sports

The UX Athlete – A New Series on Johnny Holland

Published on April 25, 2012

Recently, Johnny Holland Magazine graciously offered me the opportunity to share my thoughts on UX with their audience. Together we decided to create a series entitled The UX Athlete in which I use many of the lessons that I’ve learned while playing sports to highlight how we can all be better designers. The first post, UX Success Starts with a Good Strategy, just recently launched and I have been receiving some great feedback on it. Be sure to check it out along with the others that will be going up in the near future. And, as always, I’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback that you have on any of the posts, or the series in general. Enjoy, and thanks again to Johnny Holland for allowing me to participate.

Motivation: Whatever doesn’t kill us

Published on March 7, 2012

(This post is the fourth in a series devoted to looking at how sports and design are aligned. For more in this series see How being a jock makes me a better UX Designer, UX and Sports? Ya Damn Right!, and How to find the best UX mentor. I also presented some of this material at Interaction 12. Be sure to check out the slides from that talk as well!)

I remember the summer well. It was the summer right before my freshman year in high school. Somehow, I had been asked to play with the Varsity soccer team, and therefore I was attending the twice a day practices (practices that were brutal, to say the least). There was one hill nicknamed “The Rambo Hill” that was part of our everyday routine. In short, this was a steep, rocky (no pun intended) hill that we would run up and down. It was painful (especially falling down the hill after your cleat comes untied… but that is another story). Being one of three freshman on the team I was younger than everyone else, and because of that had very little, if any, clout. I decided to try an experiment, both for my own mental stamina, as well as to test the relationship with my team. But more on that later.

I’m telling you this story today because I think that we, as designers, are lacking the same sort of clout within our teams and organizations. Although UX is the newest buzz term, and everyone thinks they need us, they still have not granted us enough respect to really understand what we do. If you think that being “needed” on a team in order to draw the picture in omnigraffle is respect, then I challenge you to a duel. Luckily, times are changing. But, we aren’t quite where we need to be to be truly respected. And, therefore, perhaps we should try a similar experiment to the one that I conducted back during that summer.

First, I think it’s important to acknowledge the problems with not having enough respect (insert Rodney Dangerfield voiceover) or clout. First off, it is just plain demoralizing to be the only one in the room that respects your work and really knows what you do. As I said, respect isn’t just about being invited to the party, it’s about being invited to the party for the right reasons. And, unfortunately with us, that is not always the case. The second problem is that it is extremely hard to bring the correct solution or any solution forth for discussion when your position within the team is misunderstood or under respected. The third issue is that it is even harder to expect to get a representative at any higher level in an organization if your role is misunderstood and lacks clout.

So, what is the experiment that I ran with my soccer team that summer? I decided, on my own free will, to become a motivator. Doing so meant that I was the person cheering on the team no matter how much pain or exhaustion I felt. When we were running up the hill, around the field, over the river and through the woods I would yell out “Come on girls! We can do this! Whatever doesn’t kill us, makes us all stronger!”.

Bringing this over to design… this means our solution to the problems I mentioned above lies in becoming motivators. That’s right, you should motivate your teammates. Tell them, aloud, when they are doing a good job. When was the last time you saw a developer on a tight deadline all stressed out and said to them “Hey, you know what? You got this. You’re doing a great job and I know you can do this.”. Pretty powerful statement right? Imagine how they will feel when you say that? Also, you want to keep things on the project positive and push your team to excel both with your words and your actions.

You’ll be surprised what being a motivator can do. That summer, my cheering became my tagline. It was probably, after awhile, pretty freakin annoying, but it didn’t matter. This type of cheering, as well as keeping a positive attitude and complimenting and motivating individual teammates as well as everyone on the whole, shifted something. People began to trust in me as a teammate. They looked at me as someone who understood how they felt, even if I was less experienced. They wanted me around more. And by coupling this with my will to work hard and learn I gained a whole lot of respect and clout.

I think that running this same experiment will work within design. By keeping a positive attitude, recognizing effort and pushing your teammates (especially your non-design teammates) to excel you will earn a great deal of trust and not long after a high level of respect. You are no longer the creative who sits in the corner and does the fun work… you are a part of the team! You are showing that you understand how everyone else feels and thus you can be trusted. And once you earn this clout and respect the sky is the limit for how far you can take your role and the role of this profession. By letting down your guard, and pushing your team to be better, you become the one they want around more, and not just for your wireframing skills either.

UX and Sports? Ya Damn Right!

Published on January 11, 2012

This post is the second in a series devoted to pointing out How being a jock makes a better UX Designer (Also, if you are coming to Interaction 12 in Dublin, be sure to check out my talk How being a jock makes a better interaction designer!)

As UXers, we are really great at researching and designing solutions for our users. The problem is that we are not so great at convincing our teams and clients, that 1. research is needed, and 2. our design ideas are sound. One way to combat this is to understand The Importance of Rationale. However, today I wanted to talk about a new method gleamed from the wide world of sports that can help you to evangelize your ideas both within your organization as well as with your clients.

First, I think it is important to highlight why not being able to sell our process and design ideas is a problem. Besides the fact that it makes us completely depressed about our profession, and therefore makes us wonder why we are even part of a project to begin with; not being able to sell our work means that when we walk into the project we are prey waiting to be pounced on. Any know-it-all marketing person, business manager, project manager or other project team type can out talk us and make our ideas look idiotic (even when they’re awesome) just because they don’t agree with our solution (or it doesn’t work best for their part of the organization). Thus, what happens by us not being able to push our process and ideas is we end up sacrificing our expertise to the greater team (everyone is a designer, afterall) and allowing group think and design by committee to create solutions for our users instead of us. Now, of course there is always room for critique and brainstorming, but what I’m talking about is different. I’m talking about someone just pushing their ideas over you, and through the machine in order to be the hero of the organization.

So how do we solve this? One way is to look at a timeless lesson taken from the world of athletics. That lesson? Be a teammate. Yes, it really is that simple. All jocks know this one. To be successful, you have to be willing to swallow your pride, be the bigger person, and admit when something is and is not your responsibility. Sure, you can have opinions about anything, but to be honest, the marketing numbers or the coding, or other non-interaction design focused things are not your responsibility. Might you be a better marketing representative that the person on your team? Sure. But you aren’t the marketing person responsible for this project, you are the interaction designer. Respect the other person’s role. Offer up suggestions to them in a kind way, in a way that you want people to offer up design suggestions to you, and then… leave it alone. You are not the saving grace of this company, you are a part of the company team. By recognizing and taking control of your responsibilities and by letting your other team members do them same, you are showing that you have faith in your teammates, the overall team and the team philosophy.

The outcomes of being a teammate are mutual respect and acceptance on both parts (yours and theirs). Having these makes it a lot harder for people to rip apart your design ideas in a meeting just because they might clash with an opinion. By showing respect and acceptance, you are asking to get them back in return (see “Respect is Something You Need to Give” for more thoughts). By letting your guard down you are inviting your teammates to do the same. And once they do, they will start to see you as a valued part of the team and will then be a lot more likely to help you to curate the best solutions possible for your users.

How being a jock makes me a better UX Designer

Published on October 12, 2011

As many of your know, I love sports. I love playing sports, I love watching sports, and I am a huge college basketball fan (Go Tarheels! Sorry Dukies, but well you know). I have participated in some form of organized team sports since I was in elementary school, and continue to do so to this day. In fact, it’s probably what keeps me sane. Because of this, I can’t help but associate lessons learned from the field with how to become a better UX professional (I also can’t ignore this because the idea came to me from a desk neighbor at one of my favorite clients). Thus, I wanted to share with you some of those lessons from the field, and how they have made me a better UX Designer. So, our first lesson from the field: success is all about strategy.

In your current project, what is your strategy for success? Has your team sat down and agreed on what success will look like and how it’s defined? From that has your team talked about the strategy for getting the project over the finish line… and I mean talked about it as a team. Sure maybe your design team has a strategy, and the development team has their strategy, but what about the team as a whole…. what is that strategy?

Team strategy and consensus is extremely important for project and product success. Without having a shared end goal, and then a road map for getting to that goal, everyone will begin to chase their own ambitions and goals. This, in turn pulls the product apart at the seam, and real progress and success never sees the light of day. Do you think that an NFL team goes out there every week without talking about how they are going to win? How could a team of more than 22 active players win unless they all have the same idea of success, it just wouldn’t make sense.

So, in order to avoid the problems of team distrust, discontent, and lack of success, you gotta have a game plan. Sit down with your team and make it happen. Talk about what success is, how the team will get there, and what part you can play in that strategy.

By doing this, you get everyone on the same page. Tech, marketing, business, project and account management, are all heading in the same direction. Sure everyone has their own individual talents and value adds, the same as a quarterback has a different set of skills than a linebacker, but being able to combine those talents in a productive and successful way is what being a team is all about.