Harvest in Unknowns

Breaking barriers from Beijing, to Nebraska, to Seattle

I recently gave a talk at 4th annual WiUX conference on the topic of “Breaking Barriers.”

To ensuring my talk is helpful and tangible for the audience, I got to know about the demographics of the audience beforehand. Knowing students composts 70% of the population with a mixing of international and domestic people, I summarized my learnings from the past two years working as a young foreign professional in Software Product Design field. It was my honor to have the chance sharing my experience and learnings in front of 350 people. I gained a sense of excitement and self-fulfillment after hearing from the audience that my sharing is helpful for them to make informed decisions during their school time and prepare for contributing to the industry as design experts.

For helping out as many people as possible, I am sharing my talk below. Besides, this is a record of my self-accomplishment giving my first public speech outside of my home country with my secondary language.

Hello everyone! Those talks are so good, aren’t they.

You may wonder who I am. Great question. I’d like to introduce myself in this way — I was one of foreign students came to the United States. I was one of students studying at UW. I am one of you, who is constantly learning design.

I am a foreigner from Beijing, China and have my journey in the U.S. for eight years since I persuaded my parents to support me studying abroad. I traveled alone to Lincoln, Nebraska and spent my college time there, studying Finance. And then I studied information science with a focus on User Experience Design at UW.

If you are curious about why I decided to study abroad — I was driven by the curiosity in culture, humanity, and authenticity. Every day there were news and articles feeding in from social media channels talking about what was out there in the other side of the world; they could be compelling, inconsistent, loud, or moderate. With all of these voices mixing, I wanted to craft my understanding and point of views based on my own experience. This passion helped me going through all of unknowns and risks, and brought me to the Product Designer role, who genuinely cares about the human experience.

I am in the early stage of my career in Product Design, working at Liberty Mutual. To reach my dream career, I took risks — experiencing in different cultures, did many explorations — studied couple different majors, and made a lot of decisions in unknown. As you may tell from my blushing face, I am an introvert whose body doesn’t naturally feel comfortable to give a public speech, but this is why I am here — breaking the barriers and challenging myself. Of course, with a purpose that I believe is meaningful — I hope my experience and sharing can inspire someone just like some presenters attending this event in the past who inspired me.

When I was preparing today’s sharing, I felt a little “don’t know where to start”. Time has been accumulated by so many tries, fails, and lessons — some may be too personal to share, some may not apply to all of you, there are still so many unknowns remained, and a lot of things I am still experiencing that are yet to be concluded. So I did a self-reflection of the past 2 years being a young professional in design field, and summarized couple things, which, if time could be turned back to when I was still in school, I would tell myself what’s out there in the professional life.

So, here are what I learned from my journey of being a young professional in the design field:

When I was in school, the job I was looking for was UX designer, which I believed should lead the entire end-to-end design process.

But reading through the job descriptions, I found there are many versions of the understanding of UX Design in the industry. Besides, UX design is segmented in various ways. For example, some companies ask designers to work on only UI design; some companies separate UX research from UX design; some companies define roles such as researcher, interaction designer, visual designer, motion designer, and prototyper in their organizations and expect them to work collaboratively to deliver a delight user experience. So knowing which specializations in UX design you are most passionate about is crucial for you to understand where to start your career.

On the other hand, as the definition of UX design has been iterated, how the industry defines UX design work and what designers can contribute to business have been changed. The expectation on what designers can bring has slowly evolved from “polishing graphical user interface based on decided product decisions” to “working with business and tech people collaboratively to make product strategic decisions and craft product designs.” For example, at Liberty Mutual, designers are embedded in the product team at the early stage and lead the partners to understand the personas’ root needs for reaching their goals and engage all the partners to brainstorm possible solutions before executing and validating design ideas. In the collaboration, perspectives from business value, user value, and technical feasibilities are equally considered. Therefore, as user advocators, we gain a better position to help the product teams deliver meaningful solutions to the users.

Another observation I have at work is that, in school, we are so lucky to learn and practice the entire design cycle, from the user research to usability study; we have the chance to do every single step of the design process without getting too much resistance. However, when solving a design problem in real life, there are times that designers need to find alternative ways besides following the perfect design process and still deliver high-quality work.

For example, what could be ways to produce user-centric design solution at the circumstances where there is no pre-scheduled user research time for you? What would you do when you are not given access to the end-users at this moment? These challenges helped me to realize that designers’ job is not just to design user interface, but also be creative on the approaches in your design process — finding ways to continuously deliver meaningful solutions to the users within all kind of given circumstances.

The set of user needs is the North Star guiding design. In the design process, interview is a conventional technique we often use to reveal users’ needs.

But maybe because only 45% of information can be conveyed and interpreted through words and tone of voice, we also observe facial expression to collect nonverbal messages.

However, I recently learned from a Ted Talk Episode called “Decoding Our Emotions”, Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett shared her findings of studying emotions — although it feels like we make a particular expression that displays the emotion on the face for others to see and recognize universally, but under the hood actually, our brain is predicting when we look at others’ facial expression, and we try to make meaning using our past experience based on similar situations.

So the lesson I learned here is that emotions that we seem to detect in others come in part from what’s inside of our own heads.

As a foreigner, it resonates with me so profoundly. When I just started my exploration in the U.S., I didn’t know how to properly interpret a warm smile with eye contact from strangers, because in Beijing, where I grew up, people think it’s awkward or weird if a stranger looks into your eyes with a smile. It feels like I either have something on my face or am mistaken as his/her friend or that stranger has some secret purpose that cannot be told.

The reason to tell this story is that, in fact, there are so many unconscious biases within you and me. I think the unconscious biases are normal because the rich cultures existing in our human societies and the unique life experiences you and I individually have.

So how to put them aside when discovering users’ direct and indirect needs?

This is what I taught myself — first of all, be aware of the fact that all of us can be biased. I try to convert as many unconscious biases into conscious biases so that I can remind myself most of the time that I haven’t truly known enough to make a conclusion. Last but not least, I proactively seek out and patiently digging into the intentions behind the users’ words and tons, facial expression, and behaviors. I observed that when I am in the mindset of “objectively accepting I don’t know”, I can be a better listener, absorb diverse perspectives, and have a better chance to make real connection with others because they feel safe and comfortable of sharing their real concerns without being worried that I will judge them.

I believe if my cat knew that my friend’s dog is just saying “I like you, and I want to be your friend.” when waggling tail, she wouldn’t freak out and hit him with her paws.

When you are ready to listen to users’ true needs, be ready to be surprised by how many they can be.

In school project, end-users are often the only design focus.

But at work, a project can have distinctive types of user groups, for example, a To-Business type of product can have product consumers, product admins, product buyers, which add complexity into consideration for design. If adding stakeholders from the product team into the picture, the level of complexity can be even higher.

So, balancing and prioritizing needs from various groups becomes a critical task for designers. I think the crucial factor of prioritizing needs is Impact — the impact on user value and business value.

What does it mean? For example, a group of authors who generate and maintain contents can be secondary persona of a knowledge center system, where the primary person is the group of people who consume those contents. When they brought up the need of reducing the effort of content maintenance, I tended to rank it as a lower priority. However, if thinking from the impact perspective, when the efficiency of content maintenance can be improved, the primary person (content consumer)’s experience of using the product can be drastically improved, because the content now can be updated in a timely fashion with high quality. As a conclusion, the authors’ need should be ranked higher than what my initial thought.

To get this muscle practiced, I think doing more internships or side projects can help to gain exposure to the sophisticated design problems in real life. Besides, starting to prioritizing the needs in any design projects you work on is helpful too. I found trying different techniques of prioritizing user needs and writing down my rationales have been useful for doing reflection and making improvement.

One of the reasons that design is compelling to me is that I get chance to enable and empower others to reach their goals. Here I include both users and business partners. Of course, the ideal scenario requires alignment between user needs and business needs, which is often conflicting to each other.

When I thought what value that I as a designer can bring in, this diagram pops-up into my head: if I can design effective solution that satisfies user goals and enables the business to achieve its goals, there can be more resources for further user experience enhancement; this is a perfect virtuous cycle. To accomplish this, I think I need to bridge in between of user needs and business opportunities; therefore, understanding the business is critical.

This believe changed my design process a little bit. With the knowledge of the user as well as the business context, I can define design principles that aligning the user and business needs. When I work on the design details, for example, the interface layout, I consistently check back against the design principles. This process helps me to make sure my the design decisions at each degree can make positively impact on the user and business goals.

While understanding the business help to get a clear design purpose, having solid hard skills is the foundation to bring great design visions into life. I have a great example wanting to share.

When I was working on a project with my colleague that had limited development resources to make a product improvement, I didn’t know what to do. My colleague did a great job handling it. He didn’t accept to execute on what he was being told to do, nor purely rely on verbal explanation to help the stakeholders to see the long-term value of pursuing a better design solution. What he did was hand-coded a simple prototype in 2,3 days to prove and demonstrate that it is feasible to pursue a more valuable design solution with the given resources. It was an excellent lesson for me to learn that equipped with solid hard skills, I can be more powerful advocating for the users and bringing more meaningful solutions to users.

The last piece I wanted to talk about is ‘Inclusive Design.’ There are a lot of great discussions around inclusion design; in both academia and industry, people are trying to leverage technologies in ways of empowering human. We aim to empower a broader scope of people and aim to ultimately empower everyone. For example, Microsoft has Inclusive Design guidelines; Professor Wobbrock from UW has been researching on Ability-Based Design. Those things touch me so much. As an individual, I am very excited seeing the demostrations on designing for inclusivity.

Facebook empowers people living in various places in the world to communicate; Coursera enables people who may not be able to attend university to have chances studying high-quality courses. Amazon and Alibaba Taobao enable us shopping without leaving our beds. Airbnb enables us to get a better understanding of our surroundings when we explore a new city. It is incredible that how much that technology has empowered us; but on the other hand, the people in the traditional industries are disrupted by the emerging technologies.

I kept thinking whether there is a chance that we reach to a point where all of the players, consumer/users, emerging technologies, and traditional industries can be benefited from the inevitable changes. I do believe it is possible. Going back to the diagram that I talked earlier, there are opportunities where designers can help. We can seed human-centric design mindset into the traditional industries’ business strategy and support them by humanizing the technologies with a goal of empowering the individuals so that the individuals can accomplish their goals, as well as the traditional industries can be profitable. I think this is part of the inclusive design as well. I include this challenging but meaningful task as a part of my responsibilities at Liberty Mutual working as a product designer. And you are right from the beginning; Liberty Mutual is an insurance company.

At the end of my sharing, I want to say that we can always do our best to prepare for the future, but we may still face many unknowns in tomorrows. I wish everyone embraces the future with courage and excitement. To wrap up my talk, I want to sharing my favorite quote with you from the movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — “…We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

Thank you for your time and listening (reading). :)