#60: Digging Into UX Career Paths w/ Patrick Branigan

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No. Here’s the thing. So y’all heard that click and I’m gonna leave it in the Edit so that you understand what’s happening here. I want to advise folks, karate classic allottee. I have been sipping on it consistently since we started and I forgot a very funny piece of information about it. It is bottled at 50% 100 proof. So it is Oh wow, it’s a little bit more normally. I think, Patrick your Glenfiddich I think it’s modeled at 43% so I’m going to give myself a pass on that at this point.

Hey everybody, you’re listening to the drunken UX podcast. Thanks for joining us this evening. This is episode number 60, where we will be talking about UX career paths and different specialties within the sphere of user experience. We’re joined this evening by special guests. Patrick, Patrick, Pat. I’m not even drinking it. I can’t get out of my mouth. Patrick Brandon. Brannigan. It. I always say I’m sorry. But every time I read your name, I also think about what’s what’s the starship Captain on a trip stealer Rama. Oh, zap that Brannigan? Yeah, I get that a lot. Yeah. Every time I say it, I think about it. Folks. If you are enjoying the drunken UX podcast, be sure to stop by our friends in the interactive mapping world over at New cloud. You can check them out at New cloud dot Calm slash drunken UX. Be sure to throw the slash drunken UX on there so that they know that you got there because you were listening to us, we would appreciate it and they would love to sell you a map maybe or an illustration. Let’s see what else I am your host, Michael Fienen.

Not too bad. I’m still cooped up in the house. But I’ve been trying to get out and get some fresh air whenever possible. Where

Folks, if you want to connect with us, if you are out there and you’re cooped up and looking for somebody to chat with, you can find us on Twitter or Facebook. It’s slash drunken UX. You can also hit us on Instagram at slash drunken UX podcast. If you want to chat with us. There is a change you can still use our old URL that we plugged in other episodes, but use drunken UX comm slash Discord. We are moving from slack to Discord. There are a number of reasons for that change, none of which are really important to anybody but us but we will be transitioning over to discord So feel free to use the old link if you hear that. It will just refer you to Discord. So don’t be confused if you do slash slack and it sends you to a different application. Invite but Aaron, what are you drinking tonight? Man?

Yeah. Hey, there’s nothing to knock by finding something that you like that doesn’t break the bank. I’m not gonna never gonna throw shade that I drink monkey shoulder and that’s a $32 bottle of scotch and

you know, I don’t know what. Oh, yeah. So ironically, though, so on the rocks, technically alcohol, technically scotch. From a distillery called Brook Lottie now on the rocks I don’t think you can get any more I don’t think they make it anymore because we’re cloudy is I kind of refer to them as a boutique scotch distiller. They like doing like limited runs or specialty runs of things. They generally don’t have age statements on anything because of the way they blend their scotch. But I am drinking a Brooklyn tea tonight I’m drinking the classic Lahti so it’s the one last episode I had you choose for me the four roses or the Burke Lottie and four roses then so I’m having to call it tonight. It’s the classical Adi. It’s very nice. It’s an island scotch. Normally Iowa scotch is very smoky, very PD. The classic Lahti is an unpainted Iowa scotch so it doesn’t have that like punch you in the face kind of flavor. It’s actually on the nose. It’s very like a sort of dry grass, morning grass kind of smell. grainy, kind of smelling but it’s got an oily slightly sweet palette to it. Okay, you get a little there is a tiny bit of like salt but there’s this Brian because it is still an island that bass scotch so you get a sort of brine Enos that comes out in it. That’s kind of nice. So if you think about that interplay between salt and sweet a little bit is definitely what you what you get out of it and often

It’s just one of many and Berkeley has been really hit or miss for me. But I do like the classical Adi. It’s one that I am willing to go and the bottle is just very pretty. It’s a bright green. Oh, yeah. Wow. Green boy at Heidrick I think you’re you’re joining me on the trip to Scotland, right?

the the 15 is good. The 18 is pretty incredible though a little pricey. The 21 is one of my all time favorites. It’s a Speyside scotch It’s sweet that the 21 the Grand reserver is aged in rum casks similar to the balvenie 14 beautiful brown sugar kind of flavor to it. Double wood is still my favorite.

The The thing I really like about Glenfiddich, even like the 12 The 12 is even really good and I think really outperforms say, Glenlivet, 12. You’ll run into a lot, both space sides doesn’t live at 12 has very little flavor to it for me but eat Glenfiddich at 12 years actually still really good too, and very affordable thing 35 maybe I

So this week, we are talking all about UX roles and job titles and specialties and skills and all of this to help you kind of understand when we talk about user experience. That’s a huge bucket of information. And so it’s way too big for me. It’s way too big. Prior and at least by ourselves, so we brought in pet project. I did it again. Why?

I say I feel feel bad about that. But the number of times people have mispronounced my last name, you know?

he is a product designer at a little company that I have a tiny bit of familiarity with called 8.0. I think I’ve heard of them before. Yeah. Patrick and I are co workers, as it turns out, but we have a lot of overlap in some of the stuff we do. I am a front end developer, but he is one of our product designers and is heavily involved in both, you know, design and interaction design and visual design and all the things for the most part, which we will get into why these things overlap. Patrick, man, thanks for taking the time and sitting down with us. I know No, everything is crazy. But hey, we’re all trapped at home. So we might as well be doing something new this time, right?

me. So I thought the best place to start with this discussion is let’s talk first and foremost about sort of the skills that make up UX. Because even I think it’s worth kind of pointing out that even if you are a developer, like Aaron, you’re your Ruby guy, you’re a back end guy. Yeah, you know, first and foremost, but the code you write still produces a user experience at some level.

And while we don’t necessarily we won’t get into it, and This episode, and we probably won’t really talk about it much anywhere, but even things like writing, you know, things on the back end were doing, you know, database layer abstraction layer type stuff, like latency in those exchanges translates to user experience problems, because it means the front end is slow. And the user doesn’t know if it’s broken, or they should wait or whatever the case may be.

Customer Experience yeah and and all that, you know, these are things that bolt on and

we work as an industry by trying to carve out value and we say, this is what I do. This is what I specialize in. This is what makes me valuable and it’s one of the reasons why you start getting all of these titles and all of this sort of fracturing of it. So people are just saying, This is my specialty. If I write a blog that gives it a name, and it gets picked up on Reddit then suddenly it’s a thing for the next six months.

Yeah. So I wrote a list here. And these are in no particular order. But one of the big ones, to me is research analytics. Because you got to know your users. You got to you have to know things to do things. And yeah, there’ll be an article and I’ll warn everybody, not Warren, I will advise everybody. This episode is reference heavy, and I’m not going to stop to point out every one of them the shownotes are going to be right with a ton of links that describe all of these job titles, all of these roles, advice. So with research, research analytics, of course, Nielsen Norman group, as always has a great article that has a breakdown of above have tips for user research. Go check it out. It’ll be in the show notes along with everything else that we’ll be talking about. But research is a huge piece of this equation. I think yes and foremost.

The second area and I’ve joked about this on while elsewhere, I don’t know if I’ve brought this up on this show, actually, I was a theater major in college, which will come as a surprise to nobody who knows me. I learned that tonight. But I say that I was actually a communication major. My degree is a communication degree. It just happens to have been emphasized within theater. But communication is another important piece of user experience. And not just how you are able to, you know, talk to the rest of your teams or get a point across to management. A big part of this comes back to listening. It’s the whole reason is called user experiences. It’s about the user. And so a person’s ability to sit in the room with 10 people, ask a question, and then just absorb the feedback they’re giving you and write it down and take note of it. That’s all For a lot of people, yeah. And also differentiate between one loud person and a bunch of very quiet people who may be having a real problem, one loud person can make a trivial problem seem huge. A lot of quiet people may have a frustration that’s not getting noticed.

Highest Paid person’s

Yeah. Testing. Testing is a big part. Of course, we’ve been we’ve referred how many times there and we should we need a clicker for that, right? The rocket surgery made easy. user testing and understanding how to create a test that does you know, the thing of the scientific method, right? It’s all about generating a hypothesis, creating a test reviewing your results and seeing Did you prove or disprove that hypothesis? And that’s hard because a lot of people especially when Hippo is involved and is saying do this thing. They are inclined to tailor the test to produce the result that, you know, their CEO, their cmo that whoever is driving appoint, you know, they they’re inclined to kind of say, yeah, we’ll just make the test so that it produces an outcome. And that’s not good.

and I view testing to is something that I’m sure we’ve said this kind of in the past that you know, what was true for your users when you started your application or your tool, your site may not be true two or three years later, once they are familiar, you know, testing is always about challenging what you knew as much as what you want to know sometimes. And a lot of the times you can get very focused on testing the new thing, but not testing your old things. And so I think that’s something else. And those are the kind of nuanced pieces of information that I think become very valuable when somebody says, yeah, oh, yeah, we tested all of this stuff. And then we went back, and we redid it. Six months later, and we discovered that people had acclimated, and we’re using shortcuts. And so we improved this experience further, because they got used to it. Yeah. skeuomorphism is that classic comparison. We started with skeuomorphism because we needed people to understand mobile interfaces, in a way that nobody had ever seen before. Apple comes out with this thing called the iPhone. How do you change the Volume, let’s give them a knob. Eventually, people figured that out. And so you could start to simplify it and reduce and shave away. And as Aaron T, your example, we chipped away the marble on that and there now skeuomorphism feels old and dated and not as as sexy as far as that goes. And for those that we should probably say skeuomorphism is the practice of making, you know, designing something digitally to resemble something analog. So, the, like I said, with iPhone, the idea of volume knobs and

One of the big areas of x gets into prototyping wireframing. And this one is, I think, pretty straightforward. It’s exactly what it sounds like the ability to create an interface and show it to somebody and see does it work? Does it not work? Can you play with it? The idea behind prototyping and wireframe is no different, I think in the digital space than it has been in any space for the last hundred years. For the most part, it just takes on a slightly different form for us.

I’m writing an IRA. Because the words you use generate an experience and one of the other ones this folds into a little bit is accessibility and inclusive design. And the reason I add these two together, the way like cognitive impairment and and thinking about like reading Level reading level can be an accessibility issue. And understanding you know that a lot. I don’t know what it is in the US now doesn’t the average person read it like a ninth grade level in the US or something like, frighteningly low actually is, is what I remember. And I’m going to afford myself, give myself the affordance to be wrong in my memory on that. But writing an IRA, IRA is information architecture, it’s the structuring of your data, not just dealing with navigation and folders. But literally thinking about where do people go to find certain information about you and and how is that structured?

Yeah. Yeah.

Anybody who has worked in higher ed, and I think sympathize with that. Because there is such not just even hierarchy of the university from like a people standpoint, but you fight with the structure of, you know, you think, well, you have a call or you have the University, the University is composed of colleges that colleges are composed of programs. But that kind of architecture stuff is where again, you want the user to find what they’re looking for. The last big one is interaction design. This is all of those little things, all the little bits and pieces that start to bind together one interface to another interface, how a button behaves, what happens when you click on an element down to what is the resulting page, you know, on the graph that you’re looking at, or, or the checkout of your shopping cart, interaction design flows through all of you know, all of that experience. We’ll talk about journeys here in a second, the user journey, the customer journey. Ernie all revolves around interaction design and figuring out how, how to get people to do things and entice them to engage in your design without it being into that hospital pattern, that possible pattern and dark pattern territory, huh?

So from there, the reason I brought Patrick in here, as a product designer,

intro for Patrick, get to this point. Patrick has been working on a tool recently that we’ve got to look at internally that is very cool that deals with figuring out how skills apply to a user and how different strengths in these different areas translate to what you are. And I want to be first straight up first and foremost, there’s no finite list. As we’ve already said, this is like a growing industry. You’ll see titles come and go as the industry matures. These are going to be a lot of like the really common ones that you’ll hear and and what they do basically,

And it’s valuable, I think, right to especially understand how broad This is, when it comes to interacting with people who aren’t in web development, interacting with marketers interacting with management, and helping them understand why you may be good in a couple of these areas. Why you’re not good At all of them, because we’re going to go over a couple here. There’s not a lot of overlap in some of these, even though they all tend to be considered UX. And that’s okay. Like, that’s I think the big part is I want to show you how broad This is. So that you don’t feel bad when you’re not good at all of it. Because you shouldn’t be. Most of you will fall into the first category. Most people who get into this field will be the designer of one. I think that’s is that

The phrase you’ll hear in articles, I think a lot is UX generalist. Yeah, yeah. And I correct me if I’m wrong. I’m gonna speculate here. As we talk through these. I feel like if you start as a designer of one or a generalist, and that’s something you really get your foothold in, you will generally evolve into either like a UX design architect or a product designer, because those roles as we’ll mention here tend to oversee a lot like they they understand sort of the full chain, the end to end process a lot better.

thinking vision. What I’ve done, I had, I’ve looked at Patrick’s tool, and I lifted most of these titles from that. I think maybe one or two of them came from some other research.

Start with UX researcher. This one’s easy. I think a UX researcher is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a data scientist, right? Like that’s, that’s the sort of more generic term you would have heard applied to this 10 years ago,

you know, researchers have in any field, you have your futurists you have, you know, the people who are trying to predict where things will go. But you also have people who are trying to predict if, or not predict, but verify if what is happening now works. That’s the, we’ve used this phrase, I think before trust, but verify. That’s what analytics is all about. Trust, but verify. That’s what the researcher does. They are the verify piece of that equation, whether that’s verifying what you think is going to happen or what you think is happening. And so they’re the people who know how to step in, and run I said earlier, that scientific method,

excels. Earlier we mentioned testing this is where the testing starts to factor in because they will take the test results and figure out how do these things answer there, of course, will be an article specifically in the show notes that goes into you know, what, what is UX researcher and how do you become one of Andy’s episode was Episode 56 if you want to go back and check that one out.

product. I’ve never known a researcher that did Love being given the opportunity to say, go learn something. Yeah. Like not, here’s what we want to know. It’s go out and figure something out. Like that’s where I’ve always found researchers really thrive is just being given carte blanche and say, hey, go figure out where we’re going.

Yeah. So from there we translate into UX strategist. The way I classify this is the strategist is the person who I hate this phrase change agent.

Yeah, Buzz. I hate that phrase change agent. The idea is you extract just drives change. Strategy is all about, you know, positioning yourself. It’s all about finding advantage. To me, a UX strategist is that person who figures out from the information the researcher gives them and other things. They are helping product managers and product designers identify the office opportunities for the business? And then how do we align that with what our business strategy is? And you know what the user expectations are for our company?

I like that a lot.

And there’s somebody that the communication piece is going to factor in very heavily, because they need to know how to take this information the researchers are giving them and have it make sense to the business strategy. And that can be very, you know, that can go through many layers before it gets to those people. And so articulating that well and helping people understand that can be incredibly valuable.

from their design architects. This is what I call the maestro, a design. UX design architect is somebody that I think of as the person who conducts the concert, right? They’re helping, especially when we get into talking about visual designers and information architects. They’re the people there, they’re the person who is really keeping all of these things in lockstep or as a physical architect. They’re the person who knows how to make the building and make it in a way That can be actually built. I it’s

I guess, I think of a guy like Frank Lloyd Wright a lot in this sort of a silo because, you know, he was somebody, you know, revolutionary in the, you know, physical structure, architecture realm. And, you know, he designed houses that pushed the boundaries, and innovated in a lot of different areas. And you can look at his houses today and think I’m impressed that that thing is still standing. Because he understood the big picture when he would design those things and he knew that if I bring it These people and these resources we can make this house was a waterfall is waterfall, falling water falling water. That’s what it is, is one of those houses that it’s like, it shouldn’t be. But he knew how to do it and he was able to pull it off. And that’s where I think about something like a UX architect. Hmm. So you mentioned product designer. So this is the next one in my list here. So the way I phrased it was, you know, the product designer is likely to create or oversee journey maps, wireframes, prototypes, and even system design. I really hate the way I write notes sometimes.

So your title is product designer, what would you view your responsibilities as a product designer? What does that encompass for you, Patrick,

From product design we get into Visual Design. Now, visual design can be, I think, frequently confused with simply graphic design. It is it’s a squares rectangle, but a rectangle isn’t always a square, right? There’s overlap and there’s a lot of overlap, but visual design tends to focus heavily on you’ll hear phrases like visual communication, or visual language. Okay, and, and it generally we’ll apply only in the design or at the digital space. Graphic Design could be in a magazine graphic design could be on a billboard graphic design could be in a flyer, visual design is on a website,

a lot of overlap and a lot of shared value between them. The next two are very closely related at least in relation to each other Which is information architecture and UX writing.

Yeah. So if you are an information architect, you’re generally tied into organizing the stuff of your website. And figuring out like, all of the times people will think we’ll ay ay ay ay is just navigation and I had mentioned earlier, ay ay ay ay ay ay goes beyond that. It’s the overall structure of your site. And the thing I like to use is that the idea that it builds scent for your website,

Yeah, because think about when you go into Google Analytics, and you look at landing pages on your site. Obviously, the homepage is the major landing page, but people land elsewhere on your site. And if they’re looking for other information, does that landing page give them sent to know where they are?

the argument that it comes back to is something that goes back about 12 years, I think at this point 10 years, a debate I had with Jared spool about breadcrumbs and the value of breadcrumbs, because they take up space, they take up physical space on your web page. His data showed that they that nobody use them, nobody clicks on breadcrumbs as a tool. My argument was they provided sent to the user to understand where they were within the confines of your site. And how do you measure like that? That’s a hard thing to measure. But that’s part of what information architecture is all about. And an architect comes in and thinks about, okay, if you land it on the computer science degree, does that scent provide you the information if you want to go over and look into, you know, an MBA, for instance, because it was The College of Business in this case, probably not. And so you think about how these things are interconnected and intertwined, so that users can get from point A to point B, regardless of where they where they land. Patrick, I think you said you use the analogy of a compass.

That that I think rings very true. Right. It’s it’s a, it’s a different way of saying since right, you need that truenorth to kind of figure out where you’re going on a site. That’s what I A does in the con. Sure. Anyway, and

The last part of that. So I mentioned UX writing. A UX writer is somebody, think about it. There’s a really easy way to sort of divide this right. your blog is not ran by a UX writer. But the little pieces of information that exist within an application can be driven by UX writer. copywriters will deal with long flow, okay. Okay.

The phrase if you want to Google it and get some articles on it is microcopy.

that’s one that will ring true with a lot of people. It’s like these little blurbs, five, six words here and there that helps you understand interfaces and interface design.

So the last area of all of this comes down to Okay, so here’s what UX is. Here’s what some titles are, what do you do about it? How do you hone these skills? How do you expand these skills? First and foremost, I want to say, figure out which broad skill set applies to you. We mentioned a bunch of these at the start of the show. Is it? Are you a research nerd? Or do you like communication? Do you love running tests? Or do you like making something? Figure out like, which one of those things appeals the most to you? One incredible resource. And I just I literally, as I was researching this episode, I noticed this feature. If you go to uX matters.com they they’re one of the resources we’ll mention again here momentarily. They’ve got this background that looks like a little grid of UX titles. In the upper right corner. If you click a button, there’s a button that says View infographic, it brings their background to the foreground. And it has all of these interconnected bubbles of research and design and strategy and development. And it shows you how different skills kind of connect and overlap And that, to me was super cool. And it helps you understand like, the person who does your information architecture doesn’t necessarily have a lot of overlap with the people doing AV testing. But if you are doing design and product strategy, those can be two different roles, but they’re also very closely related. So that can help you figure out if you look at think about what your passion is, what interests you, and see what it connects to. Within those bubbles. I think that’s kind of a good way to go and dig in a little bit, at least to figure out where you should branch out to if you want to broaden your horizons. So so to speak,

Yeah, I don’t.

The second thing you should do read, read, read, read. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are four sites for websites I’ll recommend to you right now. They’re all easy because they all start with the name UX for some reason. Whatever reason, I guess Google likes the key word UX. And if you go to the show notes, I think we’ve got sites from literally every one of these in the show notes, UX booth, UX, planet UX, collective UX matters. All of these put out content that can help you understand any and or all of these facets of this whole realm. So you can start to figure out what makes sense to you what doesn’t, what you like and what you don’t like, and what you think you’re good at versus what you think you need to learn more about.

Yeah, and a list apart, list apart. So he’s pretty fundamentally sound 99% invisible is a good plug because I enjoy the hell out of that, because it does get very broad in, in concept. If those went by too fast for anybody, don’t worry, I’ll go back through when I’m editing and I will add links to every one of those in the show notes. There’s also a lot of online training out there. Now these are less official, there are some certifications you can go get. Do it if you want to. They’re expensive as shit. A lot of them range from, you know, literally thousands to like 1012 $15,000 don’t advocate for that for a lot of people because it’s out of your budget, but there’s online training that you can go look at it’s got a lower barrier to entry Udemy is got a really good course that we’ll have linked Pluralsight I know this episode is airing about mid April, you only have about two weeks left take advantage of it but plural sites offering all their courses free to folks during the whole COVID-19 lockdown, go check them out. And not to plug our stuff. But the gymnasium calm, we’ve got two or three different really good UX courses you can take. They are free, no strings attached to ever. And there are a lot of those resources out there that you can go and learn some of these concepts, even if you’re just starting out and really want to learn the basics and and all of this entry level stuff. Those are all really great ways to get started in that. Folks, stick with us. We’re going to take a quick break and be right back and then we will get you on to your next show that you’re hopefully going to listen to that maybe will be 99% a little invisible I don’t know. The drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends at New cloud. New cloud is an industry leading interactive map provider who has been building location based solutions for organizations for a decade. Are you trying to find a simple solution to provide your users with an interactive map of your school city or business? Well, new clouds interactive map platform gives you the power to make and edit a custom interactive map in just minutes. They have a team of professional cartographers who specialize in map illustrations of many different styles and are ready to design and artistic rendering to fit your exact needs. One map serves all of your users devices with responsive maps that are designed to scale and blend in seamlessly with your existing website. To request a demonstration or to view their portfolio, visit them online at New cloud.com slash drunken UX. That’s interview cloud.com slash drunken UX. Patrick, man, thanks for coming on with us tonight. We appreciate it and digging into all these things and there’s this is such a deep well. Again, the show notes will be open to everybody. There’s a ton of information there. But take the microphone for a couple minutes. tell people where they can find you what you got going on or anything at all that they want you to know that you want. I’m still making stuff backwards.

I feel like there’s like four to few R’s in that. And

it’s a whole range. There.

And yeah, they they will change and evolve. And I think if there’s one piece of advice I can give anybody, it’s just to roll with that and understand that you need to grow and evolve and change. Keep reading keep

do you think I was gonna say something? That the only thing I have left to say is something stupid like, Hey, folks, keep your personas close. But your users closer Bye bye.