In this episode of the UX Cake podcast we’re bringing you lots of great information about UX writing as a specialty within UX. In this special Ask Me Anything format we cover some of the most useful soft skills for a career in UX writing, hard skills that are transferable from other industries, ideas on how to upskill your UX writing, finding a mentor, and career trajectories for UX writers.

My guest is Laura Costantino (they/them), a senior UX writer at Google. For the past 10 years, Laura has worked at the intersection of editorial marketing and strategy. They fully transitioned into UX content about three years ago and now, as someone who went through a career change, Laura is dedicated to helping other people of all backgrounds transition into UX while also being committed to developing content design and strategy as pivotal parts of the UX discipline. 

Which soft skills seem most essential in helping individuals navigate UX writing roles?

For Laura the most important soft skills for UX writers are collaboration, communication, and curiosity. It’s interconnected, by starting with curiosity, be open minded. For communication,  this is really important for UX practitioners, both orally and in writing.

The work of creating user experiences has a lot of moving parts, and people are coming from different backgrounds and different disciplines, so being a good collaborator, and keeping an open mind and communicating are your essential soft skills.

What hard skills are transferable from other industries into UX writing?

• Writing is the foundation, you have to be a writer before you can be a UX writer. 
  
• Understanding UX, in terms of like, what's the framework? What are the processes of UX, so, you know, sprinkling in a little bit of UX research, like be even being able to use figma for example,
  
• Being able to speak about what the UX process is
  
• Any sort of background in information architecture or content strategy is incredibly valuable
  

Where does UX writing fit into the UX process? 
As early as possible, as early as research or product vision. UX writers can also be really helpful in writing product narratives, value propositions, at the beginning of a project. Getting a writer's perspective, it's best to have them involved as early as possible. 

Also working very closely with research, there are some areas of similarities in thinking about the user experience and how content influences how people think. And how messaging works. 

Resources
Strategic Writing for UX, Torrey Podmajersky
Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson
Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey
Working in Content
Content + UX slack


Mentoring platforms
ADP List
UX Coffee Hours
Design Buddies
Hexagon Mentorship program


Connect with Laura Costantino
Linkedin
Website
Twitter

Leigh Arredondo  0:02  
You X cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host, Lee Allen aridol. No. And I'm a UX leader and leadership coach. UX cake episode 50 UX writing, ask me anything. Hello, and thank you so much for joining me today. Today's episode has lots of great information about UX writing as a specialty within UX. We're talking about some of the most useful soft skills, the hard skills that are transferable from other industries. You'll get ideas on how to upskill your UX writing and on finding a mentor as well as career trajectories for UX writers. My guest today is Lara Cosentino who's a senior UX writer at Google. And this asked me anything format was actually inspired by a LinkedIn post that Lauer put out, Laura is an active mentor. And during mentoring, they were noticing a lot of the same questions would come up again and again. So they posted an Ask Me Anything on LinkedIn, where they have a few 1000 followers actually, as a way to answer some common questions that a lot of people have.  So when I saw this post, a lightbulb really kind of went off for me, way back in 2017. When I started this UX cake podcast, I had spent years mentoring and had myself come across many, many common issues that people would have in UX and starting the podcast was really kind of a way for me to move from that one on one mentoring to a one to many model. So I thought, well, let's have Laura answer these questions in a UX cake episode. So here we are today. A little bit more about Laura. As I mentioned, Laura Costantino is a senior UX writer at Google. And for the past 10 years, Laura has worked at the intersection of editorial marketing and strategy. And they fully transitioned into UX content about three years ago. Now, as someone who went through a career change themselves. Laura is dedicated to helping other people of all backgrounds transition into UX while also being committed to developing content design and strategy as really pivotal parts of the UX discipline. All right, so let's jump into this asked me anything about UX writing. Hi, loud. Hi.

Laura Costantino  2:51  
Hi, Lee. How's it going?

Leigh Arredondo  2:53  
Good. Thank you so much for joining me on UX cake. Yeah. Excited to be here. Yeah, I have been looking forward to this conversation. We we've had a couple conversations online and in person. And so I am really excited to bring this to the audience, because I know you have been answering so many questions on LinkedIn. So people have a lot of questions. And this is just I'm really excited to kind of like, extend this information to folks who might not know you yet. And so starting with you, and who you are and your story, you made a change in your career into UX writing, and you're now at Google as a UX writer. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah,

Laura Costantino  3:39  
I'm happy to. So I always like to say that, in the past 10 years, I work at the intersection between content marketing, and UX. So I really started my career in content writing now, around like, over 10 years ago, really, I actually have a background in media and film studies. But that career sort of like ended quickly after graduate school. And I transitioned into that started doing content writing in different aspects, but mostly focusing on editorial writing, kind of like longer form, blog posts, type of content, and then move into social media writing. So got to learn a little bit of that when Facebook and Twitter were still the hardest like platforms, social media platforms, and Instagram was like super super new. Once I started doing social media marketing, that's kind of like what helped me transition more into marketing and content strategy. So I also get got to learn a bit of that and a good chunk of like, copywriting for ads and all all sorts of like different like creative assets that will masih digitally focus. So I've always been around content and writing just from like really different aspects. During my time as a marketer, I had the opportunity to work with some really amazing designers and art directors. And actually one of them was at the time transitioning himself from art direction to UX design. And so we got to dork and I learned that he was taking this class at school in Seattle called School of Visual Concepts. And it was kind of like an introductory class in UX design. And I ended up taking the class myself really enjoying it finding myself very attracted by the principles of user experience, and simply just this idea that instead of being focused more on the business, which was you know, my goal is a market there, right, like focus on profit and return on investment and sales, etc. To really move very much more into the perspective of like, how do we help like user accomplish their task and make their experience more pleasant and, and usable, unusable and etc, etc. And so I ended up doing a whole a full year's certificate and discover UX writing that among you know, all the different UI UX disciplines. One of them was UX writing, and things just kind of like natural came to gather my experience in writing, and my sort of like, newfound love for for UX. And really found like, that could be a great opportunity for me to step out of marketing, and transition my career into something different. And I went from a marketing role at Amazon to a content strategy role, I think, a UX content strategy role. So I kind of like started the transition there. And I actually still consider myself even though my official title is UX right there. I also consider myself a UX content strategy in the sense that I focus Yes, on the word in the in the experience and in the product, but also thinking about content across how is the content organized, how is a Montaigne? What's the content governance, what is information architecture? I feel also like anyone who works in UX, you know, their careers have a lot of these different aspects to them. And then maybe then they have like, one particular area of expertise. And so yeah, I mean, I did content strategy at Amazon, and then actually took a year break. A year sabbatical, I was very lucky to do that, that gave me the opportunity to upskill continue, like learning online, on my own, started doing some mentoring, talking to people really kind of like that helped me transition into a Content Designer role. Where I was for, for a temporary assignment. And now my role at Google, you know, I have to say, during my my sabbatical, that's actually when I started posting on LinkedIn quite a bit because I was abroad.

I was Italy, and I was and it was actually during the pandemic. And I was very concerned, I was like, losing touch completely with the professional community and the UX community. So it was a way for me to try to, like keep in touch with with people and share my voice.

Leigh Arredondo  8:45  
Yeah. Which is a great voice on LinkedIn. I think you got some traction pretty quickly. Because you're talking about things that are, you know, very interesting in a very authentic way. So thank you so much for sharing that your story with us. And, yeah, so now we're gonna jump into this crazy idea. It's new for you x k. But I think the Ask Me Anything is a format that has really kind of exploded lately, by now, last few years. Yeah. So it's awesome that you did that, that you kind of put that out there. And I'm excited to share some of these questions and your fantastic insights with people. So how about if we just jump in on some questions? Yeah, let's let's do it. All right. So I really liked this question. I put it at the top because I feel like this is soft skills is has always been getting like at the core of my mission with UX cake. So the question was, what soft skills seem most essential in helping individuals navigate UX writing roles?

Laura Costantino  9:53  
Yes. So this is actually a really cool question, I think because so The first class I took in my UX design certificate just right after the introductory class was actually a soft skill class, like it was called the Yeah, so skill for UX designers. And you know, that really, like got me thinking, even before I fully transition into a career as a UX writer, like, what are some of the skills that maybe I already have? Or like, I can like practice or

Leigh Arredondo  10:30  
transition help you translate? Yeah, they can, like really

Laura Costantino  10:33  
helped me transition into into this new career. And definitely, like going through, you know, the full transition during like, the interviews, that's always been like top of mind, right? Especially because I wanted to make sure that, you know, all these years of experience that I was bringing with me, even though I may be working like collateral kind of like different industries, I still gain like, all these soft skills that can be like, really, really important in the context of UX. And I, you know, I did actually answer these on LinkedIn. And I tried to like, almost like, summarizes as much as possible, because I think we could talk about it quite a bit. But I said, three things, collaboration, communication, and curiosity. And I think you can kind of like, move them around. Right. But to me, they're all very much like interconnected, I think, starting with curiosity, like keeping an open mind, I think it's very important for whoever is starting, but also really, for anyone at any level in UX for so many reasons. Yeah. And you know, from that, I think communication, right, like communication, we are in meetings so much as UX practitioners, that's, I think, where we spend actually, maybe almost most of our time. And so communication is like really important, both like orally and in writing, you know, writing messages, we're on Slack, we're on chat, we're in email. So really dry. 

Leigh Arredondo  12:52  
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you, 100%. And it's, I agree with you, 100%, for UX in general. My specialty is not UX writing that although I have done plenty of it in my career. Definitely not my specialty. But Awesome. Thank you for that. So that actually is very related to this next question, which is, what skills and maybe we can look at hard skills as opposed to soft skills, what skills are transferable from other industries into UX writing? And I'm going to take a guess at one writing. Okay. But there's got to be more.

Laura Costantino  13:37  
Yes. 100%. I think, you know, writing is the foundation, right is the basis you have to be a writer before you can be a UX writer. And to me, that means a lot of a lot of things. I'm also a mentor to people who are two career changes and early career people. And that's what I always tell them that rarely have you done any writing and especially career changes. I mean, a lot of the people who are today UX writers, UX writing, leaders, content design leaders usually come from journalists background, when we all we do have like a very diverse array of backgrounds, but definitely a lot of people coming from journalists from marketing, so disciplines that have like a really, really strong academia like writing component. And so I would say definitely the first one is writing in all sorts of capacities. And then like you were saying, I mean, a UX writer is a UX practitioner. So understanding UX writing, like Sorry, UX in terms of like, what's the framework? What are the processes of UX, so, you know, sprinkling in a little bit of UX research, like be even being able to use figma for example, right? Okay, that is definitely a skill that UX writers should have. Because I mean, we may be like called to wireframe something, right. So even some of like a basic part skills for UX designers are actually the same kind of like hard skills for for for UX writers. And then I think also thinking about, like, other transferable skills that are more like harder skills, I'd say probably, honestly, probably, starting with the writing is a really great start adding on top of that, being able to speak about like, what the UX process is, being able to shut it down a little bit of like I say, prototyping some, some research. I think that's really the basis. And then I personally then to doubt people that if you have any sort of background in information architecture, content strategy, that's incredibly valuable, and also incredibly valuable for actually growing as a UX as a UX, right there. Anything that could be related, like taxonomies, like things like that, right?

Leigh Arredondo  16:19  
Yeah. As you're talking, it reminded me of I had Tori pugmire ski on who wrote the UX, strategic UX writing books several episodes ago, in the season two, but you were talking about, you know, prototyping and figma. And it reminded me of kind of her process, which is very much a UX process where you're looking at an end to end flow, and you're kind of even storyboarding it out more or less so that you can understand, you know, you're not just looking at one piece at a time, you're looking at the whole thing more strategically.

Laura Costantino  16:58  
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Looking at the entire user journey, for sure. And in an ideal case, scenario, lead to working hand in hand with the designer and the end, the UX researcher, I think that's the ideal state for any, like UX team.

Leigh Arredondo  17:18  
Yeah, yeah, I'll bet. Oh, gosh, I have so many questions about that. I'm gonna go ahead and throw in a couple of questions myself, because what that brings to mind is kind of the process where does UX writing fit into the UX process? Right?

Laura Costantino  17:37  
Yeah, I think almost, or any UX writer would say, as early as early as possible, as early as research as early as product vision. One thing that, you know, may maybe people may not really be aware of, but actually UX writers can be really helpful in writing product now. narratives, value propositions. So I think even like, from that perspective, it's great to have a UX writer involved as early as possible. And I also think, UX writers, or content designers, I kind of use that interchangeably, but it's a little bit controversial. So I'm going to set you up. For now, I think, working with with very closely with with research, like I feel like there are some like real areas of similarities in like thinking about like, the user experience and how content like influences how people think. And you know how messaging works. So yeah, I would just say, honestly, as early as possible.

Leigh Arredondo  18:49  
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right. So let's see, policy related what projects or upskilling and aspiring UX writers do to be more valuable candidates. So this is sort of going back to that if for someone who's looking to move into UX writing, everyone in UX in general is looking for projects to add so they can get their foot in the door, that entry level role, that first role in UX. So yeah, what does that look like for UX writers?

Laura Costantino  19:24  
Yeah, I think you know, if we've had this conversation, like even one or two months ago, I would have probably answered maybe something a little bit different, but I had a very interesting conversation online with that kind of spur from me saying, Oh, you really need to portfolios. What one being a website and one being your portfolio, that slide deck that you present during the interview, like thinking specific Usually about people who are aspiring UX writers. And actually, I had to, you know, change my boss because that was actually like my experience. I was speaking from like my experience from, you know, what I was sort of what I always what I always thought and also a UI, a US perspective, obviously, but hiring managers actually started answering me and specifically UX writing and content design hiring managers saying, no, actually, a lot of us are okay with just writing samples, and especially a B, a UX, a website can be a big barrier to entry because of the cost. And I mean, this was coming also from people kind of, like from all over the world, some I think, like, based in the US some based in the UK. So I had to sort of like really reconsider what I was saying, and, you know, made another person I'm saying all of these to say that I think like right now my answer to that would be really like focusing on writing no matter what, I think that's also important, just like, any writing sample a person might have, or even just like, writing takes practice, like a lot of other things like the craft, the mastery of writing takes practice. So I would say, I think, doing some of that, and then like I was mentioning, you know, start learning about, like content strategy, what that means if, if a person doesn't know, and really in terms of, you know, projects, I would say kind of like, really the depends what's what's available, right? I tell people that, you know, that work already in companies like or, you know, big or small, like, is there anything you get, get involved in, right? Like, can you talk is there a UX designer on your on, you're not even on like the extended team that you can start talking to, I remember when I was trying to do transition into UX, I was lucky enough to already work in Amazon. But I actually did a lot of intern like UX research, like interviews, user interviews, but I was not taken, like I would volunteer to researchers and say, Well, you know, do you need someone to take notes, because then I knew that I could, like, learn that skill, see how UX really works, you know, in real in real life and get exposed to that. So now I can say, I've gone through that I've gone to, you know, the whole kind of like process of being in the interview diagramming afterwards, kind of like working with the researcher on insights and takeaways. So I think that we, you know, if there's any opportunity at work, already, try to use that, if possible,

Leigh Arredondo  23:04  
where you're working where you already are, and volunteer opportunities to I mean, with nonprofits, a lot of folks will just reach out to that, I think was interesting is, for writer, it's almost a little bit of a lower barrier, like to entry, because so few UX teams actually have the luxury of having specifically a writer, right, so for a designer, you're limited by what can actually be implemented. Whereas for writer, regardless of what the design is, there have to be words, there has to be content. And so, you know, you can actually probably get most if not all of your words published, you know, or implemented. Whereas design, this is definitely a little trickier. Yeah. I love that suggestion for looking at round where you are working for opportunities. That's great. Oh, I did have a follow up question on the writing samples. So what what type of writing samples if you're looking for you X writing job? I would imagine they're gonna want to see kind of your writing in conjunction with a design of some sort. Yeah, just kind of like paint the picture for what type of writing samples are?

Laura Costantino  24:29  
Yeah, I think, honestly, you know, I'm just want to make sure I clarify, because I'm not a hiring manager. I'm speaking again, from my my experience doing and what I think other people may mean when they speak of writing samples. I actually think it would be any any writing that's done for the Internet, right, like for the web, so any sort of like digital writing, even in my particular case, like I said, was a marketer. And I was no product marketing, kind of like brand marketing. So I did a lot of copywriting, for sure. And so one of my projects actually was more from like my time in marketing and speaking about like, voice and tone, which is something UX, right. There's also work with work on UX writer has to be able to, like, understand what voice and tone are, and like, use them. And so that's why I'm saying, you know, it could be even just copywriting for the for the web that maybe wasn't necessarily coming from a UX perspective. But I think if you are before becoming a UX writer, you can take what you already have your writing sample, and start framing it in Europe from a UX perspective, right? Like it may not be a UX project, per se, but you can at least say, why did you write it? Why did you write in a certain way? Why does it have a certain voice and tone? And you know, what the problem? What are you trying to solve? Right? Like, what are the users like, how was helping users? I mean, it may not be of course, like, a for UX case study. But it can be at least saying, yeah,

Leigh Arredondo  26:22  
yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Okay. So if you could pick an exercise to do once a week to enhance your UX writing skills? What would it be? Yeah, I

Laura Costantino  26:37  
thought about this quite a bit. Because Okay, I'm gonna give you answer one that I think is like, really, like straightforward, it probably makes more sense than the other one, maybe it's a little bit more nonsensical. But it's also a little bit more me, there is something called something called Daily UX writing challenge. And it's actually, it's a website, I can't unfortunately, remember the name of the Creator, but this person created this website, you sign up and every day for 15 days, I think you get a prompt with kind of like a scenario a problem, right? And so something just to like, help you write a piece of copy. And I've seen actually very, you know, people who are trying to break into UX writing using an event for their portfolio as one of those like writing samples that we were talking about. And it's you know, it's great. I even done it myself now. Now, years ago, it's good to get some practice and have, you know, some really clear, like I said, scenarios and constraints. So it's definitely like great practice. One thing I would suggest is like, Yes, I know, it's daily. But one thing I do as a UX writer, I mean, I go through a lot of changes in my copy, I refine, refine, refine, refine, refine, like,

Leigh Arredondo  28:04  
just like, just

Laura Costantino  28:08  
so I would say, you know, don't just like take the prompt, do it. And what's next, right, like, let's wait for the day after No, like, really use it as if it was a UX problem, like write the first copy, write it again, give yourself maybe more constraints. Like, what if you're writing it in a celebratory tone versus like a neutral tone and just kind of like, really iterate on that? Yeah, so that's a sensical answer. The nonsensical for me is read. I don't think you can be a good writer without reading a ton. So read, read, read, read, read as much as possible, not just to gain knowledge, but for the practice of reading, seeing how other people write and really just read anything.

Leigh Arredondo  28:58  
Yeah. What's your favorite thing to read? What are you reading right now?

Laura Costantino  29:02  
What am I reading right now? I'm reading a novel Clara in the sun.  Kazuo Ishiguro, Clara in the sun. I saw I usually read in three formats. I read on paper, ebook and audiobook, usually all three at the same time, but right now I don't have a physical book.

Leigh Arredondo  30:21  
Nice.  there were a whole lot of questions about this. And so gonna go ahead and ask about finding a mentor. And I hear this in UX in general all the time. But from your perspective, and from what, you know, good advice for finding a mentor. And let's start there. Good advice for finding a mentor in UX writing?

Laura Costantino  30:51  
Yeah, I definitely think this is a bit of a hard question. And I, I would be interested in learning a little bit also like what you think, but for me, you know, there's definitely like some platforms out there that can be used, and they have a have a function in my opinion, but I think, you know, more kind of

Leigh Arredondo  31:18  
very platforms. You mean websites like ad? lib?

Laura Costantino  31:21  
Yeah. ADP, least UX, coffee, ours? Those are two they're coming to mind right now. I think there is something else called Design buddies. But I think, you know, for me, I would really like to get more of like a long term mentoring relationship, even just for myself, right for someone to like, mentor me. And so I think, you know, sometimes, like companies have their own programs, definitely bigger companies do within the company. Yeah, within the company. And then sometimes it's a matter of just, I don't know, really, like ask asking people kind of like reaching out, I, so far, haven't had a ton of luck. But I definitely have mentors. Actually, one of my mentors is a former manager. Yeah, yeah, I always try to like relationships going as much as like, as I can, I think, you know, my use of LinkedIn. Like I said before, for me, it's all about like, building connections and community. And so I see mentoring as a part of that, for sure. I also think, you know, in my head, I think about mentoring in a number of ways, like, There are mentors that I've had in my careers that were like, people, I kind of, like I aspired to be like them. And, you know, maybe they were like VPS, or senior directors, and they were kind of like, a few meetings, you know, it's like a certain type of like relationship. And then I also have people who are considered more like peer mentors, right, like people who are going through the same stuff, I'm going to people I also met online, honestly, some of that more, you know, co workers, maybe not necessarily your teammates, because you want the same space, right to be able to talk. But people in like I said, like similar roles, maybe senior level of careers. And then for me, as a mentor myself, I, you know, I want to think about the mentor mentee relationship as also like, you know, something valuable for both. So I, a while ago, listen to an episode of The Brene Brown podcast, with the guests. Her name is Patrice Corden, and she's a director, a virgin and an executive coach. And she was speaking about reverse mentorship, praise or the value of like, the relationship between Junior and sort of like senior members of the team. So I think about mentorship and a lot of different ways for

Leigh Arredondo  34:11  
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think mentorship is got benefits both ways. For sure. I've always been a big proponent of it. And I have done a lot of it. I think you've you hit on something that I want to highlight here for folks, because one of the things you talked about is meeting people and creating relationships with people. And even if it's online, somehow actually connecting with people versus going to LinkedIn and finding someone who you know, does something that that is related to what you want to do and sending out get, you know, connecting on LinkedIn and asking them if you could, you know, meet with them to give them advisor, whatever, you know, I get asked that so often, and these are people who I don't know, I have no connection with whatsoever. And it's not that I don't care, I care about a lot of people. But I also have limited time, right. And so whereas I also get asked by people I know, and to have a coffee or a conversation with someone they know, or, you know, recently did this for a friend's daughter, who's finishing up the HCV program at U DUB. So I think it's really important for people to realize that you do need to have some kind of connection with someone for it to be for that to be successful. And you can make connections with people online slack is a great way, a great place to do that. I see people really kind of getting to know each other in Slack groups. There's various UX slack groups, there are also UX groups on LinkedIn. Those are some of the examples that that I would throw out there for folks.

Laura Costantino  36:05  
Yeah, I agree with you. And actually, that that's very, very true. And some of the people I am today, like even friends with, even though maybe I never met in real life, but that I consider friends are people who I met on LinkedIn, but like you say, because you know, I post something, and they reply, and then I would reply, and so really building Yeah, I think building that conversation before kind of like call the messaging is super important.

Leigh Arredondo  36:37  
I agree. Yeah. Yeah. We have time for one last question. And so, and I like this one, what does the career trajectory look like for UX writer? From your perspective, you know, what do you think the next steps in your career are?

Laura Costantino  36:56  
Yeah, I think, you know, from from what I see out there, that trajectory is actually still being defined. But I am very excited to hear, you know, people who started in content and are becoming like UX director VPs of design. So I really think, you know, the, the sky's the limit, to To be honest, in terms of what the trajectory could be. For me in particular. I'm, yeah, honestly, like, I'm not sure. But like, I would say, next step, people's management, I think, yeah, I've been an individual contributor my entire career. So if I think about like, next step without maybe going, you know, 10 years from now or whatever, I would, I think, like really like to have an opportunity to do manage people, because I enjoy mentoring so much. And I want to see how you know, how applicable that can be in people's manager position. Yeah.

Leigh Arredondo  38:04  
What do you think about the idea of managing multiple disciplines within UX? I mean, the UX discipline, but specialties managing folks in multiple specialties. Design Research has coming from a writing back.

Laura Costantino  38:19  
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in general, like the, I think the skill of like managing people can be like applicable and to a lot of different situation. I do think content, people are also like, very uniquely position to understand visions, and narratives. And like I was saying before, I also think there is, in no way a connection between content content, strategy content, UX writing, and product management, because content people do often actually think about, like the big picture. And like we were saying, Before, you know, it is also about thinking about the whole like, user journey, but almost like even beyond that, like the entire experience. And so I do think content people are like, uniquely busy also, in day to day life. We collaborate with the other disciplines all the time. So we kind of like also know, just as much as I think UX designers, we'd know what our struggles are, we know what their struggles are, and kind of like same with research. Yeah.

Leigh Arredondo  39:31  
Yeah. That's great. Thank you so much for all of your fantastic insights. I definitely want to make sure that people know that they can follow you on LinkedIn and so go ahead and maybe you want to spell your name

Laura Costantino  39:50  
Yeah, I can I can spell it. It's a you are a so it's just like Laura but because I'm originally from Italy, I say Our and then my last name Constantino. So it's C o s t a n t i know. Thank you so much. It was like such a pleasure talking to you today.

Leigh Arredondo  40:14  
Yeah. Thank you. I hope you enjoy this episode, I wanted to share with you some resources that Laura shared with me about UX writing. There is a book strategic writing for UX by Tori Padma year ski. And I want to note that I interviewed Tori Padma year ski, and we talked about UX writing, and strategic writing for UX in Episode 33. There's another book called Content Strategy for the web by Kristina Halvorson, another book called cultivating content design by Beth Dunn, then a couple of websites working in content.com, and then a Slack group content and UX, which you can find out more about at content and UX dot Borg. If you enjoyed this episode. I would love to know you can connect with UX cake on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. And also please share this podcast with anyone that you know who might enjoy it that really helps us reach more people with this content. Bye for now.

This episode is all about creating meaning from data, and making it easy for your audience to understand by making it visual. We can apply the same principles we use to design dashboards to presentations - whether you’re communicating design concepts (and the data-driven decisions behind your design) or user research findings. I had such a great time talking with my guest Thomas Watkins about how to show meaning using data, I know the term ‘data visualization’ sounds a little overwhelming to some people in UX, if you aren’t designing dashboards. But it doesn’t need to be.  I think we did a pretty good job of making data visualization accessible for any level of data interest in the episode.

Everyone in UX should be using data - whether you’re in design or research or PM or developer or marketing - and using data in a visual way to communicate important information to the person reading it. If you create presentations, for your design or for your research, if you have any opportunity to use data to explain your design or research recommendations… this episode has great information for you. Whether you are data-curious or data-shy or you lean in the data geek direction like me. I learned some great guidelines about making data visual in more effective ways, and I’ll bet you will too, even if your eyes glaze over at terms like “magnitude comparison” or “scatter plot.” I love how Thomas talks about explaining the context of the numbers, and not just ‘decorating’ numbers with meaningless donut graphs, one of my pet peeves!
Thomas Watkins is the founder of 3 Leaf consulting, a design collective that combines psychology and design principles to create usable products and services. Thomas is a thought leader, speaker and industry practitioner in Houston TX. The scope of his work has included interface design for mobile, SaaS system architecture, usability research, and data visualization.

“By Separating the signal from the noise”

• Understand which aspects you want to communicate to you audience 
• Communicate the context of the data
• Don’t use visuals as “decoration”

• Explain your graph of choice , don’t just assume everyone in your audience understands it because it has labels .
• Highlight why your audience should care - what does the data mean

Thomas Watkins is a thought leader, speaker and industry practitioner located in Houston TX. He is a life-long learner who has a passion for bringing greater clarity to the world.

Thomas has made it his career’s focus to combine technology with design psychology in order to drive business success. He specializes in helping his business partners bring their own brilliant ideas to life, by translating complexity into simplicity. The scope of his work has included interface design for mobile, SaaS system architecture, usability research, and data visualization.

LINKS
https://www.3leaf.consulting/
https://www.instagram.com/3leafmethod
https://www.linkedin.com/in/watkinsthomas/

Show Link - Graph Selection Matrix
https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Graph_Selection_Matrix.pdf

​Leigh Arredondo  00:01
You X cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host Lee Alan arrow Dano, and I'm a UX leader and leadership coach. Hi, Thomas, thank you so much for joining me on UX cake. Today, I'm really excited to talk to you about visualizing data for more powerful presentations and kind of like data visual visualization in general. Where are you talking to us from today? 

Thomas Watkins  00:35
I am in Houston, where I'm based and I met the Met, we work one of the WeWork offices. 

Leigh Arredondo  00:42
Nice. Yeah. Well tell us a little bit about what you do in the world of user centered design and research. 

Thomas Watkins  00:49
Yeah, sure. So I'm a UX practitioner. And I lead a team of UX folks, we tackle problems where people are trying to innovate in business. And so I work with a lot of startups, I work with a lot of companies who are trying to do something new, like a startup. And we ended up learning a lot of kind of like interesting, unique things in that space. And in addition to that, we kind of we do data visualization, as well, I am very, very into data visualization. And I've kind of been on a personal journey and or a mission for the past, I don't know, maybe 10 years or so to bring data visualization more into the consciousness of UX practitioners, because I think that's where it belongs. I think it kind of belongs with UX people. But for some reason, if you go to like data visualization conferences, and you kind of see what's going on in that space, it's mainly dominated by kind of technologists, and a little bit data scientists, but mostly business people who just like making fancy graphics. And so I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of opportunity for growth in that area. And that's something I'm very passionate about. 

Leigh Arredondo  02:22
Yeah, I love that you love data. I think data is so important. And so that's why I wanted to, you know, talk about this. I know a lot of folks, particularly in design less so in research, who are a little bit maybe scared of data, maybe they just don't understand it, maybe didn't learn about it in, you know, in their schooling. And I think for designers, it's equally important that we don't have to be data scientists, we don't have to, you know, be like deep into data. But we do need to have data to inform our decisions. And we need to speak about how it informs our decisions and design decisions and research findings. So I'd love to hear a little more about your, your passion for data visualization. And how did you become so interested in it? 

Thomas Watkins  03:14
Yeah, so the, I'm actually fortunate enough to have. So I have a big background in research. And I spent years toiling in a graduate school basement dealing with data and designing experiments, running participants, taking the data off of a floppy disk and loading it into a statistical program. And doing that day in day out for years. And with that, I had a developed a really strong comfort level with data where it wasn't scary for me. So I got used to thinking about data in terms of columns and rows, in terms of independent variables and dependent variables, in terms of descriptive statistics and things that you need to do to data in order to analyze it. And so when I got out of school, and I started working in UX, I did kind of regular UX like everybody else. But then I started getting into data visualization, I had to work on something that caused me to want to read Stephen Few's work. And then I went down a rabbit hole of getting deeply, deeply obsessed with data visualization, it kind of had a little bit of an advantage over maybe the average designer who might not have that kind of background. So when I was learning, data visualization, and what you're supposed to do with different types of graphs and displays and what process you're supposed to go through with the data. For me, it was quick to pick up. So I think it was a combination for me of both having the interest having a little bit of that background being in the UX space and a little bit on that. And then so also for myself, when I did started doing consulting, started designing a lot of dashboards. And so when you're dealing with dashboards, of course, you're dealing with a scenario where you have a target user and that target user needs to receive information as a part of their daily decision making process, and you need to optimize it for that. And so as a professional getting lots of practice designing lots of different dashboards, that put me in a position to kind of, you know, gain an understanding of this stuff. So by the time I started kind of teaching this in workshops, and trying to evangelize, this is something that I think should be one of those things in our toolkit, not that every UX person has to be an expert on it, but having it in our toolkit to where it's something you could be an expert on, kind of like accessibility, right? All designers should know something about accessibility, but not everybody is going to be an accessibility buff, right? And so it's a little bit similar with data visualization is its own big space, everybody can get like a little bit. So they're not being basically good with their data visualization design. But then there's a deeper path for those who are super interested in it a nice addition to UX teams, right? So if you have a UX team would say, you know, six people, it's kind of nice to have maybe one person on the team who's, who's kind of comfortable with that kind of problem. 

Leigh Arredondo  06:06
Yeah. And actually, that was you kind of hit on what one of the questions that I had as a follow up for you about y'know, how much is enough knowledge? You also mentioned a book or an author, Stephen few. Yes. Can you give us the name of the book? 

Thomas Watkins  06:24
Absolutely. So I think Stephen Few would be the kind of most important and accessible and very thorough body of work. And I think I would start with probably Information Dashboard Design by Steven Few. And then he has a number of other books that are that are good that get into different areas and different slices of the data visualization problem. Show Me The Numbers. Now You See It are a few others.  it's a perspective that the purpose of data visualization is communication, okay, and what kind of communication? Well, you're communicating with a person's perceptive and cognitive systems. So you want to craft the visual attributes of your data visualization, so that they best speak to our way of perceiving. And so the ultimate goal is, I want a person to be able to look at this data display and be able to gain insights very easily, and not just gain insights. But particularly what's important about this data, right? different data sets have different types of things that are important about them, you know, so for example, for, you might be looking at data for stocks, and the most important thing might be trending direction, and volatility, right. Or you might be comparing the performance of multiple different entities, most important thing to grasp from it is a quantity comparison .So depending on the type of thing that the person is supposed to get from it, we can actually craft the data display to optimize for someone's ability to see that to separate the signal from the noise in a particular data set. And that is the perspective that we want to approach as data visualization is. And as UX people who are adopting that as a skill set, we want to learn a little bit about about how to do that, how do people perceive things? What is the particular use case with the persona and what they need to glean from the data? And ultimately, what are the best practices of how to bring all that together? And we can do a lot of great stuff in this space doing that. Yeah, I think maybe it helps to even bring an example of research. So people can who are listening can sort of visualize what you're talking about. So let's say there's a, there's a data set that you have from user research, and the number of people who's rated something, you know, a concept, let's say on a scale of one to five, or one to 10, and you're trying to communicate something about something meaningful about that data. So just using that as an example, or if you have a, you know, another example that's better.

Leigh Arredondo  09:40
But yeah, just kind of talk talk to me about that a little bit. How to think about it, I guess, if you're, if you're sort of if you want to say, I want to make this really clear this, what I'm trying to get at that, you know, most people were kind of neutral. You could look at the numbers, right and say, oh, yeah, there's, you know, 30% of the people said it was great. But then let's look at what's what's this the rest of the 70%?

Thomas Watkins  10:06
Correct? Yeah, so um, so a lot of times, what we're trying to do is compare quantities of things. And so when we look at how do we most accurately judge the the size of a certain thing, were very accurate if we're talking about like the position of dots, or the length of lines. And if you do, and when I teach data visualization by workshops, I start off with an exercise where people have to make judgments about different objects and things and we judge the accuracy. And they're able to see for themselves that we're better at some things than others. One thing that we're bad at is judging the volume of two dimensional areas. And we're even worse, if it gets three dimensional, we tend to dramatically underestimate. And there's, there's actually equations that can predict how bad we are at this. So that's one thing, if we want people to judge quantities, you know, maybe, for example, a bar graph or a dot plot that to be confused with the scatterplot, a dot plot where the position of the data is like the end of the bar graph, you know, that is more effective. And also, the other issue is the vocabulary of our data visualization. So people run to pie graphs a lot, because it's a very well known type of graph. But pie graphs are specifically designed for parts a hole into information. And that's not always what you're interested in. So if I have a dataset that has, let's say, 100 different categories, and I say, Okay, well, we're trying to compare the size of each one, put it in a pie graph, well, first of all, there's going to be too many slice slices, pie graphs don't scale, well, you know, maybe take the top 10 or something like that, plot those on bar graphs, and then you're able to compare quantities. You know, there's other problems that pie graphs, you're comparing two dimensional area, you're comparing your mapping angles, because of the slices on two quantitative judgments. And we're also bad at that. So it takes a bunch of things that we're bad at and puts it into one graph. So you know, each type of graph is good at the different things, scatter plots are good for showing how correlated two items are. And that's what they're in vintage for. And that's kind of what you're able to do with it. So it's a little bit about that it's a little bit about from a design pattern perspective, no different from regular UX, where we want to be aware of existing design patterns, lists versus dropdowns, versus, you know, other types of things. It's the same thing in data visualization, there's different things tools you have at your disposal. And you know, you shouldn't pick it based upon what type of graph is your favorite type of graph, as you you'll often find yourself in that kind of situation with maybe an executive who likes a certain type of graph that says, you know, I like scatter plots, or I like bubble charts. And, but we have to be there to kind of inform the process and say, This is what this graph is good at. And it's not good at this other things. So we want to be able to do that. Did you want to do like a specific example? Like a specific?

Leigh Arredondo  13:04
I know, it's hard, because so many of us are visual thinkers. We're using complete words. Yeah, so please tell me in words, what that would look like. But actually, yeah, could use kind of describe? Well, I have two questions. Right. My first question actually, is, how does one go about figuring out what the right graph for visualization is? And then maybe we can just kind of talk through an example that maybe someone would use because I'd love to talk about this in a way where people could use this in their presentations. We'll get to that too, a little bit more. But you know, how to visualize user research data, for example. So first question, I kind of molded those together. First question being, how does one find out or figure out what is the right way to represent this visually? And then maybe if you could try to describe visually what it might look

Thomas Watkins  14:04
like? Yeah, so I would advocate with all of UX. And with data visualization as well start with the persona, considering the persona, user centered design, who is the recipient of this data? Some things that you might consider there is, what are their skill sets, proclivities, and other things like that? Then the scenario, what decisions do they need to make based upon this data display?

Leigh Arredondo  14:33
Yes, so that's a very, very good point there because like, sometimes you have to present this information to program managers or product managers, or product owners. And that's very different than presenting to the sales and marketing team, and very different than presenting to executives,

Thomas Watkins  14:53
right. Totally. Yeah. And then if we're talking about the President's presentation, we have the benefit of at least realizing what the main point about this dataset is that we want to communicate and designing exactly for that, rather than the more complex situation of designing a dashboard, or a situational awareness display where we have to anticipate what the data is might show and designed for that, which is, which is more complicated. But then so if we're talking about presentations, I think that's a good start, you know, who is the audience? Like you said, if it's, if it's sales, folks, if it's executives, there's different aspects of the data. That's interesting. So we want to understand the data first, as the folks working with the data and look at it and say, Okay, what am I trying to communicate, and you want to communicate it in a way that's honest, yet gets the point across, right. So you don't want to do dishonest things with your graphs, like exaggerate things or make them you know, not to scale. To make your point. You want it, you want it to be honest. And but you want it to be enlightening. So one of the one of the trends that I've seen a lot for, I don't know, maybe the past 10 years or so, I call it the donut stamp. And it's the, it's a donut graph with just a number in the beginning in the middle of it. And you'll see dashboards and are very common, right where you see like a number, and this is going to label. And it's kind of this perspective that the data consists of maybe an interesting number that's there to be decorated. And that's a very common approach to data visualization, of just saying like a number, and then I'm going to decorate it. Well, putting together your presentation, instead of decorating your number, surround it, not with a decoration, but with context. So what context might be interesting. So if we say that our our annual revenue was $50 million, compared to what is it compared to previous years? Is that the interesting thing that we want to communicate? Is it compared to other big players in the industry? You know, are we making some kind of a competitive or strategic statement with it? What is it that we're trying to communicate, so that would be kind of my one major piece of advice that you'll go very far just trying to do that is plotting the data along with context, that makes for a much more interesting and useful data visualization,

Leigh Arredondo  17:26
I can totally see that. Because, and I see this a lot with research findings, especially the team is so wrapped, you know, is so deep in it, and they really, they come to conclusions. And they they give these numbers like, Okay, but what does that mean? Like, that seems significant is significant enough for you to raise it to the level of, you know, an executive summary, don't make the the audience have to figure out what that means?

Thomas Watkins  18:01
Totally. So there's so many things to speak on there. Because putting on your researcher hat is a little bit what you're doing in that case. So like, I'm thinking in terms of like academic standards around presenting data, you want to set the proper stage, kind of like what you're alluding to? Why should people care? What numbers are kind of expected? I think setting the stage around the research in general, we need to do that even before getting to the data. And so that's kind of what is the research question. You know, why matters? And then going into, okay, you know, this is what we did, and all of that stuff, and then presenting the data in a way that it's just the results are clear. So if it's, maybe it's let's say it's results from a Likert scale, and the strongly disagree to strongly agree for, for listeners who may not be familiar with the term I use, you want to show a lot of times in those cases, the summary of how people answered it, here's a couple of things to think about. How do we summarize the data? Because that's really all we're trying to do with data visualization, we're trying to visually summarize it. But even before that, with data thinking, right, thinking of statisticians, not just the design thinking, but the data thinking, how do we give people an idea of what's going on with the data, you have measures of central tendency, and you have measures of distribution? I think these are sometimes, you know, overlooked, we think about mean, median, and mode with measures of central tendency, what did the data tend to do? And then you have your kind of indicators of how to how was this data distributed? So, range, standard deviation and things like that. And, you know, if you if you plot the district in a histogram, you can see the distribution. So imagine that for each question. item on your Likert scale, you have, you know, the bar graphs, and vertical bar graphs stuck together so that it looks like a distribution with the strongly disagree to strongly agree, all plotted together. And then now you can see the shape of the data how people answered and draw like a line vertically, where the mean is usually you're going to be using mean for that so that people can see. So now you're not just saying like, well, the average person said, Oh, they agree with that statement. Well, you could see agree, but you get the richer context of how do people generally answer and then this is, you know, where people land. And now people can see, like some of the data that might not have been reported? Like, is it bimodal? Or is it like heavily skewed and, and things like that. So presenting the results, setting the audience up to where they're going to be able to, they're ready for the results right there ready to perceive it. And then, and then marching through the results is the way to do it. Here's another tip. Another thing that we don't do often enough, folks, in general don't do it often enough, is they just don't give the proper orientation around how to read the graph, they throw the graph up, the audience is kind of stuck sitting there staring at the screen and kind of looking at it and kind of trying to interpret it, throw up the graph and say what it is, even if it feels obvious, it's a good way to orient, people tell people the x axis is showing the responses. The y axis is showing how many people responded to each one, boom, now you've added so much more clarity and taking taken so many question marks out of people's heads and got it to where they can know now they're where you are where you're they're interpreting the data,

Leigh Arredondo  21:46
right? Even if it's labeled, like you're talking, even if it's legs, you're talking through it just like actually, that's right to what what it is you're

Thomas Watkins  21:55
That's right, that's right. As soon as you throw up the graph, say like, oh, this is the such and such graph, the title of the graph, you might say what the graph is. And this is a time series showing number of sales across three departments over the past two quarters. And you know, it Okay, time series, now they know kind of a little bit about it. And then the y axis is showing number of scales. Okay, so now everybody's know everybody's on the same page. And that goes a long way to print on presenting data.

Leigh Arredondo  22:25
One of the things that you kind of alluded to, which is like what I love about data and looking at kind of the anomalies in data, so you mentioned like a Likert scale, and you've got showing the median, I think, is what you said, and then you sort of like hurriedly said, you know, and then you know, there might be interesting skews and data or you know, some other anomalies, which actually is, is what a lot of people miss, right. And so I just wanted to make sure that we talk about looking for the interesting story and data, and then telling that interesting story in data in a visual way. Excellent point, I guess. Yeah. And I'll just hand it to you. But I think sometimes it's really, you would get us a very different story, if you just did the mean. And you didn't show Oh, everybody either either loved it, or hated it. You know, it's sort of like, it's actually,

Thomas Watkins  23:24
that's right. Yeah. Yeah, no one was in the moment, and everyone was on the sides. Yeah, that's an excellent point. And yeah, it's this is just a really good sub topic of it. Because it also speaks to be one of the advantages to being able to present the data versus the complexity is around designing a data display where the data is going to be different and vary each time, you can get familiar with the data. And you can find out what you think is interesting about it, and highlight it, highlight it in the actual data, display, circle things, point to things and show people why they should care. Now, you know, hopefully, you're not doing it in a deceptive way. And hopefully, folks in the audience are informed enough to be able to see see the data also for themselves. But in terms of communicating insights, what you're doing is you're you're giving folks the point that you want them to get the same way they would receive it if you just wrote a report or something like that, but they're also seeing the context of the real data. And so that's kind of one way of handling that. So that might be like in a line graph where there's a big spike at some certain point and people can see it, but then you might, you know, kind of highlight what that is for changes in trends, you know, and other things like that. But yeah, presenting it as a good opportunity to be able to do that.

Leigh Arredondo  24:46
Yeah. You mentioned earlier about instead of decorating numbers, I loved how you put that instead of decorate numbers, showing the context. Do you have any Can you give us any more sort of things? examples of how someone might do that visually.

Thomas Watkins  25:02
Yeah, so there's the donut stamp. That's a one big example, I think the biggest example I can think of is, right now is benchmarking showing a set of magnitudes or something like that. And you're saying like, let's say you're showing the, you know, our sales for this year, or, I don't know, a number of downloads or something like this, you might not even have the data that to compare it to, but you can oftentimes find it. Sometimes you can generate the data, if you have that your organization, if you have access to the folks who, you know, maybe you have a data science department or something like that, ask people if they have they collect data on anything, and sometimes you can find stuff. Sometimes you can go to those, like those Gartner media reports and things like that and find, you know, industry averages for things like that. Find data on it. Now, this gets a little bit tricky, because you'd have to make sure that you understand enough about the data that you're doing apples to apples comparisons, sometimes it's you want to think first about what matters. And, you know, why should it matter? You know, we hear oftentimes, like, you know, in the news, you'll hear like big numbers, this will add, you know, such and such a billion dollars to the deficit go oh, my gosh, that sounds like a bit. Is that a big number? I don't know, sounds? I have no, I have no idea with it. That's big. But you see that happen all the time, where the magnitude or the you know, there was a 700% increase in such as compared to what is doesn't normally very like that is it is held or more wild than before. That's part of the integrity of this discussing and communicating data is getting in the habit of giving context. So if the integrity plus the clarity, and helping people really be able to interpret things in the proper way.

Leigh Arredondo  26:54
Yeah, I love that. You also mentioned going out and finding data, like secondary sources of data, there's so much information out there that it can take some digging, if you don't have access to like a page source of industry standards, but there are paid sources of industry standards out there as well. So yeah, going out and finding secondary data that you could use as a benchmark is is can be super helpful, like, Okay, so we're seeing this sort of behavioral data, right, in our on our website, you know, is that good or bad? Percentages can be really deceiving. When you're talking about something like any kind of behavioral information on a website, it could be like we have 3% conversion, is that good?

Thomas Watkins  27:49
That's right. And then, and then here's, here's another one, sometimes you have to calculate the data based on something that's already being collected. And I'll give you an example. With a lot of startups when they're bootstrapping and just trying to get the code built, they'll collect data that's collected in like a logging sense, but not Dilek. Set up for BI. So here's an example. Let's take your example of like website, conversions, what you might see is like you might be gathering, how many customers ever have bought something. And what they might have on the back end is just an ever accumulating number, like each new purchase just adds to the total. And then that's, that's the only metric that they have. And then, and then getting the other, you know, it might be like, surprisingly complex to build the back end to be able to collect that. And there's a lot of things like that. And in the startup space, you'd be surprised like how many just like it's just logging in evergrowing accumulation? Well, you can calculate something more useful from that, even though the Data Science Department says they don't have those numbers, you can take that number and then divide it by, you know, how many folks per time period converted on our on our service. And then you're able to now have metrics that are more meaningful, you can say that, you know, 70 people per day, bought something on the website, you know, this year, on average versus last year, when it's 30 people per day, now you're able to get something meaningful from it. So then, that's where I, you know, I talk a lot about data thinking, where you have to think, design thinking not only for the data, insights and how to put it together and how to design the graphs and so forth. But you also might have to engage in data thinking so you, you have some massive data that's being collected, what are the things that you can do to the data to get the numbers that you want? Another example of data thinking might be computing ratios, because a lot of times what might matter is a ratio we deal with ratios all the time, but we don't necessarily think about it like when you drive down the street, your miles per hour, that's that's a ratio. Right? And it's, it's meaningful, and that's how you get arrayed. So sometimes that's another interesting thing you can do with the data is, is say like, Okay, well this thing by itself kind of matters, but not much without context is other thing matters. But if I do sales per such and such one, now I have a ratio, or how many conversions compared to marketing dollars spent on a campaign. Now we have this meaningful ratio that built in has the relationship between two different things that I care about, and automatically tells me the relationship between those two factors. So that's a lot of data thinking, that kind of plays a role in being able to do data communication, effectively,

Leigh Arredondo  30:40
data thinking, is just the thought that came into my head is That sounds scary for someone who, you know, maybe doesn't think data is cool. Yeah. I am curious, like for the folks who take your workshop, like, what tends to be one of the, like, biggest, is there anything that people find surprising that they thought was going to be kind of like, ooh, scary? And and it turns out, like, what makes that shift? Yeah,

Thomas Watkins  31:13
I think a lot of it is realizing how ineffective the kind of impulsive first response of how would I visualize this data often can be and how it's not that complicated to pick something that's like, way more way more effective. You know, one of the things that we've got to think about when we visualize data, is we're not making diagrams, we're plotting points. So like, a lot of times, you might be in a business meeting, someone goes up to the board, and they say, like, well, here's how I see us versus the competitors. And then they'll start, they'll draw quadrant, and then they'll put dots that represent the different players in that. And then, so that's fine for a diagram for you just drawing something because you're kind of showing the relationship. But if you're thinking about data visualization, you've got to prioritize, how does the quantity of the different data points yet encoded visually in a way that the meaningful thing comes out. So if I'm comparing the magnitude of different things, I want to graph that maximizes that so bar graphs are very good or bad. If I want to show, if I want to show the shape of something, I might choose a line graph, because that's something that I pre attentively can get a gestalt of how is this thing shaped. And so if I'm trying to show trends or something like that, then you know, a line graph will often be very effective for that. Or if I'm trying to show the relationship between two variables, a correlation, you know, scatterplot, might be the most effective depending on on exactly what you're doing. But what you can see, instant, instantly perceived features of the graph are apparent right away. And now it's just a matter of just being properly oriented so that your, you know, your perception is directed in the right direction. But I think I think once folks kind of get used to it, it's kind of fun. But it but if I had to boil it down to kind of takeaways that I think if you're not such a big data person, some things that you can think about, I would say, measures of central tendency, so giving people an idea of what is the data generally doing. So mean, median, and mode, usually mean, aka average, median is used for datasets where there are extreme examples that will skew the data. So there's no longer representative. That's why median often used for things like income, because you have a few number, a small number of celebrities and super, super rich people who would would drag the line too far over. So you use median, because it's a robust against extremes, like things like that giving people an idea of what the general data generally do measure of central tendency, and then a measure of distribution. How is this so you can either display it in some kind of a distribution, standard deviation is a little bit sophisticated for maybe the average audience that may not be that into the academics of it, but I think most of you will kind of get in range is a simple one, but not as descriptive. But I think getting this area is called descriptive statistics for the listeners. And if you just get the basic descriptive statistics, that's usually fairly good for giving people a good impression of it, and then and then plotting it in a way that that that it can be understood.

Leigh Arredondo  34:41
Yeah. So for someone who is interested in having more effective displays of data, how could they learn without like, diving into I gotta say tough too tough these books. Yeah, I don't know. Much Sorry about the other author that you mentioned, but like, How could someone kind of figure out okay, I have some data, what is the right way to display this? You know, like, based on the principles that you've been talking about the principles of perception,

Thomas Watkins  35:17
one thing they can do, they can sign up for my workshop, which will be USPA. International 2022 in San Diego, but if you if you don't have time for that, and if that's not in your schedule, yeah, there are there are some recent, The tricky thing is finding things that are really, that you can trust. And by trust, I mean, coming from a perspective. That is That is correct. I'm looking up right now, Stephen view, did kind of like this one page, cheat sheet. That kind of gets you pretty far. And I'm trying to look up the name of it, because they use it a lot. Yeah,

Leigh Arredondo  35:55
we can, for sure. put links in the show notes. Yes.

Thomas Watkins  35:59
And so I've found there's, there's some, there's some bad cheat sheets that I do not recommend. But there's there's some good ones. Yeah, there's one that's called a conversation starter that floated around for years. It's called Chart suggestions. A thought starter? It looks interesting. That's,

Leigh Arredondo  36:18
yeah, that's the bad one. Okay, so don't use Don't

Thomas Watkins  36:20
Don't, don't use that one. What you want to use is if you want a cheat sheet, there is graph selection matrix. My Stephen few perceptual edge, there's a bigger problem, I think it's the preference, political aspect, the

Leigh Arredondo  36:37
preference of the person seeing it, you mean, no, the

Thomas Watkins  36:41
the preference of the the folks who work above you often, who will have their own favorite types of graphs, favorite types of displays, they want things to be flashy, and colorful. And there's this misconception that if you don't make your data display, flashy and colorful, and interesting enough that people won't be engaged with it. And that's an incorrect assumption, the easy example I like to give to people is, let's say that you woke up one morning and you logged into your bank account. And then you saw that your bank account had a million dollars in it, you'd be very excited, you don't need the text for 1 million to be flashing or moving or colorful, in order for that to be. Because it's it's something that it's data that's already very meaningful to you. And so you don't need the declaration. And so it's really the engagement is really about finding things that matter to people presenting that, and highlighting the things about the data that will be that will be engaging to the end. And I promise you every single time no matter what the recipients, no matter what their job role is their job title, whether it's blue collar work, white collar, no matter what kind of, if you show somebody a dashboard, or a display, that shows metrics that are important to their day to day work, they will interpret it and if there's something interesting going on there, that's that would be meaningful and meaningful in real life, and you're plotting it on a data display, it will be interesting to them. Because that's how people that's how people perceive it. And so I think a lot of that is really one of the biggest hurdles is working with executives, a lot of it is going to be an educational process. And so doing some testing along with it, saying, Hey, we showed this to the actual users, it performed well, with people being able to use it with people being engaged, and having some of that stuff to kind of back it up will help get over those hurdles, if you have, you know, open minded people in your organization. But that is very often a little bit of a battle that needs to be to be fought.

Leigh Arredondo  38:44
Yeah, that seems like a really pretty important takeaway, which is find out what's actually most meaningful to the audience that you're showing the data to. And then it will be and and, and then takeaway number two is make sure that you are having the

Unknown Speaker  39:06
context. That's right. That's right. That's right, that makes it meaningful.

Thomas Watkins  39:12
What does it mean? Where people are able to get it and get insights and creates a lot of interesting conversations around the data as well.

Leigh Arredondo  39:20
I love that conversations around the data. So in summary, you gave us some resources, and I'll have a link to that graph selection matrix for like cheat sheet. That sounds awesome. You mentioned that you've got a workshop coming up. Tell us just a bit about how people can find out about what you're what you've got going on because you do workshops occasionally.

Thomas Watkins  39:45
Yeah, absolutely. You can do relief dot consulting, and that's a relief. Relief. Yeah. The number three and then the word leaf consulting. Find me on LinkedIn. Thomas Watkins. Yeah, in the the workshop that I mentioned. It's kind of designed for business professionals and UX designers and covering what are some of the approaches we want to make for effective graphs for presentations, for dashboards? And for data discovery platforms? What should we be thinking about? And what techniques can we use? And we do we practice examples where we redesign poorly constructed graphs, practice, redesigning them, discuss them as a group, and practice taking data and materializing that into data visualizations and discussing the pros and cons of different approaches, and getting it to where we get an increasing comfort with the practice of data visualization.

Leigh Arredondo  40:42
That sounds like such a great opportunity for anybody who can take that workshop. I think you mentioned when we talked before, that you also do workshops sometimes in your area,

Thomas Watkins  40:53
right? Correct. Yeah. So I talk a lot about design psychology, and the importance of when we're designing products, when we're solving problems, thinking about things in a very user centric, you know, human centered design, where we're taking into account and understanding of how our people will construct it, and generally, and then how our is your user, specifically? And considering all those kinds of factors when we're designing things, designing products that needs to meet people's needs, it needs to resonate with users.

Leigh Arredondo  41:27
And that's in Houston. Yes. Are you do these talks?

Thomas Watkins  41:31
Mostly I travel around, but yes, I'm situated in

Leigh Arredondo  41:33
Houston. Thank you so much, Thomas. Thank you, and I really enjoyed our conversation. And thank you so much for sharing with the audience. Absolutely. Hey, if you enjoyed this slice of UX cake, please rate it and subscribe. tell others what you liked about it. It really helps us spread the word and get this free content to more people. You can follow UX cake on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, and get all the episodes and show notes at UX kake.co. Thank you for listening and sharing the UX cake

No doubt you're already practicing challenging assumptions in your user-centered work -- identifying what you think you know (or assume) about users' attitudes and actions, and finding out if those assumptions are true, or what else is true. But how often do you take that same approach towards the people you work with, and in your own career? The result can be surprising, and even transformational.

This week’s episode I’m talking about how challenging our assumptions about the motivations of others can really change the outcomes we have at work, how it can lead to creating unexpected opportunities, and build bridges of understanding. And we can use this same skill to examine our own beliefs and identify underlying motivations as well. Practicing this skill can create tremendous results for us - help us make better decisions, improve our communication, build trust, increase our influence.

Today I’m sharing insights from my career in UX leadership, and my own personal experience of relying on false assumptions. 

Although it does sound quite simple, it isn’t as easy as just asking “what do you want?”  It takes curiosity and openness to what we don't know and listening to find out. 

What tends to happen is we start creating conclusions about what's important to others or what their goals are, because we're interpreting their words and actions through our own perspective and our own experiences.

Here is a simple practice to try next time a challenge comes up in a project or in communication or in your confidence: 

• Write out every possible assumption you could be making (little and big )
  
• Highlight which ones might be presenting obstacles, or might radically alter the outcome. 
  
• Now start poking some holes. Ask “How do I know that's true?”,” Is this always true?”,”What else might be true?“
  
• Lastly and most importantly ask yourself “how can I find out”
  

By doing this simple exercise you will be able to gain more clarity on your insights and identify the truth about your assumptions. When you open your minds to looking for “what else might be true,” you can break the cycle of false assumptions held fast by false evidence.

This can be scary and out of your comfort zone, but continuing to rely on false assumptions can keep us from believing in other possibilities.


Listen to the podcast to find out more on how you can transform your results by challenging the assumptions.

​

TRANSCRIPTION

​0:04  
You X cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host, Lee Alan arrow Dano, and I'm a UX leader and leadership coach.

0:22  
Episode 47,

0:24  
challenging our assumptions can transform our results. Hello, thank you for joining me on UX cake today. So this is a new season. And we're going to be trying some new things. And one of those things is I'll be doing some solo episodes now and again, focusing on topics that are really important to leadership in UX. And today I'm talking about challenging our assumptions and how we can really get different surprisingly better results. When we do that this topic is important to anyone really not just leaders in UX, any field or phase of life. But it really is foundational to good leadership, and leading well. And I've seen real growth and development when this is addressed with the people that I work with. And in my own career. And in my own life, I want to share with you how practicing this one thing, even just making some tweaks to what you're doing right now can create tremendous results that can help you make better decisions, improve your communication, build trust, increase influence, even increase your confidence, or reduce anxiety. And it's actually pretty simple. But it's not always easy. And it's hard to remember to do this on a regular basis. So that's why I call this a practice. Now chances are, if you are in a user centered discipline, you're already practicing this skill pretty regularly in your work. This is a core tenet of user centered design. Right? We are not our users. And we can't assume that we know our users goals and motivations. So this is critical to making products and services that our customers really want and want to use. We have to find out what their underlying goals and motivations actually are, versus what we assume they are. And we do that through observation and inquiry. Making assumptions and not questioning our assumptions in product strategy that is poison to innovation and continued growth is inquiry for finding out the customer's goals and motivations. It's not as simple as just asking them, right, what do you want? So what do you want? What's your goal? Right? There's a whole lot of other questions that we have to ask kind of ask around it to find out and keep prompting them to get at that using the deep listening approach is something that I talked with Indy young about in episode 44, we're prompting them rather than using questions. And it takes curiosity and openness to what we don't know and listening to find out. So the same is true of the people that we work with. And the people we work for our colleagues, our stakeholders, our clients, we often assume that what's important to us is important to the people that we're working with, and the people around us that others motivations are the same or similar to ours. And we create conclusions about what's important to others or what their goals are, because we're interpreting their words and actions through our own perspective and our own experiences. And sometimes we might be right or partially right. Let's say we're on a team of people working together towards a common goal, we can possibly assume that everybody wants to create a great experience for the customer. And hopefully everyone wants the business to do well. Right? So that might be true. But those are really kind of obvious. surface level goals. What else might be true? What else could be important? Or might be motivating them? These other people that we're working with, right? What are some underlying goals that might influence people's decisions or actions? What are some of your underlying goals, feeling the need to impress leadership demonstrating responsibility, maybe showing the value of your work or showing the value of your team and your team's work? Maybe getting promoted? Or getting more headcount, possibly proving out a strategy? I mean, I've seen this play out so many different ways. In In the workplace, let me tell you a story about a designer and a PM. It's a very common story. In fact, there's probably there could be multiple people listening to this podcast who think I'm talking about them.

5:15  
This could have been five years ago, a year ago, a month ago, this story may sound familiar to you, too. But there is a twist, a surprising twist at the end. So this designer, I'm going to call her Michelle, she comes to me to discuss a problem that she's having with a PM. Now what she comes to me with is that the problem that she believes she's having is that she needs to build trust with the PM, and she needs to get him more on board with design. So let's take a step back and say, what's leading her to believe this? Well, here's sort of the scenario, the Pm is making a lot of design decisions and changing the design in pretty fundamental ways. And he's not involving her at all. He's not implementing the recommendations from the research that they did. She's tried involving him more in the research, getting him to go to research sessions, and he's always been too busy, she feels excluded. And then most recently, they had a design review, and because of what, you know, sort of had been going on in the background in her head, basically, she got defensive, and because of that, he got defensive. And the end result was that it just it didn't go very well, they they didn't make the progress that they needed to make. So she's feeling like he doesn't trust her design recommendations. And this is why she thinks she needs to build trust. So on the surface, that might seem like a good approach, how could she build trust, she's thinking, maybe she just hasn't shown enough user data or the right user data to change his mind. So my question to her was, what are his goals? And she starts with Well, I mean, the project goals are decreasing calls to support and streamlining the onboarding. No, no, no, no, no, no. All that. What are his goals? Right? What's important to him? What does he think the challenges here? What other things could be motivating him? Maybe he's feeling a need to show ownership for some reason? Like, you know, he needs to look good. Maybe he's up for a promotion. What is his previous experience with design and research been? Like? Could it be, he's felt burned before, you know, maybe it's not about you at all, maybe it's about a poor relationship he had with design and research previously. So basically, she didn't know. And realize she needed to have a conversation with the PM, to find out actually what's driving what's driving these actions, after discussing some strategies for how she could talk with him, and, you know, keep it non defensive, she scheduled a conversation with him. And the outcome of that was such a surprise to both of us, it was nothing that either of us could have predicted, it turned out, actually he was moving to a different role in the company and a different part of the organization. So what was important to him really was just trying to wrap this project up. So he could hand it off to the developers before he left. And it actually had nothing to do with him wanting to take more ownership, which is, you know, kind of how it seemed to me at the surface. And certainly, we could have made that assumption, he didn't have an issue with her designs, per se, he didn't even realize the design implications of the decisions that he was making, you know, he was just trying to get this wrapped up. So turns out, the design was actually not his top priority at all. So with this knowledge, now, Michelle could make a better way forward by creating a plan that she could take to him, right. And that would allow her to take the time that the design actually needed. And she could be the liaison with the development after he left. So by knowing what was motivating this Pm, she could suggest a solution that would meet everybody's underlying needs, and in the end, create a better product. So that opportunity for Michelle to step up and show her own leadership in that project, absolutely would not have happened, had she not questioned her assumptions, and then taking the next step to actually find out and scheduling what she thought would be a very difficult conversation and was was not a conversation she was necessarily looking forward to right. But she did it anyway. So what could have been a real career blocker? Honestly, I've seen people leave companies because of situations like this that just build and build over time. So what could have been a career block or actually became an opportunity for Michelle to really level up? So often when we're we find ourselves faced with a challenge, it can be really helpful to just kind of take a step back and ask, what assumptions Am I making here? And then look at those assumptions and ask, How do I know that's true? What else could be true? And then, of course, finally, how could I find out so this also comes up in what we believe is important about the work that we're doing. We can't assume that what's most important to us about what we're doing is what our collaborators or our stakeholders or clients or our boss thinks is important about the work. If you want more collaboration with people at work, find out what's important to them. Do you wish you could be better at managing up? Are you wondering how to increase your influence? Start by asking yourself, what assumptions have you been making about what's important to those people, above you, around you? And then go find out what is actually important to those individuals? What challenges are they facing? What do they see, as most important about the work that you're doing? How does it integrate with the work that they're doing? It doesn't have to take a really long time to ask a couple of questions or dig around. For some answers. It may mean having more conversations, which can be challenging and uncomfortable to many people, it could mean changing your the conversations you are having, and asking more questions or different kinds of questions to get at underlying motivations or assumptions that other people are making. Now, sometimes we can't have a conversation, right? I once needed to give a presentation to a group of senior leaders, including a chief marketing officer who I hadn't met, and I needed to get her on board. So I needed to find out what was important to her. And I was able to ask others around her who did work with her a lot who I did have access to. And so I was able to find out what parts of their upcoming plans and strategy she had been talking a lot about. And then rooting around on SharePoint. I found some strategy documents that she had created, and was able to see well what's top of mind for her, and what challenges she's facing and what she believes, you know, like her boss thinks is most important. So that was enough of a proxy for a conversation to inform my presentation. So I had to realize that what she saw as challenges and problems to solve, would be different. Then the chief product officer who had hired me, for example, the words she used were different, she spoke in a much more brandstory kind of way. So it actually was really important for me to adjust my perspective and the words that I use in the presentation in order to make this speak to her. So try this for yourself. Next time a challenge comes up in a project or in communication or in your confidence, a decision you're trying to make set aside some time. And honestly, you can do this in half an hour or less. Just grab a notebook and write out every possible assumption you could be making little and big, there will be plenty that don't need to be challenged, but which ones might be presenting obstacles,

13:43  
which ones might radically alter the outcome. If it's not true. start poking some holes. Do I know that's true? Is this always true? What else might be true? What about in our own lives? How can we use this take a career decision? For example? Like should I stay in my current job or look for something else?

14:04  
This one comes up for people many times throughout a career, could I make my current job better aligned with what I want and what I'm good at or with what I want to learn? So now there are lots of complexities in those questions. However, we can get more clarity and insight through this exercise of identifying your assumptions about the options you're considering and then asking, Is this true? Could something else be true? And how might I find out maybe there are other people who have made similar decisions? Could you find out what it was like for them? We often have hidden assumptions that are creating beliefs about ourselves that hold us back or keep us stuck. So what happens when you challenge those assumptions and ask yourself What else might be true? This can be transformational friends, when we can identify beliefs that don't say serve us that are holding us back. And challenging the underlying assumptions that feed them. It can be such an Unblocker. To do this exercise, let me share a personal story with you. So years ago, I had a belief about myself that I was a quitter. This was a story that I had believed since I was a kid. And when I was a kid, I would start many, many creative projects and just sort of abandon them partway through, which is something that kids do. I know now, it's very typical. But somehow I formed an assumption that any and all value of creating something was was in the completion of the thing. And I'll tell you that dogged me into adulthood through school. And as I moved from one job to another, and I did change jobs a lot. I was motivated by creating better opportunities and having interesting experiences. And I actually had a pretty successful career. But that story of being a quitter would come back to haunt me whenever I was feeling down or feeling stuck, or thinking about going for a job that was a stretch or starting something new or trying to do something hard. That belief would create thoughts that would keep me from continuing challenging things, sometimes, like a self fulfilling prophecy, which is like the vicious cycle of assumptions, right, we look for evidence to prove them out, because challenging them could be scary and feel risky or uncomfortable, but continuing to rely on false assumptions can keep us from believing in other possibilities. So besides just not serving me and not helping me and helping to keep me stuck, right. My belief that I was a quitter wasn't true. It was ignoring all of the things of value, I had created all of the valuable experiences I had had all of the expertise I had gained, besides all the many things that I could point to and say, Well, I completed that I had completed a lot of things. Right. So when I examined that belief, more deeply, I was able to kind of discover this assumption. And I had to question that assumption that the most important value of a thing or an experience is the completion. Really, is that true? What else could be true, that the value of a creative project or an experience could equally be in the doing as much as in the completing or that there is no right way to progress through a career, I can start new, challenging things, not knowing what the end looks like, and not attach to a perceived completion. And I know now that I can complete things that I really do want to finish, even if they are hard, and I don't have to complete things that I really don't want to do. And it doesn't mean anything, because I don't believe I'm a quitter. I believe I'm a doer. And if I don't want to finish reading a book, because I think it's boring. It means nothing about me, right? Except I'm too busy to read books that don't engage me. And because I know I do hard things that are important to me. I could take a break from making this podcast two years ago that I love doing but I was just burned out. And I felt okay about that. I felt like I could come back to it when I could figure out or if I could figure out how to make it more sustainable for me. And I saw that the value of what I had created so far, was helping so many, so many people already they told me, I did not make that about quitting. And I very easily could have if I still believed that limiting belief about myself. And that assumption, right? That the value is the completion. I don't even know what completing by guest would be but two years in did not feel like completion to me. But you know, it doesn't matter. And because I understand that the value was in the journey, I was able to come back to it later without feeling a lot of remorse or shame. It takes an open and curious mind to ask the questions, what else could be true, and sometimes it requires a willingness to get out of our comfort zone to find out this is such an important part of managing our mind. And it's a crucial foundation for leadership. I will also mention it is continuous. This work is never done. And it's all a journey. All of it in assumptions can be really difficult to uncover on our own. So it can be helpful to do this with Another person who could you enlist to help you discover your assumptions and challenge them. This is one of the benefits of working with a coach. It can help you create bigger and better outcomes and really accelerate your leadership development. So if investing in a coach is something that you're curious about, and you want to know more, you can get more info and book a discovery call with me. On my website. It's free. It's not a sales pitch, just go to Lee redondo.com,

20:28  
l e i g h a r r e, d o n D o. Alright, as always, thank you so much for listening. And if you found this helpful, I would very much like to know I love getting your comments and questions and feedback. You can connect with UX cake on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues because there's always enough UX cake to go around. Till next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode 46. Today we’re talking about Transitions in Research with Eniola Abioye, who’s a Sr. User Researcher at Meta, and we’re talking specifically about transitioning into User-focused or Design Research, from research- related backgrounds in other disciplines. Eniola herself came from biotechnology before moving into the design research space, and she is passionate about helping others figure out how to utilize their existing experience and to learn through doing, getting relevant experience in the real world to create a fulfilling career in UX, without necessarily going back to school. ​

Eniola began her people research career at Branding Science, an agency in the biotechnology space, and later moved on to research roles at Kaiser Permanente and Silicon Valley Bank before her current role leading research in cross-functional teams at Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook). Outside of her full-time position, Eniola is a career coach for UX Researchers and leads UX projects with social justice organizations in her community. She’s excited to share how UX Researchers are uniquely positioned to drive inclusive and accessible innovation in tech. ​

Eniola always had a love for science and people and what better way to connect it to become a pediatrician? She went to University and gained her Bachelor's of Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley. After freshman year she decided to learn more about medicine but shortly realized this was not where her passion was. 
​
She started her first job at a biotech market research and user research firm. There she was able to mix science with her love for understanding people. She learned how to speak with users and caregivers, patients and doctors - an entirely new world of people-focused research opened in front of Ebioye. 

She started with doing synthesis and analysis during interviews and was able to see how people lead conversations.

“I can understand what people are talking about and really hold space for them to talk to me about personal things. “

During her time studying Integrative Biology degree she had learned a lot about research, from how to set up a research plan, how to share your findings, how to set up your hypothesis, how to collaborate with others, learning about other companies or organizations who are in the space, were all skills she was able to bring from her education and utilize in UX research. 

Ebioye now also assists aspiring UX leaders on their journey through mentorship and coaching at https://uxoutloud.com/

Connect with Eniola Abioye
Linkedin
Website
Instagram


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TRANSCRIPT
​Leigh Arrendondo  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the UX cake Podcast, episode 46. Today we're talking about transitions in research with Eniola WBA, who's a senior user researcher at meta, and we're talking specifically about transitioning into user focused or design research from research related backgrounds in other disciplines. Eniola herself came from biotechnology before moving into the design research space. And she's passionate about helping others figure out how to utilize their existing experience, and to learn through doing getting relevant experience in the real world to create a fulfilling career in UX without necessarily going back to school. Eniola began her people research career at branding science and agency in the biotech space. And she later moved on to research roles at Kaiser Permanente and Silicon Valley Bank, in the user research area before her current role leading research in cross functional teams at meta outside her full time position. Eniola is a career coach for UX researchers. And she leads UX projects with social justice organizations in her community. She's excited to share how user researchers are uniquely positioned to drive inclusive and accessible innovation in tech. So let's jump in. Awesome. Eniola. Hello, thank you so much for joining me on UX cake.

Eniola Abioye  1:39  
Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here and talk to you today.

Leigh Arrendondo  1:42  
Yeah, yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you. We have a lot of similar passions. Not only UX and and UX research, but also coaching, and you know, getting people the support that they need. And it's can be hard to find. So I'm, I'm excited to kind of jump into these topics with you. Now, normally, I don't usually start the UX cake podcast interviews with origin story questions, we kind of like jump into the topic. So. But today, our topic is all about transitions, and transitions in research careers specifically. So I think your transition into UX from biology is really kind of a key to this interview. So I'm going to go ahead and start there. Can you just start with tell us a little bit about your journey from from biology into UX research?

Eniola Abioye  2:47  
Yeah. So I am, like you said, I have my Bachelor's of Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley, and I, you know, grew up the whole time growing up, I planned to go into medicine, pediatrics To be specific, because I really liked people. And I was also really into science, right? So bio was really my jam in high school. Chem was my jam. And so I figured, you know, at the intersection of science and people is medicine. It really makes sense to me at the time. And then I got to college in freshman year decided to like learn more about what doctors do and realized really quickly that that's not what I want to do. And so kind of throughout school, I like was a little bit more open around career choices, but had no idea about UX. I think back when I was in school, less people were in UX and less companies were interested in UX research specifically. And I really got my start as my first job outside of school was at a, a biotech market research and user research firm. So it was agency side. And I feel like that taught me a lot of things. And that's a whole different conversation. But I really got a chance to in the biotech space, kind of understand what users and caregivers and doctors and patients were going through another 10s of different therapy areas. And it just clicked for me because I had the sciency part of understanding therapy are areas and drug mechanisms. And also I get to talk to people all day, and I got to really understand what users needed, and then drive that change in the companies that we were working with. So it just really clicked for me as kind of being able to be an advocate for users, and the like, solve problems and like figure out systems and figure out how to build experiences that people responded to.

Leigh Arrendondo  4:39  
Yeah, so it sounds like a very organic sort of entry into us. Which isn't that uncommon, quite frankly. But I mean, what year was that?

Eniola Abioye  4:51  
This was back in 2015. Okay.

Leigh Arrendondo  4:56  
And so UX was was the You know, definitely around. I'm super interested in you, there's this period of time when you like, how did that go from school into the work environment? And like, did you know you were going to be working in UX research? Or you know, what, what did you think you were going to be doing?

Eniola Abioye  5:25  
So I knew what I had a good idea of what I was going to be doing, I knew I was going to be talking to folks and understanding different methodologies and how to get answers. I don't think anyone knows fully on their first job outside of college, what they're going to be doing. But I was really, really interested in kind of like the points that I knew. And then starting out, I like really started out by listening to a lot of folks run research, right. And being my kind of first role was really just like doing synthesis and analysis during interviews and got to see how people like lead conversations, and I'm very much so an extrovert, I'm very much so people person. So I was like, I can do that. And I can ask questions in ways that remove bias, and I can understand what people are talking about and really hold space for them to talk to me about personal things. And so it really just clicked and I like kept getting deeper and deeper. I still remember the first time I started moderating the first time I did research out of the country. And yeah, it just it just clicked for me. So I tell people who are interested in you XR kind of understand what it is and and what you want to do. And I think there's so much room in UX for like every type of skill set, right? You can go writing, you know, content strategy, you can go design, obviously, you can go research, and so there's just a lot to figure out. And so, me, for me getting exposure in the agency space was awesome, because I did quantitative I did qualitative, I did so many different methods, so many different types of research questions that I was working with different companies. So that was just really awesome.

Leigh Arrendondo  7:05  
Yeah, and the speaking specifically about methodology. So besides the sort of industry knowledge that you had from school, you know, specific to that subject? What was it that prepare you what sort of things that you studied, had prepared you for research? But, you know, maybe in a different way?

Eniola Abioye  7:33  
Yeah, so I, in during my Integrative Biology degree had done a lot of research, right, so the rigor around kind of how to set up a research plan, how to, you know, share your findings, how to set up your hypothesis, how to collaborate with others, who played a different role in the space is all things that I take, I took to UX research and still use now. And so what people are kind of coming from, you know, STEMI degrees, or masters or PhDs, you know, I talked to him about how the rigor that you learn around research is very, very similar and can absolutely be applied in to, you know, how you're approaching research questions and how you carry out research. I think one of the key differences between research in an academic space versus research and industry is, of course, resources. Very, very scrappy, as a student, trying to get research done. And depending on where you are in the industry, or what type of company you're at, that's not necessarily always an issue. Timelines are very different, right? I feel like I had a lot more time and a lot more space to kind of figure things out and academic research. That's not always the case. on the industry side. Your stakeholders are very different. Right? So people in academia, you know, at least the academic research that I was doing was around kind of, you know, learning for the sake of learning and contributing to the space rather than, okay, this is driving product, and this is driving our very real goals and OKRs for the year.

Leigh Arrendondo  9:08  
Yeah, that is a big, quite frankly, I think, even if you had gotten your education in user research, that would have been a big difference, because this certainly is a gap in what I see in, you know, folks entering into UX research and, you know, their love of research and their love of sharing this research. And sometimes it's received also in that way by the stakeholders, but But often, you know, it's a it's a little bit of a sales job you have to do.

Eniola Abioye  9:51  
Yeah, yeah. And I think no matter what type of company you're at, there's always gonna be an education piece. Right? You can be at a company Who's in the UX space, like, you know, creates products around UX specifically, and still have to work with your stakeholders and kind of prove the ROI of research and kind of bring people along. And that just comes alongside with it, because you're specializing in, you know, a skill set that not everybody is taught. Yeah,

Leigh Arrendondo  10:20  
for sure. I know, you some people think of, sort of, like, professionals transitioning into UX from other industries, and other disciplines is, you know, kind of a recent thing. But honestly, it's been happening since since before the beginning of the term UX, I think, around, you know, like, the beginning of the century. This century 2000. But sounds like a really long time ago, I guess it is, but you know, 22 years. I mean, I've had a very unconventional path myself, I went to film school, and design for me originally was way to put myself through school. So and then, you know, research happened very organically for me as well through the last couple of decades. But I but I think what has really been kind of a sea change in this last decade, besides the fact that we're getting a lot more programs at schools in undergrad and graduate schools, which is fantastic. has been this emergence, and really proliferation of certificate programs. And everywhere, and now online, everything's online. So I think you might have some thoughts about boot camp, you talk a little bit about it on your website. So yeah, great. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Eniola Abioye  11:46  
Yeah, you know, it's been really good to see more of like, like organize learning around UX, and just more accessible kind of avenues to understand what UX is like, as a skill set. And so many people do UX already, you know, I am a coach, and I coach UX researchers, and I tell lots of my clients, you know, kind of like understanding what you're doing already, and how that relates to UX and the methodologies that you might call something else. But you do anyways, it's super important to translate and let companies know that that's something that is part of your experience. I know a lot of people who, you know, they're a program manager positions or data scientist positions, right, and so many clients tell me, you know, I do the UX stuff, because no one else can or because I'm the closest to it, or because it needs to get done, and no one else was doing it. So it's just super important to capture that. I think as far as learning, I've seen tons and tons of different programs, I've also seen tons and tons of resources out, you know, on the interwebs that are super free, or super accessible. And I am just a proponent of education being as successful as possible, right. So Boot Camps are, they serve a very specific purpose, I think Boot Camps are great for, you know, kind of bringing awareness or like exposing you to a new what field, but inherently the with the business model of a lot of boot camps. It's very inaccessible, right, I remember helping clients and looking through boot camps and seeing just like huge, huge prices. And one of the biggest things for UX researchers, and a lot of positions are a lot of different skill sets is that piece of pivoting into your first role is probably the most difficult, right. And so I've seen a lot of boot camps who don't help with that piece. And so people go through it and then find themselves, you know, six months a year later, still trying to figure out how to get into this field. And that land a job that allows them to do that industry. And so that's just kind of my biggest caution around boot camps is one to make sure that you know that job support or that career coaching piece, that's often the most difficult for people as a part of it. I've seen boot camps who have kind of like the guarantee of the full time job within a certain amount of time after the boot camp. And still cautioning to make sure that you you know, read that fine print and understand what that support is going to look like. Because it is a skill set. Like being able to communicate, what you can do and how you can add value to an organization through interview is a skill set. And not everybody focuses on that piece. And I've also seen a lot of boot camps that are kind of UX general, and they focus a lot on design and then have just a little bit on research. And so for the people who have explored those different career options in UX, and you know, research is for you. They're looking for something very, very targeted because I haven't seen a lot of them.

Leigh Arrendondo  14:48  
Right. And our research specific. Yeah, and I know a lot of folks in research end up going into getting a master's when they're like coming from a professional who's coming from another Space, even if it's a designer, like you mentioned at the very beginning, you know, the rigor around research is something that you cannot get to all the methodology and the rigor and the and the need for, you know, how do you present research, you can't get to all of that really deeply in a six week immersion, or, you know, even if it's over a few months, but you have you take a couple classes in research. So I'm glad you pointed that out. I would love to hear more about the alternatives that you offer, personally as a coach. And I think what I'm hearing actually is it's not just alternatives, but you're it's sometimes is in addition to, but yeah, tell me a little bit more about, you know, kind of how you have seen people transit make this transition, maybe without boot camps, or how you have supported people in that way.

Eniola Abioye  16:04  
Yeah, so I am Coach specifically UX researchers at different points in their, in their career journey. A lot of times I'm coaching people who have done research, or have been researched to Jason or have like, done a lot of like, you know, program or kind of product management and inherently had to do research. And so focusing on pivoting into a full time UX research role. Um, and so I always tell people, just based on your learning style, you can kind of craft your approach there. And if you were, like really organized and can go out and find information online and, and put it all together and kind of create a syllabus and a learning plan for yourself, then by all means, like, I think you can achieve what a bootcamp would do for free, right? If you're willing and have the time and you have the kind of like mental capacity to do it on your own. I absolutely advise people to exhaust all the free resources online. I work specifically with people who respond well to one on one coaching, I myself respond really well to one on one coaching, because they're always 17 things going on my life. And so it helps to have someone who's kind of like anchoring in okay, this is our plan, this is what we're going to do this week, here's your homework and and then we'll meet again, and, and kind of like that consistency in that like partner and walking through it and creating goals. And so that's what I do for with my clients as we I understand what they're looking to do. We craft goals, and we craft a plan in order to get there together. And in my timeline is usually pretty rapid. It's usually within two to three months, as I see folks who want kind of short term goals as well as long term, but focusing on getting and you know, in just a few weeks, kind of getting results, whether that's, hey, I want to revamp my resume portfolio and be ready to go into, you know, applying for jobs and interviewing or, Hey, I'm a current UX researcher, and I'd like to level up with my position. Can you kind of help me understand how, what strategically I can grow and and make a plan for where I want to be in the next few months or so?

Leigh Arrendondo  18:09  
Yeah, I think probably your model is going to work so much better for a lot of folks. Do you find that when you work with people? Are they pretty set in what their goals are? Do they know what they want to do? Are you helping folks identify even what their goals might be?

Eniola Abioye  18:30  
Yeah, so I before working with a client, I always do a 15 minute just like consultation, and those are free on my website. Because a lot of times people come to me and they're like, Okay, is this even possible? Like what really is UX? Is this something that I can do work or transition into? And so we talk through what their their background kind of why UX and why now and determine if it's a good fit to work together. A lot of times people don't come to me and don't have portfolios, right. But they have a bunch of like projects in mind that they've done and notes and things like that. And we turn into a portfolio. And so I'd say for the most part, when, like my ideal client, or when people should come to me, I guess, if they're interested is if you know, UX research is what you want to do. Right? Some people come to me and they're like, Oh, well, I think design or research or somewhere in between. And I get that because there's so many different career paths within UX, and it's all really interconnected. But I'm usually kind of asked that people figure out what they want to do first, and then yeah, and then we kind of go from there if their timeline and and their background kind of fits as far as like something that makes sense to kind of transition. There are people who come to me and they I recommend more education. And so I have packages that are have a package called skip the bootcamp and it's around kind of one on one coaching and guiding through curriculum development case study development. And by the end of that Folks have worked through to case studies and kind of have things to put into their portfolio, we also do a resume revamp, and then a plan for next steps, whether that's education, whether that's piloting some UX research projects and working with a company, under my supervision, or what have you. But the beauty of doing one on one is kind of like everything is tailored, and everything can be kind of negotiated, because it's their, it's their coaching. And if I can't afford, if I'm not the best person, then I refer them over to someone who's more so into design or more so into product,

Leigh Arrendondo  20:36  
I want to get to that piece that you brought up, you know, working on a project with an actual company, that's something super excited, I can't wait to talk to you about. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about portfolios. So you and I, in our earlier chats, I think we both have seen the difficulty that so many people have with research portfolios, and, and quite frankly, they can be challenging, they are challenging, it's hard to tell a story, just like people you were sort of talking about is hard to tell a story in a presentation. And that can take, you know, a lot of experience. But but it takes a lot of kind of learning to figure out how to tell a story from research. And similarly, now lay over that, like, how do you tell a story about the research that you've done for companies? So yeah, tell me about your approach to research portfolios?

Eniola Abioye  21:36  
Yeah, I think for a lot of people, including myself, it's really hard to look at a blank page or a blank slide and like think about from zero to 100, how am I going to build this portfolio? How am I I'm not a design person. Very much, I'm not a design person. And so it's hard for me to like kind of like, visualize what I want it to look like, and then how to get there from zero. So one of the things that I do with clients is we start together, and we outline portfolios together, because it's much easier for people to kind of respond to me asking them will tell me about this project, right? Like, don't focus on the story, don't focus on making it pretty yet, tell me about what you did, why you did it, and then framing that into the story that you or tell you that you will tell right? I wasn't there. So I don't have the context you have. But as a person who is similar to your audience, I there are things that you kind of assume that you don't have to say that I'm like, Hey, I don't this doesn't click I don't understand. So that's been really, really helpful for people like getting on a session just like this and, and building it together, starting it out together. When it comes to portfolios, I've seen a lot, my own, I've interviewed tons of researchers and done their portfolio review, and coached a lot of people through building their portfolios. And so they're things that stick out to me. And I wrote a piece recently on kind of what a strong portfolio can look like, right? Or it looks like in my experience. And I think some of the key things are around. Like when you're building this portfolio, when you're telling your story, really understanding that you're one showing the company what it would be like for you to give a research readout if you join the company. And so kind of the details that you talk to in the story that you craft is like a preview, right? And then to talking through the strategy that with which you approach questions, right? So when you have this question, kind of where do you start? Right? So taking a step back before you get into, like the sample and the you know, this is the method that I use and things like that, like, where did you start? Right, when you first got the question? And when you first work with the team, whether you're embedded or consulting with someone? What is the what is your first step when you receive a research question? Is that secondary research? Is it you know, meeting with the data team? Is it meeting with the with the pod that you're embedded in on the product team and understanding kind of what has been done around it or gaining more context? So I really like to see that in portfolios. I also really like to see some reflection on Okay, so you did this project. Here's how it came out, right? No one is perfect. And anyone who claims to be a perfect researchers line. So what would you do if you could go back if you had more resources, or if you have less resources, more or less time, kind of what would that look like? Because it shows that creativity of Oh, I know how to pivot and I know how to shift and I know where we're trying to go and I have a little bit of scrappiness to get us there, depending on what constraints change over time.

Leigh Arrendondo  24:48  
Yeah, another thing and and I think you touched on this a little bit already, but I think it's is worth talking about the need to really focus on out Pums not put, like, that's something I've been really working with my own team members for a long time. But you know, it's it's not just here's what I did. That's important. And here's my process. But what was the value of the work that I did?

Eniola Abioye  25:19  
Yeah, that's the impact that it made. Yeah. And that can be a you kind of have to get creative, especially when you're, you're coming from agency side, or if, you know, a lot of people tell me, Well, I can't build my portfolio, because everything's private. And I work in a very, you know, regulated space, and I can't just share all this stuff that I've done. And that's not the focal point. Like, it really doesn't matter what the name of the product was, doesn't matter. Kind of the exact numbers of, you know, percentages, or what you changed or anything that's private, because the focal point is, what is your research strategy? And how does your research client work? And how do you approach solving problems? And so even if you made a case study in names were changed, or, you know, you were a little bit vague about details about the specific product? That's fine, right? It's about the research plan, and the strategy and the questions and how you work with your stakeholders and things like that.

Leigh Arrendondo  26:15  
Yeah, I'm really glad that you brought that up, because that does come up a lot. Chris, it's a slightly larger challenge for folks in design, but you really do need to see it, I think in in research, you can, I mean, there are ways around that as well. But in research, like you said, you can, even when it comes to a presentation, you can speak or you know, like talking about the presentations that you've made, how you do deliver findings, like how do you deliver findings? How do you deliver recommendations? How do you know, you know, how do you know? How are you connecting the dots for for your stakeholders to make it really easy for them to just take your findings and run with it? You know, and what kind of relationships are you building? Which again, that's more difficult with an agency as well.

Eniola Abioye  27:14  
Yeah, and I think when it comes to impact, um, something that I always like to see is understanding how, you know, when you have your insights, and you've done your research, how do you work with your stakeholders, and with the people you're collaborating with to understand what recommendations are actionable, right, so instead of me as a researcher coming back and saying, hey, they really don't like the UI of the site, we should make it more modern. Instead of like me, as a researcher only coming from what I'm hearing, I need the perspective of the pm and the perspective of the designer perspective of engineer to understand what's feasible one, and to kind of like take the context that the team has, and build out next steps and and recommendations that makes sense and are actionable for the whole team.

Leigh Arrendondo  28:00  
Out of curiosity, how long were you in the agency? And was that? Did you have any other steps between the agency to

Eniola Abioye  28:13  
bounced around a lot I've been in a few industries I was at I was agency side with the, in the biotech space for about a year and a half. And then I moved on to Kaiser and did a lot of qual and quant research, specifically in healthcare. And then I moved on to Silicon Valley Bank. And I tried out fin tech for a while. And when I made that jump, people were like, how do you get from biotech and medicine, to working at a bank? And to be honest, my dad still doesn't really know what I do. And so he's like, why do you work at a bank? So but for me, the connection was really like, at the foundation, I got into UX research. And I started out having really intimate conversations with people, right. And that really, it's kind of what I do already outside of working outside of, you know, the professional sphere. And so it really clicked for me just being able to sit here and hold space for what people wanted to share, right? Because when people are interviews, they don't just tell you about this product. And like it's not all neat, and black and white and boxed in like that, you know, they're sharing real things about their life and about their story and how their product, how your product plays a part in that. And so when moving on to Silicon Valley Bank and working specifically with founders, who were having conversations about money, and about their business, right, because everyone's really passionate about something that they start. And those were also very intimate conversations as well. And so I really enjoyed being able to talk to people at a level where you know, you're having a conversation with a stranger about real things. And so to kind of build trust with folks and understand what it is that they needed and then really advocate within the organization. for what they express, yeah,

Leigh Arrendondo  30:01  
that is such a fantastic foundation for you to be teaching and coaching and, and, you know, helping others on their journey. Which brings me to, like wanting to find out more about this program that you mentioned where you work with, I'm probably not saying this right. But you you're working with folks who are breaking into UX and research and working with them, supporting them as a coach, while they work on projects with startups, something like that.

Eniola Abioye  30:39  
Yes. Okay. So I am super excited to talk about this because it is new. Um, but just for some context, I'm launched a coaching business. And it's specifically for UX researchers a couple years ago, and I am very excited to have kind of like, branded it, and it's grown. And so the coaching business is called UX out loud, there are a few things that are offered within that. Like I mentioned before, there are a few packages and kind of helping folks either get exposure and kind of learn more about UX research or pivot directly into you know, I have some a bit some background, I have some experience, I'm ready to kind of find a job and understand how I can like talk to these companies and an interview and show off my skill set and things like that, um, a gap that I saw, and working with a lot of folks is, you know, they kind of have the background, they've done research, right, whether that be an academic academic researcher having to do UX as a part of a larger job and wearing multiple hats, hats at a company, but really wanted more industry experience, right? So they're like, oh, okay, this would really build my confidence. And I also want to make sure that this is something I want to do, and just really want that hands on experience without doing. And so I've built out a new package where UX researchers, you know, no matter what your level is, or anyone who hasn't kind of been in a full UX research role, and can work with me and I coached them through working with a company doing UX research for them. So at the it's kind of meeting with like, researchers who want more experience in industry and want more hands on projects, and then supporting early early tech startups who, you know, don't necessarily have the budget to pay for sophisticated UX research, just yet, so a tech company that's in you know, the first five years or so. And so really pairing them and kind of taking the questions, whether it's tactical, whether it's a little more exploratory, from tech startups, in pairing them with a researcher who can address those questions, and then coaching that researcher through it, but all in all, it's kind of their project, it's their thing, and I'm just helping the research with the, you know, guidance and as, as they're carrying it out. So I'm really excited about that. I think it needs to needs that I've seen both on researchers wanting more hands on experience. And then also, you know, tech startups, like should always do UX research, but I understand it's very expensive. So kind of meeting the needs there as well.

Leigh Arrendondo  33:17  
And how do you find these startups? So I actually, I know someone else who was trying to do something similar, and there was a little bit of a difficulty in actually finding the startups and, and getting the work in a way that was, you know, reliable, and actually was going to be, you know, something that would be valuable for the researcher. So tell me a little bit about that side of it.

Eniola Abioye  33:44  
Yeah, so everyone kind of knows, a founder, at least where I am,

Leigh Arrendondo  33:49  
yeah. And you're in the Bay Area. So for sure. I'm in Seattle. And I gotta say it's the same.

Eniola Abioye  33:57  
So I know a lot of people who have started small businesses, or are launching a startup or have started and so I pilot with them. But we'll be opening up a forum and kind of posting on socials and posting all over LinkedIn to understand, you know, kind of who's interested in what might work. And I'd love to give preference to, you know, bipoc business owners and founders and women owned startups. But I'm excited because I think they're the need is there. I don't think it's going to be too difficult to find people who want UX research for their startup for free, because it's Amin, right? It's all it's always going to be there too. So I just think it's going to be really interesting to see the types of startups that I'm able to pair students with. And the ideal setup is having a student who's like, interested in a certain space or a part of tech or, you know, industry paired with someone that they're like Gentleman, we're interested in

Leigh Arrendondo  35:00  
him, right? Yeah, I'm excited for you. And I'm very excited to help spread the word. So thank you tell us a little bit about how people can find out more information about you and about what, you know some of these great programs that you talked about.

Eniola Abioye  35:19  
Absolutely, absolutely. You can go to ux@wowt.com. Or you can also reach out on LinkedIn I am I love connecting with folks in the UX space I just any all IBMa on LinkedIn. Yeah, those are some pretty solid ways to get in touch with me. On my website, I have my calendar Calendly there as well on the contact me page. And so folks who are interested in coaching or who have some questions can either email me right from the page or sign up for a 15 minute consultation?

Leigh Arrendondo  35:48  
Awesome. And did you mention LinkedIn? can people follow you and hear about your, you know, all your new offerings that way?

Eniola Abioye  35:57  
Yeah, yeah, I usually make sure to copy everything over to LinkedIn, which has become just like a digital. My job fair. So yes, you can follow me on LinkedIn. And us outloud also has an Instagram page. And so there are a few ways to tap in, I'm not hard to get in contact with.

Leigh Arrendondo  36:14  
That's fantastic. And I want to thank you so much. We covered everything right that we talked about, I guess you're doing a lot of stuff. So I want to make sure that I covered it all. I think so awesome.

Eniola Abioye  36:28  
It was really great. This is a lot of fun to just talking through kind of the UX world with someone who's also in the world. So I appreciate you having

Leigh Arrendondo  36:37  
me. Yeah, yeah, this has been fun. Thank you so much. Hey, if you enjoyed this slice of UX cake, please rate it and subscribe. tell others what you liked about it. It really helps us spread the word and get this free content to more people. You can follow UX cake on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, and get all the episodes and show notes at UX kake.co. Thank you for listening and sharing the flex

Ep.45  Today I’m talking about UX Strategy Sprints with Craig Nishizaki. The term UX Strategy gets defined in different ways by experts across our discipline, and some people say that UX strategy doesn’t even exist, that UX strategy is Business strategy. Which conceptually, I get that, but the term and the practice of UX Strategy is actually incredibly useful and necessary to communicate the difference between the bigger picture of a holistic user experience - which is strategic - from the the tactical aspects of designing page flows and wireframes and UI.

I like to define UX Strategy at its highest level as identifying business objectives and user needs  and then creating a vision that aligns those two things. And while that might sound simple, getting to that vision for a product or a service is anything but simple. Which is why having a framework like this UX Strategy Sprint can really help to get everyone on the same page. My guest today is Craig Nishizaki, and he’s the Head of Business for UpTop, a User Experience Design and Development agency based in Seattle. What makes Craig’s perspective here so valuable is that he’s coming from the business side of UX. He’s spent the last 12 years honing his understanding of the value of UX and how to convey that value to business leaders, to help them create change, innovation, and impact for their organizations. I know UX practitioners can learn a lot about conveying the value of what we do by learning the language of our business partners, and I’m really grateful to Craig for coming onto the podcast to share his business wisdom with us.

Download a copy of Craig’s UX Strategy Sprint Guide here

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TRANSCRIPT

Leigh Arredondo  0:00  
UX cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host Lee Alan arrow Dano, and I'm a UX leader and leadership coach. Hello, and welcome to episode 45 of UX cake. Today I am talking about UX strategy Sprint's with a business leader in UX Craig Nishizaki. Now, the term UX strategy gets defined in many different ways by experts across our discipline. Some people even say that UX strategy doesn't exist, that basically that UX strategy is business strategy, or is product strategy, which, conceptually, I get that. But the term and the practice of UX strategy is actually incredibly useful. And it's an it's necessary to communicate the difference between the big picture of a holistic user experience which is strategic, from the tactical aspects of designing page flows, and wireframes, and UI. Now I like to define UX strategy at its simplest highest level as identifying business objectives. And user needs to create a vision that aligns those two things. And while that might sound simple, actually getting to that vision for a product or service is anything but simple. My guest today is Craig Nishizaki. And he's the head of business for up top, a user experience design and development agency based in Seattle. Now, what makes Craig's perspective here so valuable is that he's coming from the business side of UX. And he spent the last 12 years honing his understanding of the value of UX. And not only that, but how to convey that value to the business leaders who are making the decisions to help them create change, and innovation and impact for their organizations. I know UX practitioners can learn a lot about conveying the value of what we do, by learning the language of our business partners. And I'm really grateful to Craig for coming on to the podcast to share his business wisdom with us.

Hi, Craig. And thank you so much for joining us on UX cake podcast. 

Hi Leigh, thanks for inviting me. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today about UX strategy. 

And I'm especially excited to talk to you with your perspective, because you're in a position where you are often from an agency kind of perspective, you've got to sell these concepts, right, you have to sell UX in general, but then UX strategy, gosh, that's another level of like, getting people on board. And so I think this is going to be a really fantastic conversation for for the audience to learn a lot. So I hope so, Ben? Yeah, I think so. I'm sure, actually, I should say, I am sure it will be. So anyway, like just to kind of before we dive into, you know, doing UX strategy spreads, and yeah, how people can sell those within their organization. I would love to hear from you. I love how you explain this. I've heard it before. So I would love to hear how you define UX strategy. 

Craig Nishizaki  3:32  
So my perspective is a little different. So my perspective comes from the business side of UX, right?And over I got into the industry in 2009, doing new business development, and coming out of working in high tech sales and sales, leadership, and consulting and all that. And so as I look at strategy, I'm looking at it

a little bit differently than maybe a practitioner of UX would. So this might be helpful. So from the business side, what I've seen is, oftentimes designers are blind to the business implications, the constraints, the politics, the nuances from a business perspective, when they're designing things or on their on their project. And then the business leaders oftentimes don't realize the value of involving UX, in the strategy phase to help them define the product vision and get alignment.

And then on the engineering and technology side, I've seen them, in many cases, look at design, it's just making things pretty, or looking at the UI and not really thinking about  the impact of the UX design strategy on, you know, workflows, back end systems and data and what needs to be interacted with to actually make that experience come to life. And because of that, I think that's really How how I've looked at strategy for UX being, if it was a Venn diagram with each of those groups as one of the circles, where UX strategy, UX, leadership, and in value all are right at the center where those three circles overlap. And the more that you could pull those three together, the larger impact the higher value in the, the more impactful strategy that you can create, keeping the end user the customer in mind, right. And so that's my perspective on what your strategy is. And the value of it is really sitting at the center of those three disciplines or organizations or however you want to look at them within a business, and helping them to frame the problem. Keeping the customer the end user that could be an employee, a buyer, a customer, a partner, a member, whatever you define,   framing the problem properly, from that context, aligning on the vision, getting executive buy in, and then creating a roadmap with participation as an outcome, or an output for that. 

Leigh Arredondo  6:08  
Yeah, I think you spoke to this a little bit, but kind of a little bit more specifically, tell me a little bit more about who your audiences who are you speaking to when you're talking about, you know, this is something that could really benefit your organization, who are those people 

Craig Nishizaki  6:26  
I look at our ideal customer is a senior leader, that's typically change agent are visionary. They have an idea they think will have a material impact on their business. And through this process, we help them articulate that vision and bring it to life. And in if you think about it, in terms of what does that look like, or who is that person, it could be an executive level, person on the business side that has come into an organization sees some opportunities for for improvement, or see some friction points in the journey sees some potential for innovation. And they're trying to get a vision cast, and need to get executives on board. It could be somebody that's on the product, or on the research side, that's been tasked with trying to try to move the needle this year, or trying to improve an experience this year. And they don't have a team necessarily attached to them. And they need some horsepower, some some additional expertise to be brought in. And in some cases, it could be even a leader on the IT side or on the technology side that has seen projects come to a grinding halt. And they're trying to get them unblocked. And part of the reason for them being blocked is they've either had projects that have gone over budget or over over time and schedule, and the interest has died off on them, or the commitment to them has died off. But they're still important. And so they need to kind of level set and restart. And by bringing in an outside in perspective, to help with that, and then really crystallizing the vision again, or crystallizing the vision for the first time. In some cases, you're able to help get things unblocked and moving. All of those sound really familiar situations to me.

Leigh Arredondo  8:24  
I mean, you know, when you're in when you're building products, or you're in organizations for any amount of time, I think you see these sort of themes happen over and over again, patterns. Yeah, exactly. And we will I definitely want to get a little bit later, I want to get to, you know, how can, because I think you have great insights on this too. But selling this from within, you know, it's one thing to come in as a consultant and or be hired as a consultant. Right? To sell this, but like, how do you do that from within. But before we get there, I want to talk just a little bit more about, you know, kind of the purpose for it. Let's say I am X business leader. And I've got one of you know, I'm in one of these buckets, you just sort of mentioned how is a this might end up leading to having to, you know, well, we'll talk about what it is but how is having a UX strategy, and then kind of like, how is this UX strategy sprint, really going to help me meet my business objectives? Like, and, you know, isn't that just like, I need a business strategy, right? Like, why why do I need a UX strategy? 

Craig Nishizaki  9:35  
Yeah, I think if you think about all the organizations that you've been a part of, in most cases, the business strategy is defined and brought to bear and then everything. Everyone runs toward that direction. Now, the business strategy, you know, talks about the market, the opportunity, the need, the problem space that you're working within, and then how you're going to go about going after it. And from there to what you have, there's a gap where your current state, and where you want to get to the desired future state, there's a gap, what the UX strategy, sprint and UX strategy helps with is providing tangibility of how to get from where you are, to that desired future state with your digital experience, whether that's, you know, an internal enterprise tool, whether that's a solution, whether that's a, you know, a portal in the healthcare space, a mobile app, etc.

So, you know, how you're going to get to the end goal with your business strategy is going to be some interaction with your customer. Right? It's whether it's an employee, consumer, a business, decision maker, etc. And that's where I feel like the UX strategy helps provide, provide them with a tangible plan, or roadmap to get there. And there's a bunch of different things within that. But that's how I would, how I would say the UX strategy plays an important part from a business perspective. 

Leigh Arredondo  11:17  
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Like, I love how you describe it. One of the things we talked about in when we were talking about this before was how important it is for for those of us in UX to really kind of use the language of our business partners and product partners and the people that we are, you know, speaking to, and and trying to champion, you know, we're championing UX to like, we need to use adopt the business language. That is kind of the majority of the organization, right. Yeah. So that sort of gave a little bit of an overview of what a UX strategy, like what the end state might be, should we talk about what a UX strategy sprint is? 

Craig Nishizaki  12:02  
Yeah, we can, I can tell you the origin of it. And then what it is, and it's really nothing new in the sense that UX strategy sprint, that is what we call it is based on a design thinking framework. And it's really our approach to solving complex business problems within an organization, using a structured approach to discovery and research, with the output being a tangible concept prototype with some recommendations and roadmap kind of high level. And how we we came to this is, you know, we started applying design thinking and Lean UX methods, probably around 2015 or so as an organization. And when Michael Wu joined our team, and then became elevated into the director of UX role, he really was looking at how do we create more consistent outcomes, with our customers with our clients that helped them achieve their goals. And what we found was, as we were looking at our client base, you had big wins, and you had big misses sometimes. And it really depended on the organization, you were working with the individual that was the product owner or the project owner. On the client side, there was a number of variables. And what our goal was, was really to figure out a way to find right fit clients and right fit projects to work on. If you think about it from a Simon Sinek. You know, start with Why type perspective, if you can find the clients that believe your why, and why you're doing things and have that same mindset, then your likelihood of being successful goes up, your likelihood of your team enjoying that work goes up. You know, there's lots of positives there. And so, what we were finding is, um, you know, there was clients pushing back on Discovery and research. 

Leigh Arredondo  13:53  
Okay, yeah, that also sounds really familiar.

Craig Nishizaki  13:57  
Yeah, internal teams, as well as agency teams are, you'll see that they have a budget, they have a timeline, and ultimately, the beginning of the project, all the work up front to get to the statement of work to an agreement squeezes into that, because the timeline seems to never move. And the budget seems to always shrink, you know, it's just one of those things. And that push back kind of sounds like, I gave you the Brd and I can answer all the questions that you just asked me, or it could be we know all the prop, we know what the problem is. We just need someone to help us figure out how to fix it, or we know what our customers want. So we really don't really need to have you talk with them. They may not say this, but the underlying bias is, you know, research will take too long, it'll cost too much and it'll only validate what we already know. So we don't really need to do anything. Or you hear good we did research couple years ago and we have all that information will provide that to you before takeoff. Right? So

That's a common theme that we were hearing. And then the other thing that we are running into is that clients want a fixed bid for the design and build of the solution. So whether it's a mobile app or enterprise tool or a portal, whatever it was, they want to have all up bid for all the design and all the development work. But logically, you can't do a fixed budget with loose requirements, right, you need to know what the requirements are. And so ultimately, what they're asking for is predictability and a plan. Right, and if you take on a project like that, without having the ability to define the requirements, and understand that the end user or do some research, all the risk is on you, as the team, whether your internal or external, because you're committing to a budget, you're committing to a timeline, and you're committing to an expectation of what that thing is going to be. And that expectation can be wildly different than what you're able to do. Right? They may be expecting dinner at the Canlis and you're only able to afford, you know, Chipotle, you know, it's it's kind of two totally different ends of the spectrum. The other thing that we started seeing out there as the buzz word, you know, digital transformation became more and more popular, and also the the actual work of digital transformation became more more popular is that design thinking efforts and digital transformation efforts were failing, because they were trying to boil the ocean. And the reason they fail, I think is you're unable to create velocity and quick wins, if you can't identify what those quick wins are, which takes a little bit of research and definition. Um, and then in leadership at the organization that you're working with. Either you have no champion, or no executive sponsorship for the leadership changes midstream, and then the funding goes away. Right. So those are just some observations that we had. So we took those observations, and then we thought about what our beliefs are about how to how to have a successful UX project, whether your internal or external, and the beliefs that we have our you know, research is important for successful UX project, you know, when you do research, ideation becomes obvious, you find the real problem, so solutions become more evident. And the ideation phase actually becomes smaller, because the problems identified early in the process, right. So research then becomes a scoping exercise. Because you actually are able to be more focused and reduce features to have a higher impact. The other belief that we have is that as a UX leader, whether your internal or external, the thing that you're there to do is create value, not deliver artifact, deliverables and artifacts, right when I first got in the industry, and you've been in the industry longer than me, but I remember we would create these humongous books of wireframes. And deliver that to the customer as part of the proof, right? And but really, if you think about it, what you're there to do is help provide actionable insights that they haven't been able to tease out themselves, help them get a better understanding of their customer, in user, organization, technical constraints, etc. Provide that perspective you're brought in to provide innovation or innovative solutions

you're brought in to help them prioritize, you know, doing an impact versus effort exercise, it's always seems to be an aha moment when you have a cross functional team in a workshop, and they have all these features and function, things that they want to do. And you start putting some dots to it in terms of impact versus effort to help prioritize, then all of a sudden, the marketing folks realize, Wow, that thing we're asking for from technology, no wonder they're pushing back. For the technology, people say this thing that they think is low on their priority, because it's not the core system that they were working on. But then they all of a sudden realize that the customers really want that. And that will really move the needle for them. It helps them to prioritize, and being in UX, and you're sitting in the middle, you're the liaison and the translator, and the mediator, if if you're playing a strategic role, and then ultimately, in UX, you're your biggest value is creating business outcomes or helping with the business outcomes. You know, because ultimately, that's you're designing a product or solution that's gonna help the business achieve their goals and help your customers achieve their goals mutually, right hopefully, so that all that all saying how we got to doing the UX strategy sprint was a or defining or developing our approach as a UX strategy sprint is, we were doing a lot of discovering and envisioning projects, but we realized that there was a need to do concept validation as part of that envisioning. And. And so adding in that concept validation is how we got to what we call a UX strategy sprint. So we look at it as a way to solve more complex problems. If you're looking at testing a hypothesis, or testing a feature, you can do a design sprint, you know, something that's more along the lines of the Google Ventures, five days sprint, as agency doing it from the outside, it's a little harder to do it, it takes us we never say it's a five day sprint, because you have the intake and all those things that you do, it leads up to a five day sprint. And I think that that's one thing that the title misguide you on a little bit that you're going to get everything done in five days.

Leigh Arredondo  20:54  
Well, then you still have to design the thing afterwards.

Craig Nishizaki  20:57  
Correct? Yeah, you're just getting validation on your hypothesis. Right. So that's, that's kind of the evolution, how we got to formalize and what we call your strategy sprint. And I can tell you a little bit about what one is, um,

Leigh Arredondo  21:09  
yeah, let's do that. But just want to I want to kind of circle back or just kind of underline a couple of things that you said, the thing that you were talking about with the deliverables, right, deliverables versus value. And the deliverables are still like, critically important in UX and for, for whether you're a consultant or internal, but one of the things I want to point out there is that is kind of like a step level from a UX tactical practitioner to someone who is really, leader. Right? And, yeah, that might, that person might also be, you know, in the end delivering all the the stack of wireframes, or mocks or whatever. But, but that point of that, just that understanding of we need to have the the larger kind of not just vision, but we need to deliver to the business, the value that they're looking for. And they don't necessarily know from all sides, which is kind of what you UX is representing the business and the user. Anyway, I just kind of wanted to point that out. Because a lot of what I talk about on this podcast is about how do you move from being that tactical to the strategic so so what you were saying just leads right into that. So let's go ahead and move forward with let's find out from you a little bit more about how someone would go about conducting one of these UX sprints and, and also how the sprint itself, like differs from a design sprint, that's also pretty interesting to me.

Craig Nishizaki  22:53  
Yeah, it's based on the design thinking framework. And so we took learnings from IDEO from Stanford d school, we took some learnings from that Google Ventures, five day sprint process, and other inputs, as well as lean UX methods. And then, in doing these things, we had some a lot of learnings as well, of what was effective and what could be more effective, and in where, where we had missed the mark. And so when you look at it, it's gonna follow kind of that double diamond model in terms of divergent thinking and convergent thinking, flaring and focus. And so typically, a UX strategy, sprint is going to take about somewhere between eight to 10 weeks, depending on the size and scale of the problem you're trying to solve. It could be done faster, and it could be it could take longer. And it's really, again, dependent on the size and scale. So when you think of a sprint, you could think of the 100 yard dash, you could think of a 1500 meter, you could think of a 5k, there's, there's still a sprint that happens. And there's just the races are longer, right. So it's a different kind of training that happens for those athletes. But if you think about just the process itself, there's the steps. There's intaking research, there's a workshop. There's ideation and design, there's prototyping and testing, and then the Northstar vision. And in the UX strategy, sprint process that that we've defined for our own team, the intake and research is critical for our team to get accelerated, ramped up and accelerated on the problem space. So it's really gathering all the information from the customer that they have about their end users about the problem that they're having about the systems that are in place, etc. Looking at it again, with those three circles in mind, right, the business design and technology as well as the end user. And then our team prepares for the workshop. And so prior to COVID we were doing these workshops in person Obviously, during COVID, we will find our ability to do remote workshops and have found that they're actually as effective or more effective. In terms of the work that gets done. The part that's less effective in a remote workshop is a lot of the break time. conversations that you would typically have fewer in person, right. And so thinking about the, you know, having coffee and there was a, you read, you read the room, and there's a skeptic in the room, and you get a chance to go talk to them during to start building that rapport, or there's someone that said something that was really important. But they were more of a quiet personality. And so you're trying to tease that out. And so you have to, there's some nuance to doing it remotely. Or you, you have to set up some off offline conversations and things like that. But typically, a workshop is going to be two to three days, again, depending on the size and scale of problem. And in the workshops. You know, you're going through activities, you know, some examples would be like expert talks, or long term goals, how might we statements, sprint questions, journey mapping, review, lightning, demos, some solution sketches and voting, and then impact versus effort. And, you know, obviously, every workshop is going to be a little different depending on the problem that you're trying to solve and the audience that you're working with. Typically, we'd like to have the audience be about eight cross functional stakeholders, key stakeholders, and then we pull in experts for those expert talks. So you don't have to have 25 people in the whole workshop, you really need the core team. And, and then you pull in those other subject matter experts. And the outcome from that is some decisions around framing the problem aligning on the vision and what the Northstar vision could be. And then you move into doing the ideation and design and for us, what we're trying to get to is a concept prototype that walks through a happy path, if you will, for that primary problem statement, to get to the Northstar vision or to the desired future state. And the idea behind this whole thing is that we're trying to get to a high level concept prototype that provides their executive team and their broader team with

tangibility. Right. So if you think about design thinking, one of the biggest, highest value outcomes you can create as tangibility it's seeing touching and feeling what it could be. And that concept prototype allows us to do that. And then we take that and do some right testing or lightweight usability testing, with actual users that would use this product tool, or app, whatever it is that we're helping them concept. And then iterating, the design incorporating their feedback, if it's relevant and impactful, and then providing to them an output. And so the outputs from this process are a lightweight interactive concept prototype, or it could be more built out if if necessary. We oftentimes provide a narrated video walkthrough of the concept prototype. And the reason for that is the executive sponsor or the champion of the project may not be comfortable presenting the concept prototype. Later on, they may want us to do that, and we may not be available. So we found that having a narrated video of that concept prototype helps them to spread the vision, to socialize it without us having to be in every single meeting, if we're not available to if we are available to we'd love to do that. Because being face to face is oftentimes really valuable for us. And then the other output is a UX summary report with research findings, workshop outcomes, a prioritized UX roadmap and recommendations for next steps. And that again, checks the box for them of having a plan and then being able to then scope out the feature design work that needs to be done and the development work sizing and scoping. And so this ultimately allows them to have more predictability, and allows us to have a better way to help them scope out the project.

Leigh Arredondo  29:46  
Yeah, and in many ways, it's very much like a design sprint, but larger, it's gonna you're gonna end up with kind of a phased approach. And I do want to mention that you have you have a couple of kind of downloads that we're gonna make available to listeners of the podcast. And those actually are great explanation of how you do this and how you explain the difference between the UX strategy strategies sprint and design sprint, which I found super helpful, because that was great. My first questions when I, when we talked about it, but I, you know, before we completely wrap up, I just want to hear, I think it'd be really helpful to hear a little bit about the what are the challenges that that you've faced either, like I'm interested in, in challenges you've faced with selling us and and then challenges you've faced, kind of during this process, because it sounds like a longer process. So it might have some challenges that are different from a design sprint,

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Ep. 44  ​You probably would agree that if we want to make products and services that people want and use, we have to talk to those people. Whether you’re involved in product strategy, UX, development, marketing, any part of building products or a business or a service – I imagine you’d agree that you’ve got to understand what your audience or user’s goals, what will really serve their needs, what motivates them. And how do we do that? We talk to them. More importantly, we listen to them talk. So, how do we get them to talk about what’s really most important to them?

You might say, ask them. And if I’m not getting the right information, maybe I need better questions. And you wouldn’t be wrong, asking good questions is really important in user research, but today we’re going to explore a different approach than what you might be used to in user research.

The emphasis here is not on asking people the right questions, it’s on identifying the objective, and then, listening. And listening some more. And not guiding the conversation, but just… listening deeply. It's focused on getting into someone's most inner unconscious purpose and motivations, and this will help you identify the most important opportunities to act on. This is something you can practice with customers for product strategy, and you can also use these techniques in  relationships at work to create impactful change in how you work together. It’s harder than it sounds, but the results can be eye-opening.
​
My guest, Indi Young, is a researcher who coaches, writes, speaks, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her books on mental models and empathy are widely known & respected, and personally I've been a fan of hers for years and I have learned so much from her. She's developed this approach of deep listening over many years, she offers training and coaching in it, and now she's written a book about Deep Listening called Time to Listen. 

Order Indi’s book here: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/
Get training by Indi on Deep Listening: https://indiyoung.com/courses-list/

Connect with Indi Young
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EPISODE 44. TRANSCRIPTION

Season 2, Ep. 43: The third of 3 episodes in our special mini-series called Learning UX, guest host Leo Zhang talks with Sara Hubbard and Caryn Wylie, the organizers of the meetup group Seattle Women of Design and UX, about growing your network and experience by getting involved in the UX community around you. 

From Leo:
In our third and final Learn UX episode of the mini-series I wanted to bring on the founders of Seattle Women of Design and UX meetup (seaDUXX). Caryn Wille and Sara Hubbard are some of the most-respected advocates of women in UX in the our Seattle tech scene through their meetup, and on the show they will be talking about their experiences in founding and growing their meetup, and how it has helped them in both their personal and professional lives.
​
Caryn Wille 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carynwille/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ux-of-you/id1476322309
http://www.meetup.com/seaDUXX
Caryn is currently a Senior Interaction Designer at Google. Since 2011, Caryn has been helping companies from startups to medical associations to operas to telecom providers architect and design experiences that nest into the cross section of user needs and business goals. Her diverse client work has run the gamut of responsive websites, B2C e-commerce sites, internal business applications, live ticketing sales, and content management system (CMS) implementations, but she has yet to meet a project that doesn't benefit from a keen understanding of the people the experience is being built for. With a focus on storytelling and clear communication, she helps teams hone in on designing the right thing before bringing experiences to life. Caryn believes strongly in user-centered design and creating products and experiences that make users' lives easier and delight them in the process.


Sara Hubbard 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-m-hubbard/
Sara is a Senior User Experience Designer at Smartsheet. Sara has over six years experience working with globally-recognized brands, taking their complex tasks and transforming them into easy-to-use experiences. She takes a human-centered design approach to my work, and ruthlessly advocates for users. She prides herself in finding ways to both delight users, work within technical limitations, while meeting business needs. Sara also finds ways to give back to the community by teaching UX courses at the School of Visual Concepts, and being a mentor to folks entering the UX industry. Outside of work she enjoys playing board games, listening to true crime podcasts, and spending time with my polydactyl cat, Maisie.


Both Sara and Caryn are passionate about creating an inclusive UX community in Seattle, which they do through organizing monthly events through the meetup they founded togther: Seattle Women of Design & UX (seaDUXX).
This is the last episode of the three-run mini-series. This was such an impactful and eye-opening experience for me to host these, and I am forever grateful for this opportunity. Thank you all for taking the time to listen to this collaboration between Learn UX Seattle and UX Cake!


Leo Zhang, Founder of Learn UX Seattle
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leozhang
Learn UX Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/LearnUX/
Leo Zhang is a veteran UX Strategist and Researcher who has developed insights-based strategies for clients including Dell, USAA, Philips, Johnson Controls, Impinj, and the Federal Government. He brings a unique approach and toolkit to his work and meetup, borrowing from his past experience as a Naval Nuclear Engineer combined with a Master’s Degree in Design from Arizona State University. Outside of professional work, Leo’s passions lie within his Learn UX Seattle Meetup, which now has over 3,300 members and is one of the largest, most active UX meetups in Seattle. Leo is equally as passionate about people as he is UX, and he is proud to be a member of the Greater Seattle UX community.


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Season 2, Ep. 42Ep. 42:
​This week we're talking about Permission to Speak - Maybe there are times you’ve found yourself hesitating to speak up, to put your voice out there… this happens a lot, it’s not just a UX issue but is a common complaint in UX, and in tech in general. And it happens at every level, I’ve been in leadership roles for 20 years and I still experience this at times. My guest is LaDonna Willems, who is the associate editorial director at Dropbox. 


LaDonna is a writer, and she’s an expert on voice. So when she realized that she wasn’t always speaking up, because on some level she was waiting for permission, that was incredibly eye-opening. She went through a process that really changed her perception, and it was so transformative, she wanted to share it with others. So She created a workshop to go through the process, to help others who want to find the power in their voice and to speak it, in whatever way comes naturally to them. That may be words or art or music or action. There are many ways to speak, but it starts with finding the source of your power, and the power of your voice.


LaDonna Witmer Willems 
@wordsbyladonna
Writer, Speaker, Associate Editorial Director at the Dropbox Brand Studio
Along her personal journey to find her own voice, LaDonna has been a newspaper journalist, advertising copywriter, copy director, and poet. She’s currently one of the editorial gurus on the Dropbox Brand Studio team in San Francisco, creating and facilitating the most powerful expressions of the Dropbox voice. In minutes between meetings and her daughter’s ballet class, she’s also writing a book.
LaDonna Willems
https://www.ladonnawillems.com/out-loud


Links from the Show


Seattle Workshop Jan 28, 2020
Free tickets on Eventbrite


Pause Fest - Melbourne
https://www.pausefest.com.au/


Follow
Dropbox.design events


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Danger of a Single Story
https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story


Lisa Falzon - Instagram https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/lisafalzon/
Bringmemybattleaxe https://www.instagram.com/bringmemybattleaxe/


Chanel Miller
“Know My Name”


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