Getting Un-Stuck
I have always liked to do things the right way. I can totally solve problems with the right amount of time and resources, but logic tells me that experts have developed frameworks & guidelines to make life easier for the rest of us. Through skillfully developed guidelines, we can work faster and prevent unforeseen problems.
About a month ago, I started a UX internship at Mozilla. The internship revolves around a problem:
Iris is a brand-new Mozilla project that will be used to automate testing of Firefox. It is scheduled to be released in a 1.0 version in November 2018. It is a project mostly built in Python, with a web interface in React.
This project is in its infancy, and the web interface employs basic functionality. However, it is in need of a designer and user experience sensibility to truly maximize its usefulness.
Aside from a proposed problem, the approach to validating assumptions and solving the problem is up to me. I am the design team. Just me. There is no senior designer giving me a clearly defined process to follow while I validate and solve this problem.
I’m not gonna lie, I am not yet a UX expert. And because I like the idea of an experienced guide, I quickly became overwhelmed with the project and found myself stuck.
I felt that, to be successful, I needed an expert to help me know the best way to tackle this problem. In all reality, I wanted someone who could prevent me from failing.
But guidelines cannot exist for every problem that needs solving. And perfect scenarios require no innovation.
To help me overcome the fear that I don’t know enough to be successful, I did a couple of things:
- I asked for a design mentor that could answer my questions as they came up.
- I admitted to myself that its OK to not know everything.
- I realized that if I want to become an expert designer, I would have to be OK with the possibility of failing. Innovation comes with the uncertainty of failure.
As I reflect on those days of feeling overwhelmed, stuck and afraid, I realize that there is a happy medium. There is a spot where a I can master some things but also feel the excitement that there is more to learn. I want to be in that middle area, always.
I recommend reading Overcoming Not Imposter Syndrome for a great way to visualize and help find a way to communicate any feelings of being a beginner.
TL;DR I was afraid and stuck. Now I’m not.
