Surround yourself with UX-Researchers to become a better Designer
It’s obvious that if you are surrounded by awesome professionals, you would improve day to day, right? On this occasion, I want to highlight one of the professions that unfortunately happens to be more unseen within the sector.
In all the companies I’ve been working as UX Designer, we all understood the importance of Research and tried our best to bring our expertise into the picture, but companies tend to not have a dedicated UX-Researcher on board, or in the lucky cases that they invested on it, it tends to be outnumbered by the rest of UX, UI, Interaction,… Designers (not to mention dev. team 🤓)
So here is what I learned from my favorite team members,
my Ode to UX Researchers ❤️
Starting from my master’s colleague Xavi Sorinas, who showed me that researchers never switch off their observation brain; I could experience first hand how a loose, not planned — almost guerrilla — testing chat with the staff members of the project we were working on (History Museum of Barcelona), could bring more valuable insights, than a perfectly planned stakeholder’s interview.
This “Que pasen cosas” attitude of Xavi is one of my most admired skills 🤩 that researchers have in common. This curious mind, natural conversation, persuading attitude, makes you vomit all your darker secrets without noticing. They are so easy to talk to, know all the non-verbal communication tricks that make you simply feel comfortable to open yourself with them.
When I acknowledged this feeling I started to pay more attention to my surroundings in every kind of situation, and also learned that is not only what you ask and manage to discover from others, it’s mainly how you make others feel, in order to provide the right place to start an open conversation.
This came clear to me working with my beloved Anna Helle, we worked together in MediaMarkt during their tech transformation in 2020. It was not easy for the UX team to bring in all these “new” ways of working into an established old-school german company like Media-Saturn.
I remember a specific sensitive workshop with the Marketing team that has been working on that company for +10 years vs. the brand new UX team. Imagine a room full of frustrated people, who all aim for improvement and progress, but don’t really manage to constructive communicate with each other. Anna just came into the room with her chilled open attitude and completely transformed the atmosphere! It felt magical to me. Just quietly sitting down and really listening to everyone, she managed to make us all put down our defensive barrier and help the whole team to come up with a clear shared goal. Anna really showed us that UXResearch is “More Than Just Asking Questions” as we can read more in the Steve Portigal book — Interviewing Users.
Another learning that I confirmed being around awesome researchers was that the best findings happen when grabbing a coffee or a meal outside in between meetings. This aspect got really challenging this last year, with everyone locked down at home… Definitely, Covid pushed us to come up with creative ways to keep up our research.
Here my best buddy Simone Damm brain exploded me. I never met someone so well prepared! Simone has not only Plan A, Plan B, Plan C… she has the whole alphabet ready to come up with a solution in case some unexpected surprise happens during our interviews & workshops. She is always 2 steps forward me, and I love that. During remote interviews, she manages to get full attention from our users, with this soft-touch that makes them feel comfortable and find out extra inputs that end up being the most valuable part of the test. Researchers have this 6th sense that knows what to ask at the right moment. She makes my work so easy and meaningful 🙌
What I learned from our remote interviews is to always be prepared for any crazy issue that can appear in the middle of the interview and get ready to react fast, (users poor internet connection, distractions, untrust to the remote setup…). But hey! Remote interviews are not all bad, we can really take advantage of the benefits of having users in their comfort zone, since the bias of being in our office with an unfamiliar device feeling observed, as usually happened when we invited people over, is no longer a problem.
The last learning I want to share with you is to constantly ask for feedback about your own work. Like Julie Zhuo explains in her book “The making of a Manager” asking for 360° feedback from our coworkers is the best gift we can receive.
We are awesome at optimizing and creating products, why don’t we think about ourselves as a product too? To become a better Designer you have to keep receiving feedback and iterating on your skills.
My final reflection from all these learnings is…
Our users are not only the final customers that consume our products. As UX designers, our “users” are also our coworkers. I now seat to discuss technical implementation with another attitude. The dev. team spends hours creating astonishing code, therefore if they complain about some of my designs I sit with them with an open mind, understanding better their concerns and struggles and working on a solution together. The same goes with Stakeholders and POs, some of the requirements that we get in our User Stories sometimes feel random… Instead of questioning everything and being defensive, I now try to understand better what is really the problem they are trying to solve here, and with a nice cup of tea clarify that it’s cool that they already have a possible solution in mind, but we are not our users, we are definitely biased, therefore it’s better to let the UX team come up with different options and test them to find our optimal product.
I am sure that all these improvements in my UX way of working are thanks to the incredible people I had the pleasure to work with throughout my career. So, now you know… add a researcher in your life to succeed👌
