Crafting the UX process — academies vs. real-life experiences
Inspired by two recent UX events in Skopje — Infinum talks organized by Infinum and UIUXMKD #2 organized by Women in tech Macedonia (that are so rare I was very happy to attend!) I started thinking more about the format of the presentations and the interest raised in both beginners as well as more experienced UX and/or UI designers (intentionally separated).
Academies education vs. real-life experiences
I’ve noticed that academies focus their education programs more on the UX process by the book (if any at all) and/or the UI tools (yet they don’t cover them enough), promising you’ll become a UX/UI designer in several lectures or months; while seniors in such events as the aforementioned, go towards more abstract presentations trying to guide you towards the right mindset or intuition. These abstract terms are very difficult to understand by beginners, who can’t make the connection with a real-life example, while experienced people might just guess what it was all about driving a parallel to their own previous experience (it might also be due to the short time of 20–30mins for the presentation, but you get the point).
I totally agree with everyone that shared their overview and guidance during these presentations, but I sense a gap between these two approaches.
Based on interviews for intern/beginner positions I’ve had over the years, most of the academies cover the whole process by the book from research to actually going live with a website/app; but are missing the crucial key to growth — to give proper feedback to their students. They miss the chance to be real mentors, to train the young designers to think about their own solutions so they understand every single one of their design decisions. I often got responses on small questions thrown in the interview that “they told me this at the academy” instead of “I read the platform UI guidelines, some best practices research, and I decided this is the way to go.. I tested it and it seems to work”.
On the other hand, it was hard to grow as a senior as well; we know about lots of job positions that are looking for experienced UX and UI designers, but companies up until the recent pre-pandemic years, rarely offered the liberty for people to grow to more senior roles and have the responsibility of making their own decisions. I see several blockers — not being able to craft their UX process on their own (not having budget/time is one big reason), or not being able to grow in a role because they were lacking a good team/mentor to learn from (or there was simply no room to grow in that company).
The “perfect” UX Process
The ideal company or a project where you’d be able to go through the proper UX design process as you’d learn in any course or academy is VERY rare. You can have many limitations — time, budget, technical feasibility, team’s experience, etc. But it’s important that you learn about all of the possibilities that are available to you, and in time, be able to choose what is the right tool for the right job.
The goal is to reach a stage to have an understanding of all of the techniques that you’ve learnt in theory, but to craft your own UX process based on the problem you need to solve, given in the constraints set by your project.
So not to be abstract again, let’s say we want to explain a simple way to choose what kind of research do you need:
Ask yourself the questions that will help you define your problem
- e.g. how do the users make coffee every day? what do they do if they don’t have time? what do they struggle with? why?… etc.
Choose only the techniques needed to help you reach your answer — interviews, personas, journey map, card sorting, discovery workshops, but also digging into existing databases because some of the answers can be easily discovered by looking at your already existing data.. you definitely don’t need all of these tools and techniques, but choose the one that is really feasible and they can help you sort your thoughts out and seek patterns that will guide you to a solution;
- e.g. the question how do users make coffee every day might lead you to casual random interviews at a cafè or journey maps to understand the coffee drinkers better.
Intentionally set a hypothesis with your solution to that problem and metrics how you will measure whether you have succeeded
- e.g. If we prioritise instant coffee instead of the espresso (production, marketing, etc), more than 60% of the people who make their own coffee at home, will choose to have it over the hipster espresso coffee making process that takes 10–15mins [maybe it’s a shitty example, but you get the point]
Try your solution out, build a prototype, check for technical feasibility and then test it with real people — if you don’t have customers available, do it with anyone internal or external (check if NDA is needed).
- e.g. You can take a small batch of instant coffee and try observe your users for several days in an office kitchen that is probably available; you might learn that people will choose instant coffee, but you also might learn that they prefer their morning coffee ritual despite being late every day… so at least you’ll learn to go back to the drawing board :)
The key to a good research and validation of your solution is that you learn something new and iterate depending on your findings. That’s how you’ll know you’ve solved the initial problem.
The handoff and communication with developers, is a completely different topic, but also important to mention as part of the process.
Conclusion
We don’t learn much from people telling us what we should do or how to do it. We learn best from real-life examples, by having a curious mind, by talking to our users, and by having the courage to dive into the unknown.
As discussed with many people after these events, maybe it’s really time for a more thorough seniors-sharing-case-studies event, that won’t focus on explaining the difference between UI and UX anymore (😅). We should be really focusing on sharing practical knowledge and building up a well-trained UX community in Macedonia whom we’d be happy to work with in the future. Seeing other people thrive because you helped them out, is magical… let’s do it more often :) ✨
