Hi! I'm Niki. welcome! I started a new job a couple of months ago and i work as a user experience
architect ( a UX architect) so if you're interested in hearing about what a UX architect does
then keep watching this video. so this is my very first job where i hold the job title ux
user experience architect and it is a little bit different from being a ux designer. so the
ux architect or what i do in my job is i oversee and i produce all of the wireframes and all of
the flows for a platform. platform is or what we call platform is a suite of products. so just think
about Google suite. so whenever you would like to sign up for google analytics or just using google
sheet or youtube then you will probably meet the same login and registration flow. so my main focus
is at my current work is just to make sure the experience is consistent throughout the platform
regardless which product our customers use. my main responsibility as a user experience architect is
to develop the structure and the flow of a digital solution or in our case multiple products but
essentially the digital solution is the platform. i hope it makes sense... so i use research sometimes
i run my own research projects if there is a already existing research done then i utilize
that research, i translate the insights into actions and how we can implement those actions
into the platform, into all of our products. task flows are the biggest things. so i map out the
current experience and i also think about a future state where we would like to go i always need to
keep in mind the strategic vision and how we get there maybe for one product that is much easier
to get to this vision but for other products it might take multiple iterations so it might take
actually years to get there and i need to make sure those things are written and documented
properly because i only joined on temporary basis to deliver certain things so i gotta
make sure that when i am not there anymore then people can take the whole team can take actions
based on that documentation. some people insist that the ux designer and the ux architect or ux
developer they are completely different and yes maybe i am in new zealand so a job description of
a UX architect in New Zealand and if you compare that to a North American or European UX architect job
there might be some differences. For example, in this job, i do not code. but i do need to
understand it (coding). because one of the biggest thing is i need to make sure things are accessible but
not only from a designer point of view i don't only think about color contrast and typography
i need to review the code and i need to check if we do have certain aria labels assigned to
html elements. that is big part of my job. as a ux designer or product designer in the past
i only gave guidance to developers like what to do but here i am more hands-on with accessibility i
don't know all of these things from top of my head so what i do i have a few websites that i check
out and i just reference those websites and those recommendations with the actual written code. so
that's what i do. that's big part of my job i also do a lot of ux copywriting. i create the
draft version for each screen. that is a pretty big role itself but we do have a professional who
writes the final copy. what i don't do in this job is user interface design. so luckily we do
have an amazing ui team so they handle all of the visual designs but we work collaboratively
i hand over my figma wireframes so they just take my wire frames to the next next level so
it is such an amazing team it's so nice to work with a dedicated ui team where i only actually
need to worry about how something works. that is actually a big difference because in all of my
previous roles i did the ui design as well. so my main responsibilities is research and drawing
insights from research so i translate the research insights into wireframes and prototypes i create
multiple flows usually we test the flows and i usually come up with metrics as well so then we
can take proper actions based on the metrics based on the result that we get after the test. i am part
of multiple work streams and i'm part of multiple product development teams who develop different
parts or different solutions for the platform so i use a lot of metrics to see whether the user
experience vision the overall vision and strategy are working and some of the metrics include
success rates like task success rate and the time users take on a task, ease of use rating, SUS score
and certain error rates. so i don't really have that many meetings funnily... so about 20-25% of my
time are in meetings and meetings are usually useful and we have actionable things at the
end of the meeting compared to my previous job where i felt that i had a meeting fatigue because
i had to attend so many and some of the meetings were not that valuable to me. the meeting and
focus work time ratio here is way better. other thing that i do is I create a lot of presentations...
a lot. Nearly every single day i present something to some part
of the organization or to a development team or product managers or executives
yeah so this is a huge part and i work highly collaboratively with my product managers so i
should say we are like best friends, professional best friend. yes, so this is basically what i do as
a ux architect. i wonder if any of these surprise you or if you find it interesting. oh by the way i
wrote a book in november you might have seen that video from me i am still in the editing phase of
my book but i have a release month which is april 2022 and i decided i will give this book away for
free so if you would like to get a copy of it then make sure you fill out the form that i link
below and i will send you a download link when i release the book. the title is, it's a tentative
title Things i wish i knew before starting in ux design. so then if this is an interest to you then
make sure you subscribe to the book it includes a lot of tips and i'm sure you will find them useful
otherwise thank you for watching and i hope i see you next time bye