Finding Your Voice In UX
Working in a UX Team, and Discovering Yourself
When working in a team sometimes it’s hard to navigate being unfamiliar with people’s individual working styles. Especially on a UX team where a number of designers may have very strong personalities, and with that, strong opinions. But diversity in working styles, opinions, experience etc., is the best thing a team could have, so that designers can really challenge each other and get to the root of user’s problems to develop real, robust solutions that aren’t formed from just one perspective.
And when a design team’s dynamic works together just right — that’s when the UX magic really happens. In the two-week design sprint my team and I ran together, we learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way.
Lesson 1: Listen to your users, their problems won’t always align with your hypothesis.
We set out to identify an opportunity within a problem space around travel and targeted Airbnb as a potential partner. Initially we thought that people would want travel planning/booking and concierge-like services to help reduce the time and effort they do researching, and use it to enjoy their vacation instead. After conducting our user interviews, we found some unexpected insights:
4 / 5 Users get information fatigue when researching for travel plans online (over 20+ sources)
3 / 5 Users expressed concern with credibility of online sources (i.e. TripAdvisor, Yelp etc.)
5 / 5 Users depend on friends as #1 source for travel recommendations
“Recommendations from my friends are the best because they know me and they have similar interests.” — User 2
After listening to our users needs, we had to pivot completely from our initial hypothesis and focus on the value of friend’s recommendations for travel — how we can create a platform that makes people’s travel recommendations more easily accessible?
Lesson 2: Take whatever time is necessary for Design Studio(s), and get your team on the same page.
This major pivot in our hypothesis lead to almost two full days of Design Studio, where we wanted to flesh out our persona, their real problem, and where our solution would fit in with their travel planning. We spent hours white-boarding together as a group to figure out our persona’s motivations and reasoning why they depended on their friends as the #1 source.
We went very deep into research and found that our persona had many layers, including the need for social validation. Which lead us down so many paths (and more white-boarding sessions). We had so many ideas, solutions and features in mind so we went back to the drawing board many times (literally).
During this time of intense design studio, it’s easy to get discouraged especially when there are team members who have stronger opinions (and sometimes louder voices) than you. Everyone wants to share their ideas and feel that their ideas are valid, even though the team might go in a different direction. As someone who tends to be more of an internalizer, I need more time to formulate my thoughts, then share out my ideas. When the team was deep in discussion, sometimes it felt like they were going 100mph, while I was attempting to give my input, but it seemed like the train had already left without me.
I Slacked out my feelings to the team and fortunately they were very receptive. After reaching out and being real about our group dynamic, everything afterwards felt like we found our rhythm. Discussions were more productive and we felt like we were all equally contributing to this great thing. Suddenly we started to feel some of that UX magic.
We realized that we had to figure out just the main problem that we had the ability and resources to resolve for our persona in this two week sprint. After many hours of discussion, it was well worth the work because we had come to a consensus on how to move forward and had a unified vision for our designs. Take the time to get on the same page as a team, because chemistry is everything and without it, your design process can be hindered from the start.
Lesson 3: Simplifying for presentations for unknown stakeholders is okay — it will help filter out what is essential to your story.
We had put in a lot of great research, background work and design studios so we wanted to show all of it when it came to the actual presentation. But then after our class critique, everyone seemed confused about what our product actual was, because we were revealing too many layers to it. We realized that we were trying to pack in way too much and we had to simplify our story — especially since we had no idea who our stakeholders were going to be.
It’s impossible to show all of your work in just a short 20 minute presentation, so you have to filter out the smaller details and show only what is essential. (Which we realized is only really 20% of what we actually did in the last two weeks).
We simplified our persona’s problem statement:
Amy is overwhelmed when choosing travel destinations/activities online because she doesn’t trust all of the sources. She has to reach out to her friends for recommendations because she trusts them.
And our solution:
Airbnb Discover will provide users with a platform where they can explore what their friends are doing around the world.
With Airbnb Discover, users can save all of the things they want to do in one place for all of their future travels.
Because we took the time to distill our story and made it easy enough for someone with no context to understand, it made it even easier for us to tell the story because the narrative we created felt natural and conversational.
In the end, our story made sense to the stakeholders and they were impressed with our work. One of them who had been a stakeholder for other General Assembly UX Design Immersive cohort’s projects before said that this was the best he had seen so far.
We were really proud of the work we produced and definitely felt that UX magic: when you solve real problems for real users, and it’s well received by fellow peers — that’s why we do it. And I couldn’t have done it without my team, and finding my own voice.
