How we're pricing UX Night School Workshops - Spring, 2017

Like any business owner, I’ve been trying to figure out the right approach to pricing classes like these. On the one hand, immersive UX programs like those offered by Adaptive Path, Nielsen Norman Group, or UIE charge beaucoup bucks for their offerings, many of which are of very high quality. For organizations, quality UX investments have a quantifiable ROI somewhere around 20:1.  

On the other hand, the model I see above is limited in its accessibility, and I want to change this. Some of those events don’t have a code of conduct. Even for those who can pay full freight, there’s also the added expense of travel and time away from work/family/community. I’ve been pretty loudmouthed about care lately, and I figure I have to walk my talk. I value others who value community. I think we can do this differently. 

In addition to just starting out as a business and trying to be competitive, I often think about how I am the product of affordable public schooling. As a design researcher, I sincerely want to learn from as diverse of a group of learners and thinkers as possible. I believe that it is possible to use technology to make us more human, more caring, more peaceful, but first we have to equip the greatest range of people with the tools to do it. As bell hooks says, teaching is transgression. 

As I was leafing through the PCC catalog and daydreaming about motorcycle license classes and piano lessons, I thought of an idea to test out. UX Night School is pricing Spring 2017 workshops at the price of one resident student credit hour at Portland Community College. To encourage a better cohort-level engagement, I’m offering an additional discount for folks who sign up for the series at $297. 

I have no idea how sustainable this all is. After all, public institutions like community colleges are subsidized by public funds, whereas my work on UX Night School is not. But maybe I can find a way to do this that allows me to draw support from the PDX community in other ways, and allows me to give back. Maybe we can figure out sponsorships and scholarships for folks who want to learn but can't afford classes even at this price point. 

So let's do this. It's gonna be fun. 

Do you need a letter for your boss? Here you go.  (It's a convenient Google Docs file that you can edit).

Want to get college credit or Continuing Education credits? Let us know. 

In Solidarity,

Amelia

My UX Crisis of Faith

Maybe we’re doing this User Experience thing all wrong

My crisis of faith as User Experience professional.

TLDR: User Experience folks think we can make everything better. We are hampered by our own training and our own environment; we are thinking too small. If we’re going to talk the talk, we can get much better at walking the walk. We might work with some of the biggest brands, but we can learn from independent and small businesses how to create innovative user experiences — at every scale.

So I’m starting  UX Night School , a professional development company for Managers, Creatives, and Technologists. Join us. 

After ten years in practice and two graduate degrees, I’m realizing that we User Experience professionals don’t know as much as we think we do. We talk up user advocacy but can’t seem to take our own advice. UX, at least how we do it now, is limited in its capacity to fix what’s broken in technology, design, and business.

The problem? We have been trying to apply design principles within our siloed design and development bubbles while working in a bigger, disconnected system. I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours in organizations ranging from museums to scrappy startups to big design agencies to huge corporations. In conference rooms, with sticky notes, with journey maps, in user interviews, in testing sessions and analyzing data. I’ve been called “Information Architect”,“User Researcher”, “UX researcher”, “UX designer” , “Product designer”, and simply “Consultant”. (I still get referred to as “the UX girl” with shocking regularity, but I choose to take this as a compliment to my skincare regimen.)

No matter the context or my role, the same problematic pattern emerges: we are blind to our own powerlessness when working as a single member of a larger team or system. It keeps us from thoughtfully applying design principles and engaging in effective user advocacy. As Facebook VP of Product Margaret Gould Stewart notes, “creating great user experiences is everyone’s job”.

Design thinking can radically improve the way that teams collaborate and deliver, but it only works when it’s part of an ongoing process as part of a larger strategy, not just a discrete activity assigned to a particular project. My hypothesis is that the only real way to make a real commitment to user advocacy is to do so throughout the development and business cycles in an organization. From the ground up.

Who here has worked on a UX team that was toxic, ineffective, or some other combination of an all-around bad experience for everyone involved? I’ll raise my hand first. Who has worked endlessly on improving the User Experience of products they have little faith in, or for organizations that were looking for easy solutions to big, embedded problems that we were all too willing to sell? I’ll raise my hand again.

Companies can no longer afford to ignore their own culture and the human experience and still create products for the human experience.

User Experience is more than just designing products — it’s an approach to solving business problems. We need to train business leaders, not just UX professionals, to apply design thinking and UX skills to their workplace.To see how well this ground-up approach can work, we needn’t look further than our own backyard.

Danner Boot Factory. Portland, Oregon. 2017

What can you learn about the value of craftsmanship and service design at Danner Boots? Quite a bit, I’d wager.

As a Portlander, I joke that our major export is brands. From what I’ve witnessed, our local independent businesses practice better design thinking than many organizations employing an army of UX professionals.

If I want to see a business that puts people at its center in order to develop thoughtful product and service design, all I need to do is go on a coffee run. My favorite coffee shops: Case Study, Heart, Stumptown — each have super-developed and thoughtful experiences for the end user to accompany excellent products. What’s more, they demonstrate real commitment to doing it on a sustainable scale. Even my local nail salon has created an immersive and interactive craft experience that seems to have totally disrupted its industry.

Portland excels at business based around excellent product and excellent service. Technology always feels like an afterthought. Whether it’s a classic pair of Air Maxes, some Danner boots, some Stumptown Hairbender espresso, or let’s be honest, some Oregon-grown pinot noir (or recreational cannabis), there are folks here who have figured it out, who are walking the walk without so loudly talking the talk.

These folks seem to know something about delivering excellent product and delightful service by some true craftsmen and craftswomen, all the way down the supply chain. These businesses are built around people, products, and communities. Digital tools and technology are seemingly a last step.

Frustrated as I am by organizations shooting themselves in the foot and as much as much as I’d like to fantasize about opening my own gluten-free panaderia or super-stylish bike shop, User Experience remains my trade. I may be having a UX crisis of faith, but I’m not giving up just yet. Instead, I’ve vowed to learn as much as I can, and design a solution built around people.

Just today, I ran into a startup founder who called out, “Hey, it’s the UX Lady!” (far preferable to “UX Girl”, I must admit). I’m constantly asked by designers and developers, “How do I learn more about UX?” Folks who are curious about the field ask me, “How do I get experience?” . My peers at mid-career want to keep learning new skills and get better at their jobs, and colleagues managing teams are struggling to help them grow and work better together.

I see an unmet need for better, practical UX training — for everyone, not just designers. So I’m working towards building a solution, using the iterative, participatory methods I’ve used in my years of client work. I’m launching UX Night School, my own independent Portland business, exploring design principles and values, developing new, engaging ways of building user experience and giving people the tools to change their workplaces and grow in their careers.

Join me. It’ll be fun, or at the very least, a real experience.

Minimum Viable Responsibility

On treating users with respect.

When things are slow at work, or if I’m feeling bored and listless, I write thank-you notes to users I’ve interviewed recently. My handwriting is both small and sloppy, so I use a black sharpie, and I keep my notes direct and concise: “Thank you for taking the time to talk with me during my visit last week. I really appreciate your feedback!”

I make a point of this, not because of any good Texan manners and effortless feminine nicety, but because it’s the only available option. In my current job, I’m doing design research for enterprise software and I’m interviewing the company’s employees during their work hours. Doing consumer-facing user research, I loved feeling like a game show host at the end of an interview by handing over an envelope of cash or a gift card. In my current job, compensating the users isn’t on the table. “If I can’t pay them, I should properly thank them.” I told a coworker. Users, after all, are the most crucial resource here.

Despite the User Experience boom of the past decade, discussion of ethics and codes of conduct has yet to see much meaningful discussion in professional circles. How many discussions have I sat through about the Hamburger Icon, versus how many about how we should treat or inform our users during testing? During secondary data collection? About deception or dishonesty?

I try to be very officious when reading an informed consent statement for usability testing or user interviews:

“You can leave at any time, you can stop at any time, you can ask questions at any time, and there is no deception involved”.

I might wager that for most tech communities, the maddening, no-good solution quandary about how to treat users and their data is less of a crowdpleaser than how our work is going to impress our peers, give our customers something new, or make things better for them. I’d wager to say that if privacy and subjectivity were given the same sort of intense treatment as the Hamburger Icon, we’d be in a much better place in this regard.

This might be a symptom of the larger disease of chronic technological myopia: by emphasizing singular instances of “solving the problem” for users with the design of solutions, or “delighting” the user in interaction, or just pulling off feats of engineering without anything breaking, there’s little room for identifying ground rules or having hard discussions. Like those about how to approach people who have sensitivities or vulnerabilities different than our own. About diversity issues or labor issues or privacy issues in the places we work.

Product teams should all use as much data as they can get their hands on- it’s good business practice. Moreover, data scientists have no reason to not work closely with product teams and customer-facing groups. It makes everyone more informed and more collaborative to know what else goes on where they work. When I facilitate user research sessions with business teams, I like to start with the questions, “What do we know and how do we know it?”

The Facebook emotional contagion experiments (there have been several) aren’t watershed moments for science: they’re crappy experiments done with crappy rationale and techniques that badly attempt to model humanity vis a vis computing. While some might be shocked to see that these went on in the confines of university labs, this is anything but a surprise to anyone who has spent time in a cash strapped and revenue-oriented R1 university. Tech companies can and do freely pick and choose between stressed-out assistant professors and underfunded grad students to take their research dollars. Institutional Review Boards will approve animal testing while grilling anyone doing ethnographic interviews, but machine learning barely merits their attention.

It’s a huge unsolved, largely unacknowledged problem, how technology companies regard their users. The only reasonable thing I can do is point to the problem, argue that it’s actually a problem, and try to make a case for addressing it. I have yet to figure out how to start to solve it on my own front, aside from using human decency as a metric: I try to build relationships with users when I can, and try to act in the best interest of that relationship when going about my work. It’s the least I can do.

That data on your wrist…

This is a throwback post that originally appeared on Medium in 2014. 

Notes from a watch geek

Wearing a watch is a ritual that has little to do with the metrics of time but everything to do with its politics.

If I have to leave the house without my watch, I feel deeply unsettled and a little bit naked. But it’s also a kind of ritual object, like the rosary beads or holy cards or scapulars that I grew up with as a Catholic.

Watches, and wall clocks too, show a devotion to “keeping” time, to isolating key metrics to improve performance. Wearing a watch is first a practical way of “keeping track of time”- glancing at my watch while I’m riding my bike somewhere or when I’m at the playground with my kid. And it’s true, when you’re in a casino or a bar there’s rarely a clock within eyesight.

I have several watches — the one I wear most frequently is a rose gold Nixon that my husband bought me as a gift, after I’d left my Seiko 5 (which had a day and date dial, a feature I loved) on the deck of the pool after swimming laps (another practical use for a discrete and sturdy timepiece: clocking intervals). A designer I met commented on the Nixon, “It’s all branding and design, no engineering”.

I also have a “ladies-style” Seiko I bought from a pawn shop in panic when I couldn’t find the Nixon for a few days, and a few vintage automatic (meaning, they have to be wound regularly) watches that I bought off of Ebay or in thrift stores, one made by Sandoz (a Swiss company perhaps more famous now for manufacturing LSD). Still, wearing an unreliable watch feels better than wearing none at all.

I bought my ex-husband a watch as a gift several years ago, because it bothered me that he didn’t wear one. (Yes, this is a Homer Simpson move). A rare 80’s Casio basketball game watch, I bought it from an online store in Japan that sells only old digital watches and boomboxes. I read about it on Nerd Watch.  “I have a clock on my phone”, he said. I sighed.

My friend Anne demurred on a diamond ring when she got engaged a few years ago. “I just want a fancy fucking watch” she said. She and her now-husband went to Cartier, and both got said fancy fucking watches. The Tank watch, with the sapphire knob and smooth black leather band, lends way more gentlewomanly gravitas than a carat solitaire would.

Watches are often juxtapositions of fancy and practical. If only I had a compendium of rap references to watches! They can also be extremely cheap, like the novelty watches you used to get in Cereal Boxes. They can be a fancy kind of cheap, like the Swatches my older cousins had. You can easily do an against-the-grain consumer assessment of watches, in evaluating them on their components and performance. Check out Wallet Friendly Watch Forum and tell me you don’t want to go digging through your older relatives’ dressers. As I reminded everyone after I saw “Hugo”, clocks are cool.

Watches are a ubiquitous intersection of engineering, data, design, and the semiotics of branding. They’re computational devices, fundamentally. But what will the iWatch do, really, that will change all of this?

…

The wristwatch itself is a relatively new invention. Wristwatches were first manufactured on the large scale around the turn of the twentieth century — its early adopters were working women in the industrial age. Just think about all those garment and mill workers, rushing to get to factory jobs. City life, and industrial work, demands a certain type of connectedness that time has facilitated.

Only after World War I did men start to wear watches on their wrists, doing so was a sign of modernity, military status, and constant connectedness.

Who can separate the metaphor of the gold watch on retirement from the ideology of the Company Man? Now, of course, the idea of keeping a job for 40 years, and of course, keeping to the predictable rhythms of white collar life, seems as implausible as the idea that one needs a distinct time piece.

…

A watch is a ubiquitous computing device, and like many others that have come after it, is one that has take such a firm position in everyday life that one rarely thinks about how they got there. At some point someone made an engineering decision about everything I touch, but I know little about how or when they were made.

Do I want an Apple Watch? No, not right now. For one, it probably will fit oddly- I would wager that it’s not designed enough at this point to be really wearable. I also tell myself that I’m done with buying consumer electronics without a thought their supply chain, and this makes me highly disinclined to buy any more Apple products. (Though my 2011 Mac Book Pro is literally on her last leg, and I’ll have to replace her with another Mac OS device just to run Omnigraffle.)

And really, I’ll only start wearing a smart watch when I know other people who wear one, like with the Fitbit or Fuel Band. Besides, even when I wore a Fuel Band, I still wore my watch.