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Matt: Welcome to the next episode of the UX Mastery Podcast. I have the very good fortune to be speaking with Mr. Dave Gray. Welcome Dave.

Dave: Thank you. Good to be here Matt.

Matt: Why don’t we start by you telling our readers a little bit about yourself Dave.

Dave: Okay. I’m a designer by training. I became an entrepreneur in 1993 when I started my company. I’m a designer by training, I became a visual journalist. I did information graphics. Then I started the company in 1993 which has grown and sort of grew from being a designer into a business person, and now even a business consultancy where we sort of found a sweet spot within companies where visualization is extremely powerful for driving business strategy and moving people forward. My company is called XPLANE and we operate kind of like a personal trainer for organizations. In the same way that a high-performance athlete uses visualization to picture the next stage in their evolution, we’re doing that for companies every day. That’s my background. And I wrote a couple of books in there along the way.

Matt: I find that fascinating. I’m sure there’s lots of listeners out there who are designers but who are entrepreneurial and probably think that the pathway to entrepreneurship is getting strong business skills, which is true but your pathway’s really been focused around the visual stuff which is unique and interesting. What is visual thinking Dave? How do you define visual thinking and why does it matter?

Dave: I see visual thinking as a way of using your hands and your brain. Design is about making things. Visual thinking is about taking the ideas that exist in a lot of people’s heads and translating them into ideas that are visualized on paper. We’re all visual thinkers in the sense that the vast majority of our processing power, sensory information coming in, and the vast chunk of our processing power is visual. And the way that our brain’s work is very visual. And so people are able to very, very quickly comprehend something when they see it, when they can visualize it. Visual thinking is the process of… Let’s say any time you’re planning something that you haven’t done before, you visualize it in your head. You’re planning to go. You take a bike ride or you’re going to go to a new place. Before you do that you visualize it in your head. Athletes visualize themselves performing at a high level, the next higher level in order to get there. 

The reason that visual thinking is so powerful is that, number one, if it can’t be drawn then it can’t be done. If you can’t draw a picture of something then you will not be able to do it. And number two, if you can visualize something, if you can imagine doing it then you’ll have a far better chance of actually achieving that goal than if you cannot imagine it. Just try and think about the things that you’ve… 

I’ll give you an example. I was working with a group on time and asked them first of all, “What are your goals? What are some things that you like to achieve in the next era.” [Unintelligible 00:03:52] draw a picture of what it looked like if it had been achieved in the process for getting there. I think they were maybe being a little tongue and cheek about the exercise, but one group chose world peace. They were not able to visualize world peace. They were not even able to visualize even the first step towards world peace, they struggled. And I think one of the reasons that we’ve had as a world, trouble achieving that goal is because we can’t visualize it. And figuring out the first step to doing that is an important piece of that puzzle. 

If it can’t be drawn it can’t be done. They did admit to me they struggled with it. I think the fact is sometimes it’s more useful, rather than visualizing the ultimate goal just to try and visualize the next step along that path. What’s the next step in our evolution towards that? What would be the next phase of that? That’s a very long answer to your questions so I…

Matt: No, it’s very cool and I’ve never really made that connection, but it makes perfect sense. But we’re not talking about art here, are we? We’re not talking about being artistic. Do you consider yourself to be an artist?

Dave: I do, but I agree with you. I think that art and visual thinking are perhaps related but they’re not the same thing at all. I’m talking about something that anyone can do. I’m talking about something that will accelerate your evolution if you do it, and that people can do it. It’s achievable. Sometimes visual thinking is something that you just do in your head. Sometimes it’s something that you do on paper. The fact is that as an individual, high-performance athlete for example, you could do it in your head. You can imagine the ball going through the hoop over and over again. That’s what high-performance athletes will do. 

As an organization, as a team you cannot do it in your head because you have to align your picture with the picture of other people. And often in organizations that’s where communication breaks down, is because we are using the same words but we’re imagining different things. And so it’s only in the process of, “You draw what you mean by that, I’ll draw what I mean by that” or “We’ll have an artist in the room with us who’s talking to us both and trying to draw what we both mean by that”, and it’s in that process of looking at it, saying, “Yes, that’s kind of right. No, that’s wrong.” And we sort imagine asking the question, “We’re a high performance sales team. What does that look like? What are people doing every day? What is happening?” And in the course of answering that questions you’re going to have a lot of different pieces of the puzzle coming together. And at the end of the day you’re going to only get that shared picture by actually making it explicit outside the mind. It’s just like you can’t share a dream with somebody else. You can’t share a visualization unless you make it explicit on paper. 

That’s why we’re like a personal trainer before organizations because high-performance organizations are a lot like high-performance athletes, they know that there are certain things you cannot do for yourself as well as having someone come in and be your coach, or be your adviser, or your trainer, or whatever. The process of creating those visualizations of the future is extremely exciting, it’s energizing. Not only does it drive understanding it drives alignment, people getting aligned about stuff. It also drives commitment because you’re drawing pictures of things, only things that you are going to commit to do. 

The other thing that’s exciting about it is it also actually drives forward motion on whatever the strategy or the project is. Because by drawing a picture of it you’re already starting to move into that future space and you’re also creating any materials that you need to communicate that stuff or just naturally going to come out as a part of that process. Not only have you got your own team aligned but now you go out of it with some pictures to show other people, “Hey, here’s where we’re going. Here’s the next stage in our organization’s evolution. Here’s the kind of things that we need to be doing.” It takes kind of the abstract stuff that you might see in the spreadsheet and makes it very clear so people actually can do… It becomes a blueprint for action. 

Matt: You used some big words just then. You said, “accelerate your evolution” that’s a big call. As kids we confidence in sketching and we lose that confidence. Why is that and why is it tied to evolution?

Dave: I’m not sure I understand that question. 

Matt: Sorry, I probably confused a bunch of stuff because you got my mind firing.

Dave: No, it’s great. Why is it that we stop drawing?

Matt: I’ve got a kids book that I wrote and illustrated and read it in my daughter’s primary school. And I asked the kids in the class, “Hands up. Who’s an artist?” They all put their hands up. They’re all really proud of being able to communicate visually. And if you do that to my eldest daughter’s class between 9 and 10 then you’d probably get about half the kids that are proud to say, “Yeah, I’m an artist” or “Yeah, I can draw.”

Dave: Let me answer the first question about why we typically stop. And then I can answer this second question about how we can accelerate evolution because I think they’re two different things.

Matt: Fair enough.

Dave: All right. The first question, why do we stop doing it? I think this is actually a flaw in our education system. If you look at the way that our educational system is designed, it really has… Our educational system, at least in my country and I probably in yours, has not evolved that much since let’s say 1900, or maybe 1930’s or so when people started moving from farms to the cities. In the farmlands you have these rural school houses where all the kids were learning together. There was much more, actually probably creative and integrated, holistic thing. When we moved to the cities we took the same kind of approach that we did to building factories and industrializing the business economy into industrializing education. 

And so if you think about it made perfect sense at the time. We were building a world of standardized parts and standardized processes and procedures where people actually had to fit into that world. I can’t remember who said this. It was some famous educator or somebody who said, “There’s an over-curriculum and a covert curriculum in our school systems.” The over-curriculum, the obvious curriculum that’s spoken about is reading, writing, arithmetic. But the covert curriculum is what you’re also learning at the same time is stand in line, do what your told, don’t stand out, don’t do something that’s unpredictable, give the answer that the teacher wants. Basically, don’t be creative. There’s that covert curriculum then. We don’t even think about it that most kids are not sophisticated enough to actually understand. They’re just trying to conform to the expectations of the adults. And if you think about it, it’s not too soon after we get into that, industrialized system that the urge and the desire to be creative and draw starts to go away. So they’re tied together.

If you like conformity, you don’t want creativity, you don’t want people drawing. Think about the art teacher, how do you grade… what’s right and wrong as an answer to a drawing problem. Visualize world peace, how do you grade something like that? How do you fit that into a standard educational format where there’s a right answer and wrong answer. How do teachers even teach that? 

That was a good solution for the problem we had at the time. Now we have a different problem because what’s happened is that we’ve now got automation. Basically we’ve got software and robots who are going to be doing anything that can be predicted and anything that can be repeatable. And we’re still training people to be robots but we’re going to have actual robots. We’re not going to need people to be robots anymore. What we’re going to need from people is that creative thinking, that outside the box, for a lack of a better term, the getting better at asking questions, getting better at understanding other people, getting better at getting aligned, getting better at getting people committed to things, and getting them excited about creating new things, new business models, new ideas. 

I do believe that our educational system will inevitably transform. It’s going to happen faster in some places than in others. It’s interesting when you look at the percentage of super successful, high-powered, high-level, new economy CEO’s that were trained outside the typical educational system. There’s a lot. Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, I think possibly Reeve Hastings from Netflix, there is a number, a higher percentage of the general population of super successful tech entrepreneurs that were trained outside of that traditional and industrialized education system, a surprisingly large number. And so I think that’s pretty fascinating. I think it’s inevitable there’s going to be a shift. 

Unfortunately it’s not happening as fast as probably you or I would like. But I do think that what’s going to happen is as our educational system transforms you’re going to find that unless the kids are stopping drawing and you’re going to actually see the kids who are drawing are going to be more successful. They’re going to have more creative ideas, are going to be better aligned with their peers because they’re going to have those conversations about what things look like. They’re going to be better able to achieve results. I’ve been on a mission for probably about 10 years now to try and build a curriculum at schools, at least try to conceive a curriculum that schools could adopt and apply in the educational system.

Matt: Awesome. Evolution, that’s a big word.

Dave: Yeah.

Matt: How does visual thinking help us evolve and become better humans rather than just be more successful in business?

Dave: I guess I sort of did answer in a way, I think that as a species we’re moving from having to scale our activities by being consistent, predictable, and repeatable, and marching in order, and synchronizing our bodies and that kind of thing. A factory assembly line to actually a phase in our evolution where those things are going to be taken care of and we need to figure out what else we want to do. What is the next great business model? What’s the next Uber or the next Airbnb? What’s going to be the bank of the future going to look like? We now have kind of an open slate and the biggest constraint is not our ability to make things so much is our ability to get creative is just come up with the idea. 

People are talking about the internet of things, people have been talking about the future refrigerator or the future shopping cart for years. But the lack of progress is more about the lack of creativity and ideas than it is the lack of technological capability. We have the technological capability right now we just don’t have the creativity. We don’t have the creative capability.

So I think next phase in our evolution and visual thinking is going to be very handy for them because you’re thinking about our problems both politically and just the problems that the world faces. A lot of them are problems related to people not being able to come up with creative solutions, sinking back into either or, either we raise taxes or everybody starves. This dichotomies that are really false dichotomies and they’re due to a lack of creativity. We’re going to evolve when we start building shared understanding about what is and also building shared understanding about what could be and what we could create together. And I think visual thinking is absolutely a key part of that.

Matt: So playing devil’s advocate, there are a large number of people who are successful and who would not describe themselves as visual thinkers. And I’ve worked with people in organizations and they don’t want to engage in this kind of activity because I guess, like for whatever reason the way that their brain works or the way that they’ve been brought up or whatever. They feel like it’s not for them. How do you address individuals who are resistant to this kind of thing?

Dave: I don’t try to… There’s enough people who understand that I don’t spend a lot of time with people unless they have big budgets I guess. I’m trying to convince them. We work in large organizations where there’s all kinds of different people. Once we’re working with a client we will find sometimes people have issues or resistance. I think the easiest and quickest way to get that over is do a simple drawing exercise or something like that. It’s actually realizing, this isn’t something that I can’t do. I think the issue there is to get underneath whatever belief they’re expressing and figure out what need they have. Maybe some people have a need not to look foolish in front of their peers. Maybe some people have a need for power and authority and they feel very confident in their verbal authority in a meeting or business situation. But drawing puts them on the same playing field as everyone else and they’re going to lose status.

They’re worried about losing their status.  I think that’s a matter of understanding what is the underlying need that they have. Maybe some people feel that it’s going to create a lot of uncertainty for them. They don’t know what it’s going to look like. So in that case then you could show them what it’s going to look like. You can say, “Here’s what we’re going to kind of think we’re going to be working on, that kind of thing that we’re going to come out with.” I think it depends on the need. But one thing I spend a lot of time doing is not necessarily focusing on the belief that people are expressing, but I focus on the need and where that belief is coming from. And usually that belief is coming from some kind of a personal need. 

There’s a model that I really like called the SCARF Model. It comes from a guy named David Rock at the NeuroLeadership Institute. It’s a model that basically there are certain social needs that we have, and SCARF stands for those needs. I’ll go through them in a second. These social and emotional needs, the brain treats the same way. If you’re lacking at one of these emotional needs you’re not getting what you need. The brain reacts the same way as if you’re not getting enough oxygen, or if you’re not getting enough food. The brain reacts in a very strong fight or flight kind of a way. And you’ll see this in meetings and you’ll see this in people. Here are the needs, because I think the model’s very useful.

SCARF, S stands for status. Some people need to feel that they’re important. They need to feel that they’re not going to lose their status within the group based on your visual thinking activity. Another thing is see a certainty. People want to be able to feel that they can predict the future. So they want to know that if they go through your visual thinking activity, what’s that going to look like and what’s going to happen? What do I need to do? What are you going to ask me to do? 

A, autonomy, people need to have feeling of autonomy, they need to feel like they have control. Sometimes that means giving people the option to opt out, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it means giving the option of if you want to do this as part of a group, great. If you want to go off and draw your own picture that’s fine too, or whatever, giving some choices. 

R is for relatedness. People need to feel like they belong, like they’re part of the group. What if everybody else draws better than me? Maybe you reduce the barrier there. It’s often when I’m facilitating that I will draw a bad drawing on purpose just to reduce the level of… I can’t draw. What am I going to have to do? I’ll do something much lower quality than I might be capable of. I’ve noticed my friend Dan [Unintelligible 00:22:38] does the same thing. He went to design school but he never talks about that, and he’s always drawing stick figures. He’s capable of much more, but he’s always drawing stick figures. And he’s never send this to me explicitly but I believe pretty strongly that there’s an intentionality behind that. He wanted us to make this stuff very accessible.

The last one is F, fairness. I don’t think fairness is coming up that much in the lack of people’s fears about visual thinking. But if for some reason they feel that the world isn’t fair or they’re not going to be fairly treated if they draw that somehow someone else doesn’t have to do it, or I don’t know what that would be, but fairness is another one of those needs that I think is very valuable and important to be aware of, thinking about all those things. 

If you find that underlying need generally speaking somebody’s feeling choked. Someone’s feeling emotionally choked. They’re feeling emotionally cut off. I don’t think it’s skepticism about the power of visual thinking in most cases. I think it’s the fear thing. In that case the way you get around is to find a way to… It’s either a fear thing or they’re just busy, they don’t have time, and they don’t think that they need it. It’s like there are things you don’t feel like you need until you’re at end of your road. And those people who just don’t have time for it then move on. It’s a fear thing, I think it’s easier to get in there and try to understand it.

Matt: Dave, it’s always inspiring and a pleasure to talk to you about this stuff. I’ve got a bunch of things that I’m going to go away and thinking about it some more. And I’d love to do this again because I think you’re absolutely right, there’s a real grand swell of momentum around this stuff and it’s exciting. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate it.

Dave: My pleasure. 

Matt: If people want to track you down online where should they go?

Dave: I’ll give you my website and my company’s website. It’s going to be easy because they’re almost the same thing. My company is xplane.com and my websites xplaner.com. And it’s just because I’m very focused on my company and that’s pretty synonymous with who i am and what I do so you could find me at either or both those places. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Matt: Good stuff.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #9: Entrepreneurship with Dave Gray appeared first on UX Mastery.

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Transcript

Matt: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the UX Mastery Podcast. This is Matt and I’m very fortunate to have with me today David Trewern. David, welcome.

David: Thank you, good to be here.

Matt: David, you have a pretty interesting and inspiring story so perhaps we’ll kick things off, if you can tell us a bit about yourself and the journey that you’ve been on.

David: Okay, I’ll try and be concise. I studied graphic design back in the early 90’s. I finished up in ’94. As part of my final year in my design course I won an AGDA (which is the Australian Graphic Design Association) Travel Scholarship, which sent me off to the United States and the UK to visit some leading design businesses. When I sat down with AGDA and talked about where I wanted to go I just said, “I’m really interested in anything to do with technology, digital design, and so forth. It was very early days for that, so it was long before Facebook, Google, and those companies back in ’95. So I headed off to San Francisco, and I happened to be there in August ’95, which is the month that actually Netscape floated and launched. And that’s really, in my view, the birth of the visual internet as we know it now. I just happened to by coincidence be in San Francisco and that time, which is pretty exciting time. I visited a couple of businesses that I’d never heard of at the time, one of them was IDEO who some of the listeners might know well. I also visited a company called Vivid Studios. That was one of the very early web design businesses. There’s a guy called Nathan Shedroff who people may have heard of who was the founder of that business. And he offered me a job and I spent a fair bit of time talking to him. I didn’t actually end up working there, but he put together a book called Experience Design a couple of years later and I can come back to that. But it was a real influence. He was working on the early days of developing websites and moving them from really just a hypertext-based linking of information to more visual websites. I spent some time with him. I also visited Studio Archetype that is now Sapient. And they were working on early websites for Sony, Apple, and things like that. It was a pretty exciting time to be in San Francisco. So that had a huge influence on me. I came back to Australia, and I was already working as a multimedia partner for one of the early multimedia companies in Melbourne. I was working on CD-ROMS, so I was designing interfaces and things, and doing a bit of Lingo programming in Macromedia Director, which is what it was then. I suppose I had these crossover skills or I had design skills as well as technology and programming skills, which I really enjoyed, and I loved switching between the two. After my trip I became pretty inspired in my final role. I worked for about a year after I finished uni and my final role was working for a company called Gyro Interactive. Again, that was one of the first multimedia companies. I had a project there designing the interface of LookSmart, which is an Australian search engine that ended up floating on the NASDAQ, and a guy called Evan Thornley set that business up and it became quite successful again long before the search engines that we have today, Facebook, Google, etc. I was in there working with a whole lot of PhD Java programmers and I was the designer. We’re designing a completely new program for search engine where you weren’t actually searching you were stepping through categories. What these guys worked at is that from sort of 4 or 5 clicks you can go from any topic to a sensible list of search results very quickly. And back then it was actually faster than searching because of the way that the technology worked and so forth. And I suppose the unpredictability of the results from search algorithms back them. We were designing a completely new interface. It was interesting for me because I was really designing a product and combining my graphic design skills. I was designing the brand, the interface, the product, working with these Java designers to try and work out. I had a target of 8 kilobytes for the whole interface because we’re working with very slow modems back then. I was working out ways of combining the whole interface into one 16-color image that could be kept up by the programmers to create this 3-dimensional interface where you could very quickly navigate through categories of neat buttons and all the rest of it. We had people in there a couple of times a week that we’d be user testing things on and things like that. That was a real influence for me. I then left Gyro and set-up on my own as a freelance designer, but I kept LookSmart as a client because my previous business didn’t really know what to do with them. I was kind of the web guy. They said you can keep us as a client. I kept working for LookSmart, which gave me some good income. Within about 3 months of setting up my businesses is in September ’96 I set-up. I got the opportunity to design the first Mercedes Benz website for Clemenger, which was a pretty big deal. They didn’t have a website before that and I think Clemenger gone in and sold them the dream of this incredible website where owners could log on and they could remind them of when their car’s due to be serviced and all this sort of stuff. I think it was a $500,000 project for Clemenger at the time. It was a big undertaking for everybody involved and I ended up being the guy that then had to deliver the dream and design the look and feel ofthe interface and actually also do a lot of the coding as well. So that was a fantastic project for me to do and I think I was 23 at the time and I learned a lot through that. A lot of the things that I learned from Nathan Shedroff from Vivid, I marched up to San Francisco went into my proposal and I pitched, and it was all about the experience. Again, this is long before UX as we know it now, but from talking to Nathan way back then I really clicked on to this idea of particularly back then when you had these huge constraints around screen size, color depth, and color palettes, but most important bandwidth. So everything was really about how can you deliver an effective experience with these incredible constraints, where people are dialling up with 144K modems and waiting 3 minutes for a very, very simple page to download before they can click. Everything had to be very, very carefully considered. And even the best websites beck then were still incredibly frustrating things. Part of my proposal to Clemenger was all about that. I talked about a little bit like baking a cake where we’ve got to get the visual design right, we’ve got to get the functionality right, we’ve got to get the content right. It’s all going to deliver the right return on effort for the user that. If somebody’s going to click and wait for 45seconds what they’re going to get next better be what they were hoping for and it better work, and it better deliver some value to them.

That really shaped my thinking very early on particularly those constraints around the importance of just designing the experience beyond just looking at the way that a graphic designer would and thinking about what it looks like. And so it was a really interesting time back then and I went through the whole phase of the browser walls and the development of browsers. It all had different quirks. And I suppose with my coding side of things, there were very few people involved in this at that time that work from a design background too. Most of the people that were building websites were programmers and they have very little interest in the way that websites looked. And they almost had this religious fervour around this shouldn’t even be in the interface. What do you need an interface for? It’s already been designed. You have blue links that turn purple when you click on them and that’s the interface. From a graphic design background I knew that we needed to bring more to the experience than that and create drama, tension, and creating an interface that was seductive that people wanted to actually engage with.

For example, just typing in job terms and see how many results come up just to see what sort of demand there is for jobs. I did this a couple of weeks ago and I think graphic design, I think about 800 jobs came up across Australia with the terms graphic design in them. And this is a pretty loose search. Some of these jobs are overlapping and so forth. I did a search for digital design, web design, mobile design, and user experience design, and each of those had more in the order of 2,000 roles across Australia, so more than two times graphic design. And when you add all those other ones together you’re talking about 6,000 or 7,000 jobs compared to 700 or 800 jobs. That’s a good example of how in the last 15 years the demand has shifted to new roles that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. And when you look at where the money is in these roles it becomes even more extreme. I then filtered that search to say, show me the jobs with salaries more than $100,000, and the results have gotten incredibly extreme with user experiences being a clear standout in terms of the number of roles over $100,000 versus the other roles, and far more than graphic design by many multiples. I then changed the filter and I looked at jobs over $200,000 and what I found was I think it was 394 digital design jobs that covered… I’m talking very broadly here, UX mobile, web design, digital design terms in the role, and one graphic design job in the whole of Australia. So basically nearly 400 times as many jobs in that range. And I saw that and experience that running DT, we need people with these new skills, but the people coming out of colleges and universities are being trained using yesterday’s tools and they have yesterday skills. So that’s something that really got me interested in education and Tractor. We took over an existing graphic design school because we needed the structure, and the license, and the processes, and those sorts of things. And we set about really trying to make it the most digitally focused. Again, I’m talking more digital than UX but the most digitally focused course that we could, and so we built right into the core of all of the courses that we offer at Tractor. All the things that I thought are really important for a whole range of different roles, which are merging with UX related skills being right at the core of that and right upfront in the course. Because it’s just so important to be thinking about the things that UX designers think about at the start of all of these processes.

Matt: Great. There’s clearly demand there and we get a lot of people coming to us asking for advice on how can I get started in UX or how can I transition? So to play devil’s advocate what’s the advantage of going to a school like Tractor and getting some kind of certification there, formal training versus learning on the job and getting the experience by kind of being in the trenches?

David: Sure. I think certainly if you can get an opportunity to learn on the job with the right mentors in place and the right business then you’ll learn very quickly. But those opportunities are hard to come by. And it’s very hard to say to a group of a thousand students, let’s say, “Go out and get yourself a job and learn on the job.” It’s a bit hit and miss. And obviously the whole point of a structured and accredited education is the kind of standardized what’s being taught, what’s being learned, put it into a process, repeat it every year and improve it every year, fine tune it so that you can provide much more efficient learning whereby you’re teaching people the things that they need to know. And hopefully not wasting time doing the things that aren’t truly building that knowledge that they need to go into that role. I think there’s certainly huge advantages in structured education programs. Again, even the course that I did that was very unrelated to what I ended up doing as a job 3 years later was hugely influential and valuable. To the fact that I went into that course from year 12 at school and not really knowing anything about the design industry at all and I came out of it and I got off with a job before I finished. That’s usually beneficial. It’s also the discussions and the exposure that you get. You kind of learn what magazines should I be reading, who should I be talking to, what websites should I be looking at these days? Not when I was at uni because they weren’t websites. And you’re having 3 or 4 hours of conversation a day with other students, and tutors, and lecturers about issues. You just don’t get that opportunity again once you start work. And also you really get to control the projects that you’re working on for your portfolio.

When I did my course I went into the industry for 3rd year and did industry-based learning, which I found really beneficial. I worked in a pretty uninspiring graphic design business that was pretty old school. I spent a lot of time in the brown light room. I’m sure many of your listeners don’t know what a brown light is but we basically used to typeset annual reports, and brochures, and things in black and white, print them out in this super high resolution… Actually these days it’s probably not so super high resolution but print it on photographic paper and then we’d chop it all up, go into a dark room, and then re-photograph the positionals and things. And this is before we had digital direct to plate printing situations. I spent a year doing that, which had nothing to do with the career I was going to embark on a few years later. But learning about how to actually be an employee was hugely valuable. But the point I was going to make is to then go back to design school and go, “Okay, now I know what work’s all about. Now I know what I don’t want to do, and now I can focus on my final year on creating a portfolio.” I’m never going to get this chance again, to spend a year creating the work that I want to create that’s going to represent me as a designer. Completely self-indulgent, I don’t have real clients. But having the context of what real work is like I really enjoyed that. And that’s what then led to me doing a project. That led to me winning this scholarship and then getting jobs in these early multimedia businesses, which is great.

Matt: What about the accredited qualification itself, do you think that we’re entering an era where employers are going to start being discerning about requiring some kind of UX writer certification or is it really more about the learning and getting the runs on the board?

David: I personally don’t place… This is coming from somebody who runs an accredited design school. I actually don’t place a huge amount of value on the actual qualification. But I do place a lot of value on the qualification it represents in terms of student X went to this school and this particular school has this reputation, and it’s put out these particular types of students. And if I’ve been through that program and had that sort of experience then I put a lot of value on that, but not so much on the piece of paper itself. The piece of paper is still important I think because, again, Tractor’s really setting out to be the best design school in Australia that’s most focused on these new, emerging digital roles. And most employees will know who the top 2, 3, 4 design schools are. And it’s funny because those top schools, the piece of paper is not that important. You’ve been to the graduate exhibitions, you know the work, you know the students, and the piece of paper is not really what you’re hiring them for. However, as you move through the ranks, and there are many different cultures, and types, and everything else. That accreditation is important because it provides some accountability and adherence to standards, and processes, and things and without that it’s… As you move down from the top 2 or 3 schools you could start getting quite unregulated, kind of chaotic results. It could be a bit of waste of time for everybody. So I think the accreditation is important for that point of view but as an employer I put a whole lot of value on it. A good example is we have a graduate from Hyper Island come to us at DT and we hired him over an honest graduate from, I think it was Swinburne at the time, which is where I went. Hyper Island doesn’t actually have an accreditation whatsoever.

Matt: Where is Hyper Island?

David: Hyper Island is a digital university but it isn’t actually a university. It’s a digital… it’s based in Stockholm and it’s actually run out of an old jail on an island. It’s been running for about nearly 20 years now so it’s really set-up in sort of a multimedia school, but they teach digital strategy, digital design, responsive mobile, e-commerce. There’s whole range of courses that you can do. It has a fantastic reputation, it puts out fantastic students, but again they have no accreditation whatsoever. So other than to say, here’s a piece of paper that says you went to Hyper Island, but because they have that reputation the piece of paper’s less important. My brother studied graphic design, he went to RMIT. He then got a couple of jobs and ended up working for Emery Studio, which is probably… Gary Emery, he’s arguably the best graphic designer Australia has ever produced. He spent 10 years there. He never actually got his paper from RMIT because he didn’t finish the typing module. I remember when he was working at Emery a couple of years later they rang him up and said, “Why don’t you come in on a Saturday, do your typing module then we’ll give you your degree.” He said, “I’m doing something on Saturday. I don’t need the degree. What do I need a degree for?” And that’s probably a good example. He spent 3 or 4 years at university working his butt of to get this degree and all he had to do was go in for a few hours on a Saturday and get his piece of paper and it didn’t interest him, because he knew at that point, “I’ve got the portfolio, I’ve had the experience, I now got a job. It’s not really that important.” A bit of a mixed answer there.

Matt: Things are clearly very different today for people entering the world of UX. UX wasn’t even a term back when you started out. What if anything has remained constant about the industry?

David: My view on the reason why it’s become… I’ll come back to the question I suppose, why there’s been so much growth in this area is that if we go back 20 years 98% of the products and services that we bought as consumers were physical products and services. And then obviously the iPhone came out, whatever that was, 2007 was it? I can’t remember. All of a sudden there was this opportunity to create digital products and services that we could consume through these devices that started replacing physical products and services. If you think about things like music, you’ve got tapes going to CD’s, going to things like iTunes, and ending up with Apple Music, or Spotify, Pandora, whatever it might be. As these things become more complicated, these products and services, they’re unfamiliar experiences that need to be very carefully designed in order to be successful. If you look at maps, you’ve gone from paper maps to Tomtom devices to apps on iPhones. If you look at photography you’ve gone from film-based cameras, to digital cameras, to apps on an iPhone like Instagram.

There’s been a couple of generations of reinventions of many different products and services that have ended up as digital products and services. And they all have an interface, which is completely unfamiliar to human beings. Whether these products succeed or fail really comes down to UX, and so it’s become so important. And then when you look at corporates you’ve got banks, you’ve got insurance companies whose main interface with the customers is now through this human-computer interactions that, again, are completely foreign and need to be designed. UX has just become so important. So in terms of your question of what’s changed, that’s really what’s changed. When I think back to the work that I did andthe way it influenced from Nathan, back then it was actually marketing and trying to engage people. A lot of it was about trying to design that experience. I’ve got a bit of a background noise here.

Matt: Yes, bit of entertaining a construction in the next building over. We’ll persist anyway.

David: Okay. Sorry about that guys. So back then you are really trying to design the experience to create an emotional response to engage people so they actually want to spend time on this particular experience. And what you’re competing against was TV and other engaging mediums like that in film. And you have these incredible constraints like what we’re facing right now, that background noise. But you had these incredible constraints of bandwidth. So the goal of experience design was to create something that people could be bothered to interact with. Now, it’s a little bit different where you’ve got these products and services and that is the way if you want to access that product or service it’s through this interface. And so it’s more of a necessity and it either works or it doesn’t. People can use it all they can as opposed to it being kind of an engaging experience if that makes sense. It’s a lot more nuts and bolts and therefore that’s why I think the emergence of… There’s far more research and things that go into UX design now, a lot of the work we did back then. And this is some of the arguments that we have with people around UX. I never really did a whole heap of user testing and research throughout my career. I started off doing a bit like LookSmart and certainly DT does a lot of it. And some people will argue with me, “That’s not really UX design.” I said, it is but I used a lot of my experience and intuition, totally focused on designing the user experience but using a different process, which is more based upon my own intuition and bits and pieces of feedback from users as opposed to constantly testing everything. My experience early on doing that with LookSmart I’d spent hours sitting through these user sessions and I’d come out and go, I kind of knew 95% of that already and there was maybe two insights here that I didn’t know. But what I was finding was the value of getting from some of those sessions based on my own intuition and knowledge base was limited compared to me spending time just thinking about and putting myself in the shoes of the user and having empathy for them. And trying to create this frame of mind of their mindset and their knowledge base looking at this. So for me it was more user experience designed from within rather than… Which again, I know talking to a lot of other people they’ll say, “That’s not user experience.” Well, it has been for me for 20 years.

Matt: Yeah, empathy has been a part of what we preach and so it’s a balancing act of course. If you’re experienced and you are able to intuit a bunch of stuff and you have one session to validate this…

David: Yeah. I definitely think validating things are important. I’ve seen a lot of the things go through such a structured process where everything’s coming from the users and I’ll still see those projects, you know, file from a UX point of view. So I just think it’s important that people practicing in this area… It’s almost like you need to earn the right to be able to break the rules a little bit and you need to know when to use what tool to create the right outcome. Apple’s a good example. They’re famous as I’m sure a lot of people have heard for not doing a whole lot of research. I can’t imagine them not validating and testing products before they launch them. But a lot of their best experiences, and ideas, and things have come more through a human creativity process than through the research says, “We better do that.”

Matt: It’s good to hear that you don’t think users will be replacing the job of designers.

David: No, definitely not.

Matt: Cast your mind forward to the next 10-15 years. Do you think, A – we’ll be using this term user experience still and then what direction do you think the industry is headed?

David: It’s hard to know. I’ve spent a lot of time throughout my career trying to imagine the future. I think that’s one of the things I’m probably pretty good at. But one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s almost impossible to do. In terms of terminology, I don’t know… really who cares sort of thing. I think that’s probably more of a function of whether people will get bored of the term and want to create a new term. It’s almost like every generation has their own little trend. They ditched the flares and go for skinny jeans, and they go back… It’s almost to define themselves as being different from the boss or the generation before them. I wouldn’t be surprised if terminology changes more out of a function of that than anything else. And obviously service design is a different thing but it’s closely linked. People are always looking for a new term to coin. I think there’ll be more rigor and structure applied to… I think it’ll just continue to evolve the way that it has been. I think there might be more specialist roles emerge. I think we’ve certainly seen that for many industries over the last 100 years. A good example is the film industry where early on the one guy would write the script, shoot the film, edit the film, act in the film. These days you’re creating Star Wars and you’ve got the guy whose job it is just to hold the light and he’s got a job title and everything that go with it. I think as computing power continues to increase exponentially as it has since the 70’s Moore’s law and all of that. As that happens there are more, and this is the way that companies like Apple grow and operate. They increase the processing power of their chips and then they go, “Okay, now we can add video. Now we can do artificial intelligence, etc.” They’ll certainly be changed. I think as computer processing power increases and the functionality behind things increases I think that will lead to more complexity, which may lead to more specialized roles. I’ve been doing a bit of marking around, working on a commercial project with drones for example. When you think about the stuff going on there with deep learning and artificial intelligence, it’s quite staggering. I think we’ll see the role of a user experience designer become more multi-dimensional if that makes sense. What I’m saying there is I think we’ll be breaking out of the phone and designing for more complex and sophisticated technology. Cars is a good example. I’ve got a strong belief in where cars are going. From what I’ve heard 2/3 of Tesla’s workforce are software engineers. And all the focus in the automotive industry is going into automation and artificial intelligence, and those sorts of things. If you think about that, that user experience job might be actually to be designing functionality that’s sitting in a car, you can see the need for splinter roles. And within that broad term of user experience you’ve got people that might focus on different parts of a process or different industries in the same way that’s happening in other industries like film and so forth.

Matt: Our Community Manager Hawk is in San Francisco at the moment. I was jealous because she was reporting on Facebook that the Tesla self-driving car was taking her home after a night at the pub. I was kind of geeking out vicariously.

David: It’s pretty incredible. What’s going on with drones and what’s going on in the automotive sector, it just makes my head hurt really. When you think about it like that I think the design industry and the user experience design industry, we can’t stand still. That’s one thing I’ve learned through my life at DT is every year it’s going to bring new challenges and things. And I think the people that will succeed ultimately are the ones that jump on new things and go, “Wow, something new is here. Let’s work it out” and really try to master it quickly. And if you stop doing that you sort of break the chain and you could wake up 5 years later and you’re doing what you’re doing 5 years ago, and you might find that the work has changed into something else. There are other people in demand and you’re not. I think that kind of continuous evolution and improvement of y ourself, and just constantly learning and thinking about the different interfaces, experiences, and technologies. Again, with iPhones you think about the sensors in an iPhone. Initially it was a chip and a screen. Apple added an accelerometer and a GPS. And when you have multiple sensors it allows an infinite number of things to happen through software. And I think over time what we’re going to see, I suppose when I’m talking about the drones in cars is more and more functionality and sensors that lead to exponentially more complexity in the products that can be created, that then user experience designers are going to get their heads around it and work out what that means.

Matt: What about you personally? Do you still design stuff? Do you still get hands-on or are you really removed from that. And if you don’t do you miss it?

David: I do miss it. I don’t do a whole heap, no. I have input from more creative direction point of view. It’s funny because I really grapple with this 15 years ago when I was at DT. I was going out talking to clients and coming back. I’ve got to get back on the tools and design. I’d sit down to design and I get frustrated because it had taken too long. It’s like, “I can’t do this in half an hour. It takes days.” And then I think I became good at having ideas and communicating those ideas to other designers and having direction and input, and I found that by doing that I could actually create more than I could if I just tried to do it myself if that makes sense. So it was just a transition that went through. I’ve always got other creative pursuits on the go that fill that need. Again, I’m doing a bit at the moment with drones for a bit of fun. Some of that’s a purely creative outlet, doing a bit of movie making and stuff. And the other part of it is a commercial project I’m working on that’s sort of more of an industrial application of drone. That’s using my skills. I’m think about the way that that’s going to work, the interface, and product design I suppose. But again, I’m not doing it in a hands-on sense.

Matt: Sure. Lastly because I know that there are lots of designers who at some point in their career, the entrepreneurial cold strikes and they start harvesting plans for going out on their own or doing product or services agency or something like that. What tips have you got? Because a lot of people think about it and not a lot of people successfully manage to pull it off. And you are certainly like a bit of a hero for every entrepreneurial designer in Australia I think.

David: Thank you. I think certainly a couple of things, one, you’ve got to have the motivation and the passion because it’s not easy. It’s hard. And if it seems just like hard work and a drain, it’s going to be hard to just keep pushing through the difficult parts over the longer term. If you look at like it’s a bit of a game and it’s fun, you just get back up when you get smashed down then you’ll go far. I think the main tip that I would give is really around focus and knowing what you’re selling and offering something, which is unique. And knowing what your proposition is and why people would hire you or your business or service whatever it might be over somebody else. I think that’s just really important. And that can change over time too. I remember the early days of DT. What made it easy for me and potentially easier than it would be today is that there were really no other trained designers who had gone and taught himself coding and could then say “I can create a website in its entirety for you.” And I can think about it from a marketing point of view, from a high-end design point-of-view, I can also create the website for you. That became a very easy sell, an easy proposition because I was competing against graphic designers who had no interest in the programming. Let’s say, “Here’s my website designed for you in QuarkXPress.” That’s a bit like InDesign for those of you who don’t know what QuarkXPress is. And they’ll hand it over to somebody. I’d find a programmer and have them build a program and say, “I can build you a site but you got to tell me what it looks like” to the clients. Which seems crazy how people would believe that, but that’s really what it was like. Probably back in ’96 there would’ve been a handful of people that could actually design and program a website. I had a very clear proposition and point of difference. It was very easy being to… Every conversation I had would pretty quickly lead to some work. These days there’s obviously tens of thousands of people that have those skills. As the business grew I suppose my sales pitch changed because early on I was, “If I can work closely with you I can create all these myself.” I’m going to be thinking about it from design and from the technology point-of-view. I’ve got minimal overheads, I could be really efficient. As the business grew we spent a while there where we were the most… and we had more design and software development competitors. Our thing was that we were the most creative of the technology companies and the most technology literate of the design companies. And that’s still something that we talk about at DT to day and that’s worked really well for us. As the business grew we then incurred these overheads and the cost structure grew. We couldn’t say to people anymore “We’re young and hungry, and we’re efficient” so we just had to be really good. We had to produce the best work and we had to not stuff projects up. As we grew and today DT’s built Bunnings and that’s a huge project. It gets 10 million unique visitors a month. It’s got 400,000 products in the database. It’s all built on a marketing automation platform with almost unlimited iterations of the home page based upon a whole lot of different data that’s coming in about the user, location, browsing history, and everything else. And those projects is just about not stuffing it up, because there’s a lot of people and a lot of cost involved, and you just have to deliver every time. The pitch changes over time. I think having that focus today, just having a reason for people to hire you or go with your business or your offer, and it might be industry specific. I’ve got real expertise in automotive, or financial services, or travel. That’s my thing. “I’m the UX guy around travelling” for example. Just having something that’s going to differentiate you from your competitors. It might be a structure, or your team, or a process that you use. But it’s about standing out and having a reason for people to differentiate you. If everyone else is an apple you want to be a telephone. How do you really differentiate yourself and get very clear with your pitch in terms of what it is that you do. And that can be something that a one man show, a freelancer can have in their pitch as well, that you understand strategy in this sector as well UX so you’ve got a great network of people around you that can execute your work, or you work on site with clients, whatever happens to be. And then think about the clients who that unique pitch is going to work for. But the one thing that you just never want at any business is just to be lost in the sea of everybody doing the same stuff. Because then all you’re left to compete on is price, which becomes difficult in something like this because you’re selling the quality of your ideas. And what you don’t want to do is then be giving away these fantastic ideas at a low price.

Matt: David, you’re a busy man so I really appreciate your time and thank you so much for your patience with the acoustic challenges of the room today. Hopefully that’s not going to be too much of a distraction for our listeners but there’s some golden advice in there. If people want to follow along and keep up with what you’re up to, where should they go? Do you do the Twitter thing?

David: That’s a good question. I don’t do the Twitter so much any more. I’m sort of laying low a little bit at the moment. But certainly keep an eye out for Tractor. We’ve got a lot of information going out through Tractor, social media, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Matt: The URL?

David: Yes, tractor.edu.au is our website, and from there you can find all of our social media channels. And also DT, which is dt.com.au, and all the various social media channels off there.

Matt: We didn’t touch on this in our conversation but Tractor has online courses as well as the in-person training, don’t they?

David: Yeah, definitely. We’ve got many students all around Australia doing our online courses. We’ve got a graphic design course and a digital design course. They have those traditional names because we have to work within this accredited framework. We can’t just launch a UX course. But again, I think our graphic design course is the most digitally focused of the graphic design courses, but it’s still teaching a lot of the fundamentals of typography, color, and form, and all that sort of stuff, which is really important for a lot of people. And our digital design course is as much as we can make it. It’s very UX- focused as well.

Matt: Fantastic. Thanks for your time and we’ll catch up with you soon.

David: Great. Thank you.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #8: Studying UX with David Trewern appeared first on UX Mastery.

In this recording of last weekend’s webinar, readers asked questions about how to break into UX, create a portfolio, and manage your career.

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Video

Flying in the face of frustrating technical hurdles, we did manage to successfully capture a video recording of this webinar for your viewing pleasure. Complete with live sketchnotes!

Continue the Conversation…

There were some great questions asked of Patrick in our community forum ahead of this event. Thank you to everyone who submitted a comment, either in the forum thread or within the webinar. We weren’t able to answer every question, but they have triggered some great discussions—we’d love you to get involved and keep the conversation going.

Transcript

Luke: Welcome, everyone, to the fourth UX Mastery webinar. We’ve got people joining us from around the world. It’s great to have you all here, we’re glad you’ve made the time to come along.

Today we’re talking about ‘How to Get an Awesome UX Job’ – finding job opportunities, crossing over from another position, portfolios and job interviews, and generally how to get started in UX.

My name is Luke Chambers. I’m one of the co-founders of UX Mastery. We’re based in Melbourne, Australia, where it’s currently a cool, overcast 9am Sunday morning. I’ve got a little croak in my throat so apologies in advance about that. And sitting not too far away from me with his sketchpad and pen is my co-founder Matt Magain. How are you today, Matt?

Matt: I’m good. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got my sketchpad. We’re going to try this little experiment. I’m going to sketch out our webinar. If I’m a bit distracted in the conversation it’s because I’m trying to do several things at once but that’s okay. It’s all good, we’ll see how it goes, if it’s too hard we’ll can it for next time, but it should be fun.

Luke: Very good. And we’re also very lucky to have with us today Patrick Neeman, all the way from Seattle. How are you Patrick?

Patrick: Pretty good. Getting over a cold and enjoying the Seattle rainy weather but yeah, I’m fine.

Luke: Lovely. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Patrick: So my name is Patrick Neeman, I’m a Director of Product Design in a company called at Apptio. We help companies manage their IT spend – you know, companies like American Express, Starbucks, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft – pretty big companies. Before that I worked at a company, a couple of companies before, called Jobvite, I was Director of UX there and Jobvite is a company that provides an applicant tracking system so we interviewed over 100 recruiters and hiring managers during my time there, so we completely understand the hiring process, and I got to talk to a lot of really cool UX types while I was working there.

Luke: Very good, so you have a lot of good experience of both sides! You also run the uxdrinkinggame.com…

Patrick: That is correct, I actually run two things . I actually run something called Usability Counts, it’s a blog that has over 45,000 words of advice about being in the UX field, and I run the UX Drinking Game, which recently was featured in Pragmatic Marketing – which is a product management training webinar and event company.

Luke: Excellent. Alright, lets kick on into some questions now.

Just over a week ago UX Mastery launched community forums at community.uxmastery.com, and we’ve been having some great conversations in there, some people asking questions they’d like answered in today’s webinar. So a big thank you to all who submitted questions – there are some great questions in here. I’ve got the list in front of me and we’ll go through them with Patrick.
If you’ve got a question about landing a UX job you’d like Patrick to help with, then you should be able to submit it in your GoToWebinar control panel. We’ll see it and get to them after we’ve done these ones that have already been submitted.

So Patrick, the first one here we’ve got from Armen. Armen is asking:

“How can I increase my job opportunities when I live in an area where there is no study or work opportunities for a UX specialist? I’ve had some success writing on medium.com and some other sites, but what else can I do for my career?”

Patrick: Basically the first question I’ll ask is where do you live? The second question is there are a lot of areas in the US where they don’t have UX specialist roles and what I encourage designers to do, is do a lot of UX activities as part of their design process with customers.

If there’s nobody telling you that you can’t do personas, you can’t do usability research, you can’t run focus groups, you can’t do wireframes – you just go ahead and do it, and then when you get to the next client you say ‘hey, this is the work that I did for this one client’ and you actually use it as part of your portfolio.

One of the examples I use that is really relevant in my life is last weekend we participated in an event called Start-up Weekend here in Seattle and we actually went through the process of building a whole prototype, including an imminent, is there a place where I can type this URL? (I’m going to go ahead and put it in the chat window)

Matt: I’ll go ahead and write the URL in this window, Patrick

Patrick: Yeah, so we went through the whole process of doing a prototype, we did a presentation, we were competing against ten other start-ups and we won the design portion and all the designers that I brought along to the event they’re using it in their portfolio to say ‘hey this the UX work that I did, that we did. We did research, we did some usability testing it was a lot of fun’.

Luke: I think Armen is in Armenia.

Patrick: Yeah, do side projects too. Side projects are awesome for doing stuff like this.

Luke: Excellent, second question is from Carrie:

“I am currently working as the only developer on a web project. I’m finding the experience terribly lonely, isolating and becoming increasingly depressed especially as I do not have anyone to bounce ideas off and lack of understanding from fellow colleagues leads to the assumption that my work is easy or they could do better.”

Patrick: Our work is so easy…

Luke: Have you had a similar experience and how important do you think it is to be able to share ideas?

Patrick: Yeah it’s really, really important to share ideas, there’s this wonderful thing called Twitter where you can go ahead and follow a whole bunch of designers and they’re all over the world, and I actually do this a lot and they reach out to me for Skype calls and we share the work that we’re doing and we get feedback it’s like we’re using the usability test and it’s very, very powerful.

Most designers are very introverted because of the emotional needs of our jobs and that is one outlet they can do to kind of do that, another thing that you can do is once you get on Twitter, once you get a start point of meetups you can actually invite designers out for coffee. I actually lived right above a coffee place and so we’re there all the time probably like once a week. A couple of weeks I’m meeting with a designer, we’re talking about our work and really exploring the kind of design work that we’re doing.

Luke: Very good. Another question, this one from Cassandra:

“I’ve been attempting to break into a UX designer position for a few years now (I have a few years of web design and front-end dev). Available positions are for mid-level or senior UX designers. If I can’t afford UX schooling and have limited UX experience, what’s the best course to breaking into this career?”

Patrick: That’s a really, really tough one. I just recently hired a junior web at Apptio and he had a really-really good mind for UX and his vision on stuff was great, and we’re actually training him. He was lucky because he found an opportunity where he can get on to a bigger team and actually learn from some other people. That would be the first thing that I would say – look for companies that might have junior people or junior positions open. I know that’s kind of hard.

Another way that you could do it, you can reach out to other designers that are more senior than you, do side projects or do other work and then show them your work and it’s almost as good as working with them directly. And another thing is like, another way that you can do that is if you have web development, I was looking at the CF web design experience, what you can do is go somewhere and use those skills, go somewhere they already have a senior designer working, and say ‘hey, these are the skill sets that I have. I want to work with this designer, I’ll do this web development and design stuff for a while but I really want to pick up the interactions design’, that’s the way that most junior designers did and broke into the field.

Matt: So Patrick, kind of off the back of that, if you don’t have a visual design background is that a hurdle for people, do you think?

Patrick: I actually don’t. One of the prototypers I have at work, he has a background in infomatics which is basically the, and I’m doing some quotes here, “product management” degree at the University of Washington and so he’s a programmer and he has an interaction design background and so he’s been real instrumental in helping us create a prototype for the company. And I actually value that skill set a lot because he thinks of a lot of things that we don’t think of, because we’re designers and we don’t totally get involved in all the technology.

Matt: That’s a good point.

Luke: I’ve got a question here from Pietschy – he says:

“I started life in a BA role, and later moved into development. Recently I did a solo job designing and building an in-house system for a small business where I particularly enjoyed getting back into requirements analysis, wireframing etc. I’d like to do more of this kind of work, do you know if there’s much of a market in the UXD world for back-office business systems? Or does the money tend to go to customer facing products?”

Patrick: Oh this great, this is an awesome question!

Where I work at is heavy-heavy enterprise, it’s IT spend, it’s B2B, if you find the right companies it’s a huge market from two perspectives.

The first perspective is they’re always looking for people that understand this is the business system because they’re a lot more complex than developing say an iPhone app.

And the second thing is – and this is the story that I tell people just me being an enterprise it’s literally 20 years of job security. As technology improves and as the products improve, the younger generation is actually expecting more products that work like an iPhone or iPad and so having a great user experience designer on staff is very, very important.

Does that make sense? Basically like the upper management I work with they are basically saying we know that you have to have the backup thing, but they also realize that a great user experience also sells the product

Luke: Yeah…

Patrick: And that’s going to increase the demand for people like us, which is great. The pay is awesome.

Luke: Yes can be very good. And we’ve got a few more questions coming in now, we’ve got one from Tim, who says:

“I’m just starting out with UX conducting focus groups, doing usability testing and now creating personas, do you have any examples of a good portfolio design?”

Patrick: There’s actually… I’m going to type it into the window and you guys can move it across…

Matt: I can put it on the sketch here.

Patrick: Yeah, so there’s this one portfolio that I point people to Laura, she’s an assistant designer that I mentored, now working for Amazon Lab 126. One of her portfolio pieces tells this great story about how they went through all the research and she talked about personas, and she did all the stuff and it was a three-day project, and it tells an amazing story.

Luke: There’s a lot of information about UX portfolios online. UX Mastery has just published an eBook about Getting Started in UX, and part of the bundled bonus extras with the eBook is a portfolio template and a resume template. That resume template is actually Patrick’s one. Go head and tell us a little bit more about what went into that, Patrick.

Patrick: As for the resume template, that was something that I actually developed when I was working at Jobvite, about 6 years ago. We went through some layoffs and I realized that my resume was horribly out of date and so I had a copywriter re-write it, and so when I got to Jobvite – which is an applicant tracking system – I actually tested my template through Jobvite over and over and over again until I got to a format that I knew that worked perfectly in most applicant tracking systems. I also did, quote, usability testing, quote, on showing it to recruiters and everything and the template basically states ‘hey this what I did at a job and then these were the goals that I achieved’. For example, if you worked at a job like an e-commerce site and then you can talk about how you increased the shopping cart conversion by 5%, that’s the kind of stuff that recruiters are looking for.

Luke: Excellent, excellent. We’ve got a few more questions rolling in from the forums . ‘UXer’ asks:

“Why all of a sudden does everyone want to be in UX, is it because they want to be in technology, but don’t want to learn code?”

Patrick: Should we describe what UX is, to start the discussion?

Luke: Sure, let’s go!

Patrick: So the way that I interpret UX myself is it’s an overarching discipline that includes design, content strategy, visual design, front-end development and then the research. There’s a couple of others in there, like information architecture, so it covers a lot of ground so when you have a UX team and you look at the people in the room like at Apptio, ‘right, how did these people ever get into the same team?’ I have the most it’s not like a whole bunch of product managers sitting around, it’s like literally ‘wow, they all have very different skill sets’, it’s like ‘how do you manage that?’

I think the main reason why people got into it is because of Apple. The iPhone is a wonderful product, and people think: “Oh, I want to develop iPhone apps for that.” What they don’t realize when they get into UX, you don’t start off and get the creative product. You have to collaborate with a whole bunch of different groups of people and the right product managers and developers and they don’t realize and they think they’re going to be able to design a product on their own, what it really comes down to is you don’t actually design the product, you facilitate the design. Does that make sense?

Luke: I think that is exactly what this person is asking – they can make the connection between the business strategy and the design team to provide value to the customer. And hence the expression of “facilitation”, as you say.

Patrick: Yeah! On that note what I like is—a lot of the products I worked on in front of millions of people. Like, I was doing some work at Microsoft with the potential to affect half billion people, and that was a huge driver for why I like being in this field.

Matt: Jeff Gothelf, who wrote the Lean UX book, talks about that exact point too. He talks about how one thing we need to learn as designers is that we are design facilitators and that everybody has valid input to influence the design, and we need to be prepared to create and instill a process where that collaboration and that input is synthesized and you end up with the ‘synergy’ of the team you’re willing to use, to use a buzz word, yeah, to end up with a great result.

Patrick: Yeah it’s really hard to create a design culture. Creating the right environment where that collaboration actually respects our roles is really, really hard and what’s really hard about that is that a lot of other people think that, they think that everybody can be a designer and they don’t understand that a lot of us have spent years and years of beating our heads against the wall to really understand what UX is.

Matt: And so on that point, ‘cause that is something that I’ve really struggled a lot with in big enterprise clients and that’s the idea of championing and justifying and selling user experience as a valid focus.

What has been your experience with that problem and how did you overcome it?

Patrick: It really depends I mean having a design-influenced culture is really top down and what you do is you have to start pounding their head more with data. Like, where I work now we’re starting to get into data design. We’re collecting immense amounts of data on how our customers use the product but yet nobody had bothered to analyze it and so one of the things we’ve been working over the past two weeks hey we have all this amazing data once they saw it like the light bulb totally turned, where you illustrate a light bulb and now they realize it, instead of just doing a lot of guessing. Asking the customers what they want now, we know what they’re using, and that totally transforms the conversation. Many companies never get to a design influence culture and then it hurts their bottom line.

Matt: Sorry to hijack the question thread, it’s a little selfish of me, but I’m really interested in this stuff because I’ve had those jobs. So for your career is it best if you’re in that situation where you’re in an organization and you see they don’t get it and you’re not, you know, an organisational change consultant—you’re an UXer. Should you acknowledge there is only so much you can do at and cut your losses and find a work environment where you can thrive and learn? Part of the stubborn consultant in me wants to say “no, I can change this place, I can really make a different here”.

Patrick: That’s actually a really good point. I’ve been in places, I’ve been presented with situations fairly recently where we’ve had consultants in there and literally change doesn’t happen overnight, like they’re being a UX consultant but they’re like two different approaches. Being a UX consultant you’re there to say “hey, there are obviously things that are going wrong, there are some areas you can fix” (I’m moving my hands around) but when you’re in-house that change comes much slower because you have to put all these pieces in place. Yes for example many companies, I think it was Scott Berkun that had a book about this. You know: “A Year without Wearing Pants” or something like that. It talked about how change has to be slow and you have to do it one piece at a time and you have to involve a lot of people. A lot of people do understand what design-led means, but they don’t know how it changes their job and so you have to gradually educate them across the organization about hey this is what it really means. And it’s a very difficult conversation because it actually involves them sharing a piece of their … of where they find pride. A lot of people want to be involved in the wireframing but they don’t understand what the wireframing means and how it’s an expression of design thinking, for example.

Luke: Cool, it’s often said that ‘the best way to learn UX is to do it’, but what aspects of UX can’t be taught Patrick?

Patrick: System design and acknowledging patterns, I think patterns and information. I don’t think that can be taught. Like, any of the reasons why I’ve really enjoyed this job and I feel I’m successful at it, is that I’m able to distill systems into objects and patterns. I see patterns in everything I don’t think that’s something that can necessarily be taught at a very high level. Some of the soft skills are a little bit challenging for us because it involves a lot of times you have to disagree and commit. Where you disagree with the concept, but you still have to follow the business needs, and that’s actually a really hard skill to teach. The visual design step is really, really tough like, visual design is under UX and either you have it or you don’t. Does that make sense? Like spatial design, like information design. For example, there are a lot of illustrators out there that do visual design but they don’t understand the structure of a page for example.

Luke: You were talking before about how UX as a field had a very broad range of skillsets, but if people don’t necessarily have the visual skills what sort of things could they head towards?

Patrick: Content strategy, UX research, information design because they can still sketch that out on a page. Information architecture is an art form in itself and it’s one that a lot of teams are missing a component of which is taxonomy, which is understanding how information is structured (there you go) and what’s another one… prototyping. If you have a programmer background or interaction design that’s huge.

Luke: Jen asks:

“I find it difficult to overcome the hurdle of not having five plus years of experience in UX, how does one get their foot in the door without years of UX experience coming from a visual background having several uses in that field?”

Patrick: Yeah I’ll use the example of like one recruiter that I talked to, I actually wrote an article about it on my blog “How to get into UX” and it was Mary Guillen, I think her last name is, she gave me a call and we outlined what we thought the steps were to break into this field at a non-designer. She followed them step by step and now she is a web producer that does this experience where she directs a team at an interactive agency. And I didn’t actually write the article until after the call with her, but when I looked back it totally made sense. A lot of times what you can do is work at a company, and a web producer says, “Hey, I’m a project manager,” and as you work there you get more and more involved in the interactive process. Prototypers is another, account manager at an agency is a huge one, product managers—sometimes they can make the shift. If you’re a programmer and you can make the shift, it’s actually pretty easy.

Luke: Here’s a related question… Sorry, Matt?

Matt: I was just going to add to that and talk about my own experience that I came from, I did work as a programmer for a while and then as a visual designer and moved across and I think a lot of people get hung up on this idea, that I’m going to find a UX job, I’m going to be a UX specialist and that’s going to be the job that I get and I’ll do everything right and I’ll get that job … and I just think you need to work towards this stuff and you need to be working in a role that may not have UX in the title. Just kind of dip your toes in, and do bits and pieces along the way where you’re working on web projects. You’re involved with the team, and you can put your hand up as stuff appears and like Patrick was saying make your way and shift sideways. We talk about this a little bit in the book, right? There are a bunch of ways you can get exposure and experience working on a web project. You can volunteer, do some usability testing, and, you know, put your hand up to have a crack at wireframes and move across that way. I see a lot of people really hung up on getting that perfect UX job right out of the gate and I think you need to look at the long-term.

Patrick: Yeah this happens. Can I add to this too?

Luke: Please.

Patrick: So I’ll give you an example. The way that I broke into the field was I was a print designer. I actually volunteered to work for a political campaign doing all the direct mail and all their branding. At the time I didn’t know it but it turned into the most expensive U.S. congressional campaign in 1994. The guy that was the campaign manager went out and started an internet company and said, “Why don’t you join?” That was 95. I did a lot of side projects to learn more about the web and look where I am today. When I interviewed interns for Apptio, I’m frankly sick of seeing just school projects. Because I have not gotten anywhere easy, I need to see people that make the extra effort to do projects outside of school. We recently hired an intern, he not only did school projects but he also had illustration capabilities, kind of along the lines of what you’re doing right now Matt. He used to be an architect, and he went out and did a whole bunch of side projects being paid very little and illustrated his thinking and talked about personas, talked about how he dealt with clients, and he was by far the best candidate that we interviewed—because of the side work. There’s no easy way, you just can’t expect any body to say hey why don’t you come work here, we’re going to train you. That’s not the way this field works.

Matt: Totally agree.

Luke: What about internships? What if you offer yourself to a company as an intern?

Patrick: What I tell people to do is follow companies on Twitter, follow people on Twitter, and ask them “Hey, is there an internship?” The U.S. is a little bit tricky right now because there are a lot of questions marks about that. But there’s a lot of smaller start–ups that may ask, “Hey, will you intern for free?” You just got to have your spidey sense about if that’s useful or not. If you try that, or if you do the Startup Weekend stuff … there’s a lot of opportunities to learn more about the field. And a lot of it is kind of following the templates to show “this is how UX is done.”

Luke: Makes sense! We’ve got quite a few other questions coming in here, thanks every one for having questions. We’ll see if we can rip through a few.

Suma asks:

“I’m a service designer looking to work in UX who understands design process but I don’t have any portfolio which showcases my UX skills apart from my academic projects.”

Patrick: Is she working full time as a service designer?

Luke: I don’t know. Maybe Suma if you can clarify?

Patrick: Like the process and the personas and all the research … you could actually use that as your portfolio because there’s a lot of, I really like the field of service design and I think there’s a lot of value in showing your thought and how it applies to your company doing web projects.

Luke: Michael also asks a related question:

“I’m currently working in a full time role not directly in a UX area. How can I get the correct qualifications in order to land my next UX job?”

Patrick: What’s the full time job title?

Luke: Michael, what’s your full time job title?

Patrick: Yeah It really depends on the job title, how you would go about that.

Matt: He said ‘designer’.

Patrick: Web designer?

Luke: Graphic designer, yeah

Patrick: Graphic designer. Print?

Luke: Yes.

Patrick: So does he work at a place that’s doing web stuff?

Matt: Should we try unmuting Michael so he can join, actually come into the conversation if that’s okay to?

Luke: Are you with us now Michael?

Michael: Yes, hello!

Patrick: So if there’s another designer working on the web stuff, actually do some research and figuring out the persona, what are the scenarios for the website that you guys are doing and actually use that to develop your portfolio.

Luke: Are you with us now, Michael?

Michael: Yes, hi.

Matt: Does that answer your question or do you need to go deeper there?

Michael: Yeah, I’ve been working in the public sector, information design and information architecture

Patrick: Oh my, yeah so you shouldn’t have any problem then, because if you can show some of the taxonomy stuff and the side architectural stuff that your doing in your portfolio piece, that’s pretty powerful.

Luke: What about Michael’s qualifications?

Michael: Thank you.

Luke: So we recently published an article on UX Mastery listing a bunch of degrees, why is it that people can get some form of accreditation? What are your thoughts on academic qualifications in UX, Patrick?

Patrick: Being the college dropout three times, there are very few schools I look to like Carnegie Mellon where I think the value is absolutely there, like the University of Washington here. They’re actually trying to orient themselves, the problem they run into is that their education is good, but they don’t have the right profile for the kind of stuff I need. And so I actually look to the side work to see if they can develop the skills to be an interactive designer.

Luke: So Michael, have you had any experience where you’ve been asked for your qualifications and told it was a roadblock?

Michael: No not really, but for my future career path I’ve been looking towards a communication design post graduate.

Patrick: You know what you can do, you can email me on the side and contact me off my blog and I can probably answer you a little bit more directly.

Matt: I’m pretty sure that Luke and I can help you out there to because we actually know Jeremy who runs the communication design program at RMIT which is, I assume, the degree that you’re looking at so. I’m sure Jeremy would be more than happy to take a few minutes and have a coffee with you and chat about the course and see if it is a good fit for you or not.

Michael: Ok thank you.

Matt: No worries.

Luke: No worries, Michael.

Jeffrey asks:

“How did you manage your UX process in an agile environment for example.” [loud laughter]

Patrick: I get this asked a lot, I like Agile okay … so a little back story. I use to work for a magazine company as a print designer we had magazines going out, four magazines to five magazines a week. My whole life runs on weekly sprints cause I worked in a lot of publishing places. I just view Agile as a series of checkpoints, and always building to those checkpoints. So it’s okay to spread research out over four weeks, but the two week sprints, it says this is what it looks like now it just allows you to course-correct. I don’t get as fearful as Agile as most other designers because I don’t know what the problem is. I was doing Agile in 2001, actually I was doing it in 1995 before we knew it was Agile, so I don’t see the big deal.

Luke: Yeah, and can you make a quick comment how Lean UX relates to that?

Patrick: So I’ve actually done a few projects in Lean UX philosophies. I was doing Lean UX in 2001, basically you do a very minimal idea you start showing in front of users and you keep moving forward. There was a particular case study out of the Eric Ries book about Lean Startup where they’re actually doing the product process for the customer, totally non-tech. It was around let me think about this, they were helping consumers select menus to cook for their family, and they would actually go out to the home and ask the customer a whole bunch of questions and then go out shopping for them, and they learned a lot about the process and the pain points and it helped develop their product. It was totally by hand.

Luke: Very good. Rachel asks:

“What are the most important qualities you look for in a UX candidate?”

Patrick: There’s the soft skills, I’m actually looking for quieter designers. I’ve had the experience of hiring the extrovert designer to find that it’s actually detrimental to the process because they don’t listen enough. I look for people that listen, I look for people with soft skills. They’ll stand their ground on certain ideas but they know when they have to shift, they’ll back off of it. There’s this matrix of hard skills around seven different skills, and actually if I get three of them, then I’m pretty happy. And I look for system design—a lot of process. I want them to be able to adequately breakdown an idea into smaller pieces but can put that idea back together and show a larger concept.

Luke: Cassandra is asking a related question:

“Thinking about presenting that in a portfolio before a resume, how do we wow a recruiter or a hiring manager for a UX position?”

Patrick: It’s back to that rule … basically I’m looking for step-by-step thinking, having nice formatted wireframes helps, but what I’m looking for is a very methodical process of the way that they designed it, and I’m also looking for research. Like Mia tweeted this last night: “If you don’t understand the user goals, how can you design?”

Luke: So you’re putting those two together to tell the story of a project, wireframes, change in process.

Patrick: Yep, and a lot of it is a way to tell stories. One project that I did I use it as an example a friend of mine that runs a chiropractor practice out in Long Beach, California. I show the home page, I share the wireframes

Matt: This is Bob, right?

Patrick: Bob the chiropractor. Everybody is going to go to him. I set the home page, I talked about the persona, talked about some of the research we did. I did it all for beers and reduced rent on a condo he was renting to me and we put together the website and we were getting 8% conversion rate. We made one single change, or a couple of changes, and it went to 12% overnight. All I did was show the home page and tracking page and it’s an incredible story.

Luke: So that would be very interesting to see put together in a portfolio! It’s something I haven’t done in the past, but this last month or two as I have been researching all this stuff for UX Mastery, I’ve been getting my head around a lot of that, thinking about portfolios and the different ways people prove certain things, it’s fascinating!

Patrick: Yeah, it’s really fascinating.

Matt: I think that was the point that I felt I could justifiably promote to the world that my role was “UX designer” and not just “web designer” and that’s when I felt like I refined my process to something that I could rely on. So if you don’t have a process, then start thinking about it and start learning from other people’s process and start working on what you can rely on to be methodical in terms of getting a good result.

Patrick: Yeah a lot of the UX work I do, quite honestly, like you guys can see it behind me in my apartment like everything is at a 45° angle, like I have this certain UX process that I’ve done over and over again because I know it works, and it’s by getting data, getting validation, talking to users, understanding the different groups of users and designing against it and I just keep using it and it works. And I change it every once in a while but once you have that process and pattern down it actually makes it a lot easier to sign and commit on “this is what we need to do.”

Luke: We’ve got about 15 minutes to go—a few more questions and then we might have to continue the conversation in the forums. Britney asks:

“My background is user acquisitions, marketing and research I have a Master’s in sociology and I’m planning on getting a Master’s in human computer interaction starting this summer, do you think that it’s necessary because of my background? I don’t want to take on debt if I don’t have to.”

Patrick: Where does she live?

Luke: Britney do you want to chip in?

‘Chicago’

Patrick: You could probably get a job right now with your background doing research and some of that stuff. The HCD background might help you learn how to do wireframing and understand information architecture that might be the one area you’re missing.

Matt: Worth mentioning a bit about establishing a network too, we talked a little about Twitter, going along to a bunch of meetups and meeting other UXers in the industry, networking is going to be valuable or just as valuable than trolling job sites. So you want to open up as many job opportunities as possible and starting down this path to make sure you have that degree and then applying yourself is one way to go about it. But if you feel connected and you’ve got your finger on the pulse about what’s happening in your area and you know who’s who, that’s where the gold opportunities come from.

Patrick: I’m going to pump up my Twitter feed. If you go to my Twitter page @usabilitycounts on Twitter, I have a whole bunch of designers characterized in metropolitan areas and regions of the world that you can go follow, and I actually find that meetups are okay but I actually have built better relationships with people off of Twitter. I’ve gotten a lot more information and then when I was local to them, I would say “Hey, let’s have a coffee”. There’s actually a community that I’m involved with, I’m involved in it with Matt, I’ve met a lot of people out of the group and it’s awesome because you get to establish that personal connection which is better than a meetup.

There’s another thing I want to mention about the whole networking thing, there is a study by a sociologist by the name of Mark Granovetter and what it shows is that 60% of people got jobs in what they call a weak tie, for example I’m friends with Matt, Matt is friends with Luke. I ask Matt “Hey you know any good designers?” and Matt says “Luke is a great designer” and in my world, Luke is a weak tie. So if you network a lot and find people of different, not just designers, people of different skill sets, then you actually have a better chance of getting a job. A famous strategy for this is instead of going to meetups where the designers are at, go to meetups where developers and product managers are at, and I guarantee you that you be one of only a few designers there. Like, one of the interns that we brought into Apptio. I met her at a product camp, not at a UX event.

Luke: Patrick in Galway asks:

“I’m working graphic design and print, I want to move on to UX. I think he has one day per week working for a UX company to get some experience, should that be alright or should I try and do a longer bulk of time in graphic design skills?”

Patrick: Why don’t you start doing it now? Because I’m a former print designer, and see how it goes. I think it’s a good idea.

Luke: So, one day a week would be enough to get value from that?

Patrick: Yeah, and then you can start doing side projects too that kind of play around too.

Luke: Allison asks:

“My current job title is digital designer. During my work, I create wireframes and develop some user interface design for apps. Does this qualify as user experience work?”

Patrick: Yes, absolutely any day of the week and then what you can do is ask them to change your job title so it’s closer to interaction designer or product designer or UX designer.

Luke: Karemba asks:

“Do you think a background in psychology can be helpful in UX when dealing with highly political company cultures?”

Patrick: Every day of the week, yes.

Luke: Psychology is a big part of both designing a user experience, and facilitating and running things too, cause you have to understand how people learn, teach, and communicate.

Patrick: A little background on HCD—Human Computer Interaction—a lot of it is related to pilots that during WWI and WWII. They couldn’t figure out “Gee, why are they crashing?” and so the US Army and the US Air Force actually did a lot of work in that area and that was the beginning of work around HCD. Also there’s a lot of talk about how Henry Ford, for example, figured out how to make assembly lines more efficient, based on the work done with lithium processors, and looking at how people use technology, even though it’s not computers it’s very relevant to our field.

Matt: Have you ever worked with a psychologist on your team Patrick?

Patrick: One of the people I have on my team she has a researcher background, yes … she talks a lot about mental models and that kind of thing, yeah.

Matt: A friend of UX Mastery, Jodie at Symplicit, a Melbourne-based consultancy that is doing very well and Jodie is a former behavioral psychologist who tried to get into UX and they’re doing great work and that’s a bit of competitive advantage for those guys.

Patrick: Absolutely, and looking back I wish I knew more about this field. I’m a little bit older. I had a job before the internet but I wish I knew more about some of this in the more formal fields.

Luke: Very well I think we’ve got time for one or two more questions. Sorry to everyone who we’re not going to get to today.

Todd asks:

“I was previously a UX designer at my company but I realized I would add more value as a product owner so I’ve since transitioned my role into that direction. I’ve been a product owner for about four months now and do really enjoy it seems like a natural fit for a former UX designer, I’m still very passionate about UX though. If I was to look for a UX position in the future would my experience as a product owner be an advantage or a disadvantage?”

Patrick: As a former product manager and program manager, sure. I actually have toyed with the idea of going back over to product management because I think having a UX background over there is very powerful and there are many-many UX designers that are making the transition over to product management because we tend to identify better with the users than some of the people that have been in that role.

Matt: I’m giving a talk at a product manager meetup here in Melbourne. Later this month actually—it’s called Product Anonymous, so if anyone’s in Melbourne come along to Product Anonymous and the product mangers are interested in the UX. There’s a lot of product overlap between the two roles. There’s stuff we can learn about marketing and market validation, and there’s a lot that those guys can learn from UXers, like visual thinking and user research compared to market research. So I think there’s a lot of overlap, and I think there’s a lot to be learned from both fields. It’s going to help your UX career by being a product owner, definitely.

Luke: Very good! A final question from Ben, who asks:

“Thanks Patrick for spending time to chat. Do you think it’s more of an advantage being either a generalist or a specialist?”

Patrick: It really depends. I live in Seattle and Microsoft is here and Amazon is here, and one of the problems I have – not with Amazon so much but with Microsoft – is they have a lot of specialists. So I have a generalist UX team. (We can take a few more questions if you guys want to) I have a generalist UX team and so I find specialists a little hard to hire and it goes back to the seven disciplines that I hire against. I usually tend to look for people that have a least two maybe three skill sets. They call it a T-shaped skillset. For example I have a visual design background, and I tend to go more towards visual architecture and interaction and so I have more of a generalist skill set then some of the people and the area I’m actually weakest in is research. Real quickly if you’re in places like Seattle or San Francisco, specialist roles are harder to find in places like the Midwest and other areas of the world, then, outside of London then yeah it tends to be more of a generalist because most places can’t support that role, and once you really, really get your job then you’re a traveling consultant.

Luke: So there’s something in being hired for your soft skills, and your ability to learn deeper skills on the job?

Patrick: Yeah. It’s a little bit hard. I’ve worked with designers that were brought in without a lot of the hard skills, and it’s an uphill battle because a lot of managers come in and they’re like, “Why did they hire this person?” and it’s great that they have the soft skills, but then at one point or another you have to perform on the job so that’s kind of tricky.

Luke: We’ve got 2 more minutes. Maybe we’ll try to squeeze in one more question.

Patrick: You can keep me after 3, as long as we’re not getting out of here after 4.

Luke: Cool. Tyler is asking:

“If you could choose one book to be your UX bible what would it be?”

Matt: I have a suggestion…

Patrick: UX Bible for what part? For learning UX, or for breaking into the field?

Luke: I guess it would have to include everything to be a UX bible of everything!

Matt: Learning, he said.

Patrick: Well the Get Started in UX book gives a really good overview. The one book that I have been recommending lately has been Russ Unger’s UX Project Guide. And another one, Kelly Goto has this wonderful book called Web Design 2.0 that was published in 2004 that I actually still recommend today. It has a really generalist view of how to do web projects in the end, and it actually includes a little product management stuff, and I’m not saying that because she bought me a drink, but, you know, I actually like the book a lot.

Luke: Well we’ll dig that out and provide a link somewhere for that.

I think we’re out of time.
Well, thank you very much, Patrick. That was an amazing set of responses to those questions. Thanks also very much to all the webinar attendees for great questions and for joining us here today.
Just quickly, Patrick, can you let us know where we can find you online?

Patrick: So, again, I run a blog called usabilityaccounts.com which is where I have a UX career guide about 45,000 words. You can also find me in your guys’ book ‘Get Started in UX’ out from UX Mastery. I also run a Twitter account called @usabilitycounts—big surprise. I run the uxdrinkinggame.com, and you can find me on Facebook at usabilitycounts (you’re seeing a trend) and if you’re actually in the Pacific Northwest I’m generally available for coffee when I can find the time.

Luke: That’s very generous of you!

How about you, Matt?

Matt: My name is Matt, and along with Luke we contribute to UX Mastery. As we’ve mentioned a couple of times throughout the webinar we do have an eBook out called ‘Get Started in UX’ which we’re very proud of, and Patrick is one of our feature interviewees and we think that it’s a very good overview on how to launch and shape a career, so please go and check that out. And I’m on Twitter as @mattymcg, which is a nickname I’ve had for Years even though my real name doesn’t have a ‘Mc’ in it, but please hit me up on Twitter.

Luke: And you can find me – Luke Chambers – posting articles on the UX Mastery blog (uxmastery.com). I also hang around in the UX Mastery community forums at community.uxcommunity.com, and my Twitter handle is @lukcha. I’d love to help by answering any questions you may have about today’s webinar.

If you’re looking for more practical advice about getting started in UX, like Matt said, our latest eBook is going to be excellent for you. There are links on the website for that now, and come and ask us in the forums.

And finally, we’re going to email all of you a link to the audio/video of today’s webinar. We’ll see if we can chase up a transcript as well. I think that is about it. We’re two minutes over.

Thank you again everyone for joining us.

Patrick: Hey can I give a shout out to some people that tweeted during the event?

Luke: Sure, please.

Patrick: So Jen Blatt, Jolly Zhou, Brittany Vanheuten was there , Simon Cratford, Chris Klasser, I think he was in the event thank you all and Oscar, and Clare thank you for all the interesting questions during the event.

Matt: And thanks everybody for getting up on the weekend too. Know that your personal time is very important and we really appreciate that you’ve taken the time to join us on this chat and thank you to Patrick for giving up your Saturday afternoon.
Patrick: Yeah you’re interrupting my whiskey time!

Matt: Thank you everyone. See you guys.

Luke: See you in the forums!

Patrick: See you.

The post UX Mastery Podcast #4: UX Careers with Patrick Neeman appeared first on UX Mastery.

While we couldn’t answer every question that was asked, we did cover a lot of ground during the one-hour session. It was a lot of fun, and we’ll definitely do it again in the future. In the meantime, here’s a recording and transcript of the audio from the webinar.

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Transcript

MATT: Hello everybody that’s dialed in so far and welcome to the UX Mastery Q&A. We’ve got Matt and Luke on the line. We’re just going to wait for a few minutes for all of the attendees to join in before we kick things off. How’s everybody doing this morning? It’s morning in Australia anyway. Not sure if you guys are familiar with the GoToWebinar control panel, but there’s a “chat” and there’s a “question”. It’s all a bit confusing actually. Can you guys hear me okay? Silence!

LUKE: [laughs] They can’t talk back to us.

MATT: They can’t. They can chat though. If anybody wants to chat … aha, Dex can hear us fine. That’s wonderful. Luke and I haven’t done anything like this before so there may be little bumps along the road. We appreciate your patience as we iron out the kinks. It should be fun though. We’re very appreciative of anyone who has joined us in a time zone that’s not very convenient. It’s pretty hard to find a time that suits absolutely everybody. It’s currently 10:00 am in Melbourne, Australia for Luke and myself. But I know that some people are staying up late to join us and we hope to make that worth your while. A behind-the-scenes look at how organized or disorganized we are. [laughter]

Well, it’s 10 o’clock so we’ll kick things off and I’ll say once again, welcome to everybody and thank you for joining us. We’ve got Luke and Matt on the line from UX Mastery. What we’re going to do today is hopefully answer a bunch of the questions that we had come through from attendees to this webinar. We’ve had almost 60 – so we’ve got 60 minutes and 60 questions. I’m not sure if we’re going to get through the entire list, but we’ll see how we go.

Very quickly, if you’re not familiar with UX Mastery then I’m surprised that you’re here, but hopefully you’ve all seen our website, uxmastery.com. We like to think of UX Mastery of being more than just the website. We’re quite proud of the fact that we’re building a community around user experience design and user experience training. We do have a Twitter account where we like to tweet interesting links; both to articles that we’ve written as well as stuff that we find on the web that we like. And we try and do the same thing through the other channels: Facebook and our email newsletter that comes out every two weeks as well.

Hopefully a bunch of you guys are at least already subscribed to at least one of those channels. We’re trying to find our way with doing some training. Both Luke and I are quite passionate about not only user experience design but about helping others develop as designers, so we do have an eBook that’s in the works, which we’ll tell you a little bit more about at the end of the session.

We started dabbling with doing some in-person workshops. I taught one in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and I’ve got another one coming up later in the year in Sydney. But we do want to try and take those workshops and convert them into an online format, basically so that we can reach as many people as possible rather than just making it an Australia-only thing. So watch this space on that.

Very quickly a bit about Luke and myself. I’m just including this information not because we’re trying to big-note ourselves or because we’re looking for a job or anything, but just so that you guys have some context about the answers to the questions. For a lot of the questions there is no one right answer or black and white answer, but we’re going to try and answer based on our experience. This is our experience.

I work as a freelance user experience designer and I started UX Mastery last year with Luke. Some of the clients that I’ve done work for include Australia Post, SitePoint, which is like a start-up incubator here in Melbourne that launched a couple of well-known start-up companies; 99designs is one of them, which has done quite well. We’ve done some work for the Australian Labor Party and then a handful of other clients.

And the thing that I’m most passionate about is communicating visually – so the sketch notes on the site is one example about that. I’ve always been a visual thinker, and communicating using visuals is really what I’m most passionate about. I’ll let Luke introduce himself.

LUKE: Good morning everyone. Similar to Matt, I’ve got a background in web user experience design. I currently do some work for Penguin Books; a couple of days a week there, working in their marketing department, working with designers and developers to do eBooks and apps and some of their main websites. I’ve been working with a few other clients as well, including the Australian Open and the Blake Prize. I’ve been doing UX-related things for probably about ten years.

Stuff that I’m very passionate about is design with soul or design with some of that human meaning behind it. That’s the kind of stuff that I like writing about and talking about.

MATT: Very good. And you might have just picked up on the fact that Luke’s come down with a bit of a sniffle overnight, so if his voice doesn’t hold out then … I have no problem with talking. [laughter] So we do have a rough agenda for today. Thank you to everybody who included a question when you registered for the webinar. We had nearly 60 questions come through. What we did was we sorted through them all, we looked for duplicates, we grouped them, and we’re going to tackle them in order of the most popular groups of questions that came through.

The number one category of questions was career-related so we’ll tackle the career questions first. Then we’ll look at questions related to education and training. There were quite a few questions about how to evangelise and champion and sell user experience within an organization. Then we’ll tackle UX processes and UX techniques—there were a few specific questions in there. We’ll talk about roles, the role of UXer and the different roles within a team. And lastly: tools, resources and other miscellaneous questions that have come through.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to hand control of the webinar over to Luke, who has the question list. And doing that should mean that you guys can see the questions in advance and you can see what’s coming up. And that should hopefully reduce any other questions that come through as being duplicates. Have you got that spreadsheet there, Luke?

LUKE: Here’s the list of questions everyone. You can look ahead. Off we go.

MATT: Cool, so we’ll keep the highlight on the question that we’re talking about at the time that we’re talking about it. Number one question and definitely a question that people ask on the website quite a bit: how do I get started in the UX field? Well, conveniently there is an article on UX Mastery that tackles this. You guys might have seen it. Maybe you haven’t but basically, I believe there are a bunch of ways that are really useful for getting started.

I’ve broken them up into six sections. The first section is about getting educated, about learning stuff. We have become a big fan of the online course that David Travis has published over at udemy. It’s called User Experience: The Ultimate Guide To Usability and I said in the article that we hate this course because we wish that we’d created it. It really is a remarkable achievement, what David’s put together in this video course. There is seven and a half hours of video and it covers everything; primarily usability related. He touched on visual principles; he talks about really everything related to the user experience spectrum and primarily usability.

The thing I love about this course is that he’s really anchored all of the advice in solid theory. So he starts off talking about the ISO standard for usability, which I didn’t know existed before I reviewed this course, so that was interesting for me. And yeah, it’s a great course. It’s about $200. If you use the discount code on your UX Mastery, which you can find on the site—we’ll include it in the notes at the end of this webinar as well—you can get 20% off.

But in terms of getting educated, yes there are a ton of books out there that we love and recommend but that course … it’s a remarkable achievement, what he’s pulled together, and will certainly be a great place for anyone who’s looking to get a good grounding in user experience. The next thing that I recommend you do is get the right tools. Sorry, did you want to add anything to the education stuff, Luke? I know we have a few other education-related questions but …

LUKE: No, I mean, there’s things like books for beginners that we’ve got in our resources section that I think would be an excellent introduction too, but I totally agree that David’s course would be my first port of call if I was looking at getting started.

MATT: Yeah, when we started UX Mastery we had grand plans to create a similar course and then we saw it and we were like [groans]. He beat us to it! And that’s not to say that there isn’t room for other online courses but we’re kind of busy at the moment and haven’t gotten around to pulling together something that comprehensive. Maybe that will happen at some point down the track. But in the meantime we’re more than happy to recommend David’s course. He’s a nice bloke, he knows his stuff and he’s been teaching this stuff for years as well as being a practitioner.

So in terms of an education point of view he’s done a great job. I talk about the tools—specifically I talk about prototyping and user testing tools. Balsamiq Mockups is the prototyping tool that I’m a fan of. There’s a ton out there that are all excellent, it just happens to be the one that I’ve latched onto and used the most. But in terms of putting together a prototype of a web app or a mobile app, I’m a big fan.

Then user testing software, screen recording software – I use Silverback. It’s a Mac-only app but there are plenty of other tools out there for doing screen capture and recording the audio. So what that software does is it captures the screen while the user is using it. It also uses the computer’s in-built mic to record their voice. If you’re facilitating the user testing session, what you want to do is encourage the participant to talk out loud, tell you what’s going on in their head, tell you why they’re confused when they get confused, tell you what they make of the page when they’re looking at it for the first time.

Really get them to explain and help you get inside their head and then that records that audio. And some of the tools, like Silverback, also use the computer’s built-in camera to record their face. I don’t think this is necessarily vital to a good user testing session but it can be useful to have, in the little bottom right corner, the person’s facial expressions and a bit more body language about what’s going on as they’re interacting with the app.

The reason I say, “Get the right tools,” as the number two point for getting started, is because once you’re armed with these two tools you can go and do user testing just using your laptop. You don’t need expensive labs; you don’t need to hire out a venue to set up the equipment; you’ve just got this portable user-testing lab in your backpack, in your shoulder bag, and you can set up anywhere and do user testing.

So once you’ve got those tools in place, you can do user testing within your organization, maybe you want to help out a friend who’s got a website – you can do user testing for him, you can do it in a café, you can do it in an office, you can do it anywhere. And the more user testing you do the more insights you get into how people interact with your software and the more you learn about usability.

Number three: get some experience. Once you’ve got those tools in place, you’re well positioned to go and actually do some user testing. And I think that education is fantastic, whether it’s a formal degree or whether it’s a course like David’s, but really, for me, the most I’ve done in terms of learning about user experience is from doing it. If you’ve got the tools and you’ve got a client who is partial to having you help them usability test their software, then that’s the best way to get started and get some experience. Any thoughts or anything you wanted to add there Luke? I’m going on a bit here.

LUKE: I’d totally reiterate that. Just jump in the deep end and start applying the principles if you can on work you’re already doing, or, like Matt says, work for some friends or a local charity or community group or something like that. Jumping in that deep end and just getting started will teach you more than learning off a course or out of a book.

MATT: Yeah, because David’s course is excellent, but the one thing that it’s lacking is actual experience. So you can actually watch a video about how to do something, you can understand the theory, you can know it all – but it doesn’t give you the confidence to apply it. And that’s the key here because being a good UX designer, I believe, is a lot to do with confidence: whether you’re facilitating a session, whether you’re conducting a user testing session – it’s all good to know what to do but you need to be comfortable and have those people skills and that confidence to actually pull it off. So this is how you get that experience.

And I think that’s a great idea Luke; working for a non-profit, a charity that’s close to home, that you believe in, that you’re passionate about. Luke and I have got a non-profit organization that we’re using as a test bed for trying out some UX stuff so we’re working for free for those guys and it’s been invaluable. Next point is …

LUKE: I was just going to say, before you went on Matt: one of the advantages of building up some experience is, when you are getting started, maybe applying for some jobs and being able to demonstrate your experience by showing a portfolio or something like that is also very useful. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but having had that experience, getting it all under your belt and being able to communicate that by explaining to a potential employer: “Here’s what I did in this particular case,” or, “Here are some examples of the type of work I’ve done,” would certainly be very helpful in getting a job.

MATT: That’s so true. And we’ll talk a little bit about portfolios later in this section I think, but certainly what Luke said, in terms of being able to talk about your process – if you know all the theory you can’t really answer the question: “When was the time that you applied this or that you did that?” So getting that experience … And whether it’s a paid client or whether it’s time that you’ve volunteered, that doesn’t matter because if you’ve got the experience in doing it, you can talk about it, you can explain your process. And that’s what people are looking for when they’re looking for a UX designer.

Next one is to get connected. Certainly by participating in the UX Mastery community. I hope that you’ve felt more connected to some of the thought leaders out there in the user experience space; on Twitter but also in person. There is a lot of value to be had in connecting with like-minded souls. Luke and I had a chat, I remember, it must have been six months ago – we were talking about how user experience is such a broad umbrella term and we were trying to work out what it was that meant that when you went along to a UX Melbourne meet-up, we felt connected to these people even though they had various different backgrounds.

And the one thing that we settled on was this concept of empathy. Good UXers have good empathy for their users and for their stakeholders and it’s that warm, fuzzy feeling that makes you feel good about your job – for me – and for the same reason it makes you relate to other UXers in the field. Agreed?

LUKE: Definitely. Like you say, getting connected – the soft skills part of the job is a large portion of that. Being able to facilitate meetings and be friendly, be transparent in what you’re doing – all that kind of stuff is certainly in the mix when you’re networking with people, for sure.

MATT: And it’s such a different world these days, where you can connect one-on-one with thought leaders that have written books that are presented at conferences and just hit them up, have a chat. And I feel really privileged to have interviewed folks like Jeff Gothelf and Donna Spencer from UX Australia, just because with the technology these days it’s really easy to connect one-on-one with these people.

The next point I suggest in getting started is to get a mentor. A lot of people struggle with this; they find it really hard. There is always lots of reasons why: “I can’t find the right person,” or, “I live in a remote location so it’s really hard for me to connect with someone.” And I think that you need to push through that and find a way. I mentioned that technology has changed the way that we connect with people and there’s really no excuse to not put yourself out there and connect with someone.

For me, find a mentor has been crucial in terms of how I look at my career. If I look back and look at various stages where I felt I really achieved a milestone or put myself out of my comfort zone to take it to the next level, that was as a result of my mentor pushing me, encouraging me to not be complacent and take the easy option. So I’ve been very fortunate that my mentor – even though we don’t catch up all that often; it’s been months since I’ve seen him and we actually haven’t spoken that much about specific process or techniques.

I had this vision of a mentor explaining to me the details of how to tackle a complex design problem, but actually, the conversations we’ve had have been more about career and more about … he’s the one who encouraged me to leave my salaried role and go freelance. He’s the one who encouraged me to get up and do some public speaking and put myself out there a bit. So you’d be surprised sometimes if you find the right person, how the conversations travel. Have you got a mentor, Luke?

LUKE: It’s important to get that … I don’t have a mentor at the moment. I’m certainly interested in learning off anyone that I can. I have a few colleagues and I go along to a few events. I think that somewhat goes towards getting some of that input and learning from somewhere that isn’t my own experience, which is think is the important thing – you obviously can’t design in a vacuum but you can’t develop your skills and things purely by experience; you’re going to reinventing the wheel.

I think having that personal feedback from someone who knows you or can see you and what you’re doing, means that if you don’t have that awareness of yourself, they can certainly suggest some things for you. I went through a stage of looking for a mentor and the Information Architecture Institute had a few things and I had a few enquiries going there, but unfortunately I didn’t push through and I wish that I had.

MATT: Yeah, and I suppose the other thing to remember is that your mentor can be valuable in terms of connections; both for jobs or for clients, if you’re freelancing. I’ve had a little bit of work come through my mentor and I’ve sent him a little bit of work, so it’s another valuable connection, if anything. Then the last point is to get hired, and we talked about portfolios a little bit, earlier.

Lots of questions that I’ve had have been about, “What shall I include in my portfolio?” So very quickly – portfolio in a summary, I believe should be different from a visual designer’s portfolio, because the stuff that we create isn’t necessarily as “pretty” or “colourfully compelling” to look at. The important thing about your portfolio should be that it shows you have a process and it is the Launchpad for you to talk about that process.

LUKE: It’s true. I think it’s also about the story of the development of the product that you’ve been working on. So rather than a visual design artefact that’s the end result, a lot of user experience work is the process of design and being able to tell the story of how things changed or how you made a bit of a difference. And being able to demonstrate that stuff by showing before and after or points where you had particular insights into the work that you’re working on.

MATT: Yeah, the before and after is definitely going to be compelling if you’ve got hard data. So if you’ve got conversion rates before you redesigned the checkout page and then conversion rates after, and assuming that you do a good job and those conversion rates go up, then there’s some hard data that you can say: “Hey, this is the process I followed for this page, this is what it looked like first. After it looked like this. And this is how much it helped and how much money it made the business.” That’s the way to make a compelling case for being hired as a UX designer.

But also, in terms of triggering conversations about your process, stuff like photographs of you facilitating a session or perhaps doing some affinity diagraming or showing the messy workspace that you’ve created, so that people can get an insight into how you think and how you work. Okay, so we’ve just spent 20 minutes on the first question, so hopefully …

LUKE: [laughter] We’ve covered a few other things as well.

MATT: That’s right. Hopefully we’ve spoken to a few of the points in the questions ahead. But let’s take a look at the next list. Making the leap from web to UX. Really, it’s a similar path I believe, and one that I’d recommend. You need to get an understanding about usability and about the user experience field. So following those same steps is definitely recommended.

In terms of the web, I think if you’re a designer or a developer or maybe a content person or a project manager in the web space, you’ve got an advantage because the terminology and the challenges that are unique to the web—it’s stuff that you’ve already covered off. You don’t need to learn the basics of that. You’re probably all over responsive design and really it’s just about getting that understanding of human behaviour and finding a process that works for you, that is user-centred. So yeah, the same advice applied. Anything else to add there?

LUKE: I would just say that yeah, probably as a web designer there are some things that you’re already doing that are possibly more UX related; design research, talking to people who might be using the product, or talking to stakeholders is certainly a big part of the input. And if you’re already doing that already then it’s not such a daunting prospect. So making that jump across is probably more a definition of your priorities in doing user-centred design rather than a totally new field.

MATT: Yeah. For me, it was a big deal for me to come to terms with the idea that I was being arrogant in the design process I was following. I wasn’t being transparent. I was expected to go away and make magic and come back and present it, and that’s what I would do. I would put my headphones on and I’d go into the creative zone and I would create a couple of designs and then pick my favourite and show all three to the stakeholders and we’d talk about one or two and we’d launch one of them. And there was no explicit user involvement at all. We just thought we knew best. Because I guess it was embarrassing to consider the prospect that we didn’t know who our users were. Or maybe it was … I’m not sure. I think I’ve blogged about it. Sorry, go …

LUKE: I was just going to say, detaching the ownership of the design – if you’re a designer then you think that your expertise is being employed to be able to provide those artefacts or the end results, whereas I think detaching your ownership from the design is relaxing your thinking as a design expert and listening to the opinions of the people; your users, who may not necessarily have design skills. And that’s a very challenging thing to do; to take what they say and make it work. But it results in a better result. [laughs]

MATT: And it’s interesting to see if I look at my role over the last couple of years, I’ve become more of a design facilitator than a hands-on designer. The idea of being collaborative and involving stakeholders and staff and users in the design process, letting them drive it and being just the conduit to make it happen – that’s made for better outcomes.

I’m loathed to say it’s made me a better designer because that sounds like my skills at designing have gotten better, but I think it’s more about becoming that design facilitator, owning the process and getting everyone involved. Then the outcome is better and like you said, the ownership is detached but it’s for the best. And if you can accept that I think that you’ll be a better UXer as a result.

LUKE: Totally. That’s very true.

MATT: There’s a question there that says: “How can I make the jump from QA to UX. I assume QA means quality assurance. I’m not going to speak about quality assurance specifically because I don’t know much about that industry, but I will say that UX has come from a very diverse range of backgrounds and I think that regardless of the industry that you’ve been in, there’s going to be some stuff that you have learnt that will be valuable and that you can leverage in the UX space.

So whether it’s as a QA person, whether you’re an industrial designer or a developer or a project manager or … I’ll even say something non-digital. There are things like communications skills, like collaboration skills, people skills – these kinds of core business skills that sound like soft skills that are really peripheral to doing a job. They are a core part of being a UX designer. So could you make the jump? Absolutely. Leverage that stuff that is going to come in handy for dealing with people, for being transparent and for championing user-centred design and you’ll be well on your way.

“How do I break into the UX field?” I think we’ve covered. Preparing to apply for a job. We’ve talked about portfolios. Did you have anything to add to portfolios or connection there, Luke?

LUKE: No, I think I mentioned it before. Portfolios, as I say, aren’t the be all and end all, but they certainly are a useful tool in being able to communicate your experience. And as Matt talked about, the personal networking; if there have been people that you’ve worked with in the past or who you’ve been colleagues with for a while then they will obviously be able to advocate for you too.

So as you said, being able to get those opportunities and hear about the jobs going – and usually, because it’s a fairly trusted role I think people don’t necessarily put someone in cold into a position of responsibility. Some might come in via a reference of someone who can actually vouch for you. So portfolios certainly help in terms of demonstrating and giving some surety about your process and previous results you’ve been able to achieve. But there are a lot more things to consider in there too.

MATT: I’m sure that you guys have heard the statistic that 90% of jobs aren’t advertised. And I think it’s pretty hard to measure that, but in terms of my experience, I think that it’s probably bang on. Most of the jobs that I have been fortunate to get over the years haven’t come because they were advertised on a jobs board, they’ve come because somebody spoke to me about something or got wind of a project that they liked and then asked who the designer was and that person said, “It was this guy.”

So in terms of those connections, it’s kind of invaluable. Next step for a career in UX after some training?

LUKE: That really depends on the position or the context that you’re in. You might be working in-house, maybe you’ve got a team around you. You’re probably going to look at developing some skills to compliment the people around you or introducing what you’ve learnt in training and getting a bit of culture change happening if you need to, or encouraging the team in a certain direction. That’s going to be a bit different to if you’re working freelance, where you’ve got a little bit more control over your process or your approach. But it’s really going to depend. I don’t think you ever really stop training. You do more training.

MATT: Yeah, assuming that this person asking this question has for example completed David’s course but hasn’t got any experience under their belt, then really, getting that experience is going to be the next big thing that you should focus on. Whether that’s with a local charity or a friend’s website, or whether it’s you having a chat to your boss and saying, “Look, I really think user testing on this software that we’re working on.” Explain that it doesn’t need to be a week of your time; it can be an afternoon.

And with your portable usability lab, with the software that I mentioned earlier, you can pull in a few people, put the product in front of some participants and start that user feedback loop. Then your foot is in the door. And when people start seeing the value of that – especially if you show them the videos; recently at a client I had a hard time convincing people that usability was a big issue with the products we were working on, so I recorded some users struggling in front of it.

And these people were just struggling; they were all over the place. They couldn’t find any of the information; they’d just go down these rabbit warrens and get stuck and frustrated. And all of that frustration I captured on video and then I showed management and said, “This is someone using your website.” And it’s pretty hard to not empathize with someone who is struggling that bad and are failing in the task that has been given to them.

And I won a lot of people over. I think I put a lot of noses out of joint as well, but I also won a lot of backing on focus on usability. I like to think I planted the seeds for almost a form of culture change about organization, because usability is getting more and more prioritized as a result of those user testing videos. So those videos can be very powerful, politically, if you need to get people on board.

All right. What question are we up to? Where are we?

LUKE: We seem to be making slow progress. Maybe pick and choose a few things out of here? The internships, as we’ve mentioned, there are lots of opportunities around if you’re networking with people. Internships … You need to be brave about finding someone who you would like to do some work with or an internship with and then reaching out and saying: “Look, I’m really passionate about stuff. Is it possible for me to come in and meet you guys and see how you work, or co-work, or come and help you do some things.” Creating your own opportunities like that has certainly been something that I’ve found helpful too.

MATT: I should mention that we had a gentleman in Melbourne, a young guy approach us – I’m not sure if Ben is on the line or not – but Ben was really keen to find a mentor and asked me if I would mentor him. And I agreed. So we’ve actually been getting Ben involved in some of the not-for-profit work that we’ve been doing here in Melbourne. And it’s been great to have him help us out because we have paying clients that are competing with our time, so having an extra helper has been terrific. But for him, it’s been some experiences that he wouldn’t have otherwise had. But it works both ways.

LUKE: Yeah, get in touch with the Interaction Design Association – IxDA – or any other groups around. Or just reach out to whoever you’ve got on your horizon.

MATT: “How can I become a better designer without a mentor?” I would really recommend getting a mentor. I think that this is a strange question because the value of having someone who you can confide in, who can give you some guidance and perspective, can’t be understated. So while I empathise with the fact that it can be hard to find the right person to play that role in your life, I certainly believe that it’s worth pursuing.

“Visual design background. What should I be focusing on to become a UX designer?” Firstly, I’ll suggest that if you come from a visual design background I think you do have an advantage. While I do believe that having a visual background is not necessary to be a successful UXer, because tasks like conducting user interviews and doing user testing don’t require you to have those visual skills, but in terms of being able to communicate visually, I think it’s a real advantage.

What should you be focusing on? The behaviour stuff. The process. Getting that user feedback loop and divorcing ownership from the design. So whatever design process you used previously, I’m sure there’s value in it. But becoming more transparent and involving the team and involving users is really what you should be focusing on next.

And perhaps the final question for the career, we’ll jump to the last one, which asks how to source and hire talented UX designers. Luke, if you had to hire a UX designer, what would you do?

LUKE: Well, I’d be attending some of the UX events, I guess; getting to know people personally or being able to hear them pitch their work. That kind of thing. So back into the personal networking kind of things. I might be looking up projects that I’ve heard about and looking at who’s been behind that work. That’s probably where I’d start. I’d put the word out, ask people … Yeah, maybe that’s something we need to look at at UX Mastery, connecting people with those opportunities.

MATT: Yeah. You guys may be familiar with meetup.com, but I’m sure that if you’re in a small or medium-sized city, there is going to be a UX meet-up of some description near you. And it’s probably on meetup.com. There’s a great community here in Melbourne called UX Melbourne, which has a Google Group and have regular meet-ups where they show videos of UX-related presentations, where they have a book club and everyone reads the same book and then we chat about it and it’s a great community and it’s a great way to meet people. And it’s possibly a great way to hire people.

So yes, those connections are valuable. I guess trawling LinkedIn is probably what recruiters spend a bunch of time doing. And I’m sure there’s value in looking at people’s online profiles, but certainly a trusted referral, someone that you’ve met or someone that you trust has recommended is going to get you a long way there. All right – the training questions.

The first question here says: “What are the best self-guided learning resources/books/references or tutorials?”

LUKE: It’s a good question. It’s something we get asked a lot. So much in fact that we’ve got some great stuff on the website. There are books and things. If you come to the resources section there are some good books; in particular an introduction to UX stuff.

MATT: Yeah, and it is our grand vision to filter this list a bit more because we’re conscious that the list of tools, the list of books, the list of courses is just a big brain-dump. So very slowly we are working our way through filtering that list. So we’ve reviewed at least three of the courses, I think, so far. And we hope to review some of the books as well and give you guys a bit more expert recommendations of what we think is good rather than just the comprehensive, “Here’s everything! Blah blah!”

LUKE: And to be able to unpack that stuff. Particularly if you guys have questions about: “I’m in this particular situation, where should I start?” then certainly let us know and we can point you in the right direction. Or we might end up writing a blog post about it.

MATT: That’s right. If there’s not something on that resources section of the site that answers your question then please email us so that we can add it. Definitely.

LUKE: The two books that I’d particularly pull out of that list would be this one by Cennydd: Undercover User Experience Design. I’ve found this very useful for being able to explain key concepts. And the other one is a project guide to UX design, which is very practical, it walks you through, it’s got bits and pieces that you can apply fairly easily and immediately to what you’re working on. They are two very practical books. Probably Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience is a foundational one but it’s a bit more abstract and theoretical, I guess. It certainly explains user experience and the origins well, but it’s not necessarily as practical as these other ones.

MATT: It can be good for getting someone who has no idea about user experience at all, on board with the concept.

LUKE: Totally, yeah.

MATT: Cool. Next question?

LUKE: So. courses. There is a courses section of the website where we’ve listed all the online courses that we’ve found here and put David’s at the top, because we think that’s the best one. There are quite a few other ones. All these other ones down here … Some are paid, some are free. We haven’t included the university courses yet because we’re sticking to online at the moment. Have a dig around in there, find something that might be useful for you.

MATT: Yeah, and if you take one of those courses and love it, write to us and let us know. We’d love to know how you found it.

LUKE: So this is the next question. Learning UX as a soloist is a very interesting question that I talked to Matt about last night, and it conjures up pictures of user experience designers as musicians – we had that article a while ago that referred to the idea of conducting an orchestra to produce a symphony as sounds as a UX designer; working with designers and developers in a team. So it’s an interesting concept also because user experience is a very collaborative role.

Working as a soloist doesn’t quite fit with that picture but I guess talking about UX as a team of one is probably what was behind the question. I think you can never really work by yourself. You certainly need to be relying on users and if you’re doing design and development as well then, sure, you can roll up some things into one. But it’s an interesting question – I’ll do a bit more thinking about that. What do you think Matt?

MATT: I did publish an article on UX Mastery last year about being a remote UX designer, because sometimes the reality is that you’re not onsite with the client – they might be in another city or in another country, even. So there are certainly some techniques and things that you can do to get a user centred process happening for a project even if you’re working remotely. So I’d recommend you go and check out that article and read about some of those techniques.

But I agree with Luke in terms of the metaphor being a bit broken because the best design projects happen through collaboration, I believe, and technology is good but it’s never the same as being in person with your team, with the stakeholders, with the users. So I would certainly say, don’t aspire to be a soloist, aspire to be a collaborator and someone who is at the core of the organization and develop those relationships and develop those connections with people inside and outside your team, because that’s how you’re going to be effective. I hope that answers the question.

LUKE: Yeah, if we’re not giving you the right feedback there, feel free to chat in the comments and let us know if we need to cover a bit more stuff. We’ll push on though. There’s a question here: “Should I pursue a formal education in UX?” That’s also another one I think that pops up quite often. There hasn’t been a lot of tertiary education courses offered in UX specifically, but it does mean the field of user experience is related to human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology and a whole bunch of other stuff; deeper foundations like that.

And those courses have been around for a while and the people that … I know plenty of people that have studied those and moved into user experience design as well. So at the moment, I think it would be an advantage to get a tertiary qualification, but it’s certainly not required. I think experience is still fairly the sought-after factors; being able to prove the work that you’ve done in the past. Perhaps in five or ten years as the user experience design role changes, maybe there will be more of us. I think the differentiator might be the form of education that you might have picked up from courses.

There are a few places you can get this – whether it be … Some of the larger universities have interaction courses. Here in Australia open universities have some good courses too. So I wouldn’t say it was required but it certainly might be something to consider, if you’ve got the time and inclination.

MATT: I’m going to go ahead and disagree with Luke on this one. I’m having a hard time being convinced that a formal education in UX is going to be worthwhile. The value I see from getting some experience and taking a course like David’s and getting out there and doing it, using user testing as a starter point to then build more experience in different areas is such a powerful way to make progress and to progress your career. I think that a formal education in UX, investing three years in learning about how to do this stuff, or just getting three year’s experience in actually doing it – for me I’ll take the latter every time.

LUKE: That is a good point. I’ll stick to my original one but yeah, Matt’s got a point that it’s an industry that’s changing often and being able to learn on the run is going to put you ahead of people who are learning … If a course was designed a couple of years ago you’re still going to be behind a bit.

MATT: Cool. Okay, let’s get onto the selling UX questions. “What’s the cheapest way you can make potential customers understand the need for UX testing?” Logic doesn’t work sometimes. Well, I did mention earlier the power of a good user testing video, and while I would never suggest presenting selective findings, it’s important to be independent and tell the true story. Certainly choosing snippets from your user testing video to show people can be a very powerful way to get them on board with the idea.

So if you’ve got someone who doesn’t believe that the page that you’re redesigning needs work, that they think is fine, and you show them a video of someone struggling to work out where the button is, because they just can’t see it, then they’re going to be pretty convinced by a real customer having a real problem. Another good thing that I like to do is actually involve stakeholders as user testing participants: getting them to be the user tester, giving them some tasks, asking them to complete the tasks. And it forces them to take their owner hat off and be a user and realise the value of this process and realise that there are probably usability issues that need fixing.

So there are two tips. Have you got any other tips to add?

LUKE: Just looking at the selling UX section here, there are a few similarities in the questions. This idea of having to convince people of UX testing is certainly one that I’ve come up against myself time and time again. So I understand where the person who is asking the question is coming from, but what I would suggest is, don’t let it be an optional extra, don’t necessarily even negotiate it. I think the user feedback cycle that Matt was mentioning before is essential to the type of work we do.

So don’t let talking to the users be your first or second or even third thing that gets taken off the table when time and budget it tight. It’s easier to say and harder to do, I know, but similarly, if you did need to pitch it a bit more, I think you need to show some quick examples, as Matt said, about how previous projects have been improved by taking on board feedback from user testing. Or borrow from other people – so if there have been some other websites you know of that have benefited from it, and you can show some before and after, or a bit of process …

So I suppose that’s still the logic; that the person asking the question said didn’t work, but openly I’d say just do it. If you believe in it, you’re probably already going to know that you can do a better job with it than without it. Testing it doesn’t have to be with 50 paid participants, it can be a bit on the run, maybe you can include some customers of the client and pay them in kind with the client’s products, or even use your own contacts or something like that.

There is a good article that we wrote on the website last year, talking about low-budget UX. That would probably give you a few tips. I think you should just include it and if you don’t have the budget then you just need to be able to squeeze it in there.

MATT: I’m guessing, Luke, that you’re referring to Cameron Roger’s article on No Time, No Excuses?

LUKE: There is that one, No Time, No excuses and then there’s also the one I wrote in August, A Time-Poor, Small-Budget Approach to UX.

MATT: Yeah. Cameron’s was a little bit controversial. He was basically advocating “take a sickie and do it on your own even though you’ve been told not to”. Now, it depends on how much you value your job and what the organizational culture is and whether you’re in a position to take matters into your own hands or not like that. But certainly I agree with the sentiment that if your organization needs to be enlightened, you might need to be a bit unconventional to enlighten them. If you’ve got an afternoon where you can squeeze in some user testing, even though you’ve not told anyone about it, and then demonstrate the value of it; I think people are going to have a hard time telling you off for it.

LUKE: If you don’t ask permission they’re not going to say no either.

MATT: [laughter] And then there’s another question in that group which you can flip back, Luke. No, no, that’s right. I was going to mention case studies. There is a very famous case study that gets used, I’m sure, to make the case for user experience design, and that’s Jared Spool’s $300 Dollar Button.

And we’ll link to that case study in the webinar notes at the end of this, but basically there’s a case study for an organization where they changed the button on the page and it resulted in increased conversions that meant an extra $300 million revenue for that organization for that year, and that’s … If we could find more case studies like that then we’d have an easier time championing user-centred design. So if anyone knows of any case studies where the design process made that big an impact then we want to hear about it right now.

LUKE: Definitely. We’d love to hear that stuff.

MATT: Cool, all righty. Process and techniques. “Do you practice Lean UX and how do you apply it at work?” Do you want to explain to the attendee list what Lean UX is, Luke?

LUKE: Sure. So Lean UX is something that’s come out of … It’s a reaction to a whole bunch of things that have been happening over the last couple of decades in development. We often go through these different phases where there’s a bit of a take of things where this is a better way of doing things, or whatever, and a little bit of Lean UX has been wandering around lately, but the distinct advantages are, as I mentioned before, that idea of not confusing user experience design with the deliverables or the actual artefacts – it’s more about the process.

I think Lean UX certainly takes that and runs with it by saying, to be able to run a lean, efficient project, you can cut back on the documentation and actually do the learning and the explaining with your team as you go along – just focus on the core bits and pieces and work quickly. And it’s a bit of a design application of the more development-oriented, agile environment. In a nutshell, that’s kind of what it is. I’ve probably explained it really badly, but that’s essentially what it is.

MATT: Yeah, and I think, well … Sorry, go.

LUKE: Sorry, I was going to say Matt did an interview with Jeff Gothelf a couple of weeks ago, and Jeff’s a leading voice on Lean UX and that sort of industry, so definitely check out that article as well.

MATT: Yeah, and Jeff wrote an article for us recently too called Beyond the Basics UX Skills For an Agile World where he talks about some of the premises of Lean UX and how that relates to working in an agile environment. Agile development processes traditionally aren’t a good fit for user-centred design and Jeff believes that if we become design facilitators and we buy a bunch of principles of transparency and letting go of owning the design and applying these lean [start-up? 00:56:45], validate your idea, validate your learning process, then it is a good fit.

And I’m in wholehearted agreement because the more transparent we are about what we do, it takes away the mystique of design being this black magic that we do behind closed walls and then present, “voila!” this masterpiece at the end of it. It needs to be a team process and in order to work with developers we need to involve developers. And you’d be surprised at how many good ideas people have if you just ask them.

If they feel that they’ve been involved then they become a champion for the design and you’ll have less of a hard time getting by and getting take-up within the organization. If you go and do something on your own and present it then you’re likely to hit a bunch of hurdles before everybody’s on board with it; regardless of how good it is. Just because people don’t like change and everyone has an opinion about design and so you need to involve them.

“How can UX principles be used to reduce cognitive complexity in educational products?” That’s a tricky question.

LUKE: I’d love to learn more about that too. [laughs]

MATT: Yeah, well, I guess simplicity is a good goal to aim for when you’re designing something. So cognitive complexity is often the result of something being complex. So simplicity is hard, but really, following a user-centred design process where you test stuff, where you have that user feedback loop and you iterate and you prototype and eventually you’re going to get there. But if you just think you can do it on your own, you’re probably not. You need to involve others: stakeholders, team members.

LUKE: Yeah. And that’s a good point about the cognitive load. I think using psychological principles to improve an interface, especially in order to clearly communicate and educate. Education in particular I think is really interesting for that because you can do a lot of stimulating by getting active involvement, rather than passive consumption.

But certainly UX should be able to help you identify where the unnecessary stuff is, to simplify it, what the useful stuff is to keep. And like Matt says, observing users, using a system and testing proposed designs. All those help explicitly in being able to find what that is; reduce that unnecessary cognitive complexity.

MATT: All right. The next question says: “How do you balance SEO, CRO and UX?” So search engine optimisation, conversion rate optimisation and user experience. And this is actually a great question because as UX designers, we’re really focused on, is the product usable, is it useful, is it the right product? And conversion rate optimisation is really at the end of that pipeline. So we’re all about making sure that things work well and do the right job for the right people.

But then, what colour should the button be at the end of it? I think that you need to test that stuff at the end. So how do we balance it? Well, what we do is we get 90% of the way there using user-centred design techniques and then if you’re a large organization and a 5% or a 6% conversion rate makes a big difference to your profit, then you test that stuff at the end to fine-tune it.

SEO – it’s funny, if you think about the user experience of someone finding information, really, search engines are a part of that touch point. Someone types in a query in Google and then they end up on your website and then they find their answer, SEO is part of that experience. So I don’t think they’re at odds. I think that if you make sure that your website ranks well for the key words that you want it to rank for, but you do it in a way that is going to help the customer answer their question, then you’re ticking all the boxes. And I don’t think they necessarily need to be either/or. We’ve only got a couple more minutes left.

LUKE: I was just going to say quickly on that – I’m a little bit wary of the association with UX and over-optimising or that sort of really tight end. I know user experience design is certainly about optimizing and streamlining a process, particularly for a user. What I always come back to is the fact that I’m within that business team; the business team obviously wanting to make money for the business and that’s part of that whole value of equation of business exists to provide value to the customer.

But I think my role as a user experience designer is very much to advocate for that user. People ask me, when I’m talking about user research, they often confuse that with market research. I think they’re very different things. Market research might be taken a bit more as finding some opportunities to exploit within the market or to understand the customer base, whereas I think user research is a lot more personal and it’s a lot more about working with the user in order to help them achieve their goals and ultimately for that to be of value for the customer and the business.

MATT: Very good. We have time for a couple more questions so I’m just going to jump down. There are a couple of questions at the end about: “Can you share some of your challenges or frustrations?” so the question is: “What was your most frustrating project?” – we won’t name any clients. “Why was is frustrating and what was the outcome and how did you resolve the issue?” I do have a project that comes to mind that was frustrating, and that was many years ago, before I was enlightened to the value of user-centred design. I was working as a designer and I would go away and be creative, come up with a few different versions of the design and come back and present it and then we’d pick one and we’d launch it.

And there were some real tensions – not really to do with me but to do with other stakeholders, where the company owner and the CEO, who was a bit territorial because each of them thought that they had the best opinion on what the design would be. And I could just see that it was nothing to do with me but the fact that this process wasn’t speaking to everyone’s need to be involved. It created some real tension and some real nasty stand-offs in the office.

In hindsight, if I’d explained to everyone there that, hey, this is a process we’re going to follow, if I’d done some collaborative sketching workshops where everybody got a change to contribute and if I made it very clear and transparent what the process was that I was going to be following and how they’d be involved, everyone would be so much happier and they would be much less argy-bargy and arguing and passion about, “But I haven’t been involved in…”, “But I know best…”.

So the outcome was that we launched the front page and all of the users hated it because they weren’t involved either. And I don’t think the issue was resolved, I think there are still underlying tensions with that product, where people resent having not been included. And people don’t like change. Whether that’s stakeholders, users or anyone.

So I learnt from that. I didn’t know at the time what the solution was but it was my mentor who really enlightened me about user-centred design many years ago. And I haven’t had that same problem since because I’ve deliberately followed a process that speaks to those challenges. Did you have a project you wanted to talk about, Luke?

LUKE: Just generally too – I think that a lot of the frustrations come particularly out of the need to define what UX is a little bit, and obviously people are still learning what that is a bit too. But it means … I had some similar experiences too. One particular client had hired me perhaps hearing that UX is a bit of a … Could help them solve some of their problems. But once I’d been working there for a little while it turned out that their biggest problems were more about the workplace culture, rather than particular projects they were working on.

So it was always a bit of an uphill battle to advocate for user above all the rest of that noise of the business that was intent on doing it’s own thing. So I had to get a lot better at convincing people about the importance of things or having a bit of a stronger voice. But I still felt that the role was a bit token. So that was one of the most frustrating things for me.

Stepping back from that a little, I think looking at my early forays into user-centred design, the two things that I internally felt frustrated about were the documents, and probably spending a little bit too much energy in making the documents look good, as a details-person with a design background, I fell really easily into spending a lot of time on the documents and making them communicate well, rather than involving people in my activities and flying more by the seat of my pants.

And the other thing was probably trying to understand when to test and when not to. Initially I used to test all my early design concepts as well. I didn’t realise that I was focusing on interactions that didn’t even exist. I was just going through the motions, doing testing because everyone was telling me to do it. But I didn’t actually make the connection that wasn’t the best use of my time and that a lot of that extra data to process didn’t necessarily have much benefit.

And I needed to focus on only testing because we’ve got a particular question that we need an answer to. I think that applies to user research as well. They were probably the two biggest things that, once I had a bit more of an understanding of, a lot of things got a bit easier.

MATT: Very good. Well, we’ve come to the end of the webinar. Unfortunately we don’t have time to answer any more questions but we’re really appreciative of everyone who’s dialled in and we apologise to those of you whose questions we didn’t get to. We would like to do this again. This is actually really valuable for us and hopefully it’s been …

LUKE: It’s been great being able to talk to you guys and hear you asking questions back in the chat. I really appreciate that.

MATT: Totally. Sometimes the newsletter and the website can feel very one-way and we much prefer it to be a conversation. So keep emailing your questions, keep the conversation going. If you’ve got any specific feedback on this webinar, we’d love to hear from you.

LUKE: We’d certainly love to hear from you.

MATT: Yeah, so just email feedback@uxmastery.com and let us know if you loved it, if you hated it, if you’re indifferent, if you wish that we’d answered your question and we didn’t – we can do our best to try and do that offline or perhaps in a future webinar. I did mention that we’ve got an eBook in the works and we’re going to be working very hard to get that out of the door soon. You’ll certainly be haring from us about that hopefully pretty soon.

I won’t tell you a timeframe because clients get in the way and this stuff is hard to do in our spare time. But we do our best. So thank you everyone for attending, especially those of you in time zones where it wasn’t easy. We do appreciate your time and for listening to us. And hopefully we’ll see you on a future UX Mastery webinar.

LUKE: Very good. Take care everyone.

MATT: See you guys.

LUKE: Bye bye.

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