#Weeknotes 68 (28 Mar) — Misconceptions of UX roles, life admin, and do more impressive, do less impressing
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Work wise:
We’re wrapping up another phase of work this week. We’ll be starting the next phase after this Easter week. As we’re organising the work we’ve done, there were many discussions around resourcing in the long term.
As contractors, we’re tested on our ability to embed ourselves into teams and often on in-flight projects diving head into various deep domain knowledge. At the same time, we recognise the temporal nature of our roles within our client organisations so there’s always a need to ensure the work will be able to continue on and that we’re leaving our client colleagues in a better place than where we started working together.
Contractors are great for supporting short-term needs: running a piece of research, testing a product/idea, creating a report/proposal, shaping strategy/vision, injecting expertise and delivering work more timely, or filling a temporary gap in knowledge or skills etc. But contractors aren’t full-time employees. This means they often don’t get involved in the full life cycle of services and products. When contractors leave, they leave with valuable knowledge that can’t always be fully handed over or transferred. This is also why whenever possible, organisations look for full-time employees who can commit in the long term and are overall more invested and focused on only their organisation priorities.
I always find the concept of hiring quite interesting. You hire for a role that’s meant to address an organisation’s pain point: either to add more manpower to strengthen and support existing skill sets, or add new expertise and skill sets to expand the organisation’s capability. So there are times we hire for roles we know very well the expectations that come with them, and in other instances, we hire roles that we know very little about (due to lack of exposure or opportunities to work with them) and thus we don’t fully understand the value they can bring. How can you hire an expert in a role you don’t know much about?
I worked with organisations that have little understanding of what user experience (UX) or service design is but feel the need to hire those roles without clear expectations of what they’re capable of. What happens then is they end up hiring UX Designers who are actually Visual Designers, Service Designers who are User Researchers, and Product Designers who are Project or Delivery Managers. I see it happen a lot in organisations. It’s devastating to see the opportunity costs these organisations are missing by making such hiring mistakes.
I was put on a project for 4 weeks in a user experience (UX) designer role to work alongside the existing UX team to deliver a complex piece of software. From day 1, it was immediately clear to me that it wasn’t a UX team they had, but a user interface (UI) design team. And yet nobody in the existing team seems to have picked that up. Everyone assumes user experience designers are those they go to create pixel-perfect visuals to hand over to developers. By the time work is “assigned” to these UX designers, it was already decided what needs to go on each screen on a feature and what it should roughly look like. I was shocked. I was witnessing the product owner who’s the tech architect taking on a UX role that he has no experience in. He was looking at the product as a whole, thinking of the end-to-end journey and creating what’s effectively a wireframe of the full product but in the form of a wordy tech document co-produced alongside the business analyst who was also taking on a UX task: gathering user needs and business requirements trying to marry the two. Neither of them knew it was not on them to do that and there’s a relevant and dedicated role to do this work! But since there weren’t actual UX and product designers, someone had to do it. There was a gap in the product development that needed to be done.
In the four weeks, I was able to shift their understanding of what value a UX role can bring. While I was delivering the actual work (the visual design work that needed to get done), I worked closely with the product owner and business analyst to look at the product as a whole while leaning on the knowledge of subject matter experts. I joined up the separate design teams and helped to establish a more central design function to bring consistency and governance to the work. We were able to deliver faster, more effectively and consistently at the end of the four weeks. The impact was felt by everyone on the team and the transformation of the work caught the programme manager’s attention which raised the need for a proper UX role to continue the work I started after I came off the project. If I wasn’t already resourced on a different project, I would’ve definitely stayed on. It may sound like I’m tooting my own horn (I guess I am in a way!), but the value of good UX can’t be underestimated!
So back to the question: How do we hire experts in areas we know so little about? It’s tricky! I guess that’s what probations are for. But if you don’t know what good looks like, how can you know you got the right person for the job? Maybe it’s about leveraging existing networks and finding credible good people working in those roles and asking them what good looks like and what to look for.
But then again, maybe there’s a reason I’m not a hiring manager!
Life wise:
Had to fill in a few forms this week. One to apply for my 2yo Layton’s Canadian passport, and another a Parental Declaration Form for his nursery to claim government funding As much as I appreciate the move away from paper printouts to digital documents, the process often still feels painful mostly due to their poor design.
The Canadian passport application process wasn’t too bad. The bits I struggled with was that despite it being straightforward to fill out the forms on my computer, I still needed to print it all out and mail all the documents. I can already picture the people on the receiving end then having to digitise everything again. Feels all very silly. I also needed to get professional photos of Layton done based on a set of fairly detailed specifications. I’m not allowed to take them myself it has to be from a professional with their signature stamp! These physical copies will be digitised and used in the actual passport. It all feels very roundabout.
In other news, I’m super looking forward to Easter break week in Norfolk with all the boys (my partner, his 2 older boys and our son Layton). I feel quite lucky that I didn’t have to do much of the planning. My partner is a planner and he’s very good at it so I leave it all to him. I did try to help plan with him before and my ideas often get rejected so being the more easygoing one when it comes to travel plans, I just go with what he prefers. It’s less painful that way.
Things I came across:
A nice podcast episode I listened to this week was by Cal Newport. It was on the topic of “Do Better, Do Less”. I quite like his quote: “Play the game of being impressive instead of pleasing people”. In pleasing people, he meant work of being ultra-responsive, saying yes to others and being supportive. Being impressive meant having honed the skills and expertise that would add value to any work or project. I quite like that. I think my default is to try to please others, to be seen as helpful. But in pursuit of that, I find I am more distracted and forced to multitask and as a consequence, I’m compromising my quality of work and have less time to develop my craft and skills. I still have a ways to go!
A funny tweet shared via DD:
Be back after a week’s break.
Happy Easter everyone!
