Month 7 of UX Interning Remotely
Volunteering, research reading and exploring accessibility within Puppet.
This month’s UX interning update is slightly overdue because I’ve been taking some PTO and have been enjoying the Easter holidays. I also used a volunteering day which was something I haven’t yet done with Puppet.
Volunteering
At Puppet each employee has 4 days during the year which they can use as volunteering opportunities. The pandemic has made it very difficult to use these days as volunteering opportunities are limited, however I had the opportunity this month to volunteer in a Community project alongside some of my colleagues. I helped put together wellbeing boxes for vulnerable, older people living in Belfast in collaboration with Engage with Age, Age-Friendly Belfast, and North Belfast Seniors. It was great to finally see and chat with people in the flesh rather than over a computer screen on Zoom.
The end result was having packed 205 ‘Hug in a Box’ packages. I’m looking forward to the next volunteering opportunity made available with Puppet to get involved in. It was a lot of fun!
Research
The UX team and I are currently reading the book ‘Just enough research’ by Erika Hall. It is filled with great insight on how to carry out good research. I thought I would share with you all what it has taught me so far.
Chapters 1 & 2
- It’s better to be wrong than working on something meaningless; embrace that and challenge my thinking. I’ve learnt I need to aim to be proven wrong and look for information that’s the opposite of my own view to challenge my opinion and to discover if my research is wrong. I need to notice bias in my research.
- It’s given me more confidence to have healthy confrontation by asking others ‘is that really a good idea?’ to help me understand concepts.
Chapter 3
- I understand I need to pay more attention to how I phrase my questions when talking with a user. I need to get to the point in my questions instead of being general and open-ended. Open-ended questions won’t help me achieve my goal as the answer is probably going to be a generalisation instead of a factual point they’ve made.
- Finding the right people to interview is important; the wrong people could mean irrelevant results.
- The more people involved in the project the better when it comes to analysing the data. Having more people means they can pick up on patterns and things you didn’t notice in your research.
I’m looking forward to what the rest of this book has to reveal to me. It’s already shifted my mindset and changed my pattern when it comes to research.
Accessibility
The Puppet Design System currently doesn't have a lot of information on accessibility. Through the month of April, I want to make this a focus of mine and look into how Puppet is inclusive when designing their products and how I can translate this into the design system.
I am going to explore tools like screen readers, narrators, screen magnifiers and keyboard commands to see how Puppet products interact with them. I’m looking forward to Puppet having a more advanced design system in the future that covers accessibility and more. I think including accessibility will clarify a lot for both designers and engineers and overall will create better, more inclusive products.
I hope to update you on the accessibility front next month, until then!
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Email: hello@emmacorbett.design
