Lecture Topics This Week
- Accessibility
- Digital Natives and Immigrants
Guest Lecture: Pair Design
Dan Winterberg is a Senior Designer at Cooper, while Kacie Winterberg is the only UX Designer at Cake Corporation. They both are fans of pair design, but utilize very different approaches due to the nature of their organizations.
Dan/Cooper's Approach
- Clearly defined partnerships made up of:
- A 'Gen': a designer who jumps into solutions, sketches multiple ideas, and goes with instincts
- A 'Synth': a designer who begins with asking questions, making lists, and evaluating goals
- These partnerships balance each other out throughout each project, allowing each partner to thrive at what he/she is good at.
- This creates happy designers and better designs!
Kacie's Approach at Cake
- No partner? Find one!
- Make people interested by hanging pictures or other materials so that everyone can observe
- You get to choose your partner! Find a way to relate different aspects of the design process to the work that other people are doing so that they are interested in coming along.
- Prime these new partners for the kind of help you want to receive (this is your job, not theirs).
- Broadcast the partnership's success to get continued support in the future!
Mike Monteiro Video: 13 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations
Watch this video! There were so many great points that Mike Monteiro made, but I'm going to stick with highlighting some of my favorite points.
- Good design does not sell itself.
- Be confident. It's not for you, it's for the client.
- Once you've gotten what you want, shut up.
- 'Oh, but my boss won't let me.' Your boss is a choice. Make better choices.
- Never conflate helping a client reach their goal with making them happy.
- Don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answer to.
- Don't give real estate tours of your design.
- You have an ethical responsibility to tell your client about problems you see.
- Bring excitement!
Outcomes: GA Profile
In outcomes this week, we walked through the process of creating our profiles for the GA job board. There is quite a bit of information that we have to prepare for our profiles, so we have a lot of work to do even after we finish UXDi this Friday!
As soon as possible after the program ends, we each need to complete our:
- LinkedIn profile
- GA profile
- Resume
- Portfolio
It would have been great if we had some kind of previous notice that we would need to still be completely available for the weeks after the 10 week immersive to complete all of these materials. I had considered taking some sort of trip in November, but I'm glad I decided not to!
Field Trips: Macy's and Venmo
On Thursday and Friday, we had tours of offices at Macy's.com and Venmo and learned about their companies and UX departments.
Macy's.com
- Has ~25 UX Designers, and is rapidly growing! They currently have 3 UXDi grads on their team, 2 of which connected during the Meet & Hire event.
- Large company, but has tried to incorporate an Agile framework for some projects.
- It was pretty cool to see that they were using so many of the design processes that we've been using throughout UXDi, including these personas and customer journey maps:
VENMO/BRAINTREE/PAYPAL
- More of a startup feel. There was minimal structure to our tour and Q&A session, which probably reflects the overall work style here.
- The designers we talked to are fulfilled with the level of ownership they have over their designs.
- Highly value humility in new hires.
Work on Project 5
The vast majority of class time this week was spent on Project 5 work. My group went through several large redesigns throughout the course of the week, but we finally have some wireframes put together that we are comfortable presenting on Wednesday, after spending most of our Saturday at GA.
We have had a great experience working with our clients, and it has been an interesting challenge balancing user needs, business needs, and development time constraints. More details to come!