Unexpected UX Journeys: An Interview with Expat Teacher Turned UX Researcher Leslie Forman
Learn how to break into UX from a Workday UX researcher with a nontraditional UX background.
Interview conducted and edited by Emma Siegel, Product Designer II
The individuals who make up Workday’s User Experience organization have a wide variety of career backgrounds and skills. These experiences offer us a more holistic understanding of our users and how they interact with our products. In this series, we’ll meet some Workday’s team members and learn about their non-traditional UX backgrounds.
Leslie Forman is a User Experience Researcher on the Platform Services team in San Francisco, CA.
When you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up? How do you think that relates to what you do today?
In high school, my dream was to become a recipe tester. I did a school project on the chemistry of baking. I read all sorts of recipes and then attempted to create my own. After dozens of failed experiments, like lemon muffins that fell down in the middle rather than rising up, I gained great appreciation for the power of baking soda, gluten, and well-tested cookbooks.
When I’d experiment with DIY cake recipes, I’d write everything down and take lots of pictures, noting what I’d want to change for the next round. Over time, I became much more comfortable with the process — and got better results. That has also been true with design research.
What did you learn in school that helps you in your current role?
I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Latin American Studies. Learning to write in Spanish helped me think more deeply about writing in English. Specifically, making sure the conclusion of any essay really transports the reader to a new place. I think about this whenever I write anything: where do I want to take the reader? Why am I writing this? The sense of ‘so what?’ is so important.
Tell me about your journey from Latin American Studies to UX.
After college, I moved to China, where I taught English and worked all sorts of jobs in advertising, consulting, and corporate social responsibility.
After four years in China, I moved to Chile (where I’d studied abroad in college) to join a startup that was selected for the government-backed accelerator Start-Up Chile. I enrolled in a six-month nights-and-weekends course about creativity and innovation in the design school of Chile’s most prestigious university. At the same time, I started teaching entrepreneurship classes through the lens of design thinking and user experience. I read UX books in English and paraphrased them for my students in Spanish. I soon hit the limit of what I could learn from those books, and was eager to learn more.
In 2014, I moved back to San Francisco (my hometown!) to enroll in General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive. The 10-week course introduced me to different designers and design methods, and to the startup founder who hired me for my first UX job.
How did your experiences living abroad impact you as a researcher?
My experiences living abroad helped me think more broadly about how different people have different experiences and perspectives. Living abroad — for 8 years altogether — helped me see beyond my own biases.
When I first came back from China, I had major reverse culture shock. My expectations of what it’s like to go to a bank or a supermarket had totally shifted after a year and a half in a completely different culture. The culture shock I had coming back to the US helped me internalize that people come at experiences from different contexts, and I’m always conscious of this in my UX research work.
What do you work on at Workday? What does a typical day look like for you?
Since we do research in cycles, every day is different depending which stage I’m working on in a project. I try to focus on one project at a time so I can dig deep and close the loop.
We start with a discovery phase: meeting with different teams and product managers to figure out what kind of research is most valuable at this stage. We establish goals, plan the study, and figure out logistics. Next is the execution phase: running interviews and discussions, which are usually over video or sometimes in person. Then we host an analysis workshop where we get the team together to discuss what we’ve found. Finally, we document and then present the findings and follow up through the next steps.
What’s your favorite thing about being a part of Workday’s UX team?
I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities to collaborate with different researchers and learn from each other, especially since qualitative research can be really subjective. When I was getting started in UX, it seemed like the answer to every question was: “It depends!” Collaborating with other researchers and designers helps us get beyond those non-answers and build a confident path forward.
What motivates you?
I love figuring out how to help other people access certain opportunities and answers — things that will help them get to the next step of what they want to do. I used to be a teacher and work with students: what motivates me in general is the opportunity to figure out how to open doors for people.
What advice would you give to someone to open the door into UX?
If you’re in a place with a design community, I’d recommend joining an event. Search Eventbrite and Meetup and you’re likely to find events where you can learn about UX and meet like-minded people. If you’re really interested in an event but the tickets are out of your price range, I recommend emailing the organizers and asking if they need volunteers.
One time I volunteered at a UX conference, helping to introduce speakers and pass around the microphone. I met several members of a design team and asked them about research. After the event, I followed up with the people I met, and a few weeks later I joined their team. I never would have found out about that opportunity if I hadn’t been at that event!
To continue this conversation, you can connect with Leslie on LinkedIn.
