Jill's musings

One of the biggest transitions I experienced as a UX researcher and designer was graduating from academia to join the industry.  In this post, I'll be sharing some of the books I read (or wish I had read :-)) and found valuable during my first year at work. These have helped me tune my practical UX technical skills, project and time management skills, as well as my soft skills working with colleagues and stakeholders. 1.  The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide  by Leah Buley. If I could only read one UX book, this would be the one. This book offers a wonderful collection of low-cost and yet effective methods in both user research and design to help the single-person UX team which is often the case even within an organization where UX is well established. My biggest take-away from this book wasn't any specific methods or tips. Rather, it was the mentality of asking "What would I do if I only had the resources to do one thing". 2.  T

I recently picked up a project from a UX colleague. Here are a list of questions I asked (or wish that I had asked her). People Who are the key people? What are their workstyles like? Who are your resources? Who are your best friends? Who might have opposing views from UX? What are people's expectations from UX? Project Is there a project charter? (Goals, stakeholders, schedules, milestones, risks, etc.) What does the project schedule look like? What are the milestones? What's the overall project strategy? How is success measured? What are the important assumptions? Are there any risks you are aware of? User Who are the users? What are their roles and goals? What motivates them? What are their primary tasks or workflows? What are some of the tips for working with these users? UX work Where are we in terms of UX research and design? What UX work has been done? Explain materials/artifacts. Explain process for a

Holiday cards are always fun to make. Our card from last year caught many by surprise: it appeared that the Gu and Cao family had adopted a new family name, "Thompson". That was not what we had intended at all! What went wrong We were super behind in creating the card last year. In fact, I didn't get to it until well past January 1 of 2017 (gasp)! In a haste to get things done, the blunder happened, inevitably. I unknowingly agreed to the new family name Walgreen's had decided for us (or for all of its customers who happened to have selected the design).  Not until when I was holding a giant stack of cards that bore our proudest family photo of the year did I notice the the tiny print sneaking under the cheerful "Cheers", and it spelled T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N. Oh, no! I wasn't going to discard all the cards that I had just paid for so I had to fix it. After experimenting with a few variations, I settled on "The 'Thompson' Family" because

One of my favorite books I read in 2016 is an interior design book named Styled: Secretes for Arranging Rooms from Tabletops to Bookshelves by Emily Henderson . The book is teeming with beautiful photos and amazing tips that can transform any space from boring to sophisticated. In this book, Emily encourages her readers to use a tray to hold small objects together. I tried, and it worked! Just look at how pulled-together my vanity l ooked after following this tip. And I can't help but wonder: what a magical tray! Interestingly, I came across something very similar while reading on a seemingly unrelated topic, web design, this time. In their book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design ,  Jason Beaird  and James George talk about the concept of proximity when considering  the composition of a web page. It's a pretty intuitive idea: in a composition, objects that are close to each other tend to be interpreted as a single unit by the viewer.   The proximity concept