UXography

UXONHO: User Experience On Home Office

It’s everywhere, it influences everybody, it changes things. It’s Covid-19, of course. I guess it’s safe to say that almost everyone in the UX industry is working remotely now, including me. In this post I’m going to sum up my experiences and observations about doing UX  while on home office.

1. Teamwork. It’s just different. I’m used to having team members in different countries, however I’ve always been surrounded by my local team or at least friendly faces from different teams (yay for open space). I must admit, sometimes I do feel lonely, I miss face to face conversations, feedback, and all. 

2. Workshops. It’s an extension of Teamwork in some sense. I miss working in a same room. Remote workshops are super tiring, imho people can manage to do up to two hours of focused, remote work. Afterwards it’s zombie fest. Also, I miss using my body language - it may sound silly, but now I realize that using my hands, walking around the room and touching e.g. whiteboard or flipcharts really make a difference and all of that was/is very important to me. During a remote workshop I can use my voice, and that’s all. Mimics aren’t that visible when you’re just a miniature on another's screen. And everyone is looking at Miro, or Mural, or whatever anyway. 

3. Research. I’ve been doing remote research for ages, so it’s not such big news for me, however I realize some of you rely heavily on corridor testing. It’s impossible now. Shame. 

4. Meetups, conferences. Yep, they’re online now. On a positive note, everything is a big webinar now, so introverts can finally return to their indoor habitat. 

5. Starting a new job. Happened to me. Two weeks after I joined the company, the lockdown fell upon us. I still felt awkward reaching out to people online, especially because many of them use their nicknames instead of full names - how the hell am I supposed to know who you are? :P So yeah, I don’t feel like I belong cause all of this “let’s chit chat in a kitchen” phase was taken away from me. 

6. Job hunt. Whole recruitment process is online now. Same as the point above, only worse, cause you don’t get to see the office, and you know you won’t meet your colleagues for a (long) while. Ok, the real downfall is the fact that many vacant roles got suspended (cause budget is uncertain) and companies are imho way more careful with new openings. But hey, there is also a glimmer of hope: once they start a recruitment, it’s hard to find a specialist (people don’t want to switch jobs during pandemic, duh), so the rivalry should be less present. 

7. If you’re a junior and there are budget cuts… well, you’re not in a best position. I saw a bunch of even experienced juniors in IT that were made redundant.

8. Many projects just don’t start, cause as above, budgets are uncertain. 

9. Working in sweatpants. It’s a new mullet: business at the top, party (naptime) at the bottom. I’m hilarious. 

I don’t include the fact that any of us might just stop working suddenly because of the virus - it’s clearly universal for every industry. It scares me. It’s impossible to be scared all the time, but at this very moment I am scared of not just sickness, but the whole pandemic package: loneliness, staying at home forever, being suspended into the unknown. 

I dribble in Sketch sometimes :)

Sneakers online shop product page, I hope you like it.

Disclaimer: I do not own the shoe pictures, they come from https://www.nike.com/ and all relevant rights belong to Nike. Cheers!

Hello, hello, hello.

Sometimes I happen to visit the glorious area of western Germany. Sometimes I happen to use their public transportation without anyone local (and German speaking). I prefer to pay for my tram rides (as much as I believe in common responsibility for the vehicles we’re using, I also enjoy not getting fined), so first thing I do is searching frantically for the ticket machine, so NOBODY can suspect me of mischievous ride stealing.

And then it happens – the machine doesn’t work.

But I don’t see it. I did the WHOLE process: I changed language to English, I selected the ticket, I confirmed the purchase, I took the card out of my wallet and bam, the card input is blocked.

I panicked.

I tried to click my way through ticket hell again, but it started giving some communicate IN GERMAN. Finally, I stepped back and I asked someone for help – luckily, they spoke English. That guy just took a look and said “oh, it’s out of order, you’re lucky, you get a ride for free! Just take the picture of the machine”.

What, how, really? In Poland nobody cares you couldn’t buy a ticket, you get fined. Obviously, I assumed it works that way in Dusseldorf as well. Obviously, it’s not my fault – it’s never user’s fault when the service is not self-explanatory. In that case it was a double misfortune: the service is used by someone not local, someone for whom German is already a third language, and who’s not aware of legal regulations. Sucks to be that person, right? :D

The designers (probably the tram service) tried to manage the crisis and support service user, but they did it badly. How badly? Well, they let me proceed with at least four unnecessary taps (gasp!), but they also could follow my advice and focus on the arrows below:

First, the green line. That is an absolute border of my eye focus. I have my ticket-purchasing-task, I don’t think about the coin input, I think only about the screen, period. Therefore, I can’t really be helped by…

Purple arrow: Auβer Betrieb (Out of Order) sticker. Personally, I love the idea. I like that it’s so easy, a driver can just put it there and inform… well, only German speakers who use coins. Dusseldorf might not be very big, but it’s quite international, especially during fairs (so pretty much: all the time). Why there was no secondary sticker with the message in English? Why there was no icon, common for every language? Why did you almost let me have a heart attack, guys?

Pink arrow: I did the whole process and only then the machine stops me to say “ticket was already cancelled”. Thanks. FYI, I took the pic while trying to buy again, this time in German 😉

Blue arrow: red screen is good, it already alerts. Also, you have “Out of Order” written in five languages: awesome! Where’s the problem then? Well, in inconsistency: these are two different ticket machines (believe it or not, on my way back I took a different line with another broken magic box…), and both of them inform about the problem differently. It’s a small issue, as long as both are, in fact, informing properly. But do they? I’d still add some icon. Iconic out of order, yes. And lack of stickers saddens me, even though it’s not a mistake per se. This is how we get to…

Yellow arrows: as I said already, one sticker above my head wasn’t sufficient to alarm me about the problem. Why there was no sticker on the card input? Germans might not be that addicted to cashless payments as Poles are, but come on. There were no stickers on the second machines and I get it, we have the red screen already. But stickers are great and might be the only help for the visually impaired people: I’m not sure if there was any option to listen to the communicate out loud, for sure there was no Braille card. Still, if we make stickers a thing, then it’s easy to check if the machine is working just by touching the inputs. That’s my biggest recommendation: give the drivers sticker with Out of Order international icons and Braille points, damn it!

Last, but (as we all wrote in school essays) not least: white question mark. White as my terrified face, low as my spirits. Question without a clue, cause there’s no hint what to do next. I was lucky, I had a local, friendly and English-speaking person to instruct me, that it’s ok to continue my ride and it’s smart to take a picture. Otherwise, I’d haven no idea. I’d bother the driver, who’s busy, responsible for passengers’ safety and probably doesn’t speak English very well. My advice is: tell us what to do. Manage our crisis. Improve the public transportation User Experience.

This is so great! Icons used (and explained) to complement colors and make it acceble for color-blind passengers. Simple and, unfortunately, rare solution. 

Let’s make public transportation great (again?). 

Here goes the mix of a few things, that I hold very close to my etno-heart: design, museum, education, craft, and of course: a surprise 😊

In October 2018 I visited Why the World Needs Anthropologists conference in Lisbon (not gonna talk about it today) and afterwards I spent three foggy days in Porto. In between pasteis de nata (guilty as charged) and azulejo selfies I visited Soares dos Reis National Museum. To be honest, it looks just like every other typical European national museum, except for this:

What is this magic? My assumption: the outcome of some workshop for kids. But imagine the feeling of stumbling upon it in a quite empty gallery, an odd object branded with childish touch, surrounded by all the objects we decided to call national heritage.

Top class painting checking itself out in the collective creation: that’s some Sontag or Latour shit, girl. Or Barthes.

Why am I so excited? Cause this is participatory design. In its best form, if I may hazard such expression. I love it so much, cause it’s an act of pure creation, there are no goals, stakeholders, conversion rates. It’s a beautiful tool of channeling the creativity, and in this case: creativity of children. Imagine how the world where it’s legal to cultivate your initial, primal genius, IMAGINE.

Or not, let’s not be sad today.

Design or art? Agency or expertise?

One may say: if it doesn’t have a purpose, then it’s art, not a design. Indeed, but in this case it’s just me (and you) who DON’T KNOW the purpose. We can make it up. We can be kids again, it’s a time machine.

In some cases, participatory design workshops are not that much about the design, sometimes they serve a research or social or educational purpose (see how is this… “event-identity” flexible and processual?). We create, we design, we learn how to agree and share the ownership. We discover we long for something (we glued a pillow to the wall? Do we need more softness? Or a nap? Or we want to hug the wall? All of that? Or just simply listen to stories that appear when no-ux people start explaining their design decisions) and we allow all the voices to appear in a material form. In traditional research&design process, we take the experience and common knowledge from the people (ekhem, target group), filter it through our brains (ekhem, habitus) and morph into something else according to what we understood and what kind of expert knowledge we possess. All the agency is taken away from people we’re supposed to care about. Bummer.

But back in my days...

Alright, why was I so moved by this little discovery? Well, I have my humble experiences as a workshop facilitator. Many of my workshops were done with school children in small town or villages. I redesigned the scenario a bit - major topic was... “Ethnography of your area” and schools headmasters expected a lecture about folk costumes. Oh boi. But, as a modern anthropology warrior I knew how to argue that creating neighborhood mockups is a way to go.

Work in progress.

And it was. However, there was another problem – usually, kids were trained by the school system to think inside a box and to just finish a task. It took me a lot of effort to convince them to go a bit crazy: how do you want your area to look like? What is here now? What should be? What do you want to build here? A beach? A starship? A cinema? Just do it. The workshop would begin with us talking about the past of their neighborhood: some of the kids did a really kickass presentation. In some cases, children had no idea there used to be a Jewish community. I wonder why…

Hi to all,

as you know, I’m a cultural anthropologist. And I’m also a UX Researcher. How did it happen? Sadly, not a moonlight, not a cool auntie giving me job in her startup – just a lot of hard (at first: unpaid) work. Then, internship, then a proper job – continue reading and you shall get a handful of hints how to proceed with your occupation transformation *drums*.

Some introductory babbling

Ok, so here’s my first insight and first advice to all of you, young social scientists, trying your best to become a UX warrior: be prepared to do a shitload of money-free effort, so you NEED to have either way some external support (I lived with my parents), some serious savings or somehow divide your time between learning and your day-job. It's how our life is, but it’s not ok. It’s not right, when guys from poor environments can excel their talents and polish their skills, cause they can’t afford unpaid internship, not to mention private UX schools. I was lucky, in my generation it’s still not obligatory to have such certificate, but it opens a lot of doors. I’m double lucky, cause finally anthropology/ ethnography became recognized as a valid and valuable vocational training. Many of UX specialists come from business-oriented backgrounds: they just “re-oriented” in their previous jobs. We need folks with consulting or graphics roots, but the second they become overrepresented, the industry looses broader perspective: we all put different flavors on a plate. Psychologists, frontend devs, linguists and social scientists, we are all needed. UX Research differs from Marketing Research simply by its orientation: we want to investigate the real human person within our product/service, not the product within the market. I know that CX (Customer Experience) is for some a new brand term for UX. It’s true, BUT only in some specific contexts. And every time we replace user/person/human with “client”, we use free market narrative and see the design process through the narrow, capitalistic logic. But that’s a different story.

So, what to do to transform into UX someone?  Oh sister.

1.       Easy stuff.

Join all the UX-related groups and pages on Facebook, subscribe to newsletters, visit all the meetups and free/low cost workshops, follow Them Famous UX Gods on Twitter – not gonna prepare a list now, go Google yourself.

Oh, and if you’re still a student: check if any faculty at your uni has any technology/design related courses or even associations. You don’t have to sign in, just go there and listen. It’s the very last moment in your life, when you get formal knowledge for free. That’s what I did during my Erasmus scholarship – I took my sneaky butt to IT students-oriented lectures. I’m pretty sure that host Erasmus supervisor still hates me, she kicked me out from almost all of the courses (“you’re from anthropology, you can’t sit with us”). Official way doesn’t always work. World might not be ready for you. Be ready to bite back.

2.       Tough stuff (aka everything else).

Think. Think who you are: what are your skills? What are their names in UX/commercial research lingo? What do you mean they’re not the same? Wait, so in-depth ethnographic interview is not correct? HOW COME.

Yep, my young padawan. We all spend hours reading Clifford, Hastrup and Geartz, and yet it taught us nothing about communicating non-etno-peeps what kind of tools are we using. Yes, they are tools, not sacred means of humanitarian contact. Get over it.

Start with reading blogs (e.g. Medium offers a tone of cool short articles) to update your vocabulary. Then read books: “UX Research” by Brad Nunnally and David Farkas, or if you know Polish: “Badanie jako podstawa projektowania UX” by Iga Mościchowska and Barbara Rogoś-Turek. Desk research, IDI, observation… yep, continue. I’ll get some coffee.

You know your skills (more or less)? Cool, now think again: what do you want to do within design process? For social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists…) it’s natural to aim into UX Research specialization. There are others, the names and scope of competences can vary a lot in every company. In general, you have UX designer or product designer, a person who’s responsible for flow, interaction, logic and basic interface structure. In package come also UI designer, who will make the prototype beautiful, usable and real-life-looking, so developers can start production. There are unicorns, that just do everything. You can think about it later.

Once you know what you want to do, I recommend learning more about general usability and design process. You will need this knowledge no matter which specialization you want to pursue. And, darling, you need to have be able to back up your future design decisions – people will challenge them. They’ll challenge them so hard. Pages like Coursera or Udemy can help you – you just need a lot of motivation to finish the courses. You register (and pay) to get access to recorded video lectures, sometimes there are readings. If you pay for a course on Coursera, then you’re able to participate in a class project and get feedback on your work, afterwards you get a certificate. Cool beans, I did the free version, cause I was poor. I found myself some offline occasions to practice.

Other options are (mentioned above) local meetups: find a UX community in your area and check if they’re organizing anything. Even better, ask if they need volunteers: you’ll help, you’ll meet interesting people and you’ll get the free pass for all the events. Same goes for conferences: email them and ask if they need volunteers. Some NGOs run continuous projects (does TechSoup ring a bell?) and they always welcome new people. Don’t be shy, all the programmers build their portfolio that way, you can do it too. Learn and help the world, even if it’s just for a few months. Same organizations conduct mentoring programs – I took part in TechLeaders by Women in Technology: totally recommended! You do your own project and have a personal couch to give you feedback, inspire and most of all, guide through the process. Go for it, mate.

If you’re a student, join or start an association. It’s easy, it’s free, you can play your “I’m an university student doing great scholar things” card, while dealing with institutions. Find people like you, creative, eager to learn and responsible (I’ll write a post on that one day). Think about a small project you can do together: new website for your institute, new service for foreign students, series of meetings with interesting specialists. The latter can become mentors/patrons for any design project you want to run – these people are busy, but also very friendly and enjoy sharing their UX wisdom.

Alright, how about internships? Well, they’re the hardest to get. The more known the company is, the more advanced recruitment process becomes. They might ask you for your portfolio, for sure they’ll ask you for a CV. Luckily, in IT it’s more common to pay interns (everywhere else – not so much). My internship turned into a fixed contract, so hooray for me. But even if you don’t get hired, internships are crucial. Worst case scenario: you just brew coffee and get a happy stamp on your Linkedin profile. Better case scenario, you learn things, you network and leave the place way smarter.

Last but not least: UX schools and long-term paid courses. Oh my. I’d love to enroll. I’d love to have people watching out for my education. But, as all the good things in life, it’s expensive and it’s requires free weekends (your lifestyle has to be regular enough to not skip classes every week). Plus, if you’re not from a big city, they usually it’s just not happening in your area. I got my skills anyway, but I can’t show THE paper. Still, I can show my two diplomas from the best uni in my country, so I think I’m covered 😉

Another thing is: UX is quite a young discipline, at least in terms of vocational training. There are very few places offering legitimate knowledge. Still, UX is hot, is trendy and it opens our pockets, so there are also “schools” offering courses with “experts” with two years of experience. Just don’t fall for that.

Bye, bye

Did you manage to read all of that? Neat, mate. Now go and learn some Axure 😊 

Beginnings are hard, but we can reach any destination with small steps... Alright, so before I start proper writing, let me just upload this modest illustration of how I see my “careerity” (it’s Career + Identity, so smart. Don’t steal this idea, I might need it later).

I’m a cultural anthropologist (or ethnologist, or ethnographer...), who kind of morphed into UX - UX Research, to be exact. Why am I writing this, apart from bragging how I managed to defend my master thesis AND find a no-code job in IT?

Cause UX industry is relatively new and we, usability freaks, come from so many different places. Cause we all have different backgrounds and different perspectives: and they all deserve some screening time, you know? Therefore, I decided to represent my native discipline in this collective digital knowledge repository.

Plus, it’s free.

Double plus, I miss writing. I would risk saying, that writing is one of the biggest differences between academic and commercial work. We (at least us, researchers, hehehe) still think, plan and analyze. The object of our interest is usually slightly different (e-commerce prototype instead of modern practices of local urban heritage), but the outcome is... well, contextual. What do I mean by that? As an academic I would write lengthy essays and subsequent chapters to my painfully-slowly-growing thesis. Corporation-context then? It has to be quick. It has to be short and packed with essential information. No time for maturing your thoughts, referring to smart books (totally not copy-pasting them from your previous article, whaaaat) or writing 20 pages of pure text. Powerpoint presentation, up to 10 sentences per slide (usually way less), present key findings during a video call, then create some Vulcan tickets and... that’s it. You got paid to do it, you sold your analysis, you can’t discuss it with anyone outside your Outlook address book.

Well, at least until your NDA expires.