Challenges at work? It’s just a Terrifyingly Beautiful job…

This week’s UX Mega Meetup hit its mark as a group therapy session for UXers and other creatives.

The evening began with a ‘UX Dictionary’ game-storming activity run by Daniel Neville. Every second person was given a card containing a UX term, then asked to explain this term to the person next to them before passing the card around the group. Seemingly straight-forward, however, much heated discussion followed about the use of buzz words in the industry… ‘Lean Canvas’?? Along with the arguments, lots of introductions and conversations ensued.

With the group nicely warmed up, we sat down to listen to the evening’s panellists: Denise Jacobs, Ashlea McKay, Rhett Luciani and Catherine Hills with moderator Sarah Pan. The topic of the night was ‘What Challenges are you having at work?’ and the panellists generously shared their insights in response to questions submitted by the audience:

How do you deal with pressure to move forward with designs that aren’t testing well?

The group agreed that problems are a good thing! It’s feedback, an essential aspect of our work. Ashlea pointed out that part of our craft is to build evidence and communicate it effectively. Try split testing to back up your hypotheses. Rhett suggested trying to understand where this pressure is coming from — is it due to a looming deadline for instance? How does understanding these external factors feed into prioritisation? Maybe some things can be let go for now and returned to later.

What are strategies for inter-departmental communication on best-practice and accessibility?

Catherine underlined the importance of bringing people together physically, to regularly share and engage others in the work we are doing and, importantly, to understand the work that they are doing. The group then discussed how critical an issue accessibility is for UX — we must embrace inclusive design practices to really be doing our work properly. One strategy for explaining this in a business context is to point out the risk of not designing accessible experiences — missed users/customers and litigation for example.

How do juniors get started in the industry?

The consensus on the panel was that job advertisements can make us feel inadequate. When presented with a list of requirements, if we are missing one or two we assume that we are unqualified for the role. This tendency is even more acute in women. Denise insisted that we not be thwarted by Imposter Syndrome! Fears about suitability to a role are largely in our heads — we have transferable skills.

Catherine also underlined the importance of finding people we want to work with, rather than focussing on the role— get out to events like this and form relationships. Find your tribe! This idea was picked up by Rhett who pointed out that we can’t always get what looks like the perfect job on paper. If you’re given an opportunity, grab it — you’ll get valuable experience and establish relationships that will help you get to the next stage.

How can I find out what the business values are, so I can prove the worth of UX?

Ashlea insisted we use that essential UX super power, empathy to communicate with and understand divergent thinking across the organistion. Essentially, Denise suggested, we need to use UX itself to prove the value of UX! Ashlea pointed out that there are many methods we can use to rapidly push out deliverables that demonstrate the value of the work we do.

How do you know what the focus of your research project should be?

The great thing about research, said Catherine, is that it’s scalable. There are many existing research models we can look to for help and inspiration. One thing we do need to watch out for, however, is fascination with outliers and edge-cases. We must keep a focus on the priorities and move the outliers to a lower priority to return to later.

What are some good facilitation techniques?

• Taylor Swift or Margaret Thatcher? The audience has to guess who said what.
• Have the audience draw a picture of the person next to them and then present the picture to the group.
• Commonality bubble: The group works to find out what they all have in common.
• Have the audience sort themselves in to a line, going from oldest to youngest without speaking.
• In pairs, both people take turns pointing to items around the room giving them incorrect names as they point. Next, each person points to items around the room and gives each item the name of the item they pointed to previously. Sounds complicated because it is! The point is that participants then debrief and discuss which task they found harder — this is a great way to demonstrate that people process information and communicate in very different ways.

How do we manage the mental toll of fighting for the value of UX?

Ashlea pointed out that we need to depersonalise and to some extent detach ourselves from the work we do — at the end of the day, it’s just a job! Denise, however, talked about the idea of the challenges we face as being ‘terrifyingly beautiful’. The problem is that we tend to focus more on the ‘terrifying’ and less on the ‘beautiful’. Challenges are what give us meaning in our work, and perhaps part of why we love our terrifyingly beautiful job!

Thanks again to the panelists, Sarah Pan for moderating and Zendesk for a great night!