UX + (ADD + ADHD + Dyscalculia) = My Battle with Myself. A Candid Look at working in UX design with disabilities.
I recently started my journey as a UX Designer by taking the UX Design Immersive program at General Assembly in NYC. I come from a background in performance, public speaking, and education. I was living and working in Hong Kong, but I felt that I had plateaued in my educational career and sought a change. After consulting numerous friends and professionals, I decided to pursue new field that I had absolutely no experience with. It certainly was going to be an interesting journey. For all intents and purposes, I was going back to school, and as I described it to people, I felt like I was earning a master’s degree in three months.
It has been a while since I have been in school. I did rather well academically in college, but that was only after I got proper support after realizing that I suffered from dyscalculia. (Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what it is, even spell check does not know. It’s basically math dyslexia.) It was not diagnosed with this until college. I was also was diagnosed with ADD/ADHD as a child. How would these things affect me as an adult? I certainly have calmed down a lot, for better or worse, but for the life of me, it is still very difficult to pay attention or focus on many things, and doing a UX Design IMMERSIVE in no exception. I have learned, at least in my life, that there is no shame in realizing your own weaknesses that are out of control, in fact, not acting upon them or addressing them is actually far much worse than being honest with yourself and the people you work with. I was very candid with my instructors and all of my teammates from the beginning. Specifically I acknowledged that my dyscalculia, in conjunction with my ADD, will make it extremely difficult to keep up at a standard pace in regards to the technical stuff, and I would need to learn all of it in my own way and time.
I initially went into UX design partially due to the recommendation of a career coach. She thought it would a good field to go into because it is in demand and people and companies my value my inherent skills and qualities. I would have to agree. I feel confident and comfortable talking to anyone or group about anything, enjoy the humanity side of usability testing and feel competent in writing reports, but the actual design and technical aspects of UX gave me pause. I am terrible at math, and people are often in shock at my handwriting, yet I still graduated from college with it! How would I cope, let alone succeed? So far it has been to my luck and good graces of wonderful instructors and amazing teammates. To be candid, I have been able to coast on my skills, without having to deal with my weaknesses because of my great teammates, but for my upcoming project, I won’t have a choice but to do everything myself. Before we get there, let us talk about the last project I worked on.
In essence, we were tasked with coming up with a way to innovate the Fandango app to include events not just limited to movies, but concerts and anything else a person can do. We went through all of the steps of the UX design process. I contributed at various levels to several areas of the project. The biggest area of the project I contributed the most and basically did myself was the card sorting.
First me made a site map that can be partially seen here:
Then we took over 60 products from the site map and put them into a card sort to see how people identified the product with a predetermined category. Here is a “brief” view of some of the results.
Furthermore, we discovered that “socks and underwear,” including its picture found below, was the most mismatched product with a category on the site.
So all of this is stuff I can easily wrap my head around. Then comes all of the other stuff. The usability testing, all of the synthesizing, all of the reports…I can get my head around that…then things start to get really tricky.
Site Map
I understand this, but I’ll have the curse of the damned if I am to construct one myself, without any help, in a timely manner.
User Flow
We they first went over task flow and user flower, as you can imagine, with my ADD in full force, my eyes quickly glazed over as I was lectured to on the concepts. I felt like I was in high school Spanish class again, but heck, English and Spanish use the same alphabet, I might as well have been learning Mandarin!
I certainly couldn’t make this myself then, and I will certainly need a lot more time and help going forward.
So, as has been most of my life, my skills in human communication, public speaking, and writing have saved me from having to deal with my inadequacies with math, design, and just plain being able to pay attention. Now, for better or for worse I will have to rise to the occasion and not cherish my skills, but work on my weaknesses. It is a necessity for success. It will be difficult — even writing this I had to struggle against audio, visual, and my own mental excess stimuli — but it has to be done. It will be difficult, but as they say, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. I will certainly be falling down a big hole, but when I climb out of it, much like Batman at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, I will be stronger for it, and be able to defeat my own personal Bane, in this case being dyscalculia, ADD, and user flows. I just wish my life had a Hans Zimmer soundtrack accompanying it to make the struggle and the battle just a little bit more epic.