- Each quarter, we host a participant panel
where past UX conference attendees
can share lessons learned.
Here's our panelist, Edgar Anzaldua,
a UX designer in Australia
sharing his work in our 2020 virtual participant panel.
- My name is Edgar.
I'm the head of UX design at Canon Australia, and I'm also
on UX MC from Nielsen Norman,
and it's really exciting.
It doesn't go away, the excitement from that.
I want to start,
my story is going to be a little bit different
from average, because I it's like another time
on the courses that I've taken.
And my first conference that I attended was
in 2015, and these were the courses that I took.
I at the time I was already,
I've been practicing for a while
and I am a senior UX designer working at this consultancy,
and the company decided that they were kind enough
to pay as well for the conference
so I decided to attend.
When I went to the conference,
of course there were things that I already knew
because I've been doing user experience for a little bit,
but there were things that were like bombs
of knowledge, like that really came in and filling the gap
of what I already knew.
And up to this stage, I already know,
I only know user experience more as a really close
to interaction design or user interface design,
and not so much as a stakeholder management approach.
And I was, I had been assigned to my first discovery project
and I went to a conference
and then I saw this particular slide and I was like,
that's exactly what I need to do discovery, (laughs) .
So so I took it and I kid you not,
I was working with five different TV stations
and I was working with a magazine and I was working
with a new learning platform as a consultant.
And I use the same thing for all of them.
It was really useful.
This template in particular allowed me to think about
how I'll actually realize how the goal
for a particular project in the minds of the stakeholder.
Like if I was going to meet five stakeholders
and perform a discovery exercise with them,
those different stakeholders will have different ideas of
what the discovery, oh, sorry of what the product had to do.
And this particular template allowed me to put it
in front of them, and I started facilitating that,
and that was sort of my introduction to facilitation.
It was really messy, but
that didn't play made it really easy
I need, had a bunch of aha moments.
I think I can share these now because it's not really old.
So I hope nobody gets upset.
And I know, so it allowed me to,
this is another slide from the same year.
And it allowed me to see how not only user experience could
be ambition from the beginning of the project and a set
of strategies, metrics, and the KPIs and what not.
But also you can look at it backwards in terms,
in terms of what the project has been performing over time.
And this is one of the charts
that I also stole from the slide decks back in the day.
After this, I got my UX certification
and I was super excited.
I actually bought
the exams after the fact that after I attended
and I was like this was fun.
I felt really empowered by having the UX certified aspect
of in my, in my profile
because now I had the authority to say that I
knew about what I was talking about, which was really good.
And so the next year that I decided
to go and the masters certification was nowhere
in my, in my radar, but I decided to go,
I only do one course a wire framing and prototyping one.
And then there was another of those aha moments.
And it's we,
we looked at different ways in which people
talk about different things,
and in this case it was prototypes.
And I didn't realize that prototypes have these many names.
And that was really cool because not only knowing
a few tips and tricks or filling in the gap
of knowledge that you might have is useful,
but also calling it by their name.
You feel like a lot of authority, which is really good.
And also by calling it
by their name, you can actually move faster at the time
of working because now everybody's you start the morning,
I see the language around,
then that's really useful to get traction.
This is me doing this.
It's a small animation of the prototype
that I built in Canada, just recently.
That's me in the bottom right.
Doing the remote testing because hashtag thanks Covid.
So we cannot do it in person.
But anyway, so that was 2016.
And in 2017, I started shifting the
my intention became user experience.
I started noticing that there was a little bit
of I've got that, I had to feel with the management stuff.
So I started adding those sort
of courses and I attended the conference.
Those were the courses
that I took and then something surprising happened.
I started noticing that not only the first conference,
I met people that were really cool to hang out with,
and that were really like-minded.
But in the second conference
that I attended, the same thing happened.
And just to get this photo is taken
in Vancouver, and I spoke to the guy
in the left of the, this photo this morning,
so that you make really long lasting friendships
in these conferences is really cool.
But anyway, that was a tangent.
And I guess I don't have like a lot
of examples that I can talk to like that I can show you,
but I just quickly talk to you about the significance of,
again, talking about the concept side,
their name feels like it's something that we all deal
with when we are in these days.
And just, like knowing
how to ask for feedback,
the feedback comes in completely different,
which is really useful.
And this is just a small nugget of the whole world
of knowledge studies transmit into these conferences,
which is really cool, here's another one from,
I think this is from (indistinct)
which also allowed me to learn a little bit
about myself on how, what is my communication style
and how to talk to others
when I can do kind of certain communication style.
Lastly, we have the team manifesto here.
I have asked for, to send it to me twice over the course
of the years, because I come from the chance to apply it
in a company that I used in California and now in Canon.
And this is the photo
of the team manifesto happening in Canon.
It happened at the beginning of the year and really got
the team really pumped up
and really wanting to work together.
So now I had 12 courses finished and now I said,
I might as well just do it,
so I went for the next year for the masters certification.
And again, a little bit of a mixed bag
between research and the assignment management.
And now the surprise that I, that I met Jacob and Noah.
It was super awkward because I went to the bathroom and I
just bumped into him when I was walking out of the bathroom.
And I took the most horrible photo with him, but like,
you already seen it.
So just to reinforce the fact,
if I haven't spoken about how much you can fill
in the gap, when you attend these sort of conferences.
Person doing research was something
that I always wanted to do.
And I have really like, I'm a data nerd.
I have a bit of knowledge
of how to do code and stuff like that.
And I also have, I'm not,
I probably not as good with the qualitative stuff,
but it's still, I sort of know my way around it,
but I didn't know how to measure them both.
And when I attended this conference, I had like, ha,
this is how, so this is, this was, is live.
And I was like, mind blown.
I won't give you the details so that you probably go
to the one of the conferences,
but this is how I put it in practice.
So right now I'm mentoring two people
into UX and you can see it here in practice.
This is for an evaluation we're doing of the app at space.
And this one is from some research piece
that I did with Autotrader,
which was it's a really long piece of needs finding.
And it was really useful.
And we went from nothing from doing product personas
and sort of tapping on the knowledge of stakeholders to see
how to create personas all the way to do the interviews
and validate our,
our beliefs about them and then create the personas.
And then become master certificate certified, yes!
And but I'd realize that I wasn't doing it for that.
I was doing it because I really enjoy the people.
I really enjoy the knowledge.
I went again to the, to the conference
and I saw these, which is just that bit about facilitation
on how to do perform facilitation.
And as a guy that has done his fair bit
of workshops in the past.
You will realize, you would think
that I already know how to do them.
And then I went to the, I saw the conference and I was like,
oh my God, I have been missing this for so long.
And just recently in Canon coming back from the conference,
I did like I did, A net approach like the one at HD,
and this is like a story map or a journey map
if you like It starts with sticky notes, so it's not
that fancy, but it's like a story of map of the sprint.
And within this, in this design screen,
we have all the processes that happen within that screen,
the prep that you do and the post work that you do.
And in green there, you have the things that worked out.
In red are the things that didn't work.
And in purple you have the things that we could do
to fix the red things.
And most of the, a bunch of the things that we could do
on how to fix it, come from the conference,
which is really, it has been really useful.
So I guess to summarize.
These conference are really good
because you always get something out
of it, like a story mapping,
new ways of communicating stuff, or research methods.
You'll make new friends, at the top left,
that one, Juan is also considering
attending the conference as well.
I met him in 2015.
We reconnected just recently when I moved
to Sydney and we together, we started the UX happy hour
and of the bottom, right,
you see a photo of one of the events that we have there,
that we have closed it.
And that also helps if I hadn't said it enough,
it helps you to join the dots, but
so make friends learn something and join the dots.
And oh, and one more thing in the last conference
I had Jacob to my house, yeah. (laughs)
That's me, thank you guys.
- [Sarah] Great, thank you so much, Edgar.
Really funny to see that maybe you can put
that back up again, that picture of Jacob on your TV,
You have Jacob over in your living room, that's great.
Thank you so much for sharing that,
and so again, just like we did
with the reach, if you guys have questions,
feel free to drop those in the Zoom chat,
but as we're waiting for those to come in,
I definitely have a couple of questions and things
I want to know more about, Edgar.
It's really great to hear your experience as somebody
who is in a leadership position now, and, you know,
kind of came to a lot of these courses
with more real world experience.
And to hear you talk about
how some of these courses, you know,
even when they didn't give you things
that you didn't already know,
they maybe gave you the terminology
for those things, or they helped you connect the dots
between things that you had kind of learned on your own.
And I loved what you said about that.
Also lending authority,
and sort of enabling you to standardize language
with the teams that you worked with, you know,
things like calling it a T prototype.
I wonder if you faced any resistance while you were trying
to sort of establish those norms, like,
did you find any challenges
in trying to get that terminology to be consistent?
- In my last, in Canon right now
there's a thousand different ways
that people refer to a high fidelity wire frame.
I call it high fidelity wire frame,
and some other guys call it wire.
Some other guys called it, call it comps.
We don't have like, it's always different
from company to company, how they call things.
And so standardizing it sometimes I feel
like a dictator or if I just come
in and then I, this is a way we're going
to name things, so I, instead of doing that,
I try to adapt to their language for a little bit then.
And then I tried to start like
pushing as much as I can in a soft way
and try not to be not too pushy.
Yeah.
But sometimes I just end up being what they call it
because they already, yeah, they're using it already
and it's working so why would I change it.
- That's something that Jacob's been
talking a lot about recently,
this idea of vocabulary inflation within the UX field
and how there's all these different terms that you can use
to refer to the same concept.
But that's a great tip
that you know, you may want to sort of soften your approach
in some ways and not, you know,
declare that this is what we're going to call these things.
You know, it probably doesn't matter
too much in a lot of situations
as long as you're consistent, so that's a great,
that's a great tip that you can just try
to adapt to whoever you're working with.
Sarah has a question for you Edgar, she says
what's one piece of advice
you have for someone who's newer to the UX field
and is trying to establish themselves in the field?
So somebody who's maybe a complete newbie.
- I guess, remain curious.
I guess I mentioned at the beginning
of the, of the presentation that I I've been doing UX,
The first time I went to the conference, I was already
with a title that had a UX in it, like for 3, 4 years.
So when I, when I went
to a conference, I felt a little bit like, how do we know?
You know?
And and it humbled me to realize that I didn't know this.
I didn't know that there was
a lot of stuff that I didn't know.
And so keep an open mind, keep learning
that would be how to tackle the
remain curious how to go from nothing
or from a junior to something more senior, yeah.
- Yeah, that's a great tip Not only for new people,
but anybody at any phase in their UX career.
And that's so true that, you know,
like any product or service that we're working on,
there's always room for improvement.
If we're never like, okay, now it's done, now it's perfect.
I feel like the same thing's true for us as professionals.
Like, you know how we're like, okay, you know,
now I know all the UX things
and there's nothing new for me to learn, that's a great.