judged, so your design should
speak for itself.
your design is going to be judged, so your design should speak for itself and any decision should be accompanied by the reasons for taking that decision. Technical knowledge is mandatory, but also strong communica-tion skills are needed, both written and spoken. One year after leaving, the re-design was published.
Meanwhile, I got my second job for a big corporation—so huge; that in the NDA I signed I was almost forbidden to say I was working for them.
Many people say “Wow, you’ve worked for ‘The Company’” and ask for more information about what it was like. I feel that I deceive them when I say I worked for a consultancy firm. I never actually stepped into the famous headquarters as my job was purely mechanical on “The Company” online interface. Indeed, the interface was so poor that the mechanical job became full of repetitive stress pain. I proposed some changes in the interface to improve it, but “The Company’s” response was zero. Deceived by this behaviour and with pain in my hands, I re-duced my involvement to the minimum until the end of the project. I learnt not to be impressed by the name of a company you are working for;
they are just another group of people looking for money. Instead look for good projects, no matter what company.
My next job was for a small company, where I thought the same was not going to happen again—and I was right. In this company it was quality over quantity, and we even got free cake on Fridays! I was hired to pro-vide support on accessibility for some big companies, but I also did my best information architecture and usability reports there. I had finally escaped from the technical issues and even the code, and was complete-ly focused on user experience, as I had always wanted. But numbers were not good, and we, four co-workers and I, knew it for sure the day we were fired. Maybe I was too idealistic about that “user experience”
stuff, putting the user in the centre of everything. The last jobs showed me the importance of profitability for every company, no matter what size. So with that clearly in mind I faced my job search differently. My priority is still working on interesting projects about user experience,
but from that moment on, I became a freelance professional. It has its pros and cons, like the certitude of being completely alone, but it also has the reward of being free to accept or reject projects.
And that’s the way I have worked until now.
Breaking the Fourth Wall For the First Time
About three years after starting to work as a designer for different com-panies, I was offered my first opportunity to become a teacher. A friend of mine was teaching Multimedia and needed a couple of weeks for personal issues, so she recommended me to cover for her. At first I was really frightened about what kind of questions I was going to be asked.
I was still a junior and I did not attend meetings without the support of a senior consultant. But this time there wasn’t a net. It was going to be five days of Mambo CMS use.
I studied a lot, prepared some nice PowerPoint slides and downloaded a video-tutorial from YouTube with the same lesson I was going to give.
When I got into the classroom, the students were checking their email.
“They have good internet skills” I quickly figured out, “they are going to be a hard audience.” I introduced myself and asked them to do the same. Their profiles were very different: from 50-year-old housewives to 19-year-old chemistry university students. “Maybe they are too differ-ent for this course” I thought. Then I started my presdiffer-entation. “Mambo is a system to manage contents on your websites”. Suddenly, the first hand rose. “Do we have to know how to code?” Strange question as in the syllabus of the course, no coding skills were asked. “No, don’t worry about coding, it is not needed.” I continued my speech, “We use Mambo to create complex websites with no need of coding.” Another person raised her hand: “But you have just said that it is for managing content on websites, not for creating websites.” Another person pointed out
“But to create websites you need to code a lot!” A third person took part
“I don’t want to code, it is very difficult!” Damn! What kind of students did I have? A rebellion after two sentences? I stopped the lesson and
asked them why they attended that course and what they expected of it. It was then that I realized that their knowledge about the Internet was worse than I had previously considered. And they were scared.
More than me, probably. Apart from emailing and googling, they knew nothing about the Internet. I was really surprised by their response. So I relaxed and calmed them down. I gave one third of the lessons I had prepared, but fulfilled all their expectations.
This first experience in teaching taught me to know your users as early as possible, so you can adapt your actions, contents and speech from the beginning. Because they are probably different from you.
Once I had overcome my fear, I decided to give personal lessons on design. I had time and needed some extra cash. I put adverts on several websites and the calls came at once. I selected five students and started the lessons. They were very different (Photoshop, HTML, Flash etc.) but their main goal was to pass an exam. In fact, they didn’t want to learn, but to pass an exam. They already had the books and tutorials, but wanted someone make it easier, because “books have many words; they are very difficult.” Although my fees were not low, those people were willing to pay for things that they could obtain for free with just a little of interest. In other words: people will pay you, if you can make their life easier.
Some years later I thought it was time to give back some knowledge to the Design community. Most of the things I know now come from library books, courses with scholarships and free tutorials on the Internet. I proposed to organize a free course on usability with the Cadius group in Madrid—Cadius is a Spanish speaking community of professionals from the fields of interaction design, usability and information architecture. About 30 people told me they wanted to col-laborate in the organization, but finally only a bunch of them kept their word. We joined a non-profit conference series about science that is held in Madrid every year. We did this conference for two consecutive
years and had a great time. In the second year we changed the focus of the lectures, in order not to repeat ourselves. The third year everybody was very busy (I was the very first one) and stopped organising confer-ences. We did it just because we wanted to, no money was involved, but it rewarded us with far more than we had given. For example, review-ing the videos recorded at the conferences, I found myself repeatreview-ing a pet word. Although I have practiced at home, and my script was rid of this word, I could count more than 20 uses in just five minutes! Beside that I had changed some examples on the fly, and I still do not know why. Maybe I was too nervous to follow the script or had not practised enough. Anyway, people were happy and learned a little bit about User Experience. Probably they did not spot the pet word or the change in the examples. They really appreciated our effort. This taught me that it does not matter if you make little mistakes if the overall satisfaction is good. People forgive little lapses, especially when things are good, free and presented with enthusiasm.
So, here I was, able to speak about UX in front of other professional colleagues and university professors, as well as people who know noth-ing and have low expectations. So the next step could only be in one direction—try it abroad. It can be very easy to say but not to do. I was a young Spanish girl, with some UX skills and some contacts in the Spanish community. But I knew hardly anything about people abroad.
The only thing I was sure of was that I had to speak English. I had taken lessons for years, but when I started at the university, I gave them up to enrol in French lessons. Ten years later, I needed to speak English again and I found it very difficult! A Spaniards’ level of English is traditionally quite poor. Only written skills are learnt in school, and the oral part is practically symbolic, so I downloaded tons of English movies (thanks P2P!). First it was really difficult to follow the storyline, even with sub-titles, and five years later, I still need them sometimes.
My first international conference was in Beijing in 2007, but only as a delegate. There, I realized that my spoken English was not so bad; in
fact it was much better than that of some of the lecturers. So I plucked up courage and tried my first shot. The conference was in Austria, and I spoke about my doctoral research. I felt terribly nervous, but I knew the subject, had practised a lot and had some slides to support my speech in case I was blocked. But one thing happened that I couldn’t foresee. My low-cost flight had landed so quickly that my ears were blocked; I could not hear anything for three days unless it was shouted! The worst thing was that I noticed it during the question time of my presentation. So I gave my lecture with few language difficulties, but when people raised their hands to ask questions, I entered into panic mode. I could not un-derstand a word they said and continuously asked them to repeat their question in a clearer way! I became more and more nervous and finally had to leave the platform without answering anyone, feeling like an idiot. But, at the same time, I felt liberated as it could not get any worse.
This was the worst scenario I have ever imagined in communicating in English. So from that moment on, everything could only get better. I got rid of my complex and practised my English diligently. There is still plenty of room for improvement, but if I hadn’t dared that first time, I would probably have missed a lot of opportunities, including writing this text now.
So, What Do I Teach Now?
Until now, I have enunciated some big value statements, but nothing about the content of the course. If you are reading this book you will probably know all the lessons, but here is how my background affects my teaching. I have summarized it into four big concepts.
It’s Your Life, It’s Your Decision
With the Bologna reform, exams are not the way to evaluate. In my case, the students have to work throughout the semester at the rede-sign of a product with the UCD methodology. Although attendance is requested at the university, I let the students do what they want. To keep them at the class, my lectures are like a “Lost” episode—much
in-formation, in an amusing way, but if they miss one, they will probably have problems to understand the whole subject.
To solve this potential issue, I mix the UCD theory and practice with an introduction about different, related disciplines, like information archi-tecture, usability or ergonomics. If they miss one lesson, they have my slideshows on the e-learning platform and I provide basic bibliography, links and videos.
I can be flexible with the attendance, but I am not with their deliver-ables, as it is the only way to evaluate them. Probably those who attend will get better scores, but it is their choice.
Open Your Horizon
To complement my explanations, I use YouTube, comics or visits to ar-chaeological museums. Knowledge is not only in Wikipedia. Books at the old library are also recommended as a source.
Also, I insist that my students have to try to speak English. No matter what their level or their mistakes, it is better to try as early as possible.
Knowledge is available out there, and we cannot close our minds just because it is not in a formal way or in our own language. They have to dare, so they will not miss any opportunity.
You Are a Communicator
Design work is 50% communication (what you want to say) and 50%
art (how you say it). There are plenty of subjects in the grade about art, so I focus on the first one. Moreover, 50% of our time is design and the other 50% is convincing others that your design is good, so I try to im-prove their communication skills both in oral presentations and written deliverables.
As you can imagine, simplicity, ease and user needs are stressed in the syllabus, and their redesign must reflect these concepts. Beside, all the
deliverables related to the redesign must also follow these guidelines, as I want them to kill the myth of “Usability professionals make un-usable documentation”, from the very beginning.
Design Is a Profession
User Experience is not only about the user, but also about how compa-nies benefit through design. Organizations, even charity associations, want to maximize the productivity of their actions. So the designer must also look for that profit, both for the company you are working for, and for the client of that company.
To get this, they must learn to:
1. Adjust the budget, resources and time to the reality; do not try to implement everything users, or clients, want or need. Be realistic.
2. Calculate (and communicate) the profitability of your design.
3. Consider sacrificing a quality product in order to promote a prof-itable one.
4. If you want a quality product, it will take time (and time is money, so return to point 1).
I know this may hurt the artist’s heart we have inside us, but this is what the real world is like.
About the Author
Olga Revilla holds a Degree in Journalism and a Master in Multimedia and Internet. Besides, she is a Graduate in Ergonomics and now she‘s researching on her PhD in Multimedia Engineering.
Meanwhile she manages the UX department of an Engineering Company and has her own business ‘Itákora’ where Olga thinks, de-signs, tests and audits interfaces.
In her spare time Olga plays basketball, draws and takes long walks with her dog.
Web: www.itakora.com Twitter: itakora
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/itakora