A Coffee a Day, for 5 days — Day 3 with Alex Théroux
“A Coffee a Day, for 5 days” will feature a new discussion each day with a different UX professional. The goal is to understand their story and journey into the field, receive any advice and gems they can share for recent grads and junior designers such as myself, and receive feedback on my killer portfolio which can be found here: https://www.callmedak.com
You can view day one with Teunis Vorsteveld (UX Designer) published here, and day two with Lisa Guo (Product Designer) published here.
Yesterday, I sat down with Alex Théroux. In his own words he’s an experience design and business innovation lead who aims to challenge and grow the people he works with, regardless of the project or business. He is truly outcome driven. What matters the most at the start of a project to him is defining the emotional outcome he is setting out to achieve amongst users and then to work backwards from there.
Let’s jump right in. I started by asking questions to learn more about Alex as a designer and his journey.
D: Can you describe your journey towards the UX field? How did it start and what’s next for you?
A: I’ve been doing UX before UX had a title, funny enough. I went to school for computational arts, which is a mixture of computer science with design and media theory. I started as photographer/graphic designer and eventually became an art director at an ad agency. When I was in Singapore, I would say the transition into UX happened for me. I was working on global brands and the challenge I would constantly be asked is “how do you create a marketing campaign or brand platform that is globally applicable but locally relevant?”.
That challenge got me deep diving into learning user motivations, habits, behaviours and trying to balance multiple cultures for a global marketing solution. So this was the first step of UX, empathy. This was before UX was a thing so we were just calling it “shopper-backed strategy”, which was a terrible name looking back.
D: Has teaching part-time at BrainStation had an effect on your design career? If yes, how so?
A: 100%! I’ve had the good fortune of meeting a lot of really great students. The thing with teaching is you go in with the objective of imparting knowledge on people who are hungry for it. What I found is that I would keep learning new things from my students that I had not previously thought of.
There’s also a significant amount of reflection in your own ways of working. It gave me time to reflect and evaluate how I do things and why I do those things, which was beneficial. It also helped me distill a way of working into an easily understandable format regardless of the audience. When you’re talking to designers you can have that design jargon. When you’re trying to teach a whole group of people what UX is, you can’t default to those same terms. You need to find a way to make it more accessible, which has helped me tremendously.
D: Is there a particular UX project that stands out for you through your decade long career?
A: One of the last projects I did in Singapore, I worked with a global team between Chicago, Singapore, and South Korea to develop a global redesign and rebuild for one of our clients’ e-commerce sites. It stood out because it was one of the first times our global marketing client bought off on a full UX approach to a project. There were quite a lot of challenges as you can imagine working with a decentralized team across different markets and two continents, and the final product was going to be deployed to 11 markets in 7 languages. Lots of challenges but we were able to finish on time and the client was fantastically happy with it.
Advice for junior designers
As someone that is senior in their career and is in a lead position, I found it would be super valuable to hear what sort of advice Alex can give to designers at all levels.
D: What are some of the key skills needed to advance a UX designer to a senior level designer?
A: You’ll realize in design you’ll go from a “do-er”, to a “lead do-er”, to a team manager. And that leap between that “lead do-er” and a team manager is a huge one. I think the single biggest thing that that lead requires is listening to people. When you’re a designer you’re judged on your output. When you’re in a lead role you’re evaluated by the people around you and their output. So listening to the people around you is important as well as balancing that with your perspective. You have to be able to bring a POV, but one that’s built off listening to your team.
D: Given that you’re in a hiring role as a design lead, what are some of the things you look for in a junior candidate’s resume/cover letter?
A: Critical thinking and focusing on the right things. Critical thinking is not showing a really nice design project and saying how good of a design job it is. Critical thinking is the thinking that went behind the final product. What questions you had, what the different iterations were, what you learned and your process driving towards a solution. Showcasing that thinking is more important than the end product. You need to keep in mind that at the end of the day, the product result is not defined from just one person. There are developers involved, the business folks that make decisions, the technology that you use, all play a part. For this reason I get less hung up on the final design and more so care about the critical thinking.
For me, focusing on the right things means outcomes like I mentioned in the beginning. A designer is someone that is taking in information, processing it, and making decisions towards a solution. That can be a wireframe, a user flow, an interaction with a button. You’re making decisions. What’s important is being very clear as to which outcome you’re trying to yield with every decision.
D: What sort of advice would you give to recent grads unsure how to get their foot in the door and land their first position?
A: It depends what you’re looking for. Step one, figure out where you want to end up. Going the agency route has benefits and challenges. When you’re in the beginning of your career, going agency side has more benefits because you’re exposed to different industries, different types of projects, and that variety is a bit of an accelerator to ramp up new and diversified skills. That variety also gives you time to reflect and find an industry you do care about more than the others. For example, getting excited working on an automotive brand can help you realize that’s the industry for you to find a UX role within. So I would say when you’re early in your career there’s more benefits going agency side over client-side (in-house).
That being said, the benefits of going client-side early on means you get to go deep on specific projects and see it through from beginning to end. You’ll be exposed to the strategy and business side, you’ll be able to do research, concepting, experimenting, deployment, and maybe even maintenance and management. The whole process.
One thing to look out for at an agency is ensuring they value time for research and testing. You might often hear from clients they didn’t budget time for those things and just want something done quickly. Agency is “pull it out of your back pocket, ship it, then work on the next thing”.
Portfolio review
I shared my portfolio with Alex live and walked him through one of my case studies to get some of his initial thoughts and high-level feedback. Here were some of his comments:
- For the design process, it might be helpful to stick to the most recognizable verbiage for the specific methodologies instead of tweaking them
- Ensure the whole thing is as scannable as possible so consider placing headers on some of the artifacts
- Aside from the things I mentioned, the only other pieces would be me nitpicking very minor things. I think the feedback is just to work on more projects. However, keep in mind it’s not all about the amount, just continue to focus on the critical thinking.
Extra gems from Alex
Be mindful of being the only designer when you’re starting out. It’s important at the early stage of your career to work within a team that you can learn from.
Key takeaways
I learned a lot in this short chat with Alex. Here were a few of the main takeaways:
- Have a structure and plan in place before you jump into a project. You should ultimately know what sort of emotional and business outcome you’re looking for and then let that guide the rest of the project.
- You’re final design is great but it’s more important to show the critical thinking that led to that design. What does the process work look like? What were the challenges and constraints? If you’re a UI designer, what lead you to picking certain UI elements in the final design?
- Having an opportunity to teach not only benefits others but it also benefits yourself as you’ll need to do a lot of self reflection in your own UX process and the things that you know.
You can connect with Alex on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alextheroux/
