The User is Me: Insights from a Design Researcher
Over the past 6 months I’ve been working as an Impact Design Fellow at the Business + Impact Studio at the Ross School of Business. During this time, I’ve been working on a prototype for taking action for racial equity in the workplace, and have encountered two major learnings: 1) interdisciplinary teams may be messy but are critical to creating strong projects 2) working on projects outside of your comfort zone can not only help you learn about a new topic but about yourself as well. I’ll speak a little more on both of these topics below.
Interdisciplinary Teams are Hard but Critical
Going from working on a team of User Experience (UX) Designers and Researchers to joining this team, I saw many gaps along the way. I didn’t realize the extent to which we UX’ers approached problem-solving from the same perspective. Although we had come from different majors, we all problem-solved in the UX way. The mistakes you spot are often the same mistakes your teammates spot.
Through working with my two other Impact Design Fellows who have backgrounds in social work and software development (although they are also currently pursuing MBAs), I saw the value of the different skill-sets of our team and how each of our individual experiences impacted the ideas we created. For example, I had been taught in my own classes to always look for how to make product or service experiences seamless or enjoyable for the user, following specific protocols considered ‘best practice’ in my field. As we progressed with our project, I continued to be focused on the current user experience of the project, while my teammates quickly pointed out considerations where we might need to sacrifice some user experience to be able to scale the company smoothly in the long run.
I was learning to constantly reevaluate what I was seeing as I learned about my inherent biases in problem-solving. It definitely made the ideation and prototyping process much messier than it would have been if I had been working with other UX Designers and Researchers. However, as a result, I believe our end product will be much stronger than if the path had been straightforward. If you’re not given an interdisciplinary team to start with, I would encourage you (and everyone else!) to embrace finding interdisciplinary opportunities instead of running from them.
Learnings about who?
The second learning I want to talk about was learning more about the project, and myself in the process. As a User Experience Researcher, I always begin new projects excited to see what I will learn about my potential users or players. Nothing changed when I applied to be an Impact Design Fellow and design lead on a team. I was prepared to put 100% toward learning my users’ needs for whatever project we were pursuing. What I didn’t quite expect was to also learn about myself.
The mission of our project is to create a movement of business students committed and empowered to take action for racial equity in the workplace. The earlier version of the prototype was focused on the idea of social capital as a resource that people could use to help advance racial equity. Social capital is generally defined as the network of people in an individual’s life and the benefits that come from it. When we think about getting jobs and referrals, people with ‘more’ social capital have more people they can contact for help. Social capital is still an important dimension of our revised prototype, and our team has expanded the education, tools, and actions to advance racial equity as people engage in the experience.
As we were thinking of ways to show people how to use their social capital, I realized I, myself, had been underusing my own social capital. As a Master’s student at the University of Michigan with a father who works at one of the Big Three automobile manufacturers in the US, I would be considered to have relatively high social capital on those facts alone. However, upon being asked to give an example of where I explicitly used my social capital, it was very difficult for me to name any specific instance, making me realize that I unintentionally needed our project. I had a very narrow idea of social capital as purely being held by someone who will inherit their parent’s business or someone who has parents in the business field. Although our project looks at social capital through a racial lens, I took this quiz to see what other forms of social capital I had available to myself. Through this project, I got to learn a bit about myself and my social capital. Sometimes we’re so focused on designing projects to help others, we forget that we’re also part of the big picture and can continue to learn too. I came into this project hoping to design for others, but inadvertently designed for myself as well. Most people are familiar with the idea of social capital, but are you really aware of how much you have? Take the quiz! You might find that it looks a bit different than you thought, and you can start to see different areas where you can use it besides the workplace, as I’m learning to now.
Speaking with users and learning about their experiences has been an adventure in itself, but this journey has allowed me to reflect on my own experiences as well. Looking forward to many, many more iterations of our project and myself :)
