 All right, great, well, I'll go ahead and get us started. Welcome everyone to our funky bunch, the funky bunch of experience building who makes up a UX team where we explore all the different roles that make up a UX team at Red Hat, everything from designers from different areas, writers working in content strategy, UX researchers, developers, managers, a whole bunch of us kind of make up the UX experience team. And so today we'll be talking and asking some questions of the panelists that you see here today. A couple of things before we get started, since we are on a limited time, Mary Shakshabar, an interaction and visual designer on our team has volunteered to kind of monitor chat and answer any questions that we might have. Also, if you'd like to reach out to any of the panelists, you should find an attachment that kind of has a slide where it tells everyone's name and their contact information. We would absolutely love to hear from you. So I'm gonna go ahead and get us started with introductions. First, I'm Stacey Logan. I'm a principal interaction designer and I'll be our moderator today. Next, Chris Shin, senior interaction designer. He graduated from Tufts University with a degree in human factors engineering and computer science. He's been with Red Hat for seven years as an interaction designer and briefly as a developer. His current work focuses around metrics, logging and all things observability. Next is Michael Saladonia, a senior visual designer. Michael has a BA in graphic design from North Carolina State University. He's been with Red Hat for three years as a senior and visual interaction designer. This year, he's taken on the role of visual design team leads supporting cross team efforts as well as working on the open source design system pattern fly. Next is Abby Donahue, associate manager, UX content strategist. After graduating with a degree in English, Abby started her career in marketing. Shortly after, she moved to the tech field and took on roles ranging from technical support and writing to e-learning and marketing. Since breaking into UX, her goal has been using writing and communication skills to bring a sense of humanity to the world of technology. Next is S.J. Clark, senior UX experience, senior user experience researcher. S.J. has been with Red Hat for nine years. Her background is in technical writing with a little design thrown in, all of which is in service of making complex, critical products understandable. Next is Jessie Huff, JavaScript developer accessibility specialist. Jessie, a front end developer, has a passion for inclusivity and advocacy that landed her a role of overseeing accessibility efforts across Red Hat user experience design. She uses audit, design, testing, tooling, and processes to create accessible product experiences. Her goal is to lead and educate others to build experiences for all. And last but definitely not least is Natalie Wong, principal interaction designer. Natalie held positions as a tools and UI developer before obtaining her MS in human factors and information design in 2012. She's been with Red Hat for four years and is currently in the design lead, this is currently the design lead for one of our larger product spaces. Thank you again, panelists for joining us. Let's go ahead and dive into the questions. So as we kind of talked about what the panel is about itself is really one of the different roles that go together and kind of make up the UX team. So what we'd like to hear from you is how did you get into UX and user experience design? Let's start with Abby, how did you get into UX? Thanks, Stacy. Great question. My journey into UX has been quite unconventional. I studied English in school and I didn't know that UX or technology was even a career option for me. I started working in marketing at a civil engineering firm and that's when I started becoming really fascinated with this intersection between the arts and the sciences. And that's ultimately what inspired me to take the plunge into the technology field. I started working at HubSpot which is a global software company and I worked in their technical support department before becoming a technical writer. And then over the next couple of years, I took on various content roles in e-learning as well as content marketing. And I really started appreciating and learning firsthand about the importance of human-centered design and how you can use content to help make that happen. And inevitably I started becoming really interested in UX and its focus on empathy and people. So I moved into my first UX role here at Red Hat. Actually, I joined Red Hat almost two years ago and I was a team of one at the time. I was a UX content strategist and it was such a great experience because I got to meet a lot of people but I also got exposure to a lot of different UX disciplines and I found myself becoming very fascinated with visual design because the visual aspect of an experience can really help convey information and functionality but it also heavily influences a user's interaction and behavior and that really interested me and caught my eye. So recently I moved into a management position for content and visual design and that has been such a privilege because I get to not only explore two areas I'm really interested in UX but also work with really talented people who are a lot smarter than me. Thank you, Abby. I love your enthusiasm. So let's next up, let's have Michael tell us about how you got into UX. Sure. And Abby, you are just as smart as anyone else here. So I have a background in graphic design. I kind of grew up actually, fortunately enough I was able to just be on the computer all the time when I was a kid. I grew up on like Windows 95 and at a really young age I discovered graphic design and I was probably like 11 or 12 and I just saw all these cool things that people were making and I really wanted to be able to do it and I sort of taught it to myself and throughout high school when they're trying to get you to pick a career at such a young and mendable age I was one of the few people who knew exactly what I wanted to do and I was able to work to get into the program pretty much on my dreams at NC State. I've been an NC State Wolfpack fan my whole life because my parents went there and they have a very competitive design program that I was able to get into which I was really excited about. And at the time, at least while I was there they were doing a really great job of providing a sort of dual education in both a traditional graphic design sense and they were doing that alongside of a focus on a more modern UX design kind of education. And so from that point on I really with that kind of overlap happening I realized that there was a ton of connection between the two design kind of industries or practices and having grown up on a computer and never really gotten off of the computer I had always been kind of thinking about UX but never really consciously recognized it as a field or anything. So UX was never really a foreign concept to me. It kind of felt like something I had been doing all along and I was able to sort of combine it with graphic design and transfer those skills quite easily. And yeah, so I decided to take a shot at it and got an internship at IBM and I discovered I really liked it and I enjoyed this kind of sense of being able to transfer my skills over to this new industry. At the time I was also doing a lot of freelance graphic design work and doing that while I was getting my education kind of put a damper on my passion for graphic design. So I kind of figured out that UX was this really nice way to use those skills and have a great career and still find a lot of fulfillment with this kind of work without kind of putting out the flames of my passion by making it my job. So I still get kind of the best of both worlds. And that's why I'm here. Nice. How about you Natalie? How did you get into UX? Yeah, so I actually have a bachelor's in computer science and one of the computer science courses that I took was actually called Human-Computer Interactions. And it was that course and another course in software engineering, just like how to have a software engineering project kind of manage it. It really taught me that I really liked to talk to the customer, getting the requirements and then building out an interface for it, which is what really sparked that kind of passion in me on that side of the house. But once I got into the workforce, it was a lot of heads down coding. So I kind of worked my way, if you will, from being a tools developer into a UI developer. And from there, I had some really, really great co-workers who actually started courses in user experience. And so that kind of got me into the Bentley program, which then delved me further into all the studies that you can about being a user experience person. So it's very much of a progression, if you will, of coming from the technical side into more of the user-facing side of the house, I would say, that got me really into the field, if you will. And so after that, it's been kismet. Great. Well, thinking about how we got into UX, how about we kind of change gears and think about what we currently do? So I'm curious, how do you and your role currently fit into UX? And so let's go with SJ, how do you? Yeah, great question. Research is kind of in a unique position where we are, we should be, in all phases of the design process for the user experience. When we are involved early on, it's kind of called generative research. So we're trying to figure out what folks are trying to do, what their goals are, what their motivations are. This is long before you're even looking at screens or looking at pixels or designs. We're just trying to understand their use cases and their behaviors. So that hopefully happens early enough in the process that it will help the designers figure out what to design and how best to design it. The more work you can do on the front end in the early days, the easier the work becomes later on. And we as researchers show up later in the process too to help kind of evaluate those designs and those ideas as they become more formulated and more solid. So we will sometimes take a prototype. We've been known to take paper prototypes or prototypes on the screen to put them in front of users and get their take on it and help the designers adjust from there, do some iterations and kind of refine. But we're also known to do evaluation on live software too, so if it's already been released, there's no reason why we can't do some testing on that and get some feedback because that'll help us figure out what we wanna do in the next release. So really we are embedded hopefully throughout the entire process. Great, thank you. Chris, how about you? Yeah, so the job that I do at Red Hat has changed over the last several years and it kind of has adjusted along with the needs that Red Hat has. So when I started, we had simple problems, right? Our UIs didn't match each other. The different products looked different. We didn't have a lot of consistency in the branding and the navigational screens and things. So the work was really, for lack of a better word, simple. It was just looking at what we have and making things match each other, deciding what looked good. And it was very kind of low level. And then once we solved that layer of problems, we moved on to the next one of what are the most important tasks and how do we make those easier to do? So kind of more complicated thinking about connecting different pieces together and designing larger flows. And then now it's one level above that even of thinking about how do people accomplish goals across multiple different products and larger scale thinking like that. So I would say that my day-to-day job has gone from doing things like making wireframes and contributing to our pattern library to now my primary role is almost coordinating between different people and sharing information and things like that. So I've gotten to do a little bit of everything over the last few years. Wearing many hats, it sounds like. All right, how about you, Jesse? So as a developer, we're gonna be taking the designs that are created and then building that out into the reality that the users will interact with. So we have to consider a lot of things about the experience that we're building. For example, my area of focus is accessibility. And the final product basically can't be a good user experience if it's not accessible to our users. And accessibility is about removing the barriers to usage and thinking through what all of our users experience and not just what the average is or what maybe the developer or designer that created it experiences. So it's about empathy and building something that is helpful and solves user problems. So in my role, I help designers and developers imagine what the full range of experiences with their UI might be. And I help guide them to use practices and development solutions that are more open to all. And this would include everything from analyzing designs and UIs, using different tools for testing a solution's accessibility or even building out the solutions myself. All right, thank you. So since we've got the time, I'd love to ask a bit more of a harder question, I'll call it and this is kind of, any of you can kind of volunteer to answer here. And I hear this question a lot is, what is the difference between UI and UX? Who's gonna volunteer? Someone should. I don't wanna have to pick someone. I will, okay, you go Natalie. Both of you I think. I was gonna say, I've been in both positions before. And it's sort of like for the UI, it's very much of the user facing interaction, right? So I don't wanna pigeonhole to GUI, the CLI and the API, but pretty much like those type of interfaces, if you will, that's what I would say UI would focus on. But UX could be broadened just a little bit more in the sense that it encapsulates the user's journey, the user's flow, the overall experience, not just necessarily what they see in front of them, but also like, what about the buying experience or the support experience too, that also matters, cause it all comes back to the product, what the product can do for you. So that's my appeal on what UI and UX is the difference. I don't know Michael, if you have a different one. I think that was great, I totally agree. And I have a slightly different perspective, but it's sort of just an alternate direction to come from, but I really don't think there's much of a difference at all beyond what you've stated Natalie. Ultimately, I think we're product designers and we are designing products of the digital realm, whereas other product designers might be designing products of the physical realm, like an industrial designer designing a kitchen appliance or something like that, right? A good industrial designer is gonna think about that full process that Natalie's talking about, that what's it look like when it's not being used? How is it ergonomic in its usage? How is it made with sustainable materials and how can you increase the value that we bring to the consumer? And I think all of that is exactly the same for us. It just relates to this different context of being a digital product that people are using and the interface is the experience. So I think that's kind of where I come from is this idea that I don't think there's really too much of a difference at all, but I also agree with what Natalie said Natalie. I think that was a really succinct explanation. Does anyone else have any ideas for that or are we ready for the next question? I'm gonna take silence as ready. So this one is another one, given that we've already talked about all the different roles that all of us have based on where we came from and even what we're currently doing. I'm curious, what are some of the skills and characteristics you think are necessary to make a quote unquote good UX designer? I could probably speak to this, I'm not technically a UX designer, but being in the UX field as a content designer, I would definitely say first and foremost is collaboration. A design cannot really be successful in my opinion unless there are a variety of stakeholders involved. And I would say the same is true for the content that you create. I feel like in school we were taught that writing and creating content was an individual thing and it certainly can be, but I also think there's value in making it collaborative. So I would definitely say collaboration is the first most important skill. And alongside that, I would say empathy, you have to put others before yourself and really put yourself in someone else's shoes and try to really consider people who aren't exactly like you. And Jesse can probably talk more about that with accessibility, because that's really important, thinking about all abilities and all different people and really recognizing that this experience is not just for people like you, it's for all people. Yeah, it's funny you said that because actually I was thinking of staying empathy as well because no matter who you are, whether it's the researcher, the designer, the developer, you have to be thinking through your user and what they're experiencing and what they might think, feel, and there's their problem that you're trying to solve. So it should be a good problem solver. And everyone here on this panel has had all kinds of different backgrounds and I think it shows that no matter what background you come from, if you have empathy and the ability to help people, it'll help you in this career. The one thing I was gonna say is listening, which is you'd get to empathy through listening. So you need to be a very good listener, a very good active listener, but also negotiation. If I could go back and take a class in either undergrad or graduate, it would be something to do with negotiation because a lot of what you need to do is sell your idea and get your idea understood and accepted into the business, right? And some of that is negotiation. Some of it is trading off. Maybe this is a little harder to build, but it'll have much more payoff. So I think that's sort of super important skill too. I appreciate that correction too, Abby, because you're right, it's not just designer. As a UX designer myself, I think that's kind of what I immediately go to, but as this conversation improves, there's so many different roles within UX. So I'll say UXer instead from that. But kind of playing off what SJ had said, there's been some questions around how do you, where do you go to learn about UX? Is there blogs, anything that kind of, what are your go-to kind of methods of learning about UX in any of the roles that you have? I may have a little bit of unusual stance here that I don't really read a lot of blogs or anything about design. Maybe it's because I'm less visual based, but I think there's some really fantastic literature out there, like this is a really good book for just learning about presenting data in a way that's easy to distinguish and things like that. There's lots of really good toms out there. If you want to avoid the trendier stuff and look at the things that are like really backed by research and are reliable. What was the name of that book? Sorry, it kind of flashed pretty quickly. Yeah, sorry, this book is called About Face, the Essentials of Interaction Design. That's a really good one. And I have a handful of others on the shelf here, but I can't pick a favorite. This is the largest one, the easiest to grab. Anyone else? Yeah, I guess as someone being on the more visual side, I definitely like to look for inspiration online, but I actually agree with Chris, the learning process is sort of never ending and it's something that's always ongoing. So whenever I'm using a website or an app, I'm semi-consciously thinking about those interactions and how they feel to me and how they look and how the experience is and sort of evaluating it in my head, taking down notes. If there's anything I see that kind of relates to a design problem I've been trying to solve, I think about how those connections appear and what that means and how I can use that. So I think taking, this sort of goes for design of all sorts, but just taking inspiration from everyday life and everywhere you go can really go a long way in terms of heightening your taste, I guess, of design and you're developing this more discerning taste by just noting things that you're experiencing on a day-to-day basis, so, yeah. I would say I learned about UX from other people. Just talking to user, well, I mean everybody's a user, but just being able to talk to people about things and analyzing certain aspects with them helps me learn how they feel and in turn how I feel about things, so, people. User, that is kind of what we call ourselves, right? So, yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, then kind of playing off of that too, so it sounds like some really great methods of kind of learning and kind of expanding your skill set with that, but if you're looking for anything like specific certifications or degrees and learning themselves, I'm curious if anyone has any kind of recommendations or sources or places to start? I recently took a couple of classes through Nielsen-Norman group, so NNG, or NNGroup, I think, dot com. I was a little skeptical about them because I felt like, oh, geez, this is stuff I should probably already know and already be familiar with, but I was very pleasantly surprised at how much additional content there was beyond what I felt like I already knew. Excuse me, and they have a wide range of topics from interaction design and visual design and management and research, and there's all kinds of topics there, they're like one or two days, so definitely worth checking that out. I'd also say look at your local university or any university you might be inquiring about, it's coming to my mind that there's a lot of places now that are having courses for user experience. I know during my time, there wasn't as much, but then I felt like it just exploded, so definitely check out your surroundings, you never know, but I'll give a shout out to Bentley University, but what? I was waiting for someone that has to recommend something that they've been to. Anyone else with those kind of any search or any other kind of learning mechanisms you'd recommend? All right, well, let me kind of change directions here a little bit then and kind of move back into what we had talked about between kind of UI versus UX. I think in a conference like this, we've got a lot of people who might be developers or working kind of on backend development and engineer, so there's some kind of questions about the differences between UI, UX developer and backend developer engineer, or even just how you work between those and work with them in your data lives because a lot of what we do is working with technical people. So I'd love to hear any experiences you have and kind of recommendations with that. That might be a tough one. Should I have not kind of ended with the tough one maybe? So when you say experiences with that, like what exactly I guess are you asking? Sure, I think that, yeah, no, thanks for asking for clarification there because it is kind of a broad question, but first I'll kind of starting with the difference between UI, UX developer and backend front end backend, excuse me, backend developer engineer, but then also thinking about how us and UX work with them on the day-to-day basis and kind of communicate with them. Well, it goes back to collaboration, I think. So at least in my experience that all the engineer, honestly, everybody has a place and a position in designing and developing a product because if what you want to show the user that the backend can't give you, well, then you can't get that. And so it's almost like you need to have everybody on the train in the room together. And the most successful projects that I've been on, Koku, we're all in the room and we design together where like the backend folks are with me in lockstep as so is the UI and as so is the product manager too. Everybody's involved documentation as well. And the most successful projects, like I said, everybody's in the room, everybody's participating, everybody's thinking and empathizing kind of with the user to then know what they need to do in their jobs to make that happen, to make that fruitful. So I don't know if that helps or hurt, but that's in my experience, that's what it is. Everybody needs to all hands on deck type of thing in the process, in the design process, I should say. So I totally agree, Natalie. It's all connected and you really have to be, collaboration really is the name of the game because there's always this balance of wanting to drive technology forward, but also acknowledging the situation and the limitations that you do have and designing within those so that you're not wasting time designing a bunch of solutions which ultimately just get cut short because, or compromised because of technical limitations. But like I said, at the same time, you do wanna take note of when it might be more appropriate to try to push technology forward and see if we can push for more advantages there and all of that, but all of that comes back to collaboration and context. So yeah. Great answers to my rather complex question. So thank you guys, I really appreciate that. So we're kind of running out of time here. So just wanna say thank you again to our panelists for joining and for all of our viewers. You can probably find a recording of this conference within the next few days, I understand. And also as mentioned before, there's an attachment with all of our names and contact information because we would love to hear from you. So thank you again to all of our panelists. Thank you. So run.