Advice and Tips from our LXD Team Members

We asked Karen Vazquez, Learning Experience Designer, to share advice and lessons she’s learned throughout her career.

About Me

Hi! I am Karen and I’m passionate about the world of Design Research — which has allowed me to empathize with and analyze complex challenges. In this field, I have found a way to improve lives through Human-Centered Design (HCD), an approach that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective.

I have been able to create tailored experiences suited to people’s needs by following a human-centered design process. Specifically, HCD has allowed me to engage with my team and intuitively ask deep questions ranging from users’ behaviors with our products to making intentional decisions of our recruitment for research.

Based on that background, here’s my advice and tips to practice Human-Centered Design.

Empathy + Users’ State of Mind

One key aspect of HCD is empathy. One way you can practice empathy early in the process is by hypothesizing the different states of mind users may be in when interacting with a design experience. To minimize the risk of creating a negative user experience, it is important to ask yourself and your teammate's questions about how a message or interaction is perceived in different contexts. Here are some questions you can use to better understand users’ state of mind:

• How will this message sound to a user who is really unhappy with our product at the moment?
• How will this message be taken by someone who is having a terrible day?
• How could this image be interpreted in ways that we didn’t intend?
• What assumptions are we making about our users, their backgrounds, and their mindsets?

Identify Your Assumptions Early On

Assumptions and biases greatly influence our critical thinking. I’ve found ways to understand my assumptions and mitigate bias by doing the following:

• I write down the assumptions I have about my target audience before I start the data collection process.
• I stay committed to learning and uncovering my biases by continually receiving constructive feedback from people around me and consistently ask myself the following questions:
• I ask myself: Am I falling for confirmation bias, or am I challenging my assumptions? What details here are unfair? Unverified? Unused?

Identifying my assumptions, helps me understand my own perceptions. When I am in the analysis stage and revisit how my mindset started comparing it to what I have learned from others; it becomes a mind-blowing experience. I feel grateful to both my teammates and the users who helped me expand my mindset to unique perspectives.

Another strategy to minimize assumptions is to rely on your target audience. This can look as simple as seeking confirmation through a follow-up email to a few people from your target audience, re-stating what you talked about, what you understood, and asking them if that insight is aligned to what they shared. You’ll help your team avoid assuming your users understand and know as much about the product as you do.

Be Curious about Demographic Trends

If you are trying to uncover trends about how different populations or communities interact with your products and services or/and how they perceive your brand, consider testing with different segments of the population. For example, if you are struggling to appeal to a particular group of people, you can conduct a study for that demographic to explain how they feel about your product or share with you what is important to them when making decisions.

One of my main personal practices is to engage a lot in topics of social, cultural psychology, sociology, biology, and anthropology. It is relevant to the work I am doing because each modality has its own methodology to learn about what makes us human and how the elements we interact with can be used differently when taken into a different context. I draw a lot of inspiration from insights and advice from other fellow researchers.

Learn How to Effectively Cut Down Your Research Time

My curiosity and love for user data are two characteristics that have both helped and hindered my research process. It’s easy for me to get lost in a topic and lose sight of my research goal. When I was an associate-level designer, I became aware I was relying heavily on obtaining insights from interviews and surveys alone which could take weeks if I was struggling to get any user to sign up. If you ever find yourself in this situation, here are some tips I have learned to effectively use my research time:

• Build from existing literature, previous research your organization has conducted, or explore finding anonymous ways (ie. social listening, web-scraping, vlogs, etc.) to generate insights before conducting interviews or surveys.
• Ask yourself: “As a researcher or designer, how will digging deeper into this information help our research goals? How relevant is this topic? Is it worth it to spend more than 1 hour doing this?
• Have an accountability teammate who will point out whenever you are going too deep.
• List your ideas or potential areas of research in a separate document. This technique is especially helpful when writing reports and suggesting areas for further research.

HCD has helped me grow in various aspects of the Design Research field. The tips and advice from above reflect on my lessons learned. These lessons have helped me to better communicate users’ stories to other teams (e.g, Engineers, Product Managers) so they can feel a personal connection with the user even though they haven’t interacted with those users at the same level that I had. Taking an HCD approach helps designing services, products, and ecosystems that truly make the world a better place.

Every day, I am learning new things to improve my career and I would like to learn from you too! Please share your tips and advice in the comments

Check out our wgu blog to learn more about the projects our full wgu labs team is working on, and to hear from our amazing researchers and interviews with our leadership.