UX and Growth Mindsets
My confession is I didn’t have gmail hot keys toggled on until a couple months into my first job. It’s been a long journey since and it unsurprisingly, in retrospect, led me to user experience (that’s for another post). User experience encompasses the skills, values, and mindset I’ve been developing since entering the business world and it’s an adrenaline shot finally putting a name to it. Given where I was fresh out of college, I know it can be adopted by anyone who wants it. UX is a(n attainable) superpower.
I could get flashy with my new skills from General Assembly and rattle off fancy terms like contextual inquiry, feature analysis, card sorting, affinity mapping, and heuristic analysis as my superpowers, but at the end of the day, those are tools. You can be equipped with the tools, but you cannot be taught the mindset. You have to want that mindset and nourish it once exposed to it. With the mindset and tools, you can make the impact you want in your life and your community (or the world, dream big, why not?).
What is the UX mindset? This mindset is flexible and embraces being outside of the comfort zone and plunged into uncertainty; it’s aware of and deeply empathizes with the different players in the process, whether it’s the users or the business-owner of the product. If you step back, you’ll see this can be applied to any and every experience in life, not just UX. It also happens to pair nicely with growth mindsets given how I learned to embrace the UX mindset.
Tyler Hartrich, my GA teacher and endless source of UX quotes, knowledge, and enthusiasm, states that “our UX super power lies in our ability to operate in systems.” In UX and my life, my interpretation is it all comes down to having processes in place, trusting that process, and probably most importantly, embracing the messy process that is problem solving and paving a new path for yourself (or a product!).
My process is about moving from the big picture to the single pixel of a wireframe (or a single decision in my life).
In the UX world, that means understanding a problem from all vantage points, focusing on the key components of the problem to ideate all sorts of ways to address it, and finally testing my solution(s) (over and over) until it solves the problem; it ideally also produces a beautiful prototype.
In life decisions, I’ve begun to apply similar guidelines; it’s critical to think high-level about a problem. One, it gives me perspective of how that problem fits in the grand scheme of my life so I don’t stress about it as much (life is chaos). If it goes the worst it could go, how would that impact me? Would that continue to impact me a year from now, ten years from now? Diving deeper, what would the different outcomes of varying degrees look like? Stepping back again, what are all my possible decisions? Then diving back in, exactly what do I need to do? What are all the possible ways I can prepare for something? This UX process ensures I have a framework and can prioritize the outcomes that’ll benefit me most as well as minimize negative ramifications in my life.
There’s a lot of chaos in the UX process. There’s funnily enough, a lot of chaos in life. There’s not much I can do about either except embrace the chaos and have faith in my process.
Think big picture, care painstakingly about the details, embrace chaos, and trust the process to lead the way one step at a time.
I’ll end with a quote:
“In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source — periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon — to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success.
In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
