 Welcome everyone for joining the session of finding your UX voice by Dan. So let me introduce Dan. Dan is the co-founder of Charming Robot, a product design company based in New York. For the past 15 years, he has been helping startups and media companies share their online product strategy, including Foursquare, Rent to be Run Away, Jetsetter, and Savers. His experience also includes television, music, and print media. He has worked with great shows like Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Gawker, Saturday Night Live, Universal Music, and the Ball Street Journal. One of his most noted projects are creating the original strategy and user experience for Hulu. So prior to starting Charming Robot, Dan co-founded the design agency Heart Candy Shell. So welcome, Dan, and we're over to you. Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate that lovely intro. Great to be here. Hi. Good morning from New York City and good evening to you guys over there in India and everywhere else you're joining from. So today we're going to talk a little bit about finding your UX voice and kind of what that really means in terms of like both the industry and for yourself. And to kind of just reiterate some of the things you just heard, my name is Dan. I do want a company called Charming Robot and feel free to hit me up on social and you can agree, disagree, you know, challenge anything I'm saying there or here in the question box. My company, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about experiences from large companies, you know, like some of the ones that you just mentioned, including but also journal and we actually worked with WeWork before their kind of tragic downfall. We worked with large banks like Deutsche Bank and Barclays. We've worked with Booking.com. But we also work with startups, you know, with places that are just looking to get themselves out in the world and figure out what they can do to solve, you know, smaller problems that will probably eventually grow into larger situations. And you can hear a lot more about those things on my podcast, Story in a Bottle, where I talk to a lot of founders, a lot of UX people, a lot of venture capitalists. So we try to, we try to really expand the gamut and who we talk to because I think that when it comes to creating products in general, it's really important to understand all the different sides of that, of the process and the inputs that went to it. But today we're going to talk to what you asked and hear talk about your UX voice. And I think the important thing with UX is understanding that no matter what we're creating, no matter what we're doing, whether we're creating a product for, you know, mass amounts of consumers or we're creating a product for, you know, a single solution for business to business application. It's still about storytelling. It's still about, you know, how do we get someone from point A to B to C and what's their journey on the way. And how do we make that journey as seamless and as exciting and as useful as possible, and as simple as possible in most of the time. And even if it's something super complex that we're working on, we always want to keep it simple. But one of the most important things about this conversation today, and I look forward to your questions and please put them in, you know, throughout the talk. You know, I was saying earlier, I don't, I don't know that anyone needs to hear me just talk at them for 45 minutes. But one of the most important things is that like whatever that storytelling technique you have is, it should be unique to you. And there'll be a lot of factors that we'll talk about that'll kind of feed into what that unique methodology is for you. And there's no necessarily right or wrong way of doing it. But it's kind of understanding how to take all the factors that you get as part of your experience and leverage them. And I believe we're in, you know, in hard facts as well as is going to soft skills, and I like to start with a little bit of a foundation just to get a sense of like, where are we coming from let's all kind of start from the same foundation, when we're creating a view on the UX and so I think you know, let's start with history. And these are experiences been around for millennia. And some of them, I think we often think about UX is just something that happens in the world of digital and the world of software and the world of apps but in reality like UX and designing for people goes back to, you know, 500 BC, when, when the, the Greeks were really really interested in economics, you know, they were talking about how, how different spaces should be designed. And actually, even before that, you know, Feng Shui talks about the importance of space and the idea that how you, how you organize things in an area and let the elements collide whether it be wind or water and how kind of your surroundings affect your mood. Like those things have been existing in so long and they just simply evolved over time, you know, for now another, maybe in the past 120 years we've gotten a little bit more about making experiences that were a little bit more kind of hardcore and like actual like physical tools, you know, I think Frederick Wynzo Taylor talks about the idea of what is that in relationship that a person has and a worker has with their individual tools and how do they work for like, you know, how you hold something in your hand or how it interacts with the hammer me to nail or something like that like what are the, what are the ways that we can make that more efficient. And then we kind of start getting more into like in the late 1900s of 1900s we started thinking about user experience as something about actual human interaction, you know, what is that experience between the the actual human and the process that's going on to the point where actually Toyota was one of the first companies to really introduce the idea of usability and putting people, you know, in part of the equation that was not just for the cars that they were creating which obviously you want to make sure a car is super usable because I keep it safe on the road, but also about making sure that people who are part of the process had input into the process and one of the things that's really interesting about Toyota today is when it comes to UX research or hearing from people, they actually have factory workers can pull an accord to stop the assembly line if they wanted to have a suggestion as to how to improve the process, just a lot of ways like live action usability testing, but but really, you know, the first beginnings of getting input outside of just, you know, yourself or your kind of siloed way of thinking about your product. And we get into the 1950s and user experience gets, you know, it's still not a coin to term yet, but it's still a big part of like, like the evolution of the world of product design. And that's where actually product and user experience research comes in, like actual like the paper that's got this guy, Henry Dreyfus wrote called designing for people where he talks about, you know, where people come into contact with products and where there's friction there and where that fails. And the idea that like people have been thinking about this for a long time and it and you know, I think that in some ways, you could say the first true user experience, you know, centered company was probably Walt Disney, because their whole goal and everything they did once they kind of started doing their theme parks like Disneyland is you're creating experience as soon as you walk through that gates. You know, whether it be the rides you're going on the characters you're interacting with every single touch point that you have in a Walt Disney world or land experience is all about kind of the user is all about making people feel good. And that's what user experience is right user experience is always about like, what is, how does this product or how does this brand feel in every different interaction you have to today that interaction may not be walking into a physical space it could be the app that you download but it could also be how does that brand express itself on Twitter, you know, or on discord or how are we, how are we talking to each other about it you know what, what are the other ways that a publication or application is is kind of showing itself off in addition to just its core experience and I think that's kind of what Walt Disney was going for is not just that awesome ride, but every little piece of you know, every little detail really mattered. But it's not until the 1970s that you really get into the you actually think about today at least this was more hardware design with Apple and Xerox and, and IBM and, you know, I was actually interacting directly with products that we would buy you know in in store or in our office. And that's really when our industry started to come to fruition and I think this is all important because you think about figuring out how you tell your stories, knowing that you can tie, you know, the things that you're putting together down back to 4000 BC back to Walt Disney back to Xerox, and then you know, into a more modern era when Don Norman and Apple actually created the phrase user experience as the first user experience design person at Apple. You know, and he kind of really, I think ushered into this world of us at UX with his book the design of everyday things. But you know, I mean, the idea that we can, we can kind of leverage all those things to help support the stories we're telling today and the world of UX is so much more complicated because we're not just designing for hardware software, we're doing visual designs we're doing audio designs we're designing for virtual reality we're designing for, you know, large screens for tiny screens like there's so many different things we think about in the world of UX, but it all still comes down to 4000 BC and Feng Shui and thinking about, you know, what is a way to make space as well as possible, and as friendly as possible and as relaxing as possible for the people we have, we're going to use whatever product that we're just to say that UX has always been everywhere. You know, a lot of it, as I mentioned that a lot of people think of UX as a place where you basically spend your world in digital but the reality is that I think about this a lot when I, when I, not only do I work in the world of tech but I actually also own bars and restaurants in New York City, and I think about this the idea of UX design when creating a bar or a restaurant when you walk into a place, what is the person behind the bar looking like? What are they smiling at you? Are they reading the newspaper? What is the decor of the place? How easy is it to kind of find a table or a place to sit or move around people? It's not just about the aesthetics of it, it's about spatial design, and it's about making sure that a person understands what you're all about from the moment they walk in or they enter your website or download your app, and it's the thing that you think about, I think, almost before you think about anything else, because it is your brand, it is the story you're telling people about yourselves. So I think that there's some, some fun just real world examples just again to think about UX and the story you're telling outside of our typical day to day. And so, you know, UX design hits us everywhere we go and sometimes it can be quite alarming like this image on the left. Sometimes it can be, I think, quite poorly thought out, like this person in their hotel room on the right, they, you know, maybe to create an aesthetic, they added that curtain there without realizing that, you know, a person actually will be disturbed by the fact that there's no window, and so they kind of faked it. It's almost like that. In my last slide it says UX shouldn't come with the last minute. This was something where someone thought, okay, we can cover up a mistake we made by adding a bit of an aesthetic on top of here, but in reality, you know, that's a poor experience. In this case, you know, look at a playground where a slide drops into a hole, you know, imagine a kid going down that, that's a parent's nightmare, it's my nightmare. That's it. I think I would, I would look at that and be like, there is no real thought that went into the overall experience for the person who's going to go down that slide or the person who's watching kids going down that slide, because the planning wasn't correct. You know, the story they're telling here wasn't correct and no one voiced an opinion and said, hey, perhaps we don't want to have a giant hole at the bottom of the slide. And that's a big part of it too is voicing your opinion, understanding, you know, that someone has to speak up and be the advocate for the user. And how do you do that? Where do you do that? And how do you find your best way to do that? And that's what we'll be talking about a bit more today. Because when we do it, when we voice our opinions, when we get that story right, like the chances of success for a product go up by leagues and bounds. And this is something that you should own and be excited about as a UX designer, knowing that the voice you put out there, that the opinion you have, that the data you're using will in the end be what ultimately drives success for a product. It's not going to be the business vision, though that certainly is a good place to start to understand what is it that we're trying to do. It's not going to be, you know, the quality of code that again, that's important because it might help the speed of a product. It's really about understanding what is it that we are doing? What is the problem we're solving? How can I communicate the best solution for the user so we can actually create something that is a good business that does kind of marry those user needs and the business needs. And if it doesn't, if the thing that we're trying to do from a business standpoint isn't taking into account that user journey, isn't taking into account that story, then perhaps we want to rethink it. So let's start with the simple part. When you're starting in the world of UX, I think it's okay to have kind of a sense of like, I'm not sure which part is right for me. Like I can tell you from myself, like I never thought of myself as UX designer and until like probably five or six years into my career. But I thought of myself as creating experiences, even though I didn't know what that was. But I also like never was interested in one particular vertical here. Like some people just want to be content strategists. Some people just want to be user researchers. Some people just want to be visual designers. That's great. That's not a problem at all. There's nothing wrong with owning that and having kind of your own lens into that world. And if that's what you choose to do, then I think that's amazing. And find a way to like take that visual design aspect of yourself or that content strategy aspect of yourself and really insert it into the process to make sure that it's right for the audience. Myself, like I'm a generalist. I kind of am someone who really likes to lean heavily on strategy. But I can go down that spectrum to a certain point and like translate strategy and user user research and kind of overall thoughts on business analysis into probably probably best for me is a wireframes. I probably should not be allowed to open, you know, big ma or sketch and actually do pixel perfect visual design. It's definitely not a skill set I possess and I once tried to do it early in my career and realized very quickly that I am not good at that. And I wish I was. But but the great thing about having a team is that, you know, you can you can leverage their talents to and kind of oftentimes combine your storytelling abilities based on the different skill sets you have. But in this case, you know, I think it's always interesting to like choose the things you like and maybe it's more than one of them. I think that I strategy and and user interface and and research, you know, but, but kind of understanding your lens here is where you start getting that voice like what is it that you're adding to the conversation. Where is it that you can put the most value in in early meetings in where you're putting pen to paper in all those places, because once you kind of own that it becomes a lot easier to be a part of the conversation. I think makes one of the biggest challenges are industries like the fact that like, no one's really decided on titles. You know, people still call themselves, you know, information architects, some people call themselves UX designers, some people call themselves product designers. I think it's a little bit easier when you get into the more specifics of like, I'm an art director, or I'm a, I'm a researcher, at least you kind of have one particular vertical. But what often happens in our industry is instead of talking about how do we create the best experiences or how do we really, you know, bring the actual best successful interfaces and trends and patterns to people. We often get into these arguments about, well, are my UX or my UI. And I'm such a fan of not doing that. Like, I remember talking to a friend of mine, a few years ago who, who comes to a lot of these, these conferences and she was telling me how, you know, they'll spend, you know, hours and hours, you know, rethinking old card sorting exercises or debating that UX versus information architecture versus UI, you know, what should we call ourselves and I'm just like, Why are we spending our time wasting our time? I mean, even say, you know, worrying about titles when it really comes to the fact that like, what are we doing? What are we doing to be better at our industry? How are we learning to better serve our audiences? And our audiences can be users, they can also be clients, they can also be the business owners, they can also be, they're also probably like three or four different audiences. Right now that I'm working with, it's in the auto parts world. So super exciting. And we have like, so we have three different constituents, we have the owner of the business. And it's like, this business is like a marketplace for, for auto parts. So you have like the company itself, which is basically a middleman between the mechanics who fix the cars, the suppliers who supply the auto parts like the car door or engine or whatever. And then the insurance companies who are paying for the parts. So if a person gets into a car accident and the mechanic has to order a part, the supplier has to give a part in the insurance companies to say how much they're going to cover. We have to, we have to understand that those are, those are four different audiences, you know, for one product who have very different needs and very different definitions of success. So how do we come to them, understand their needs and then create a product that's going to be successful. I don't care who's a researcher or a product designer or whatever. All I care about is, how do we best get the information out from them? How do we talk to them? How do we empathize with their particular situation? And they're all going to be different ones and kind of use all that information to tie it together into one overall experience. And I think the best way to do that is to, is to take what your strengths are and put them forward. You know, I get asked a lot, and I was doing an article about this a few years ago about how you get into UX, you know, what is the best, what is the best way in? And I don't think there is one best way in. I don't think there's one best solution. And I certainly don't think there's one background. You'll hear a lot about people who, and maybe some of you on this call have taken, you know, immersive UX classes, kind of 12 weeks of really intense, you know, boot camp of UX. And I think that's fine. I think there's a lot of value to be held, you know, from getting the basics or kind of learning a bit more about an industry that you may be a little bit more unfamiliar with. But I certainly don't know that, like, going and getting a degree in human factors is the best way into UX design. Again, it's one way in. But I always like to think about, like, all the other ways that people get into UX, it actually does shape how you talk about things and how you kind of bring your own personality and experience to the user experience world. If you look at someone, for example, who majored in English or major in liberal arts, I think that there's something really interesting there because that person, if you're like an English major, one of the things you learn as a skill set from day one is how to defend your arguments. You're writing term papers or analysis or critical theory on things that already exist, but you're trying to attach meaning to them and find out, you know, how, what was this particular author or storyteller intending and why is it important and why do we care about it today? And then you have to defend those arguments. In the world of UX, it's the same kind of thing. You're telling a story that you're defending the pieces of that story, the pieces of those features, the flows all along the way. And you learn how to do it in a very compelling and I think often probably short-handed way. And similarly, like if you look at this person, 2% of people who come into UX are biology majors, like biology while obviously science, much more science than it is creativity probably, there's a path you learn around scientific method there and doing experimentation and being willing to be wrong in order to eventually find the right solution. Those types of approaches work so well in UX and can be, you know, the beginning of your approach, right? If you have scientific method background, that might be how you kind of walk people step by step through why this is the right answer for a particular problem. Similarly, if you have a liberal arts or an English background, you might start thinking about, well, what are the other facets out there that I can bring into this that help me make my argument? What does that story look like? If you're a psychology major or have a background in psychology, maybe you're approaching this more from like a cognitive standpoint. Maybe there's a story you're going to tell about, you know, well, you know, when we think about the way that humans approach fearful situations, here are some factors we want to keep in mind as we kind of put together an experience. So whatever the background you have, and it doesn't have to be any of these, but let that be what kind of starts your journey into how you explain yourself or how you explain the choices you're making in your UX story. So Sid Harrell is one of my favorite people in the industry. I had the fortune to like, basically interview about 10 leaders in the world of UX in coming up to do this presentation. And I'm hoping to actually turn this into an article at some point, but Sid is really well known in the US for a lot of her kind of industrial, commercial design work. And what I didn't know about her when I started talking to her was that her background was in poetry. And the fact that like, I love the fact that she is able to leverage that background that she had in poetry and as a linguist to be a better UX designer and to be a better person in the world of, you know, information architecture. And my guess is that, you know, thinking about being an expert in linguistics and definitely thinking about being a poet is poets about consolidation, right? It's about using fewer words to paint a word picture. Linguistics are about understanding the different ways that people approach language and those slight nuances that really matter between, let's say, Spanish and Portuguese. And, you know, using those construction patterns to be better in her career. And I love that she also is like, I'm not a visual designer. And maybe I like that because I'm also not a visual designer, but it doesn't prevent her from being a great UX person. She leans into the things that she's really great at and finds ways to apply those. And I'll be honest with you, like, I think that past that past experience is so important. You know, and I say this because like someone who my experience, just to give you a little bit more context, like, when I was a kid, I was a child actor, I grew up on stage, I grew up doing television commercials. I grew up playing music in a band. I grew up playing sports. I didn't do anything that had in my mind anything to do with design. I had nothing to do with your experience. I later became a bar owner, which is a separate picture here, the first bar I opened. But that, you know, that's when I really started realizing that the storytelling, this idea that you're creating, you know, everything you do in the world of UX and design has a parallel somewhere else. I'll give you an example. So I'm the upper left hand side here as a play I did about 20 years ago. And what I've learned about theater and how it affects the way I approach design is that when you're in the world of theater, you can be an actor, you can be a director, you can be a set designer, whatever your role might be. What I find really interesting is that it's very similar to how we approach product. In theater, you know, if you're a set designer and costume designer and makeup designer and line designer out on the same page of the vision of the director. Well, then no one's going to be able to see the actors or really get a sense of the personality of the of the production, because they'll all clash with each other. You know, color lighting, hitting a costume that maybe reflects back to the audience and, and blinds them, you know, there are so many factors into that experience that require collaboration that require, you know, a collective sense of vision. And that's true in product design to and I think as a UX person, our job is is to oftentimes wrangle those together right sometimes the developers and the designers don't see at I sometimes that the the person who's kind of the visionary or the stakeholder may have one particular sense of what they're doing, but but they don't know how it's going to impact impact everyone else. Thinking about like for me in my my voice in the world effects as I go back to theater and I think, okay, you know, does everyone understand how this is to work together. Stanley was true when I started designing bars. You know, I'm not I'm not an architect in any way, but I do understand that like and I do play a game with my friends every now and then we walk into a restaurant a bar and say what's wrong with this bar. And it's all it's all about you act it's all about. Okay, you know, is is this does it feel friendly. Do we understand what this is all about. Like, do the cocktails match the the overall kind of aesthetic like is the bartender friendly or is it not friendly is the personality of this particular place meant to be more aloof, you know, thinking about those things, help me be better at my job as a product designer or because it let me kind of divorce myself from. Oh, this is the rules of UX the rules of how to do it and be like no, what do I know how can I communicate what needs to happen here in the best way possible that leverages my kind of my expertise and my expertise just happened to come from places that had nothing to do with digital at all. So, and that's kind of where I think of like the idea these skills that we have here, they really do go beyond just one particular industry and you can see they are like all these different, all this stuff that goes into creating a product you know all this stuff that goes into creating an experience. There's so many different pieces and I don't think it's possible to necessarily be an expert at all of them, but I do think it's it's kind of fascinating that like, I don't think we ever take a step back and realize that to quit. To put something out there in the world that is actually successful takes so much effort and take so many different lenses of expertise that we shouldn't consider the one that we have as the only one, but I do think it's important to consider the one that we have to be a significant part of it. And if you think about it like let's see you come from a science background which again plenty of UX people have, they're probably going to come at it from a much more analytic, you know, how can this be done technologically and how do I turn that turn that into experience, but but being very empathetic to the developer versus someone who comes from library science might have a very different approach because of the way they organize information in their, in their heads, maybe by default, but also by how they were how they kind of were raised or how they were educated and that's going to bring them to a different way of approaching this, but that doesn't mean that the information architecture library science person, or the computer science person is right or wrong. It just means that like they they're coming at the same problem with a different perspective. And if you can combine those perspectives you're going to have a much more high a much higher chance of success than otherwise. So think about that when you're when you're, it's your voice isn't just about your experience. It's being understanding that people are coming at that very different point of view, and how do you accept that. How do you embrace that. How do you challenge that. And ultimately, how do you collaborate with that. So, my friend Jonathan Corman, another really new X person is a bit more cynical when it comes to this stuff. But I don't think it's cynicism is necessarily meant as a way of combating, you know, or excusing the challenges of our industry. I think it's comes from the place of, he really wants there to be great people in this industry. And when I was talking to him as part of this project. We were kind of in the midst of a renaissance of new, these are kind of the new UX bootcamps where a lot of people are coming out of it, and trying to, you know, shoehorn themselves into the industry versus finding out what's right for them. So, you know, in this quote, there's a not, there's an act for you to have a bigger doubt. Like, I think that's a bit, a bit of a misnomer, though I do think, you know, like in any industry, I think the more, more you have an act for something, the better you're going to be at it. But I think the idea is that like, you don't have to come in here and try to be everything to everyone. In fact, we would say, if you are UX in UX, you know, you should never try to be everything to everyone because that's impossible. You're boiling the ocean. And it's about figuring out what it is you have an act for. And then, you know, on top of that, well, where, where does that fit best into the world of product or UX design? And how can, how can you help? Like, that's the biggest question is really how can you help? And I think we have come to any problem, any project with the, with the idea of how can you help? You've already, you've already kind of leapfrogged above and beyond everyone else, because you're already looking to the North Star of what it is that the solution can be versus, well, what do you bring to the table? What do you bring to the table? Well, I bring this to the table, which is never a healthy approach. And when it comes down to it, what we are as UX designers, as product designers is we are empathetic people. And I think the word empathy often gets overused in the world of UX and product design. And we're like, oh, we were empathetic. We're, we have to like be thinking about the user, the user, the user. Well, that's true. But I think empathy actually and creativity come from all sides in a project. If anyone in, in working on product, whether it's wanting something new, or doing something that are evolving something that's been around for a while. There are so many stakeholders involved, right? The stakeholders can be the ultimate users. They can be the person whose idea was they can be the developer who's been working 18 hours a day to try to get me to deadline. It can be your fellow UX designers. It can be the project manager. It can be the marketer. Like there are so many different people involved in launching something. And our job when it comes to empathy is not just to be empathetic to the user, but empathy, empathy to everyone else around us who has their role to play. And this is the, to say that they shouldn't have that either, but we can lead there. So when I think about my voice or your voices as a UX designer or a researcher or whatever role in the world of product you want to play. I think about the fact that like we should be the ones who are thinking, who are, who are thinking about everyone else too. Like, not just how do we create this experience for the user that's great, but how do we in the process understand that, that everyone has an agenda that everyone to make everyone's accessible we need to come to terms on what where those agendas overlap. It's that generally kind of give us that, that perfect band diagram of what to focus on. And that put us up and I think left out of the boys, you know, I think that there's a lot of times we forget about the fact that we are the people who are bound to the two people in general right where, you know, we go back to the history of us. It was about creating necessarily the right experience for our audience, it was about creating right experience for ourselves right and for, you know, our peers and that's, that's kind of where it all comes from is like let's, let's make an experience it's great for, for everyone throughout the entire process including And I think that, you know, that comes back to some of the storytelling stuff we were talking earlier, you know, there's, there's storytelling can have many layers to it when it comes to our jobs. One of those stories of course the end product of, you know, that thing that someone uses. And I don't know that necessarily that that's the best, you know, that's the best example of where our voice comes in the most handy because if our voice was the storytelling mechanism for every product we worked on, then there probably wouldn't be a lot of a lot of variety in the things we work on and I can't speak for anyone on this, on this call but I can tell you like you know in my team, we work on, we work on projects and so many different verticals you know we have a lot of stuff in media and entertainment but we also do stuff in like finance which is a very different, you know, tone and different audience, we work in fashion which is a different tone and audience as well we work in education, and in the nonprofit world and we've done work in construction like, like our stories are telling in the way we, the way we tell those in the end product tend to be more about how we understood the audience and how we had to relate to the audience and the thing that we're creating, you know, the auto parts. When I mentioned earlier, you know, the audience for that for those mechanics those people have been in the business for 3040 years, they already have people that are depend on to order parts from, and they're not between, you know, nothing against them but they're not particularly savvy and I say that because I did a bunch of user research and talk to them and that's what they told me. So I'm not judging them on that. But, you know, I'm designing a product for them that's going to be say a very different approach than for someone who is going to be, you know, Gen Z super tech savvy and who spends a lot of their time on tiktok and Snapchat. And so that story is different but the story we tell along the way, you know that that way we, we, we kind of like pick up, you know, support along the way from all those different sides. So that's the story that really comes from the root of your voice, you know, and the way you use the tools in your arsenal to convince people, whether that be through, you know, logic and deductive reasoning whether that be through actual user stories from things that you heard from people whether that be from data and analytics like how do you combine those things and and pastings you've worked on to really get that across. And Sarah duty, I've worked a lot of work on a lot of research projects together. We actually just finished a project together. She has a great she's probably the foremost expert I think on how to put together UX portfolio. She's brilliant at storytelling because part of her whole thing and it was just telling about telling people who you are as a as a designer as a UX person. But, but I do think that her point here is that, you know, I think a lot of people think of UX design as this functional, you know, part of the process where we deliver black and white wireframes or maybe even prototypes and I think there's maybe great talks about about some of those sort of things in this conference already. But, but, you know, sometimes that doesn't make sense. Sometimes that's not how we need to communicate, because we need to get, we need to use whatever's right for you. Like Sid said earlier, she's not a visual designer, maybe boxes and arrows aren't the best way for her to tell her stories. Maybe it's anecdotes, maybe it's videos, maybe it's something else like how do we get across the stories we need to tell in our best way and our best patterns. Then a quick time check, five more minutes for the session. Great, thank you. So, I think the last part of this voice and the setting the most important part of it, which is, we as UX designers need to have opinions, we're not just telling stories for, you know, our own benefit, we're telling stories to get to a solution. And that opinion needs to be formed by a variety of inputs that I've already talked about. But it's how we express that opinion. I think that's that's most important. Because everyone has a style. But the first thing I think is, is if you're going to have an opinion, be clear about what the problem is that you're having an opinion about, like why is this a problem and sometimes it's super simple like the fact that in this picture, the mom is pouring milk into glasses, but there's no milk in the jug. Like, oftentimes, we either kind of dial back our kind of strength in our opinion or we are afraid to share it because we don't want to hurt feelings. But in the end, like, we need to show where those problems are before anything gets to launch. Like, we need to point those out as quickly as possible so that we can course correct it. Like, I'm doing this right now on a project I'm working on in cryptocurrency where, like, there's a lot of things that this kind of new wallet that I'm working on has to do. But there are a lot of problems with the flows because there's just holes everywhere. And, you know, they're doing like the marketing team has done a great job of creating like product demos and show, oh, like, this is super easy to use. But when you look under the hood, there's a lot of steps that haven't been thought through. And if we aren't pointing out those problems, like the go to market strategy and the go to market timeline will be totally whipped because we weren't thinking about or sharing the concerns we have. But it can be scary when you have to share like what you put together and you're putting in front of clients isn't accurate and we need to rethink this. Like, that's scary to go back to the beginning, but better do that now than not do it later. So where your voice really culminates is the attitude. Are you soft spoken and a listener? You know, are you a very loud kind of abrasive person? Are you direct into the facts? I think that that's something you consider and you'll get that from anywhere, but that'll feed into like how you even share your opinions. Or, more importantly, how you share an opinion as it's changing because your opinion will change and it should change and your lens on things will change because it's like products change technology changes. The way that people navigate the Internet is very different today than it was 10 years ago. And if my opinion on how people do that based on the research you hadn't changed without probably a dinosaur and irrelevant in the world of product design. So when you're coming to something and know that things are evolving and sometimes you have to be contrarian just to get people pushed over the line to that next level of experience, right? If someone is stuck in how they do something, this is always a big problem. And like they talk about, well, I do this or I do this. It's okay to challenge them. But back to should bring, bring whatever evidence you can behind you. And again, whatever that voice is that you use emphatic or set abrasive or self spoken, bring that but bring it with with real information. Because if we're not questioning things constantly, if we're not looking at things from the angle of someone outside of our purview, not looking at things from our clients or our stakeholders point of view from the designers point of view from the users point of view from the businesses point of view, right? Sometimes what the user wants is direct contrast to what the user wants, but we're still going to drive, you know, revenue or whatever. Well, how do you take a look at it from their point of view and understand here's how I can communicate why what their approaches isn't right. But here's how I know, you know, we can we can course correct. And just because someone's in charge doesn't mean that they're right. Oftentimes, I think the best people who are kind of in charge are the ones or who have the vision or who are who are kind of overseeing something. I think that they they should be dependent on some people with people like yourselves, you know, who who have a lens that is outside of theirs, who can bring a perspective that they can't have. And who I think ultimately can show them how to shift their thinking to be more on the right path. So I talked about communication style. One of the things that I'll tell you is that I I've had a lot of bosses in my life or people or people like managers in my life that like very much like had different approaches. I had a creative director years ago who was very committed. Like that was his his thing was like, I believe in this vision. I'm going to stand by it. Like I'm going to say everything I can to be emphatic about the fact that this is the way to go. And I had another boss who I think he led out of fear. And not not to me per se, but like to to the people who work with who are above him right. Talk about like being being questioning authority like he he would like yell and scream it at you know this this stakeholder and like slam the phone down. This is years ago. And I could never understand how that works because I can't do that. Like it's just not who I am. It's not it would not be effective for me. If anything, it would come across as just offensive. But it works for him. Works really well for him. And, you know, he's he's now super successful in the world of product management for whatever. And, you know, he was an intimidating six foot five biking looking guy. And I think that that probably helped into it where I am not that but but kind of seeing those different ways that people approach things. And borrowing here and there from them is kind of how I got to figuring out what's the best way for me to communicate. I had a business partner who was insulting to our clients years ago. He would just be like cynical and snarky. I just feel like condescending and how how why would you think that that's a terrible idea. And, you know, for him that kind of came came across as kind of commanding. And, and I think in some ways knowledgeable. But for me, I just thought it was mean and I could I can't pull that across. I for me I have to come across as like, Well, here, let me listen to you. Let me digest and let me come back with what I think as logically as possible. Make sense from all angles and I'm going to sit there and talk to you and be like your best friend. And that's my approach. And that's for me. Again, that's not right for everyone. But what what works for you? That for me it comes from like directing plays and doing with actors and doing those really challenging personalities. And also dealing with drunk people that bars through the more like calm and logically you are the easier it will be to get them through whatever situation they're in. So for everyone, I think it's about being an amalgamation. You know, like take take from the best parts of you take from your education take from the history that I mentioned earlier, take from the people you're working with people taking the people you don't necessarily get along with. Or agree with but but see how what what they have to offer can be useful to you borrow, beg and steal everywhere you can. Because as my friend Steve Portugal says, you know, those little things that make you feel good those little things that other people do that you never thought would be useful. File those away as as tips and tricks and tools to use throughout the course of your your career, you know, go back to history, borrow from everything. Read and read and read and then always look forward. Always be learning because nothing stays the same. And technology will change. People will change habits will change. And if we're not on the cutting edge of those things, if we're not the ones who are learning about those changes first. Well then we're never going to create experiences that embrace those that involve those and then ultimately change the way people interact with technology with devices. And probably with each other. So thank you guys so much. Okay. Thank you all for joining the session. Thank you down for thank you Dan for taking the time and talking about this interesting topic was very interesting.