Back to School this Fall – UX Education

This year, September and October were for learning. I had some free time and money in my Education budget, so these are the workshops and conferences I attended:

  • In September I started with the Lean UX Workshop given by Jeff Gothelf , author of the book Lean UX.
  • A couple of weeks later in October, I attended a UX Masterclass conference on UX and Market Research.
  • Near the end of October I attended Measuring the User Experience: A Workshop on Usability Metrics, which was sponsored by the NYC UXPA and given by Bill Albert.

Though the methods varied, all the speakers stressed the importance of research and testing in creating a viable, usable product. However, first you need to decide what you are creating, who you are creating it for, what it is supposed to accomplish and how you will measure the success of the outcome.

Now that it’s been a while since I attended the above sessions, two things stand out to me from my experience as mid-level working towards senior UX designer:

  • Information about project goals is often not clearly communicated to the more junior members of the team, especially when the team is spread out over different departments.
  • Good research will update information about user needs, the market, etc.. and goals will have to change to accommodate that; not an easy task within a large corporation.

I haven’t had the chance yet to work on a Lean/Agile type project, but I would really like to as the approach appears to prevent those issues.