Excuse me Mister, what is User Experience Design???
I hardly thought about it at the time. It was mixed in with other flyers that came home from school with my kids that day. Holding out one of them, my daughter said, “Come speak at career day! Dad, you should do this!” Without much consideration I said “Sure”. Then I filled out the form, noting my profession as “User Experience Designer”, put it back in the folder and added a reminder to my calendar so I wouldn’t forget.
As the date got closer, I felt this mounting anxiety. I’ve spent most of my career doing product design, product management and user experience design. Whenever someone asks me the simple question “what kind of work do you do?” I feel like I’m going downhill on a roller coaster because I’ve never been sure how to explain it. It’s easy to explain to people who also do this kind of work, but to the dad I just met at a school BBQ who may not be familiar with the field of UX design, it’s not so easy.
Many times, the conversation will go like this:
BBQ Dad: “So, what kind of work do you do?”
Me: “I do User Experience Design.”
BBQ Dad (eyes already glazing over): “Oh, cool, like…. what kinds of things?”
Me: “It varies a lot. Generally I learn about people’s experiences with something so I can fix or improve those experiences. Those can be all sorts of experiences — websites, apps, physical spaces…”
BBQ Dad: “So, you make apps?”
Me: “Yes, sometimes we’ll design apps.”
BBQ Dad: “Do you do, like, graphic design?”
Me: “Um, yeah, sometimes that’s part of it.”
Then I try to change the subject and focus on what they do or I just run away pretending one of my kids needs me.
It was this kind of conversation that started running through my mind as I got closer to career day. If I couldn’t explain to an adult what I do, how was I going to explain it to 2nd graders?
Below is part 1 of my story — how I got through this experience and came out the other end a lot smarter and ready to take on future BBQ Dads. If you find yourself in a similar predicament of not being able to explain what you do, regardless of what kind of work, I hope this will be helpful.
Career day was still a few weeks away. To fight my anxiety, I turned to google. I found some great articles, but none that exactly reflected my situation. Most were parents who’d done a modified design sprint with their own kids or teachers who had built some UX practices into their curriculum. I found some inspiration there, but still needed a plan, so I began to break the effort down into smaller chunks.
Logistics:
I’ve led enough workshops and speaking engagements to know that logistics can make or break your session. I learned from the school guidance counselor that I’d be speaking to four different classes of 25–30 students each, ranging from 2nd grade to 5th grade. I’d have 10–15 minutes with each group. I’d be stationed at one of many tables in the gymnasium. Each class would be rotating through the tables, sitting on the floor in front of each. “It got pretty loud last year” she said.
Goals:
I decided on the lofty goal of the kids being able to explain at least one aspect of my job to another person.
Tactics:
For this, I made a rough outline:
5 mins: introduce myself, what I do, what I studied in school, show some examples
5 mins: do an activity that will help them understand what I do
3 mins: answer questions
Practicing what I preach, I tested this plan with my own kids first to learn if I was on the right track. Here’s what I did to prepare each section and how the testing went:
5 mins: Introduce myself, what I do, what I studied, show some examples
For this part, I had some great tips from the school guidance counselor, who shared questions that would be good to address. (I later learned that the students had been given sheets of paper with the same set of questions to ask, so I was fully prepared for Q&A!) For my intro I pulled together a few basics — photos of me speaking to people at workshops, people interviewing users or prototyping things. I’d talk about how I studied math, science, art, design and language and how all of them are essential to my job every day.
Then I gathered some examples of things they would be familiar with to demonstrate how user experience design had played a part in their creation. I chose mobile apps, an apple watch and the computer mouse. To show them the process of problem finding, prototyping and iteration, I showed and described these items in various stages of fidelity, from basic concept drawings to prototype to final product.
This approach really seemed to work well in the test. I learned that showing the examples from low fidelity sketches to the final product vs the reverse order made the most sense to my test audience of 2. They were familiar with the items, could name them and I got a few “wow”s when I showed them how all of these had started as ideas and drawings. I felt good about the intro.
5 mins: do an activity that will help them understand what I do
This part was tricky. I decided I wanted to do an activity that could help the kids really learn about one of the following: empathy, ideation or prototyping (in 5 minutes or less). I didn’t think I could do all three.
I got together with my PwC team with whom I get do this kind of work with all the time — for adults. We did a quick anonymous, remote brainstorming session to think of all the different activities that might help kids learn various concepts of user centered design and design thinking. To get the juices flowing, we used the following “How Might We?” questions:
- How might we teach kids empathy in five minutes or less?
- How might we teach kids ideation in 5 minutes or less?
- How much we teach kids prototyping in 5 minutes or less?
We generated a bunch of ideas, organized them into similar groupings and voted on which ones we thought might be the most effective.
The top three were:
Now I was starting to feel a little bit better about the upcoming session but still had no idea if these three ideas would work. I brought them home to test with my user group of 2.
I explained to the testers that I would be asking them to evaluate each activity by writing down a “fun score” on a post-it note — zero being the least fun and five being the most fun. I went with fun as a voting criteria because I thought that if the kids weren’t having fun doing the activity then I probably wasn’t going to be successful at helping them grasp the concept. I also had them do this on post it notes individually to avoid influencing each other.
Here’s what testing looked like:
For this activity, I asked them to interview each other about their day at recess for 2 minutes, then to each sketch one idea that could make next recess better.
I really liked this idea going in, but once it got going I immediately thought about how difficult it might be to manage 30 kids doing it. I was struggling with 2. That said, I let it play out and let them score it.
For this activity, I showed them a picture of a random object, pictured below. Then I asked them to write down as many uses for that object as they could think of. I gave them 3 minutes. To get them to stretch their thinking in many different directions and used verbal prompts like “think of the silliest, the most obvious, the most surprising” .
This one really seemed to work well. They came up with creative ideas and the activity took very little explaining. I knew I was going to have 2nd graders (younger than my two testers) and wondered if this would work for the younger groups. Overall it was a success and seemed like it would scale to a group of 30 kids.
For this activity, I’d explain to them that I had a problem. I simply couldn’t keep my pens organized. Every time I needed a pen, I couldn’t find it. They’d roll off my desk. It was really frustrating. I asked them if they could design a solution to my problem using a piece of play doh.
This one went really well. I gave them 3 minutes, and as a solution became ready, I quickly tested it with a handful of pens to see if it solved my problem. I asked them to observe each test and incorporate what they learned into a new version of their solution or a new idea. Then I’d test again. They came up with really creative solutions and a few that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of. I still wanted to see the fun scores, but this idea seemed like it would be a hit.
I tallied up the fun scores and there was a tie for the winner.
I decided to go with the “design a solution to my pen problem” activity for the younger kids and try the “think of as many uses as you can” activity for the older kids.
I was ready. Even though I prototype and test things all the time for work this was a great reminder of the value of even some lightweight testing. It gave me so much more confidence about my approach.
To find out how it all played out on career day, keep an eye out for part 2 of this article, coming out next week!
