uxmelina

As you may know, I recently graduated and started a great new job as a UX Engineer out in Silicon Valley. My summer was filled with moving myself across the country (again), getting settled in a new city (again), and getting everything I need set up. The fall is here, and although it’s nothing like the cooler fall weather I’m used to back in Waterloo, it’s nice. When I finished school I wrote a bunch of goals about all aspects of my life: social, health, money, and continual learning. Below are my education/learning goals. I will update you on the progress!

Education/Learning (career-related)

- Read more blogs: When I was in college, I think I spent so much time reading about design/research in textbooks, I found myself just reading entertaining/tech blogs. I need to cut back on those and introduce some design related blogs. I’m taking suggestions on this one, what blogs do you enjoy?

- Get more involved in the UX community in Silicon Valley: I’ve attended some BayCHI events and those are usually pretty good ways to meet new people and learn new things. Does anyone have any suggestions on other events or organizations locally?

- Explore continuing education options at Standford: I don’t plan on doing any formal education in the next year but knowing what is available will be handy when I have the time to do it!

- Blog more: I’m going to start with setting the goals at 2 posts a month. It’s not huge, and hopefully I can increase it to 2 per week. Blogging will help me find new and interesting topics to learn and write about, and also improve my writing skills (never hurts).

Education/Learning (non-career)

- Learn to Surf.

- Learn drive a motorcycle. I’m planning to take a course in the spring.

- Learn more about money management tools and investing options. I’m loving mint.com.

All of those things are interesting to me and help with money, health and social goals. I tried surfing already. It is much harder then I initially thought, I will keep at it!

Today, I took part in the “The Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer“, a ceremony taken by many students who complete accredited engineering programs in Canada. The ceremony involved making a moral, ethical and professional commitment to my profession. I was “wedded to cold iron” (as they say), when given an iron ring to wear on my pinky finger of my working hand. This ring acts as a reminder of this commitment.

The ethical obligation held by more traditional engineering disciplines is clear. If a civil engineer doesn’t act ethically, and fails to design a bridge safely, then people could, and likely would, be harmed when it fails.

Can ethics have as important outcome in UX design? I say yes! It may not be as obvious at first, especial to people just starting out in the feild (such as myself), but I saw this talk last week (shown below) and it started to make me think. Robert Fabricant talks about IxD, I recommend watching the whole thing, but around the half way point he talks about the difference between output, outcome, and impact of design. I understand it as the result on the project level, user level, and society level. He uses the example of purity pledges with Evangelicals. I will summarize his distinction in his example.

Output (project level) : purity pledges, purity balls, rings (as designed)

Outcome (user level): teens taking the pledge, father’s giving rings to daughters (as designed)

Impact (society level): Higher teen pregnancy in Evangelical (not intended design)

It’s the impact where ethics really come into play. As shown with the purity pledge, if designers don’t consider this level fully, it becomes clear of the unethical results that can occur with a design. Robert talks about the need for an “impact model” similar to business models used for new ideas.

Since an impact model doesn’t really exist right now, can you think of any methods to determine an impact model or elements that an ideal model would have?

Robert Fabricant - Behavior is our Medium from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

One large part of University that I don’t agreed with: Exams.

My main beef is due to the fact that they are really unlike anything you will ever do in the real world. I know I have only worked in “the real world” to a total of 2 years, but at each job, I have yet to EVER be placed in a traditional exam situation. Please comment if you have ever been stuck in a room with 100+ people, all solving the exact same problem, without the aid of a calculator, a textbook or the internet and told not to talk or make any noise, and doing it all in an extreme time crunch. It’s just not realist. I have thought up a few solutions, but that’s not the point to this post.

On Monday I did something more ridiculous then writing exams. I handed in my proposal for my design plan. This 20 page report detailed everything my partner and I will do to complete our 8 month project (I will post details on it soon). The funny part comes with HOW I handed it in.

Try to follow this,

The prof who was marking us (our awesome supervisor) was at a conference, to ensure we had it completed on time, she was emailed a copy. Then according to course requirements, 2 copies were left in her mailbox. This was so she could read, mark and return one copy to us and kept the 2nd copy for future reference. Now a 3rd hard copy was given to the prof running the course so he could also make sure everyone’s projects were approximately similar (since we all have different supervisors).

So, 60 pages of printing, 3 cover pages, 3 backing pages, 3 bindings and one email later we handed in our report. A report that will be read by exactly 2 people (until I post it on this blog). Does anyone else see the problem with this? Actually some people do, I read another blog about this a few weeks ago, but can’t seem to find the link.

Imagine if instead of hard copies the report was posted on website. Each prof (and anyone else) could give their feedback in the form of comments. Students would have a higher sense of accountability since the viewing audience would be higher. If the report was any good, other people could learn from it. Students wouldn’t spend all morning in printing labs and a few less trees would die. The report, in all it’s glory, could be accessible from anywhere. New media (like videos and links) could be added to actually enhance the report. Referencing would be so much easier and so much more accurate and verifiable. The list of benefits goes on and on.

Their are some drawbacks that need to be worked out. Sometimes inline comments are nice on reports and that’s not really supported with traditional comments. Also, I don’t really know how many profs would want to read hours and hours of reports online, some user research is required there.

How does this relate to design? Earlier in the term, when I was trying to think up something fun to research and redesign, a friend of mine (who is actually redesigning a tattoo gun) said to me “think of something that hasn’t changed for many years”. Likely, due to new improvements in technology, their is something that can be improved and enhanced that hasn’t been designed, exams and report submissions both fall into this category. This reminded me of the idea about TV viewing (a task that has reminded pretty static since its inception) and realized that it would be a fun topic to explore.

Please comment if you have used an alternative method to submit reports that is more efficient then my adventure on Monday. I am using Google sites for 2 of my courses as a method of content submission, but only in addition to, traditional methods. Also, our school has an online course distribution tool that allows us to submit electronic copies of papers, but is not used by all profs. So their has been some movement in the right direction.