On Friday, I premiered on the big stage at Big Design Dallas. My topic was “Cognitive Biases: How to keep them out of UX Research and Design.” This topic us very near and dear to my heart because we all suffer from cognitive biases. You don’t have to hold a psychology degree to know that. The focus of this talk was how to recognize biases in yourself and others. Also what you can do ti fight of the symptoms cognitive biases. Finally, I told my crowd how they can “turn their frown upside down” and how to use cognitive biases for good in your UX designs.
Jen Blatz on stage at Big Design talking about Cognitive Biases.
For my first international/national conference speaking gig, I think it went really well. Sure there were a few minor mistakes that only (hopefully) the speaker noticed. My whole goal was to get the crowd interested and engaged in the topic. And I did that by balancing funny images, real-world stories and relatable content.
The crowd laughed, participated and learned something new form the talk “Cognitive Biases: Keep them out of your design and research.”
I am very excited to announce that I have been selected to speak at Big Design on September 20, 2019. My Talk will be about “Preventing cognitive biases from creeping in to your UX design and user research.
I feel really lucky for this first opportunity to speak at a national conference. I will be sharing the stage with some very prestigious UX professionals. This is a great opportunity for me and I am very excited. Read my full bio on the Big Design page. And save the date. My Talk is September 20 at 2:30 p.m.
Jen Blatz lays out the sitemap for the Dallas Goethe Center website for all of the team to see.
This past weekend was a busy and productive weekend for me. I participated in my first Dallas Give Camp. What is Dallas Give Camp you might ask? Dallas Give Camp is an annual event where professionals ranging from UX designers, business analysts, project owners, developers and other technology-related professionals come together with non-profit organizations to design or redesign the organizations website.
Dallas Give Camp’s Mission:
“We support our communities by bringing together motivated volunteers to dedicate their professional expertise, deep insights, and individual talents to further the missions of local charitable organizations through the applied use of knowledge sharing, technology solutions, and innovative design.”
It’s a jam-packed weekend starting Friday evening at 5 p.m. and ended Sunday evening at around 4 p.m. Yes, you do get to go home and sleep. It’s not one of those all-nighter type hackathons (Thank goodness. I am too old for those. Ha!) But I was there, fully-invested for each hour and minute.
What was my assignment?
I was the UX designer helping redesign the Dallas Goethe Center’s website. I’ll refer to the organization as DGC for short. The DGC is a local organization that promotes German language learning and culture in North Texas. They have two primary audiences: students and parents of students who want to learn to speak German, and members who participate in the cultural events.
What was my role?
As the UX designer, I worked with the team of developers to come up with a technology solution. I also worked with stakeholders to surface DGC’s problems, pain points and needs to understand what they wanted out of the new website. Also, I helped make sure that the project was moving forward, all pages and components were being built, and the content was being added to the pages.
What was the problem?
Their current website platform was on Drupal, and they wanted a platform that was easier to work with. That new platform was WordPress, which is what Dallas Give Camp encourages all teams to work on. Drupal was difficult for DGC’s Drupal-challenged volunteers and staff to update. It was also technologically limited, restricting features like easy “customer shopping” and website customization. The Divi theme on WordPress would help with org overcome these challenges.
BEFORE The Dallas Goethe Center website before the redesign. This was the page to purchase or renew your membership.AFTER The new way to sign up for membership is much more visually appealing than just a boring table. Now there are interesting icons to illustrate the different levels one can purchase. The purchase buttons are also more interactive.
How did I get started?
As with any good UX designer, I wanted a better understanding of the problem. The week before Give Camp, I talked with three members of the DGC staff to get their perspective of the website. We talked about reasons why customers come to the site, their pain points and goals for the new website. I wanted to do this initial research to get different perspectives on how the website could be improved.
What was my challenge?
I was very new to the Divi theme and have very little experience with WordPress. My experience is pretty much just posting stories to this lovely blog. Nothing too fancy. So I am not in the regular practice of building out pages or components within WordPress. I needed a tutorial quickly on how to work in the Divi theme, where to find things and how I can get up and running asap. I will say, I am really spoiled in working within WYSIWYG programs like Sketch.
How did I collaborate?
I worked with developers to understand our technology constraints. The devs also helped me understand Divi themes, WordPress and basic CSS. Thank goodness I had a basic knowledge of code. It did help me customize things a bit – once I found out where to do that within the Divi theme interface. I also worked with several stakeholders from the DGC who were our on-site subject-matter experts. It was wonderful to have them on site, right there to answer any questions we might have at any moment. The best part is the staff members from DGC were at Give Camp from the start of the day until late in the night. They were just as committed and involved as we were.
I put up the sitemap fo all of the team to see and validate. I also included sketches for basic website structure.
Friday
We started Friday evening, with a hearty dinner to get us ready for the first night of the event. We met the team, broke down the problems and prioritized the major issues we needed to solve. We talked about what aspects of the website needed to be improved, what new pages we needed to create and we were introduced to WordPress and the Divi them. But the end of Friday evening, at 10:30 p.m., we had a pretty good plan of the site map, what pages we needed to build and what elements would go on those pages.
Saturday
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we all rolled in around 9 a.m. ready to build out the site. I wrote the site map on the whiteboard so that we could verify that we had all of the content included. I also started sketching out some basic wireframes to further validate that all content was accounted for. Then it was time for me to get to work.
Like I mentioned earlier, I was pretty inexperienced with WordPress, and had no previous knowledge of the Divi theme. So I was pretty slow to jump right in and churning out components. That is what I wanted to do. I am so used to just being able to build things at a pretty hefty speed in Sketch. But this proved to be much more challenging than expected. I wanted to get pages build and templates ready ahead of the team so that they could just plug and play.
A number of pages had 3 cards, in a box, of content to lead the page. I wanted this component to be built and ready to go so that it would be consistent across all instances. But it took the developer and I over an hour to get it built to (near) the specifications I had in mind. Yes we got it built, but it ate up a lot of time. Yikes! Now we were approaching early afternoon and time was pressing against us. We had a lot of pages to build. We had to get components like boxes, buttons, purchasing options and other website elements on the page. We had to get all of the content on those pages. The content was all really, really long, so we needed to edit that content down to digestible chunks. Then we needed to apply some design style to improve the design beyond the basic offering.
Well, shit started hitting the fan in the early evening. We were very behind. We still needed pages built, components added, content added and interactions tested. We started to panic. Well, I did. We did not know who was working on what. We were not really sure what was and was not finished. It was a mild case of chaos.
We called in some help. A floating developer came in and assessed the situation. We had not been using Trello. Hence, we did not know who was assigned to what part of the project and how that was progressing. So we got all the remaining work on the board. That way we got a bit more organized and figured out who was responsible for what. By 10:30 at night, we were running on fumes. We finally got all the pages created, components on them, and basic content on most of them. We had not adjusted the style from the out of the box offering. And we had not even begun to test items like links, shopping cart functionality or other interactions. But that was OK. We still had a few hours on Sunday to do our best to make it to the finish line. At least now the fire was contained.
AFTER The events page after the redesign. We could now highlight the major events happening within the org.
Sunday
Bright and early again. It was a calm atmosphere, coming to terms with the fact that not all of our to-do list was going to be complete. Content was on the pages, but it still needed to be edited. Style was not going to be modified, but it was pretty good looking for now. Links and buttons were going to be tested. The shopping cart experience was working. We were very close to a functioning website. The stakeholders were very pleased with the progress we had made in just one weekend and were very excited to launch. We were 90 percent to complete success. And 90 percent is not only good enough, it’s pretty damn good.
We wrapped up the day updating the Trello board with tasks that still needed to be completed after Give Camp. We all gathered again for all of the Give Csamp teams to share their stories and display their much-earned success. We had built a website in just one weekend and it was pretty kick-ass.
What did I learn?
I need to get ahead of the game: I should have worked on the design solution earlier and started constructing wireframes, mockups and structure.
I need to learn the technology: I should have looked in to Divi a bit more. I should have learned the capabilities before hand and thought about how I wanted to tackle some of the design challenges.
I need to track the progress: We were assigned a Trello board well before kickoff, but we quickly abandoned it in the midst of the chaos. But there’s a reason why they gave us access to Trello, and we should use it. Tracking our progress on Trello got us back on line and better organized.
I can do it: I can pick up new technology. I can work with a new team. I can get a lot of work done in a short amount of time. I can establish a good comradery with a team and help us get to a common goal. I can do it!
Our volunteers and Dallas Goethe Center stakeholders made it through the weekend.
Would I do it again?
Hell yeah! Maybe not for another year. But yes I would do it. It was fun to work on something different and get fully emerged in the website design process. It was great to have stakeholders on hand who were willing to get their hands dirty and pitch in to get things done. It was exhausting to put in so many hours straight. But it was exhilarating to jive through and get it done. Most importantly, it felt really great to contribute my skills as a UX designer in a positive way and to give back to the community in some way. Working with Dallas Give Camp and the Dallas Goethe Center was professionally and personally rewarding for sure. Sign me up for next year – after I get a bit of a nap.
Working in the field of User Experience is rarely working alone. It is a highly collaborative environment and this means that oftentimes developers and designers must work together.
There was a time when designers would just mock up designs and “throw the designs over the wall” to the the developers who would then put the designs in to code. This led to a lot of tension; mostly because there was little communication. Now I find that better designs come as a result of communication across disciplines and areas of expertise.
I love talking with my devs. There are so many benefits of doing so:
Devs are aware of design decisions on the table, they feel more involved
They can point out potential technical issues and constraints
They often have great suggestions
It’s their product too, they will have more pride in their work if they are involved in the process, not just pulled in at the tail end
Talking together builds camaraderie and and stronger teams
They can fill in knowledge gaps or holes you might have
Basically, early communication between UX designers and developers gets everyone on the same page. And let’s face it, we work with these people the majority of the day. It makes for a better work environment if you get along with your co-workers.
So I encourage you to talk with your developers, several times a day if you can. Do this to build stronger relationships, learn from each other and have buy-in from all members of the team so you can build better products.
Sharing with your team when they cannot participate in an event or workshop is a good skill to have in your UX Designer toolbox.
Our office recently had the honor of hosting renowned GoogleX prototyper Tom Chi. He came in to our office to work with Product Managers on learning the value of testing fast and testing now! I had a chance to participate in the session as both a user, working through prototypes, and as part of a team building the prototypes for testing.
I have to admit a lot of what Tom covered was not completely new:
Find the quickest path to the experience
Test early and test often
Don’t guess. Learn
Don’t “fail.” Learn
Stop talking and start doing
Get in front of your users and get their feedback
But there were a couple of concepts that really resonated with me and thought they provided value to the session.
Drive conjectures to experiments. Experiments drive decisions.
Conjectures are the same thing as guesses. In other words, people tend to get stuck in “analysis paralysis” and over talking about the situation. In fact, a lot of these discussions are not reality based and is a process of throwing out personals opinions. It might be driven by the best intentions. But these conversations often go on for too long and are never backed up by actual user research. So encourage your group to stop talking and start doing.
The way we did this in the Tom Chi Prototyping session was to stop talking and we each sketched ideas quietly for 3 minutes. They key here is to sketch individually insilence. There should be no talking during the sketching exercise so that each person is exploring individual ideas without the influence from others. After sketching, the ideas are then shared with the group. One or more idea is selected as the “champion.” And this this rough sketch is what should be tested with users. No need to create a higher fidelity version of the sketch. Just show them the rough sketch and get quick feedback before you are too emotionally and technically invested.
Focus on people’s energy
Whenever there is energy, that means something that matters is happening. This energy can be positive or negative. When a customer gets exciting about something, pay attention to that. And the same is true when they show angry excitement as well. It’s these magic “energy” moments that really improve or ruin an experience. So tweak those energy points to make them awesome. One particular example Tom Chi mentioned was Uber. Most of the Uber experience is just like riding in a cab. It’s the few seconds that are different in that experience is what matters.
Don’t lead the witness
Finally, I want to talk about one lesson I learned by going through these sessions. Most of the people participating in our sessions were not researchers. In fact, there were product managers and designers. These are empathetic people who are excited about getting great feedback from users. But they don’t understand that the way they ask questions can skew the response from the participant. It is better to ask broad, open-ended questions rather than helping the participants by giving them examples. It is these tactics that researchers know how to do, but others might not know. They don’t understand that by providing examples for the person to think about, they might be blocking other examples they could possibly come up with on their own. With a little coaching, I know that product managers, designers and other non researchers can learn effective ways to ask non-leading questions.
Take away
I thought the most valuable aspect of bringing Tom Chi in house was to empower non-designers. I think he gave everyone confidence that they can explore ideas, sketch the ideas, and get quick feedback from customers. I hope this process takes off and continues well in to the future.
Jennifer Blatz’s UX design work can now been seen on dribbble.com.
My portfolio can only hold so many work samples. I like to edit my work down to a small representative sample so that hiring managers and other UX designers can get a quick taste of some of my UX design capabilities. But there’s so much more to my UX design skills than I can showcase on my website. That is why I love alternative websites like dribbble.com and behance.net so I can show some of my latest works in progress and finished projects.
Dribbble is a great platform for inspiration and sharing your latest work. So I was honored to get an invitation to join the exclusive group. Who knows the true value of sites like Dribbble and Behance? But these sites seem to be an important part of a UX designer’s web presence. So I guess I’d better get in the game as well.
Please take a look at my clips and let me know your thoughts. I always love feedback.
As my project with Wingspan Arts comes to a close, I am pleased to share the results of my Website Audit.
What did I do? I volunteered to perform a Website Audit through Catchafire. For those who don’t know, Catchafire is a website that allows professionals to give back to the community. The professional who volunteers will use his/her skills, be that UX Design, Web development, Graphic design, Marketing and other creative fields. They are providing their exercise to an organization that needs help, and saves that organization sums of money.
What is in a website Audit? A Website Audit report that includes:
Outline of Organization’s goals for the website
Feedback on current website’s layout, user functionality, visual design, content and other features
Recommendations for improvements to help achieve Organization’s desired goals
After I completed the project, I got a wonderful and very lovely review from Rachel, who was my parter in this projects and the representative for Wingspan Arts.
My professional review from Wingspan Arts after completing the Catchafire project.
Surveys (interviews) with stakeholders and users (parents)
Userflow
User goals
Competitive benchmarking
Content audit and text review
Design analysis and consistency
Social media presence and activity
Strengths and weaknesses of the site
Information architecture and proposal of new taxonomy (navigation)
Footer proposal
Recommendations for improvements
Wireframes (to share with the developer)
What I gained from the project
Pride in helping a community center in need
Exercising professional “muscles” that I don’t get to “flex” on a regular basis at my current job
Learned more about my UX process
Working remotely and coordinating meeting and data
Synthesizing survey results
Content analysis of the current websites (yes they have 2!)
Creating a full report summarizing all findings and recommendations
Feelings of accomplishment that I hoped someone else out, and used my professional skills to do so.
I encourage you to check out Catchafire as well and volunteer your time. They have opportunities that can take as little as an hour, or as much as a few weeks.
I am honored and humbled to say that I have reached a milestone for myself. I have earned the following of over 300 people. Now, I know that could fall back below 300 at any time. You know how it goes…. But I am going to enjoy the moment even if it doesn’t last forever.
Do you want to follow me too? I would be ever so delighted. You can join the fun at https://twitter.com/jnblatz. Come over and say “Hi.” Let’s have a conversation and maybe learn a bit from each other.
Sometimes small accomplishments can bring big joy to a person. Be proud of your accomplishments and keep on going.
Maybe you’re interested in a career in UXD, but where should you start? This infographic from Schools.com looks at how to go about becoming a user experience designer.
I am not sure if I agree with all components of this graphic, but is an interesting way to present a lot of information.
Inforgraphic
Jennifer Blatz explores the world of UX through words and imagery
