Your success story as a new UX professional
If you failed yesterday, you have tomorrow to fix it.
Yesterday
It happened. You did it! You forgot about sleep, nights out, and friends to get it done. And you got your first dream job in UX!
It was not an easy battle. It took three rounds of stressful interviews, a white-board challenge, and sleepless nights. But it’s all behind now. Today you are starting your new job, where you will be doing something you love. And it’s making other people’s lives better. This fight was worth fighting.
Getting to your desk, you fire up your computer and look at your first task. The task is to create a couple of wireframes. Amazing! Now you can show what you learned. You spend a couple of hours brainstorming, making sure that everything is perfect. You check with respectful resources and the best UX practices. You’ve thought of interactions, end-users, and everything. You are the star of UX! They should be proud that they hired you after all.
The next day, you present what you worked hard on to your manager, a technical director, and some other people. Not too many of them, so there’s not so much pressure for you. And you know that there’s no reason to worry. You’ve double-checked everything, and nothing can stop you.
You passionately explain what you’ve created. Your solution is going to be delightful for the users. After all, it corresponds to the best practices of the UX process. There’s a short silence once you’ve done talking.
It’s a bit awkward, but you are still okay. These people are just new to UX and need to get used to it.
You are thrilled and excited until the technical director says:
“Well, all good. Great job. But we need something simple,” the man turns the laptop, and everyone can see what’s on the screen, “There, I asked some of my guys to put it together. Easy and simple. And we almost do not have to make any changes on the back-end.”
“So, we are not going to waste too much money and time? Just one person?” your manager asks before you can utter anything.
“Yep, just one person, this morning,” the technical director says, “So, I guess we will just go with it.”
“When do we need to start talking about this feature, then?” a guy who was sitting silently all the time asks, and you understand that it is a marketing manager.
“We can start in a week, I think,” the technical director answers, and they all nod to each other. They all get up and head toward the exit continuing to discuss what it’s going to be like on the marketing side. They are about to leave the conference room, but stop next to the door and turn to you.
“Yeah, by the way, thanks. Great presentation,” they are out, leaving you speechless and alone in the conference room with your wireframes you’ve crafted for this meeting.
Today
To say that you are devastated is to say nothing. What you do not understand is how this could happen to you. These people hired you to make things better! You came up with the solutions customers love. How can they ignore it?
It seems that while getting ready to do your job in UX, you skipped the most important part of it — actually doing the work that matters.
Most people do not like change. It’s in human nature to be afraid of uncertainty and the unknown. Well-established processes are always better. If you are a first UI/UX Designer, it’s not going to be as great as you might have hoped.
Let’s look at some moments that you think are true, but in reality, they look different.
- Everyone will follow what you say because you are, well, the expert now.
No. Just because you are “that guy” does not give you any credibility to make decisions that people have made without you before.
After all, everything worked well, with pitfalls, occasionally, but things happen. So, what’s the point of radically changing the approach they already have?
- Other people care about the brilliance of your UX process.
No, they don’t. And there’s not so much to add. Others care about their jobs, their KPI, their tasks, their families, kids, pets, movies, everything but the brilliance of your UX process.
- Implementing what you said should not be a question because it’s better for the user experience.
No. What does “better user experience” mean here? Does it mean that users will feel better than they are?
Okay, but if they already feel good, why do we need more? Would “more” cost more money, effort, and resources? If yes, why don’t we keep the users satisfied? And come back to “more satisfied” when we have time and additional resources? And you know that it’s a code name for “never.”
What should you do then?
First of all, brace yourself. Nobody is going to give an unlimited budget and an army of minions who will follow you blindly. It’s not going to happen.
Whats you can do, instead of keeping your unrealistic thoughts about the brilliance of your UX process, is to think.
- Learn who makes decisions.
It does not have to be a final decision. This person might not want to listen to you. Start by looking at the people around you who make decisions. Find and get to know how they do it. What help do they need?
Do not forget that it’s someone else’s job to make decisions. Their livelihood depends on it. So they will not just risk it because you say it’s right or you read it in a very respectful UX source.
- Speak human.
The more you are going to bother people with the terminology they have to get used to, the less influence and credibility you will get. Strange, right?
While learning who’s in charge, make sure to pick up their language and understand what on the people’s minds. Do they want to increase revenue or sales? Do they want to reduce churn? Do they want to beat a competitor? Do they want to be talked about on the Internet?
Whatever they want, learn about it. And then tell others how you can help.
- Don’t be afraid to involve other people.
But don’t bore them with the UX process. Many people in the organization do not have UX in the titles but will be of great help to you. Also, the more people can back your story up, the easier it will be to convince the others. If a majority is in favor of the new approach, maybe it’s worth trying.
Do not look at other teams and departments as if they are not worth your attention. Marketing, technical support, customer support, customer experience, sales — all these people communicate with the end-user. And they can be of great help to you when you are looking for insights and ideas.
More people in your process means more credibility.
- You might find it necessary to prevent something from happening or shut down some bizarre idea.
Doing UX is not only about adding more features. You need to know how to hold off bad decisions from happening.
Tomorrow
You are in a conference room. But you are not alone this time. You asked Josh from Customer Support and Lana from Marketing to join you. You calmly go over your main bullet points you’ve prepared together earlier.
Your manager and technical director get into the conference room a couple of minutes later and get their seats nodding to you.
“I’d like to address one moment today. I’ve talked to Lana recently,” you star and point towards your colleagues. Everyone is looking at them now, “She noticed that the conversion rate has been dropping quite significantly in the last couple of weeks.”
“Yes, our regular conversion rate is about 7.3%. But in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had about 5%, and just yesterday, it dropped to an alarming 4.3%, which is way low for a SaaS company. If the trend continues, we will start losing money.”
The technical director and manager glance at each other, interested.
“But what happened?” the manager asks.
“We do not know for sure, but Josh has some ideas,” you look at Josh.
“Well,” Josh leans forward, “Remember, this additional step for account connections? We also removed the Facebook login because of some security concerns. According to my team, it’s a deal-breaker now. Many were not able to log in anymore without resetting their passwords. It was stressful! But also our new prospects get too concerned with the new security screen. No Facebook login adds more steps for creating an account, also.”
“I am afraid we cannot get it back. The security matter is important,” the technical director says.
“Sure, but the conversion rate keeps dropping. We will start losing money,” you say.
The manager and technical director glance at each other again.
“So, what do you suggest?”
And there’s a big smile on your face.
Happy-end stories are great. They give us hope that there’s a world where it’s rewarding to make the right choices.
If you’ve started your journey in UX, don’t just get discouraged if things do not go the way you expected. Now, you need to be very good at what you do and find the right people, opportunities, and places to make things better. They are not just lying around waiting for you. It would be too simple in this case.
When you were fighting for this job, it was not easy, too. But you kept at it. You needed it. You wanted to be able to make things better. And you have it now.
Don’t let any minor obstacles stand on your way to a gloriously happy ending.
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