of the people we design for.

As such, one of the primary goals of any good designer is communicating the intended message…the one that leads to a positive user experience. The copy-writing, the color of your text, the alignment of form labels, using all-caps or going lowercase on those navigation links—even the absence of a design pattern—are all part of this communication.

Knowing this, we can ask (and hopefully answer) the question, “Does this element support or contradict what I am trying to communicate to the user?” And by asking this you will find yourself refining and improving the little things; the things that often go unsaid or unnoticed, that ultimately make up the user’s experience.

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This is such a powerful message inside and outside of user experience. 

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Sketchbook + sunshine + best friend = hopefully the ideal recipe to vastly improve my project. #UXDI #UXDI5 (at Scott Circle)

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The first post

Welcome to my blog! Today is June 4th, and after exhaustive research and soul searching, I've just solidified my enrollment in the summer cohort of General Assembly's User Experience Design Immersive.

*deep breath*

What this means for me:

1. I'll give my two weeks notice for my current job next Friday. 2. I start the pre-work for my course tonight. 3. My course will start Monday, June 29th. It will end Friday, September 4th. 4. Life is going to look very different this time next month. 5. I have no clue what life is going to look like this time next year. 6. I'm completely lit up by #4 and #5.

How I got here:

When 2015 began, I didn't even know that there was a field called User Experience Design. I did know that I was increasingly unfulfilled working as an Executive/Marketing Assistant for a professional services firm. As a general rule, I like having a voice, I like the collaborative process, I like problem solving. I didn't feel like I was in a position where those things were expected or even possible. I stumbled across User Experience when I was looking for jobs. I had walked my dog past a start-up here in DC (based out of San Francisco) called Mapbox.com, and immediately went home to check out the company - the workspace looked so inviting and innovative. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I really wanted to work for a company like that. They had just hired a User Experience Designer, and I started to learn about what that was. The more I learned, the more interesting it all became and I started to feel that giddy excited knot I sometimes get in my stomach.

I found out that I lived a block away from a school called General Assembly, and they offer a course, the User Experience Design Immersive (UXDI). 10 weeks. 9am-5pm. Monday-Friday. It was expensive, both in the tuition and the opportunity cost. I would be required to quit my job and go without an income for three months, maybe more. At the time, it seemed like too much of a stretch, but I was still really fascinated by the whole idea, so I attended a few introductions. The admissions staff answered all my questions and read my long-winded emails (sorry guys). I also started interviewing people around me who worked with UX/UI Designers, and managed to get in touch with some amazing and helpful people. My sister works for a start-up that is developing an insulin pump. She connected me to their UX Designer, Jason, who gave me an in-depth list of ways for me to figure out if the program was right for me, and ways to know if I was really interested in becoming a User Experience Designer.

Here's what I did next:

I talked to a lot of people. I had conversations with people connected to the industry. I talked to my aunt who works with UX designers at Ellucian. She was pretty sure that her company only hired graduates with a Human-Computer Interaction degree, but she said that what UX designers did was really fascinating. I also talked to a number of my professional mentors. I shared what I was learning and asked them what they thought about compatibility. I did this because it was important that people who had worked with me in the past saw a potential fit for me, that it wasn't just me being delusional about things I might be good at.

I looked for jobs I would want. As Jason suggested, I started looking at job descriptions. I started to get more clear on what a UX designer might do on a daily basis, and what some of the key concepts were that companies looked for in a candidate.

I joined the Interaction Design Foundation. I started taking some courses online, and really enjoyed what I was learning.

I explored other options. Around this time, I was exploring a few other tracks. I realized that I was interested in Web Development, and so I started working on the Firehose Project's pre-work for their online course. I considered a Digital Marketing Certificate from Georgetown University, and attended one of their information sessions. I looked into getting my Masters in HCI. I continued applying for jobs that I was qualified for as a Marketing Assistant. The more I explored these other tracks, the more I kept coming back to User Experience Design, and the pull of an immersive learning experience.

I attended a weekend UX Bootcamp at General Assembly. Two months into this all, I saw that GA was offering a bootcamp on a Saturday. Everything was pointing me in this direction, so I decided to take a course to get an idea of how the courses were taught, and how I performed. It ended up being a hilarious day where I designed a clickable prototype with a team: an app for finding buddies to go to professional events with. After the bootcamp, I talked to the instructor about the immersive for 45 minutes. I left that day ready to apply.

This brings us to today (minus a few weeks of application and funding conversations). I'm planning on using this blog and this website as a platform for sharing what I'm getting from my education. Ideally, I'll be sharing my portfolio here as it develops - though the venue might change. If you're still reading this, welcome to my blog! I'm Vanessa, and I'm so glad you're here.