The forest

I built a little forest. Or so I call it.

My corridor has a bend. It makes a right angle to the right, that you can’t see from the entrance.

So in that part of the hidden corridor, a part I only transit through — like all corridors — I hid a forest.

Why?

My mental health is in tatters.

And it’s not just the lockdown. Between the breakup of my 8-year relationship, a stressful job, and living alone for the first time in my life during the covid-19 lockdown and single-handedly shouldering all expenses of living in London… 2020 has been kicking me in the mental health balls.

So I have been trying desperately to keep myself afloat; to reduce the brain-scrambling.

I come up with crazy hacky solutions and ideas all the time. To make it sexy, corporations call it innovation. To me, it’s a sightly bonkers connect-the-dots, and it is part of how I function all the time.

So — no wonder — I came up with something seemingly nuts, but scientifically sound, to help me stay afloat.

I wasn’t sure whether I should share anything about my mental health. But then, on the back of mental health awareness week (last week) I thought: fuck it. Sharing stories is how we grow. Both in the writing and the reading. So let’s grow!

Why bring green in

I’d used some vines before in the second room. I’m not even sure what gave me the original idea. Then I used them on a project at work, where six people shared a bland white box of an “office”.

By adding the vines, colleagues and clients (we were a blended innovation team) were both finding the space more cheerful, comfortable, and were commenting on it. We also started standing up and collaborating more post-vines. I’d even wrapped one around the meeting box’s HDMI cable for the screen. It made things feel more playful.

Both in my personal space and at work, I discovered that greenery really makes a space feel more comfortable.

Spaces who can afford to have real live plants will also reap air-cleansing benefits on top of the soothing of greenery and multi-dimensional light.

There are hospitals who add greenery to help with healing… and discover that patients who can see nature (real mostly, but even looking at photos of nature helps) have a higher and faster recovery rate. ( Effects of Flowering and Foliage Plants in Hospital Rooms on Patients Recovering from Abdominal Surgery. Seong-Hyun Park and Richard H. Mattson)

Green is good for humans.

Even painting a wall green or giving exercise sheets in a green folder boosts creativity and calm. ( The effect of looking at green before doing a creative exercise)

So the lifelike vines? They work brilliantly.

Why I did something wild

When I realised I’d be living alone in the flat I’d shared with my partner for 5 years, my best friend suggested I get rugs. I’d wanted some anyway, as a rental-friendly way to add some colour to an indelibly BEIGE apartment.

She also made the point that they would help me ground the rooms and own the space. She was right.

While browsing, I came across this forest carpet. It’s still on wayfair if you’re interested, and comes in various sizes.

I’d bought the slightly disorienting carpet with my main order of one rug for each room (bedroom, kitchen, corridor, corridor bend — the forest -, and living room). Had it for maybe a month (1.5 weeks of that in lockdown) before I got started with the forest properly.

It reminded me of that huge canvas print IKEA was selling for about a decade (now discontinued) of sunlight through trees. I had wanted that print very badly, but by the time I was no longer constrained by co-habitation-vetos, it had disappeared. The idea of having huge nature scenes on my walls hadn’t.

Placing it in the bend was a design choice.

In order to delight, the element of surprise is required. Once something happens as a standard, you come to expect it, and it’s harder to be continuously delighted. By hiding my forest in a place I transit through and can’t see all the time, I am increasing those tiny moments of surprise and possible delight.

Delight is one of the three classifications in the Kano Product Model

I’m not sure this was conscious. I was not at full capacity when I installed it. (I’m not sure I am now either). I had collected that dot many years ago. I am glad it came into service when I needed it most.

Multi-sensory experience

So now I have a corridor forest.

I regularly paint the leaves with a diffuser scent I discovered in my favourite Paris hotel and soon bought for myself. So when I walk through, it smells of something I like. A bit like walking down the street and catching some lilacs or jasmine in bloom.

The way the vines catch and layer the light is very beautiful to me.

I also hooked up fairy lights, just behind the leaves in the ceiling, to brighten up the corridor at night. Also I love fairy lights.

They are hooked up to a smart plug that turns them on at 18:30 every evening, to remind me to stop working, and turns them off at midnight by which point I should be fast asleep.

If I say “hey google turn on the forest” the fairy lights come on. Alexa can handle them too.

How it’s built

I used little sticky hooks and fake vines that I bought on amazon. And fairy lights.

• Sticky hooks: 100 Pieces Adhesive Cable Clips Wire Clips Cable Management Wire Cord Holder (13 x 10 mm, White) Sticky hooks on amazon.co.uk (£6.25)
• Vines: MARTHA&IVAN Artificial Ivy -M&I Design 14 Pack 115Ft, Fake Ivy Garland Decorations,Fake Plants,Fake Vine,Vine Decoration for Wedding,Party, Garden, Home Decoration (14 Pack Ivy) Vines on Amazon.co.uk (I managed to get a 42-pack for £29. Now they sell 14-packs for £14)
• Fairy lights: Fairy Lights, OMERIL 12m/39ft 120 LEDs String Lights, IP65 Waterproof Warm White Firefly Lights for Xmas, Party, Bedroom, Wedding, Indoor/Outdoor -Silver Wire (12M-USB Plug in) USB fairy lights on amazon.co.uk (£9)
• Smart plug: Smart Plug WiFi Outlet Remote Control Anywhere, YAGALA Mini Plugs Compatible with Alexa, Google Home and IFTTT, Wireless Timer Socket, No Hub Required (2 Packs) Smart plugs on amazon.co.uk (£14 for a pack of 2)
• You will also need a usb plug. I had a spare one from an old apple phone.

Total cost £53.

I am only counting one of the smart plugs (so £7). And I am not including the forest rug.

The only secret to installing it is this: offset the vine strings. They are identical. Leaves in the same place. Which is a bit creepy and very unnatural. So to make them feel more natural, install them two by two (never alone) and offset them: pull each of them in opposite directions to make one longer vine where only some of the middle bit has two vines.

Nature heals

While writing this, I discovered an entire website dedicated to how nature helps health. NHSforests.org.

I will be looking up the “a view of the coast helps recovery”, because that is precisely how I holiday for 3–4 weeks every summer and it is the most restorative thing ever.

Especially when you just sit on the beach, read books, and swim. I’ve found a few good spots. All of them are in the Aegean or Ionian (the seas east and west of Greece, respectively).

And to pre-empt a question I got from someone two summers ago: the Aegean is in the Mediterranean in the way Surrey is in the United Kingdom. (they weren’t sure how the same patch of sea could have two names)

Did it work?

The week after I installed it, I caught myself moving around the flat a lot. I was tidying up. Crossing the forest again and again and again. I hadn’t had energy for any of that for weeks. Yet after the little forest, I had more.

Obviously the forest is not the only thing that helps me. I have CBT sessions, to help me get unstuck. I try to make an effort to talk to friends with video. It’s hard for an introvert who needs to collect dots, see new things, to refuel.

But it did start a little ball rolling.

I hacked a battery-powered string of fairy lights to run off USB. I painted a few clouds in the sky (not in the actual sky, on a canvas. You can see it hanging in the forest). I made a ginormous grocery bag with three types of handles, including backpack straps. I made a t-shirt. I painted two more small squares with sky and sea and sent them to my parents. I scooted to Hyde Park last weekend and to Fulham on Wednesday. I hadn’t gone further than 1.5km from my house in two months.

And I am managing to focus on a book again. Snowball, if you’re curious. Warren Buffett’s biography. I go to the gardens — the real gardens in front of my apartment — every day and read in the sun. Nature heals.

Nature heals.

So if you can’t go to it, you can always stick it on your walls. Turns out it helps.

Originally published at http://eurydice13.com on May 30, 2020.

TLDR: I bought lavender sachets to protect my woollens, and the sachets CONTAINED moths, causing several thousand GBP worth of damage.
Vendor is requesting photos, Amazon blocks any emails I send with photos. So I am posting this publicly for them to be able to access.

I own a lot of wool and cashmere because I get cold.

Earlier this year, I bought a batch of lavender sachets from amazon to protect my jumpers, dresses, cardigans and other garments from moths.

I bought these Natural Lavender Sachets, that are listed as MOTH REPELLENT.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07FK9NBB3/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

DO NOT BUY THEM.

Turns out they CONTAINED MOTHS!!!

The hungry devils ate their way out of the bags, and devoured my closet!

It’s really gross.

Anything the bags were next to, was eaten.

My biggest loss is an Alexander McQueen dress that I love, and which alone retailed for more than £1000. 😭

But that approach is not always possible… say on maxi-cardigans…

Where the holeS are below the butt, and the size of your palm.

The moths from the lavender bags destroyed one Alexander McQueen dress, two cardigans from uniqlo (one wool, one cashmere) and six jumpers (2 wool, 4 cashmere).

I know they came from the bags because only things in contact with the bags were eaten!!!!

Then I contacted the vendor to see what they proposed to do. Perhaps they could stop selling the weapons of wool & cashmere destruction?

December 9th

They asked me for photos.

So I replied with photos… and got this from amazon. It BLOCKED my reply with photos.

I told the vendor.

They replied.

Hello 
Please add the photo to the attachment, then click send, thank you!
Kind regards!

Like I’ve never sent an email with a photo attached before…

So I did that again.

I got blocked again.

I told them again. And this time included a link to an evernote with all the photos.

December 12

They replied.

Hello,
Sorry we could not view the link because it was blocked by Amazon.
Please see the attachment , attach photos to the attachment then click ,thank you !

I think the team cannot understand what “Amazon is blocking my email with photos” means, or how to circumvent it.

So here you go, team at KOOLTI. (that’ll be my next email in a couple of minutes, with a link to the public URL of this story)

I hope you can see the photos now! They are ON THE INTERNET.

December 13th.

The saga continues.

Hello , Sorry we still don’t see any pictures and links. The links you sent have been removed by Amazon. You can view the attachments. Please attach photos to the attachment, each of our customers can send pictures by adding to the attachment.

In June 2017, I was hired for a few days by a consultancy to help with a design thinking workshop they were running for a client. They needed to run it with 80 participants, and to make it work they’d split them up into cabaret tables of 8, each with a facilitator… who needed to be told what to expect!

So I put together a short guide, to help me quickly brief the facilitators (experienced consultants) on what to expect and watch out for.

I’d be on stage MCing the activities, giving instructions, and getting the outputs played back, so their role truly was to keep everyone focused during each activity.

Because I love meta-jokes, I ran the briefing as a workshop. So it was a briefing and a demonstration and a workshop all at once.

I found it funny, and everyone was much more engaged than in their typical death-by-powerpoint approach.

Below is the guide that I put together back then, refreshed with a few items from a more recent and intensive workshopping experience.

It will not tell you how to run a workshop in detail, because the choice of activities, or venue, or audience sizes, and your style of facilitation will be your own. But all the things you need to think about and prepare are listed.

And there’s a link to an amazon wishlist with all the materials I use, to make it faster for you to set up.

It’s long, but I’ve tried to make it easy to skim, and split it into the various phases of a workshop.

A. Before

1. Exercises — it’s ok to customise them

* Define the area being explored. Write a problem statement or goal, to make it clear.

* Discuss and decide what sort of insight and aspects you want to learn about from your participants and have them discover and build amongst themselves.

* Design exercises (use out-of-the-box classics as they are, customise them, or invent new ones as necessary).

* I use index cards with exercises summarised on them to help me plan the activities sequence of a workshop. Easier to remember your options when you can just see them all. Most come from either Gamestorming or Universal Methods of Design.

* Practice the exercises, or pretend-do them at least in your mind as if you were the participants from their perspectives, to see how valuable the outputs are likely to be. Change the activities if necessary.

* A good working group size is 8–12 people. Once you cross 15 it starts to be unwieldy, and beyond 20 you need to redesign exercises or modify them heavily or split the group into smaller teams for each activity, because it’s just not manageable.

2. Materials — procure these early, and get 25% more than you deem necessary

* Many post-its, preferably the 10×10 square ones. Calculate one pad per person, per day, volume-wise. I’d advise 75% classic yellow and 25% other colours.

* Depending on the exercise, one or two packs of different (larger? Coloured?) post-its for writing affinity sorting cluster names or other headings. Expect to replace those headings as you iterate, so you’ll use quite a few.

* Sharpies. A lot of black sharpies. One for each individual, and 20% of spares because some come will come out of the box dried up and, invariably, extra people will show up.

* Whiteboard markers that look different to the sharpies. They’ll be useful for writing on the magic whiteboards or on windows and erasing what you’ve written.

* Any facilitator prompts and notes that are necessary.

* Magic whiteboard sheets to cover the walls where post-its will go. We call these a “stage”. In case these cannot be found, or are not affordable, brown paper, cellophane, or solid colour giftwrapping paper stuck up with masking tape will also work (though not as well).

* Masking tape for moving the stage(s) with the post-its secured onto them. Masking tape is also useful for making any long lines such as the horizontal ones if you’re laying out a service blueprint.

* A4 paper for larger storyboards.

* Index cards for frame-by-frame storyboards or other comments. They stick by touch to the magic whiteboards, which is amazing. Just remember to secure them with tape or blu-tac before moving them.

I have a workshop materials list I maintain on Amazon. That has all these and more. You’re welcome to make use of it, as I’ve already spent the time finding the best bundles of each thing. http://amzn.eu/h4ZMGRl

3. Room — it can take two hours to set up. Book it for the setup time, and be there early

* Stick up the sheets on wall areas in front of where your group will convene, so that everyone can see it. These will be populated in each activity, and then quickly moved to the side to make room for the next activity.

* Get colours on the walls if possible. Giftwrapping paper makes for good temporary colourfulness. This helps remind attendees that we are there to play, have fun and be creative. This isn’t a working day, we just happen to be talking about work.

* If you can, adjust the seating to be similar to a cafe, creating small clusters of people. The exact arrangement will depend on the number of people in the session, and the activities planned. Remember, this isn’t a presentation or a boardroom meeting. All people are equal in this space, and everyone should be comfortable, easily see the staging area (where the sticky-note action will be happening), and be within speaking distance without needing to raise their voice.

* Allow for space around the seats and in front of the staging area so people can easily stand up and stick their post-its to the stage when necessary.

* Stick up two large pieces of paper on the side of the staging area. Mark one “?”, and the other “P”. These will be used to make note of questions that we cannot answer immediately or topics that we cannot address immediately or at all.

* If I am doing a workshop within a company, and I expect people come to it as they would to a meeting (read: with their laptops), I will make a “Laptop Parking” sign, and put post-its and a marker for labeling any identikit laptops beside it. I prefer to set this up towards the “back corner” of the room, so nobody will feel anxious about their laptops getting grabbed.

During

4. Introducing the game

* You are the host and game-master. Do not be afraid to use a louder voice or clap to attract attention, if necessary. Always do these with a smile.

* Begin the session with a safety briefing regarding expected alarm tests, nearest exits, bathroom and refreshment directions, and timings for scheduled breaks, if any.

* Instruct them to park their laptops, and explain that they will need their hands and deskspace for the activities of the day; not a keyboard.

* Introduce the facilitators, and give context for the activities being run today. Why are we here, what is the higher aim.

* Introduce and run a warm-up activity, to shake up the crowd. This could be the inspirational “design a vase” vs. “how can I enjoy flowers in my home” or “draw me a mug” vs. “How can I enjoy coffee”. It shakes up the brain from thinking of a product to thinking about a multi-sensory experience in a series of contexts. Because we’re there to shape experiences, not products.

* Always introduce the exercise in chunks of instructions, never in one long breath. Break it down into phases that you mention up front, but wait to give step by step instructions for each phase when the group gets to that phase. If you give them all up front, they’ll forget and you’ll have to repeat them anyway.

* It can be helpful to have the phases or goals written out on the wall or on a slide. (though monitors are discouraged in a workshop space)

* If an activity is meant to be in pairs and there is an odd number of players, make one group of three, don’t pair up with a single person yourself.

* Answer any questions that people want to ask. Wait for all questions to be answered before starting the activity.

5. What to do while they play

* Move around the groups, and sit with each for a minute or two, to make sure they’re all comfortable with the activity.

* Answer questions, but mainly ask questions to open up the team’s approach to the problem.

* Keep an eye on time. It’s ok to not be hyper-precise, but it is critical to make the entire endeavour run to time or 5 minutes early, because it shows respect for any work commitments your participants have outside of your project.

6. Keep an eye on the audience for

* Disengaged. Sit with them and switch to interview mode briefly, to get them talking about the topic. This should get them unstuck and working. Once, I came across an aggressively disengaged person. I learnt later that they had been working on the topic for a year, and the company had killed the project and hired us instead. Don’t stay too long, not everyone will engage fully, and that’s ok.

* Overtalkative, taking over. Step in and ask how is everyone doing. When the louder presence speaks up, engage with the others more directly to validate their presence and give them a voice. Leave once a conversation is happening again.

* Quiet. During a full group verbal activity, you will need to probe the quiet ones out of their shells, and stop the louder ones from taking over the discussion.

* Finished early. Some people will be faster than others. If they are done, don’t rush the others on their account. Most moderators engage them in conversation to keep things interesting while waiting for others to slow down or to announce “time”.

* The smartass. Every larger group ends up with one. He’ll question everything, try to take over the show, hopefully make some good jokes, but is generally an annoyance. I personally acknowledge their contributions, and then ask someone else to comment on them. By giving authority over what he just said to someone else, I both open the conversation to another voice, and allow everyone to question the validity of what he said. There will always be wise people in that group too, but wise people are usually quiet, and will need more encouragement to speak up.

7. Wrapping up the game: The discussion

* The most important part of the workshop, while it is running, is the final discussion amongst the group. Never skip that, even if you’re pressed for time. It’s the only occasion you’ll have to catch all of these people in the same room together, freshly having thought about this problem, and full of things to talk about.

* Encourage anyone too quiet, but active with their eyes, to speak up.

* Keep an eye out for interruptors, and either cut them short, or make sure that they will finish speaking and give the floor to someone else.

* Whenever an objection comes up, question it (you can even use the five whys method).

* You should always add all comments to the stage, and if you’ve used the five whys technique to probe into something, it is smart to also write those answers in sequence next to the original statement.

* It is good form to affinity sort items and find groupings that refer to big ideas or topics. It is only by going one level “up” that it will be possible to do the next thing.

* Give a summary / story of what was discovered today. Often, this is a genuine narrative, because a lot of creative activities are centered around an actor or hero / heroin (our users). This will open up the floor to some elaboration, clarification or a few more ideas. Write those down too.

* When nobody has anything else to add, the summary has been given, and (or very importantly when) it is time, move on to the next activity.

* It is good form to have breaks between activities, or at least after 90 minutes. 5–10 minutes, enough for most of the group to fetch a coffee, biscuit, or go to the bathroom. Assume you’ll lose 15 min of working time though, with all the chit chat and running around.

After

When you look online, it feels like creative workshops stop with the post its on the wall. That is untrue.

The real work begins AFTER the workshop. And typically, from 90min of workshop, you have about half a day’s worth of work in “decoding” what was contributed. Documenting it can take anywhere from two hours to three days, depending on what the material will be used for.

If the workshop content ends up in the bin, or purely in your brain, your project will have a higher risk of failure.

8. Capture

* After the workshop, photograph the stage(s) from close enough to be able to read what’s on every item when you open that photograph at 100% zoom. (iPhone 6s and newer have 12MP cameras which are particularly good for grabbing a full wall in one legible photo).

* Do a full photo as well, even if you can’t read it, as it will be useful for illustrating all the work in a report. A wide-angle lens is useful for this. Occasionally, panorama shots grab a nice overview, but bear in mind they’re usually too blurry to read.

* Secure the post-its onto the stage(s) with masking tape, and take them away.

9. Evolve

* If the content calls for it, once you’re in a secure location, affinity sort all your items with great attention, until everything has been classified into themes. This will have been done superficially in the workshop. The post-workshop work needs to be more thorough, because this is when the real insights are found.

* Typically, a sense of family or narrative will emerge from the clusters you have discovered.

10. Document

Start a document where you will have

* The context of the activity you ran (project, attendees, goal of the discovery exercises)

* A description of the exercises themselves

* How you processed the information after in your affinity sort. Photographs of the sorting in progress and at each intermediate stage are handy here.

* A full record of which items were posted under each theme. (this will take quite a bit of time, and is best done with two people: one reading, one typing)

* What your conclusions are, in terms of

• What has been discovered (e.g. themes)
• What needs to be done next / should be addressed first
• Other items to investigate
• What this information can be used for

11. Share

Share that document with your client as part of a post-workshop pack.

This was run for a reason. Take the insights back home, where they belong.

I know that there will be a “next steps” deck somewhere soon enough. I believe that every project also need a “Here is why we did this workshop, what came out of it, and how we intend to use these insights” document, which will be a separate entity, and related purely to the process and discoveries of the day. Expect to spend a day putting it together.

I’m sure there are other tips and tricks for running workshops. These are mine. If you find inspiration or use them and succeed or fail, I would love to hear from you.

Originally published at eurydice13.com on January 30, 2019.

I’m at a startup, as Head of UX, shaping a product that’s launching next week, and helping the team find ways of working that make them be more productive and feel more empowered.

One of the challenges with the otherwise small and jovial company, is that there is already a silo: Marketing.

What’s wrong with silos?

The one and only copywriter in the company is from Marketing, and typically spends his days defining copy for advertising campaigns, landing pages for the campaigns, emails (All The Emails), and the website.

“Product” is a new term. “UX” is a new term. Marketing and Technology don’t typically hang out.

And you don’t want to look at the state of our JIRA…

People forget UX

All the stories in the backlog until I showed up had “Design”, “Copy”, and “Build” sub-tasks.

There was no “UX” or “flows” or “how does this work”…

*in a David Attenborough voice* : “They were unaware of how important this was to their survival.”

So how do you get forty people who’ve never really met UX before to include your discipline — UX being a lynchpin discipline, especially for startups — in their every day workflows?

Posters FTW!

I don’t know how _you_ do that, but I made YAVD (yet another venn diagram) with emojis and stuck it on the wall.

I’m regularly referring people back to it to get them to question whether we’ve finalised the details of our product:

Do we now know

• How it works
• How it looks
• What it’s saying

And if not, someone needs to do some more work.

There’s lots more documentation happening too

Right now I’m creating diagrams upon diagrams upon diagrams of how things work, and sharing them.

I use balsamiq, because it’s heavy on keyboard shortcuts, colourful, and sketchy. It also has built-in icons for most concepts, and various annotation shapes like arrows, post-its, curly brackets, etc…

I’m _very_ quick in creating with it, and people find what I make appealing to work with.

And then what happened?

The “products we love” poster lives on my desk, and on the wall next to our scrum board.

I’m incredibly lucky that I have a dual role, both Head of UX for the company and UX Lead on their new product team… and I sit right next to the product owner who is a great guy.

We — as a company — are slowly getting better at remembering to think about, analyse, and document “How this works”.

And the copywriter is walking over to the Product side on a very regular basis, to have a peek at what else he might need to work his plain english magic on.

Things are good!

Want this poster for yourself? Products we love poster (.png)

Originally published at eurydice13.com on June 29, 2017.

UX is trendy, and we should all rejoice…

Except UXers often work to unrealistic expectations, (“make this product user-friendly in 8 weeks”) try to solve non-existent problems (“build that team a dashboard with metrics XYZ”), and are seldom allowed time to do real research or work as a team (“we don’t have time for that, just design something”).

Sound familiar?

The first and biggest problem is that UX is trendy. This would be good, if everyone knew what UX is and when a UX Architect should get involved in a project.

How bad UX happens

Someone has an idea, and gets some people to put together “requirements” which are passed on to an IT team.

Three months later, a product exists but it’s… not quite right.

So they call in a UX Architect to make it “user friendly”…

No. NO NO NO!

UX isn’t sprinkles on a sundae or rolling a turd in glitter. If what you’ve built is a pile of shit, then it’s too late for a UXer to fix it, because in 100% of cases I have encountered, how it was BUILT now constrains how it can WORK.

Which means that I can’t fix it, because UX is about HOW something WORKS.

To win at UX, let us in early

The right time to call in a UXer is when you think you might have a problem or a product idea.

Let us in early, because we help find and define the problem to begin with…

Let us in early, because we might discover that what your customers actually need is something entirely different from what you thought…

Let us in early, because we can devise ways to prove whether an idea has value.

Don’t listen to a consultancy who pitches you a solution to your self-diagnosed problem, delivered in 8 weeks.

Self-diagnosing product, process and service problems is about as intelligent as self-diagnosing a bellyache with WebMD.

You’ll end up healthier if you let a professional have a look.

To win at UX, build an internal team

What every business needs is an internal team who will spend the time getting to really know the people, practices and systems involved in running the business.

This team of smart, resourceful, multi-skilled, user-centric people, will work in one place together, for a long enough time, and will start at the root: researching and understanding the needs and motivations of clients and employees.

Our superpower is that we know how to get your customers to tell us what works and what doesn’t… rather than creating what’s in your imagination, we find ways to iterate to something that wasn’t even in theirs, until we listened to their problems, and showed them a new solution!!

And that’s how you get richer, and give us bonuses as a thank you.

To win at UX, make us lead

I am advocating that a UCD (User Centred Design) team should LEAD the evolution of processes, technology and the customer experience.

The team would work in tandem with the C-suite and Product leads, because we would be contributing to the growth and success of the business.

That’s how you run a true user-centred business; starting — and ending — with listening to the users.

To win at UX, hire multi-skilled UXers

It’s not possible to do good work in any of the UX disciplines without all individuals at least understanding all facets of the problem being solved.

Designers or BAs or “prototypers” (why is this even a thing?) who choose to work to a blinkered brief are a curse to our industry, because the challenges lie in the complexities linking up the various departments and disciplines. Nothing exists in a silo. Everything is linked to something else.

And I know from experience (and the five whys method developed at Toyota) that I can only do good design if I fully understand all aspects and constraints of a problem, because that’s when I know that I am working on the REAL problem.

This means I need to know how to conduct user research, and analyse the results. Understand and document processes. Ideate multiple solutions and draw wireframes illustrating them. Turn wireframes and flows into prototypes and test content and interactions. Write features and epics and prioritise a roadmap.

Not forgetting of course doing demos, composing and delivering presentations, writing the copy for the interface (probably THE most overlooked and critical component of every product) as well as getting stakeholder buy-in and motivating my team to build the best thing possible.

Research, Analysis, Ideation, Agile skills, Writing, Presenting, People skills and leadership. While understanding human cognition and current technological capabilities, and solving problems using design methods.

Are you tired? I’m tired…

Today, being a T-shape is not enough. You need to be more of an F or an E, and be able to progress a problem through more than one phase, because the tiny things you learn first hand are usually the key to insight and innovation.

And ALL of these UXers need to understand technology. Because I’d need them all to work with the developers in the team, and have everyone’s lives be easier through this collaboration.

It’s possible

It really is possible, because in smaller companies and startups (a recent *cough* GIRLBOSS *cough* netflix series comes to mind), listening to your customers is how you know what to do next.

The older industries and companies will take longer to adapt to this idea and embrace a discipline they still consider “new”, but they all will inevitably morph into smarter entities, listening better to their customers.

Because that is the natural selection of the business world of the future.

I’ve bet my career on that.

To win at UX, in summary:

To really solve a problem, we need:

1. to start thinking of UX as a problem-solving discipline (which it is), and getting UXers involved when you say “I think we have a problem here”… because we’re good at finding what the real problem is!
2. an embedded team of UX Architects doing research and learning the tasks, processes, tools, goals and motivations internal staff, and of the needs, motivations and reported pain points of customers.
3. to let customer insight drive decisions… and this means having the UX team lead the way. Let the professionals have a look. You’d be surprised with what we’ve found!
4. a multi-skilled team that will stay put, learn to work together well, and will be able to solve a problem from beginning to end, collaboratively; and it will include developers.

So…
What are YOU doing to win at UX?

Originally published at eurydice13.com on June 22, 2017.

How to win at UX was originally published in Ladies that UX London on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This isn’t 100% wrong, but it sure as hell is flawed!! I’ve written about why I think this is flawed, included some examples of — REAL — good and bad UX take-home tasks, looked at how other industries handle the “maybe I want to hire you” problem, and I have four suggestions for a better way of doing things.

This is a #longread, so go get a cup of tea, or save it to pocket or to instapaper for reading later. I promise it’s worth it.

The permie job song & dance

One of the reasons I am not looking for a permanent job is the fact that companies adore dragging out interviews across weeks and months, and include a series of songs and dances that a candidate has to perform. Conversations with future bosses. Conversations with future colleagues. Conversations with HR. Live tasks with competing candidates. Live tasks with future colleagues. And, most often in UX, the dreaded take-home task to return and do a presentation on!

I’m not solving your problem for nothing!

My dislike of take-home tasks fundamentally comes from the fact that all the shit ones are of the “solve my problem for free and if I like your idea, I’ll hire you” variety.
This is bad for three reasons:

1. It is unremunerated labour, and by definition unfair.
2. Because it is not founded on real research or data (there is no time), it cannot be of real use to the company.
3. Because it is the company’s niche little problem, it cannot be shared on a portfolio or blog by the candidate.

Everybody loses.
If you add in the fact that you are in great part judging the candidate on their ability to present their entire design and development process as a story, as well as on how much you personally, subjectively, find their ideas appealing… Just stop it, stop it now.

Some BAD examples

The three most hideous tasks I have ever encountered were all of the “solve MY problem for free” variety. I only stayed in the interview process for ONE of these companies. I quit the process with the other two, because I felt it wasn’t worth my time.

Lead UX position in R&D company — 2016

You need to create an open source app-store website for Apple. Apple administrators need to be able to review the apps uploaded by the open source community and approve them. Some apps may have the same name and logo, but different Author. Apps have top level categories and each of these has hundreds of subcategories.
You are the UX designer in charge. Show a plan with the key steps you would take to deliver this and list the deliverables for each step. Design two IA options for a good navigation and home screen. Design the main journey of searching, finding, buying, installing. Please take your time and choose any tool, you decide how detailed you want to be to communicate your proposal. You can use Axure or hand drawing.

So only a bit of research, analysis, personas, TWO versions each of the IA and home screen, journeys, and dozens of wireframes and mockups, to make a hyper-bloated prototype, and a presentation to put together. No biggie. It’s at least TWO WEEKS OF FULL TIME WORK, you jerks! The recruiter was also under the impression I’d met the person I’d be working for. Alas, she’d not had the courtesy to be at the office for my interview. I pulled out of the process as soon as I saw the task.

Lead UX position in travel company — 2015

I was given login details for a fictitious person on their current app, as released on the app store, as well as a link to a prototype they had built for the next version.

1) Please comment and critique on the new app design against the current app: what’s better about it? What’s not good enough, and what would you do differently? 2) Come up with your tablet solution for the new app design: how would you bring this new experience onto the tablet app? You can either use wireframe, prototype, visual designs, or hand sketches — whatever you feel comfortable with. Think about how you would drive a coherent customer experience across devices, but at the same time how to leverage the larger real estate of tablets and enhance the experience on them.

We’ll invite you for a next interview to walk through your design and thinking.

I looked at everything, realised I had zero appetite to use this app (the priorities and content of the app were so out of sync with what a real traveller wants, in both the current and future version, that I was put off), and pulled out of the interview process. I think they’re still recruiting…

Senior UX in British Luxury fashion company — 2013

The sales associates in our stores have recently been trained to contact customers for personalised services, like notifying customers of new product arrivals or when alterations are complete. They contact customers by either telephone or text message. The store managers have a problem keeping track of which customers are being contacted, and by whom and they need a solution. The sales associates also need to know if a customer has already been contacted by another sales associate, so that they can determine whether or not they should call or text that customer. Every customer has a customer profile, a record that keeps all their information, like their name and contact details. All sales associates have their own iPads that they carry in store. Expected deliverables:

As the sales associates will be performing these tasks on their iPad a solution is required for that particular device. You are expected to provide whatever deliverables you feel are necessary for conceptualising the solution and presenting it to both the stakeholders (store managers) and the developers so that they can build the solution.

Sadly for my sanity, I actually did this. I spent every single evening of a week working on it, and that was after I’d spent many hours on my holiday sketching out personas and workflows and talking to sales associates IN THEIR OWN OVERSEAS SHOPS!!
When I went to present, the person I’d be working for didn’t even have the courtesy to show up (because their sample sale was on. Not a joke.). And given what I’ve heard about the brand since, I’m glad I didn’t get the gig.

Some GOOD examples

UI designer position in R&D company — 2008

The actual brief they gave me is too verbose to include here. Basically, it was “Design a multi-device remote control”, and included presenting my design process and various sketches, as well as filling out a typical Design Document with use cases, scenarios, and functional requirements.

It was brilliant to work on, because it was immediately relatable (everyone has at least a tv!!), easy to research (talk to friends, go to an electronics store), and easy to sketch for on paper.

Oh. I got rave reviews from the principal developer who was at my final presentation, and I got the job.

Lead UX Architect in Digital agency — 2014

Bluewater are in need of our help, they have heard of this thing called UX but are not convinced of the value it can add to their business. We need to convince them of its value and look at a simple task that would demonstrate what UX can do for their business and users experience. We would like you to look at http://www.bluewater.co.uk/stores and improve how users currently find stores / shops / brands that they are looking for.
For example — the user would like to buy a paul smith shirt. We would like to see your thought processes, sketches, scamps and wireframes to show your work process. This is a responsive project so we will need to see how this works on the mobile device. For this task — there are no technical limitations, so just make this best and usable experience as possible.

This was great fun to work on, again because it was immediately relatable to anyone who’s shopped in a great mall before. I did a lot of sketching over a weekend, came up with many new ideas (which went well beyond “how do we improve the navigation of the shop catalogue”) and basically blue it out of the water! (sorry, I couldn’t help myself!) My solution included Augmented reality (in 2014), Bluetooth Low Energy, a store index with a map and indoor positioning, and product lookup across all stores. They did say there were no technical limitations!!
Unfortunately they changed their mind about hiring people. But because it was such a relatable task, I could write about it on my blog.

So which ones would you like to work on?

The bad take-home tasks are horrible, as mentioned above. The good ones have the redeeming element of being inspiring and reusable-ish.

My problem with all this, is that a critical element, the practitioner’s personality, isn’t a part of it. Their ability to think on their feet, which, in agencies and consultancies in particular, is very useful, doesn’t come into play. And will you know how they collaborate with others? Nope!

There must be a better way, right?

How do other industries do it?

Special occasion cakes

You would never ask the pâtissier to make the cake you want to your spec so you can check they can do it and not pay right? You can try samples of cakes they’ve made on the day of, say, another wedding, and see a portfolio of previous work. You then discuss what you would like, and the pâtissier talks you through some similar things they’ve done, and tells you a bit about how they would go about creating yours. At that point, it’s your turn to decide if you’d like to have this person work on your project to your brief.

At no point did they make you a full product for free.

Handbags

When you’re new in the handbag design industry and you have a new design to produce, you need to find a manufacturer. You can see various manufacturers’ past products, and choose a few to try things out with. You would send them your specification, and agree a price for producing a prototype (often around £1000), based around the complexity of your spec and the materials required. After you receive all your samples (which you have paid for), you choose the best one and that company becomes your manufacturer.

You got a bespoke product, and you paid for it.

Hiring an Architect

Maybe you’ve had a loft extension done, and worked with an Architect before. Architects do offer some consultancy services for free, in the sense that they will sit down with you and understand what you need, and give you a rough estimate of what the design and build will cost, and how long everything will take. At that point, you also agree when revisions to designs can be done, and generally what work the Architect needs to do for you (do designs, apply for permits, coordinate the builders, …). Each of those elements is payable. Then they go away and produce a real blueprint (that they are paid for), and come back to you for approval or edits. Once there are no more changes to do, building can begin.

You got a bespoke design, and you paid for it.

Notice a trend here? Nobody — in their right mind — does work for free. It is not expected, or required, or a good idea (many consultancies have tanked because they wasted resources on pitching against competition).

A discussion always — always — happens, to ensure that the two parties who need to collaborate can communicate what they want and what they can do, respectively. Past work always comes into play, because it’s the easiest way to demonstrate capabilities.

So how can UX do it better?

I strongly believe that we need a better way to do interviews in our industry, and as a starting point, I suggest we look around us and do these four things.

1. Test communication skills — All good collaborations rely on good communication. So stress test this. Talk, ask for the practitioner to do something for you on a whiteboard. Communicate a query to them, and watch them solve it and communicate it back to you. If this works, and there are creative sparks flying, you’ve got a good apple.
2. Look at past work — Every industry in the world relies on past accomplishments. Even politics. So have a closer look at the projects your candidate has been involved in, what their role really was (backstage or front stage, narrow focus or whole-project view, a workhorse or a driver).
3. Have a conversation — The world is human. Some people we get along with, others not so much. So go out, have a coffee or lunch (yes, food or drink is necessary here), and learn about each other. It’s only half an hour, but in that short time you’ll be able to tell if you want to work with each other or not. And in today’s work environment, this is very important.
4. If you must, agree on a task. And pay for it. — If you have a high risk project on your hands, or really want to see what your candidate is capable of, give him or her a task to do. Agree on what the goal is, discuss hypotheses and scope, as well as deliverables, and set a price for the work to be done. My recommendation for these tasks would be to keep them as relatable as possible (like the remote control or the mall navigation), and remove any technical constraints. We never really get to work without constraints, or within everyday environments (at least I don’t… qualification design, corporate banking and steel manufacturing sure as hell aren’t accessible to everyone). This would be something your candidate could use elsewhere instead and might enjoy working on, and happy people do good work; so it’s a win-win. And yes, you should pay for it.

Conclusion

Obviously, these are my personal thoughts. They are based on more than ten years of interviewing, during which I have met all sorts of people. My favourite jobs, when I got them, adhered to the four (ok, three, nobody ever suggested they pay me! But also not everyone asked me for a task!!) points I made above.

I hope that we’ll start trying them out, and end up hiring better candidates as a result. Oh. And have fewer people curse our recruitment processes too.

Originally published at eurydice13.com on March 9, 2017.

Travellers, beware of the #HertzHustle !!

Hertz rental agents will encourage you to prepay for your tank of gas “for your convenience”, and to return your car partially full.

DO NOT DO THIS. Fill up your tanks to the brim.

This is an INTENTIONAL LIE so they can rip you off later.

They will also tell you that the price is preferential to petrol stations on the island. ANOTHER LIE.

When you ask about how much it costs, they say it will be cheaper than to go to a petrol station. MORE LIES.

Hertz lie about everything.

Firstly, there is no Hertz at the airport. They say there is, but there isn’t. (Not at Larnaca airport, in Cyprus)

You have to hunt down an unidentifiable girl with a clipboard (i asked a taxi driver to help me because she was nowhere to be found) and then puzzle your way to another floor and part of the airport on your own.

When you repeatedly call the office to ask where to find Hertz they tell you to look for the girl, not where to actually go. Her only job is to tell you where to go to find a man with a van. Good service would be to have her walk you over, right? Though if I’d been able to FIND HER in less than an hour, that would have made for a better start.

This is the #HertzHustle

Take customers to a remote and secluded location from where they cannot leave by their own means.

Convince customers to prepay for petrol and take payment.

Convince them that they can return the tank in any state they like, and that this is provided for their convenience and is for their benefit. That, if anything, it will be cheaper than refilling at a regular petrol station.

Then, when the customer brings the car back to the middle of nowhere, worried about catching their flight, HERTZ RIP THEM OFF.

There is a (surprise) refueling charge. Another €20. They LIED about there not being an extra cost.

Cheaper than a petrol station? It’s about €5/litre too, instead of €1.27. They LIED AGAIN.

When you ask to speak to a manager, the staff tell you the manager is on holiday.

When you ask to file a formal complaint, the staff say “you can write to hertz on the website”.

When you ask if you can refill the car and leave it at the airport because you’ll miss your flight otherwise, they laugh in your face and tell you there is nobody to bring it back. LAUGH. Not kidding. The person who was ripping me off laughed when I suggested this.

When you ask them where in the purposely illegible (longest lines possible, light grey text on white, tiny font size) terms & conditions it mentions the €20 refueling fee and the price per litre, they cannot point it out to you.

Could it be more LIES? Could it be I paid them for something that is NOT LEGAL out of ignorance?

The hertz hustle is based on lies, and putting the customer under duress.

Those 3.5 litres cost me €34.

Thirty-four euro, you read that right.

I was a loyal Hertz customer, given they are on the preferred suppliers list at IBM, and I rented from them repeatedly when I worked there. (Or they were at the time I left IBM, in June 2013)

But Hertz cannot be trusted.

I will never use Hertz again, and would caution anyone from trusting anything Hertz employees say, because they have lied to customers in order to profit.

Avoid the #HertzHustle. Do not believe a word their employees say, and demand to get everything in writing.

This happened at Hertz near Larnaca airport in Cyprus on 23rd (pickup) and 27th (dropoff) February 2017.

Hertz team on twitter have promised to follow up on what the charges were, but despite their helpful attitude, I am still appalled at what their staff did to me both at pickup time, and at dropoff under duress.

I was a woman travelling alone. My pickup and dropoff were after nightfall, in the middle of a field. And I was openly lied to, taken advantage of, and forced to pay a disproportionate amount of money, under duress, at the risk of missing my flight home. Such behaviour cannot possibly be allowed to continue, and as a first step to making it disappear, I have written what happened in a public forum.

I hope Hertz take note and hire honest and caring staff in the future.

Earlier this year, I spent six weeks on a completely insane project. You’ve been on those, right? Not enough time, not enough sleep…

The aspect I want to write about is how this insane project had no scope for (or understanding of) user testing, even though we needed to do some. And this article is about three “hacks” I devised to get some user feedback regardless of what others had planned.

Constraints

All we had was three 30-people 4-hour workshops with SMEs, where the consultants planned to show progress and get feedback. It was in those 30-people-in-a-room sessions that UX needed to get feedback too.

This is what we did with them, and what we got out of each.

Activity 1: pick & mix UI critique

By the day of the first workshop, we had only created one design for a demo. It was simple, built in a single day, without enough knowledge of the problem (it was my second day). Happily, the fantastic other UXer I was working with had been involved for MONTHS, and had a bit more context… as well as a dozen other versions that had been mocked up and waylaid over that time!

We were asked to show designs, but we both knew that if we showed them one design, we’d get things like “why is this blue” or “make the font bigger”. It’s the sort of feedback you get when you ask a human to look at a new interface.

So we took another tack. We pulled our freshly hacked design, alongside three old designs, and devised a “pick & mix” session.

We gave groups of 3–4 SMEs pens, scissors, scotch tape and post its, and asked them to pick out elements form each UI that they found useful or gratuitous, effectively critiquing all four UIs, and build one that answered questions better for them.

What we got out of that session was that 2 of our 4 groups did the same thing: (main part of design A with sidebar from design D), which meant that 12 people agreed about where the value was. One more group chose design A as-is.

This made us very happy, because our new hack was actually design A… And 3/4 of our users found it had the best information of the ones they saw! Validation: achieved!

• Preparation: 15 minutes. Running time: 45 minutes.
• Analyse results: 1 hour.

Activity 2: Information trail

By the time the second workshop came round (these had been pre-scheduled as part of the SOW and we could not alter anything), we had made some progress in understanding the perspectives of our users and their primary needs and goals. But we were struggling a little to understand the depth and breadth of their challenges (think use cases and journeys)

So we made them create a huge map of all information exchanged. We placed the personas belonging to our project on a big wall, and gave them cards, pens, pins and string. They created a huge web of information exchanged along the resolution journey of various kinds of problems.

From this, we got some of our more insightful and valuable user journeys. We also discovered that there were five more personas that we needed to add to our collection! (Just in case the project wasn’t complicated enough, right?)

• Preparation: 2 hours (plus personas!!). Running time: 1 hour.
• Analyse results: 3 hours.

Activity 3: Pair user-testing

Part of the agreement with the client was to deliver a fully functional prototype of what we were aiming to build. What we’d made that far was plain images hooked up on InVision, so we thought that it was time to build something smarter. We used Axure to create something much more real-looking that they could explore.

Our activity was traditional goal-oriented user testing: asking them a typical question / problem they deal with (our insights from activity 2 helped us here) and observe how/if they resolve it and what gets in the way.

THe difference between traditional user testing and our setup, is that we set them up two-by-two, with one moderator per pair. We were worried this would be awkward…

But our moderators told us they got fantastic feedback and conversations from their SMEs, because pairing them up made it easier for them to talk amongst each other! This should not have been a surprise: the talk-aloud protocol works better if you’re talking with / to someone who doesn’t feel like a knowledgeable observer, but a newbie puzzling things out like yourself.

From this activity, we got great feedback and a large tabulated view of all the points that they struggled against or made suggestions about. Which set us up for our final designs perfectly, as we knew precisely what problems to address and where to make the most improvements!

Preparation: 1 day (idea, worksheet for facilitators, brief facilitators) plus the prototype (6 man-days). Running time: 1 hour.

• Analyse results: 1 day.

These are the three activities that got us through this project:

1. Pick & mix UI critique
2. Information trail
3. Pair user testing

Hopefully nobody has to use them under such extreme circumstances… But they proved very helpful for us, and I decided to share them here.

Originally published at eurydice13.com on November 8, 2016.

Or why having UX co-leads is better for your company (and our sanity)

I’ve been working with someone. This is note-worthy, because I have mostly worked alone. Most companies today think that one UX Architect is enough to fix All The Things going wrong in a project.

We are UX co-leads on a Big Fat Software Rewrite project. On our first day, a Monday, we were told that a workshop was running on that Wednesday. The ground was hit with running speed, with the most mundane of tasks: setting up a workshop space.

On Tuesday, first thing, we went to the office space where the programme manager planned to run the workshop… and stared, mouths gaping, at an office that looked like the Mary Celeste, complete with strewn shoes, multi-year dust layers, and a vibe of utter, dusty, beige, desertion.

We spent an entire day clearing, cleaning, and carting things around to set up a viable space for that workshop. A neat trick we used? Double-sided tape, to hang colourful wrapping paper on wall segments, and give the beeeeeeeige space some colour. We joked that we were the highest paid cleaners and decorators in London, that day!

It was FUN. Digging for a vacuum cleaner, picking up stranger’s old shoes, lifting desks, dragging chairs, hanging paper onto walls… was FUN. When was the last time that a collection of chores was fun for you? (yeah, me either)

We kept each other going, laughed at the mess, used our brains to get massive desks to fit through doors, and generally stayed sane.

The next day, the workshop was a great success. Having one person lead an exercise and the other instigate discussion and activity in the audience helped move things forward better! And the space we created was well used and loved. Our guests felt comfortable there. Indeed, it’s still being used today by other colleagues: They left it set up, and team meetings happen there every day.

Unfortunately, and despite our fantastic start, the project has been going a bit sideways from day one. In fact, barely six weeks in, the client killed it without any warning.

While the experience of having a long-term contract cancelled without any notice (yes, really) was painful, we enjoyed working together SO much, that we both felt that what we discovered needed sharing.

Hiring two very experienced UX Architects has many benefits.

Better memory and faster information processing

Our very first task after helping run the workshop was to extract insight from the information our participants contributed. In this instance, it meant doing an affinity sort on more than 500 nuggets of information. We’d started this during the workshop, with our participants, but needed to complete it.
With two brains on the job, we found faster ways of working. When one of us didn’t quite remember what an item meant, the other could jog their memory (or simply remember it themselves) and we could note down the clarification, have joint understanding, and move on. With two pairs of hands dancing on those cards, things literally moved much faster.
Our information processing speed was increased, as was our understanding. And with two brains for remembering, our total recall (unintentional punning) was better too! Our affinity sort was complete, and insight gleaned, in less than one day!!

Better communication

As mentioned, the project was wobbly. We exchanged glances in meetings, wondering why terms and processes were being misunderstood and misrepresented. One of us would speak up, and the other repeat, amplifying the message. Sometimes with different words, occasionally playing on the “if a man repeats what a woman said, it more people listen” practice. Sometimes, we just rolled our eyes in disbelief, and made notes to talk to our colleagues privately afterwards so as not to embarrass them or confuse the client. It kept us sane, and helped us get our points across.

Better & faster design

When it came time to design something, we worked together, coming up with as many ideas as each of us could, quietly, working alone… and then merged them together, discussing, augmenting, refining them until we knew what the final product would be like. Iterations happened naturally, and so, so fast. With our collective experience — a broader one than any one person could have, the internet really isn’t that old — we had some pretty good ideas!!
And then we split up the documentation work, so one of us wrote the spec and the other got the visual designer in the team up to speed on how these widgets would work, so he could start thinking about how to style them before the full spec was done.

Better & faster documents

Once you’ve done the work you also need to share it with the client, of course. And often this means passing around a lifeless document, which travels without adult supervision, and hope that it tells a complete story. This is tricky business, and benefits from more than one set of eyes both in the writing (adding & augmenting ideas) and in the editing (cutting & refining ideas).
We used a neat trick here too. Each of us had done work on one aspect of the project that needed documenting. We knew what the other had done, obviously, but weren’t experts. So each of us started a google slides document (we made “booklets” telling the stories — NOT slide decks) on their area of expertise, and talked as we wrote about our work. This meant that we were reviewing and augmenting each other’s ideas as we wrote them. When we were stuck, we’d ask the other person to have a look — and because of google slides, we could edit each other’s work just by changing browser tabs! When we were done, we both had access to both documents, both of which were finished thanks to the continuous writing and review process, and we could export them to PDF and send them wherever necessary.

Always moves forward

It was also handy for holidays. James had some time off booked, whereas I didn’t. So when he went away, I stayed behind, and progressed the work. It was only one sprint, but the project didn’t suffer or stall because the UX lead was away.
Because it had two UX leads.
The project was continuously progressing, even when one UX lead was away, because the other was still there. This was good, because to take a meaningful holiday, one needs to disconnect. And when you’re a single point of failure, you can’t do that. With two UX leads, there is no single point of failure. It’s a very literal win-win situation.

Higher job satisfaction

And I’ll tell you a secret. The best perk, the most underestimated perk, the one you’ll want to steal from this article and share with your buddies over coffee? RECOGNITION.
James and I both have extensive experience in our domain, and we respect each other and the work we’ve done. So when one of us wrote a document, or did a design, or created a framework or model to use in the project, and the other person reviewed it, gave feedback, and said “good job”; it really meant something.
Just having your work reviewed by a respected peer is enough to make you feel like your work is worthwhile. And that, ladies and gentlemen, contributes SO much to job satisfaction and happiness, that you’ll want to tell your friends : review each other’s work; say “well done”; share what you do. Because it will make you happier.

Working with James was awesome. He cursed loudly when I felt it might be unseemly, and I enjoyed hearing him say out loud what I was thinking, in occasionally even stronger terms. We used each other as megaphones, validators, motivators, reviewers, editors, and — of course — designers.

We did a much better job together than we would have alone. We were more than co-leads or partners. We were accomplices.

Neither of us had experienced collaboration at this level before. We both fell head over heels for it and have half-jokingly talked about setting up a product discovery & UX strategy consultancy.

And we would strongly recommend to all companies wanting to bring UX into their own processes and departments to carefully consider hiring two very skilled UX Architects, together, to lead the UX vision.

Some places are doing this already. Shunning the atom-centric way of working (person per person) and favouring particles (teams of two or more people who work well together).
Good communication and teamwork are the foundation of good work. Advertising agencies know this, and hire Copywriter and Art Director teams rather than skilled individuals. Good communication, trust and respect are built over time, and all are necessary to producing good work.

So go on. Hire a pair of UX co-leads.

Because two heads are better than one.

The two heads of this story

• Sophie Exintaris (@eurydice13) | Twitter
• James O'Brien (@sparrk) | Twitter

Originally published at eurydice13.com on June 2, 2016.

I have some more free time, so I am slowly progressing my hand-coded wordpress theme.

Why kittens?

Why NOT!!

Every time I try to customise a theme, I curse at how hidden all of the things I would want to brand (like colours, fonts, and sizes) are.

So I am making myself a theme where all of those things are in variables in scss, and I plan on making these editable through theme settings. So anyone would be able to grab this and make any changes they like.

It’s a work in progress. And it has kittens from placekitten.com.