We often hear the word “evangelize” when we’re discussing User Experience, and we’ve been fortunate to have many leaders who have been steady, results-driven proponents of improved UX. Showcasing the benefits of better User Experience in our applications is extremely important to any business that is consistently improving its digital learning offerings. For those of us who design, research, and practice User Experience every day in our work, we strive to communicate the relevance of what we do through project share-outs and cross-team discussions. But some of the most effective communication arises from outside our immediate sphere of influence - when we extend further than just our usual environment. In the past few years I’ve thrown the net wider to grow the conversation about how UX helps learners, and in the process, found that we can apply it to a variety of contexts. The following are examples of how I broadened the circle of good UX beyond the traditional safety of the desk:
Pearson Bi-monthly UX Shareouts:
Single slide from the Principles of Design share outs.
This is a series of extended presentations for the larger 113-person group of UX designers, researchers, writers, and other professionals within Pearson’s Higher Education department, who meet regularly to present the work of their teams, projects, research, and have discussions on design issues, accessibility, and a host of other UX-related topics. I began a series that worked a bit outside of the box, presenting examples of great design to be found outside of our typical work. Called “Principles of Design,” these presentations showcase examples of important design from unusual places - book design, urban planning, aviation, farm management, artificial language creation, just to name a few. The idea is to see UX as a living, organic system of principles which are used in nearly all design, and study how those lessons can be applied universally. They’ve helped to create conversations about how UX extends into the larger world, and suggests that what we practice is much closer to human usage patterns that just theory. You can view recordings of these presentations: Principles of Design 1, Principles of Design 2: Human Factors and Principles of Design 3: Adaptive Design.
Portfolio Reviewing at General Assembly:
General Assembly is an education center with over 20 campuses worldwide, focussing on skill acquisition for careers in UX, web development, coding, digital marketing and product design. They have a particular focus on preparing people for the job market, and they also look to local business leaders to volunteer their professionals in UX to help mentor their students. I spent an evening reviewing student UX portfolios, to offer constructive criticism, and to give important examples of how UX is being approached by companies in their day to day business. It became a great win-win opportunity for General Assembly’s students and for my own understanding of newly developed UX designers. The opportunity for sharing and learning is a vital one, to help raise the bar of great design practices for everyone involved.
Research, Meetup and Facilitation Outside of Work: Subforum:
Subforum evening on the topic of “Routines” hosted by Google in Cambridge, MA.
Colleagues of mine within the greater design, product, and research world in Boston have discovered a shared desire to work with the larger community of design-thinking talent in our area to promote extended conversations about technology, ethics, culture, patterns, and practice. This culminated in the founding of Subforum, a group of design professionals who gather to facilitate guided activities around emerging ideas and problems in design. Our topics are usually centered on broad but important trends in today’s arena of issues, ideas such as: Distraction, Data, Routines, Remote Collaboration, Artificial Intelligence. The meetup activities are fun, engaging, and help to raise complexities and potential solutions to problems within these spaces. Ideas emerge such as designing means of communication without phones, designing for dystopian world projections, and thinking through the ramifications of truth-evaluation software for data-mining. We were sponsored by Google for an evening meetup discussion on the effect of routines on our expectations from technology.
By getting involved in the greater world that sits just outside us, we make room for those important opportunities to give and take, fundamental to the development of practical User Experience growth. Otherwise, we design in a vacuum. We also miss that vital chance to evangelize the best UX principles possible. Through engagement that reaches beyond what we’re commonly used to, the challenge of communicating UX design is heightened, the reward is greater, and more people are reached.