Lessons from my hobby, implemented at work
They say that learning is just beyond the classroom–lessons can come from anywhere. Well, I totally agree with that. Everything we go through in life can provide valuable lessons if we are willing to reflect on it.
Traveling is one of my hobbies. New places gave me new energy, one of which was to support my writing career. Luckily for us at Blibli, finding time to travel isn’t so difficult as we’re given the trust to work in hybrid setting. Not only it supports my extraversion, but also fuels me to keep doing better at work.
If we look further, the lessons that I can share just from one trip are a lot (and hopefully be useful for you). I have grouped these lessons from my travels into 3 sections. They have been useful in my product/content design career and hopefully will be helpful for you too. So what are the lessons from traveling I’ve been using at work? Let‘s explore them.
Research
I am quite well-prepared when it comes to traveling. Even before buying a travel ticket, I have to know what the place I am visiting will be like, including the weather, transportation, food, tourist attractions, and the character of its local people. Traveling helps me hone my research skill to later be used at work.
In a design process, specifically at Blibli, research is a fundamental step to get to know our users; what they do, what their daily difficulties is like, what are their input for us.
The writers at Blibli Design are encouraged to carry out copy research to have our microcopy validated by users. Often, writers think the copy has met user expectations just by following existing guidelines, but sometimes it turns out the user does not fully understand what it means. Insights from copy research really helps writers to make better decisions.
Standing up for yourself
I prefer travel independently, without a guide, sometimes even completely alone. My confidence was nearly always tested. But most of the time I receive help a lot from local people by being clear about my intention and my needs.
This strongly reminds me that in my job, standing up for yourself is very important. Every day, we meet and deal with stakeholders from various backgrounds, characteristics, and different approaches. When a disagreement occurs, communicating my intention and the reasons behind my copy proposal helps in clearing up discrepancy.
Standing up for ourselves also shows our integrity in our work. Which ultimately makes our work meaningful for ourselves and the users.
Documenting everything
I love taking photos and capturing the atmosphere of the places I visit. I also like sharing some of them to my social media account along with the location tag, so anyone who wants to go there can use it as a reference. Moreover, those who haven’t considered it yet may become interested if complete location information is provided.
In a design process, documenting work is useful not only for yourself but also for others. Others can easily continue our work if it is neatly documented. Additionally, documentation is helpful for tracking how far your learning has been progressing in your career.
As a UX writer, I find documentation fundamental to fulfill our crucial mission in crafting a user experience journey: keeping our words concise across all squads within one tribe. This documented information makes it easy for writers from different teams to find commonly used terms for various cases.
Not only that, it also helps in knowledge transfer as the organization may go through a change in role distribution. When a new writer transfer to a team, the onboarding process will be greatly facilitated by this documentation, which we call ‘copy runner’ at Blibli Design.
So those are pretty much the lessons I’ve learned during my travels. I simply can’t wait to learn even more in my next trip!
Wrapping up this article, my hope to you is to find something that can fulfill your mind. Whether it’s traveling, hanging out with friends, reading some books, or anything. Not only they will support us mentally, but also help us perform at our best in our career.
Blibli is currently hiring full-time and intern positions! Send your resumé to recruitment@blibli.com and get the chance to work with our PM and UX team and create your own unique stories.
