How can I share that with you?

While I do want my portfolio to show the quality of my work, I also want to take a stab at explaining how I show up, in the hopes that you will be able to get a more complete view of who I am and what I believe, without having to make too many assumptions in my case studies. As a leader, the impact I have in terms of how I show up—and how I push the designers on my team to show up—will far outweigh the impact I will have as an individual contributor.

In an effort to stay concise, I’m going to share 3 constructs that I find useful.

• How I focus myself and my efforts. (1 min)

• How I approach the work itself. (3-5 min)

• How I manage people and teams. (2 min)

Curiosity

Hands down, I believe this is the most important quality for any UX designer. And this quality manifests itself in so many ways throughout the design process. Curiosity drives us to uncover the root cause of a design problem. Curiosity pushes us to create a wide variety of solutions. Curiosity helps us to deeply understand the concerns of partners and lets us incorporate them, instead of letting them stop us. Curiosity demands that we understand the impact of our work and takes us to new design problems.

Context & Consistency

Design systems have benefits for everyone involved with creating digital products, but too often they are seen as binary—either everything is in the system or its not working. While they introduce a level of consistency in both design and development that increases quality of experience and speed to delivery, there is a danger that the promise of consistency can drown out the need to consider a user’s context. They allow us to breeze past the simple and repeated problems to provide space for larger and more tangled opportunities. But, when we focus on those larger opportunities…context becomes critical. Any component, no matter how robust or elevated, will not be successful when placed into a context where it doesn’t fit. There is a healthy tension between designing systematically with consistent components and creating contextual experiences that serve specific needs.

Communication, Collaboration & Compromise.

The last one, but probably the most important (I know I said the same thing for Curiosity). We don’t ship Figma files to production. Everything we build is filtered through product teams and built by developers. On top of that, UX is but one of the many voices in any conversation. There will almost always be business goals, technical constraints, marketing requests, legal requirements, creative guidelines, and more. Communication is critical—both for UX designers to have a clear understanding of the points of view of all of our partners, and for our partners to have a clear understanding of UX. Collaboration—both within UX and with cross-functional partners—ensures that our experiences benefit from a wide range of expertise and viewpoints. Compromise is, and always will be, how things get done. UX work is a benefit to our users only when they get to see it. While we need to be clear in the value we are trying to provide, we also need to be flexible with our partners in how we get there.

Bias towards Action

The only thing worse than spending 4 weeks on an idea that doesn’t work is spending 8 weeks on that same idea. We should constantly be asking ourselves “how can we move this body of work forward so that we can test and learn?”

Obvious always Wins

Users spend most of their time on other sites. The expectations that a user has when they come to our site are built on other sites. They come to our site to interact with our products, not to learn how to interact with our site. Any novel experience needs to be a 10x improvement over the obvious and be absurdly easy to beat out the common pattern.

Outcomes over Outputs

While the thing that we design is an output, creating the output is not the ultimate goal of our work. The central goal of our work is to create a specific outcome, either for the user, the business, or both. Maintaining visibility to, and a focus on, the outcome we are trying to achieve is critical to creating a successful experience.

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy

The processes we use to create our work are merely tools. Like any other tools, they should be inspected regularly for their value and discarded when they break down. As tools, they do not represent the value that we create…but rather they enable us to create our true value: a stellar user experience. Whether its as simple as a recurring meeting or as complex as overall team structure and cross-functional collaboration, we should maintain a healthy level of curiosity about whether or not something is still providing value in its current iteration.