On building Effective Empathy — UX study— ee:01

With permission from General Assembly and my agency, I am allowed to record my learning experience online. So here comes this publication: effective empathy, where I aim to write about my learning activities starting from Mentor-Guided User Experience Design Circuit (UXC Mentor) course and so on, log my questions, save useful resources, and share with you.

Record

Situation: I was looking forward to developing my professional specified in UX during my employment as a digital graphic designer at Milan-based digital agency firm, to strengthen my performance and skills for advancing further projects and team’s outputs.

Action: I’ve made a conversation with my supervisors, confronting direction and discussing possibilities. At last, I enrolled in one of General Assembly’s part-time online program: Mentor-Guided User Experience Design Circuit (UXC Mentor).

Helpful resource:
The suggestion on kickstarting conversation for personal development to supervisors from Treehouse. Alternatively, this one from The Muse, this piece from Udacity, and this one from Envato.

Study log: Week 0: Getting Start at UXC Mentor (GA)
[7 Nov 2017] In learning platform, the course guide us some starting materials to understanding panoramic of UX fields, clarify the role, responsibilities, possibilities, and pre-course reading list.

Recap

After reviewing the materials, I decided that to get the most out of the course; I need to:

Define learning goal

Learning on the passionate topic is fun, but there are a few thing to define on.

After reflecting, my current expectation is to be able to apply personal experiences, perspective, and background knowledge toward ongoing project via learned methods at the final stage, and make it unique.

Own proper mindset and attitude

Most of all, develop empathy, understanding way of understanding people, by cutting off bias and prejudice.

At this point, I search for useful resources on concreting human-centered design perspective. The answers lie here and here.

Mark my prospect T-Shape

I considered myself like one of design generalists out there, the “Jack of all trades, master of none,” started from industrial design and evolving skill alongside the markets and consumer. I end up collaborating with many teams in various roles in these past six years: product design, graphic design, presentation design, visual and editorial contents, motion creation, and illustration.

I found that reviewing and setting my prospect T-Shape is very helpful.

Upper line is mine as design generalist, lower line should be mine for being UX(&UI) designer

Seems a bit confusing at first, but now I can understand what to strengthen by the “depth in specialty” direction (in my case: user research, graphic design,presentation design, visual&editorial content), and what to extend and actively practice to specialize in user experience designer role (in my case:progect management, user testing, information architecture, and front-end development).

Brushing design thinking

— Recall what I learned from industrial design school
One of my favorite lecture during design class is about redesigning the oral contraceptive package. For some unknown reason, I recognize this case more evident than the classic IDEO Shopping cart.

— Read lecture record during communication design class
My classroom experience in communication design school was a gem and I know it. I tell everyone that I have got numerous keys from the professors: they would give you a hint where the treasure lies rather than reveal it to you.
The one that I enjoyed the most are: Jakob Nielsen’s ten general principles for interaction design called “heuristics,” and the law of interaction design.

— Read Creative Confidence by David M. and Tom Kelley.
And more readings.

Time management

One of Cal Newport’s good suggestions in his book is — simply dedicated five minutes a day to matching to-do list with deadline and calendar to remaining free from stress. These tips would be very helpful during my unavoidable day-off, agency workload, or part-time collaboration responsibility.

Observing better

Improving to read what drives any decisions, spotting spontaneous act. This image , this article, and also this.

Next steps: finish reading, update article repository, and move forward on study materials made available by GA this week.

UX of learning UX is not broken, you just need to understand your approach and define your way.

Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, discussions. I’d love to hear from you.