UX Speaker Series #1: Ljubomir Bradic
Director of Design, Sage Bionetworks
Topic: Systems Design
This article is the first of a series. Next: UXSS #2
Today was the first of 10 guest-speaker lectures as part of a Winter seminar series on UX. I ran into a couple of my friends in the Master’s program at the lecture — they told me it’s actually available as a graduate-level seminar, HCDE 521. For general information about the series, the HCDE department has a description here.
I am probably hoping to be a UX designer as my first job before product management, so in attending the lectures this quarter I am hoping to hear about the experience of working in UX as well as a number of current topics in the field. My format for this series of posts will probably be a scan of my notes from the presentation as well as a short reflection.
This lecture was specifically focused on systems design. Ljubomir defined a system as “a set of things, working together, over time,” with an emphasis on the extended-time aspect of it. I suppose a set of things working together is just an event. His case studies gave me some rough ways to conceptualize what is a system vs. what is something else, but in all of the talk, my ability to identify a system is probably my biggest concern. In his case at Sage Bionetworks, the system was clearly the network by which they distributed information, and their system had a number of different user-facing products associated with it. This seems like a clear system to me — I’m just less sure if other things with more narrow scopes are systems.
I think the three takeaways I wrote in my notes serve as the best overall summary for the lecture:
One. Build in a modular way. Make many small changes to your system constantly, rather than creating big, inflexible things.
Two. Build things that scale into the future — both on the UX side and the development side, make features and code that can be easily reused to assist implementation of features moving forward.
Three. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. You must tackle more complexity to learn — working in familiar, safe settings won’t teach you to grow. “Be the dumbest person where you work.”
One of the most memorable things I learned from Ljubomir was actually just a UX ideal, not one specific to systems. It is acceptable or even beneficial in UX to give users multiple ways to take an action (redundancy). I relate this quote to Canvas frequently. The same assignment file can often be accessed through modules, files, assignments, or even grade book → click on assignment → click on the link in the file path at the top. This walks the fine line of added complexity, but if done well, redundancy can improve user experience by making it easier to do what they want. I also equate this to the various ways users interact with computers. I am often reminded of alternative methods to keyboard shortcuts (which I abuse), such as right-clicking a link and selecting “open in new tab” from the drop-down menu. (Windows keyboard shortcut version: hold down Ctrl while you left click a link.) This particular point resonated with me and some of the experiences I’ve had in a way that the rest of the talk didn’t, since I have no discernible experience designing complex systems.
This series will most likely become my consistent Friday blog posts for the next 9 weeks. In the event that I can’t be there in person, all of the lectures are recorded, so the post will probably just come a few days later.
