How I made the pivot into UX: start where you are — part 1
It’s hard for me to believe this story begins almost ten years ago. I’ll tell it in two parts: (1) start where you are and (2) learn the skills. If you’re considering a pivot into UX, this two-parter is for you.
The backstory
“What do you want to do after college?” probably my mother.
“I don’t know,” definitely me.
And so began my journey into tech, as an Office Manager for ThoughtWorks San Francisco, a global software consulting company. It was a great first gig: I got a taste for tech while startups were blossoming across San Francisco. Innovation everywhere.
That said, the role of an Office Manager never really “spoke” to me. Ultimately, the role was a foot in the door, and as an anxious soon-to-be college grad with degrees in Sociology and Urban Design and zero interest in grad school, I was ready to take almost anything.
My main project at ThoughtWorks was to redesign the office. Having studied Sociology and Urban Design, I visualized the office as a mini city and myself as a city planner. I got to think about how design would affect behavior and practice design thinking in real time (even if I didn’t know it at the time).
Empathize with your users
Designing an 11,000 square foot office was no small task, so I was excited to work with talented architects at FENNIE+MEHL. I wanted to keep my colleagues top of mind during my design process, before I really even knew what “user-centered” meant. I consulted with my manager, Ana Rodrigo the Office Principal, who pushed me to leverage UX methods to understand the employee vision for the space and appropriately articulate it to FENNIE+MEHL.
I started with user interviews, and broke the script up into three sections: what employees liked about the current space, what their hopes and aspirations were for the new space, and what made them excited about ThoughtWorks in general.
My biggest takeaways from interviews were:
- Employees valued shared space: most consultants traveled 4–5 days a week across the US and have little connection to the physical office. A comfortable and social space to come back to after a week of travel made them feel more connected to ThoughtWorks, and not the client they were staffed on.
- Focus on running events: we hosted events multiple times a week but the attendees would spill over and / or not have enough AV capabilities. This led to capping the size of meetups and providing minimal support to groups we wanted to be a part of after-hours.
- Not enough meeting rooms: there weren’t enough meeting rooms in the existing office, so people took calls in stairwells or outside on busy San Francisco streets. This led to tensions in the office when meetings went over their scheduled time or individuals never booked their conference rooms in the first place.
At some point after affinity mapping quotes and observations, I remember sitting down at a whiteboard with Annie Conn, a UX designer, and we started developing personas. We looked over my research, chicken scratch in a notebook with circles around key quotes, and she helped me separate the primary users into three buckets:
- The regulars: folks who worked in the office day-in-day-out. They needed consistency and comfort in the space and also a permanent desk.
- The travelers: they would come in once or twice a week, generally be a bit more boisterous because they would catch up with old friends and therefore didn’t need a permanent desk.
- The community: members from our community that we shared space with to throw hackathons and meetups
I didn’t put it together at the time, but I was employing UX research processes to de-risk the development of the office. The best part? I loved every moment of it, which was a signal to keep going.
Build and test the thing
So I had a set of insights and needs from specific user groups, and I brought them to my weekly status meetings with the architect and contractors. We were at the point of demolishing the previous office space in the new building, so time was of the essence to confirm a new space plan. Jenna, our architect, designed an initial space plan based off of the user needs I identified of the three personas, and we had a starting place. I asked for two weeks to test the space plan.
You might be wondering: how do you test an office space before it’s been built? I leveraged the existing space plan — essentially an architectural paper prototype of the space — and put it in front of end users to see how they reacted to the proposed plan. My strategy was to test with 2 regulars of the office and 2 travelers of the office. Given the community members were mostly invested in the common areas of the office, I chose to have a group discussion with them instead. Mind you, these tests were incredibly unstructured (again, baby designer here who didn’t really know what she was doing), so it was essentially me asking folks to “walk” through the space with their finger and talk through what they “saw” and what they thought was out of place or missing within the architectural plan.
Despite my scrappy usability test, I learned some pretty key things:
- All participants expressed there STILL weren’t enough conference rooms, especially for solo calls. This led to ideating on phone booths with Jenna and purchasing phone booth-like furniture for spillover.
- A new mother expressed disappointment that there wasn’t a designated space for breastfeeding/pumping, so Jenna and I got back to work to incorporate a parent room in the space. This would allow for new parents to privately nurse and / or pump during the workday.
- There was a general desire to be better informed of what was going on in the office, so we incorporated an events board in the waiting area and a more tactile “community board” in the kitchen that everyone could make their own.
I didn’t have time to test the revised space plan because at that point the contractors were putting the walls up — our prototype was not much of a prototype anymore. It was honestly a magical feeling, seeing this thing on a piece of paper come to life right before my eyes. Now my concerns were less about walls and more about furniture.
I began to wonder:
How might we support the activities ThoughtWorkers take part in around the office?
Again, I didn’t want to make decisions in a vacuum, so I set up working groups to ideate on amenities and furniture. I held the working groups twice a week in the evening over the course of three weeks and proposed a scenario at the start of a session like “you’re in the kitchen, what are you doing?” Colleagues wrote their responses on stickies and we affinity mapped items that were related: eating together and having lunch, or making an espresso and grabbing a cold brew. This helped drive alignment across colleagues in the office and gave Jenna and I user needs for how to drive the interior design: large dining table with benches and coffee counter with an espresso machine.
Deliver & measure
We were all incredibly excited on opening week, especially myself. I organized weeklong events to stress-test the space: from social gatherings with colleagues like building a succulent planter, to an opening party for friends and family. We got to see how well the space worked during work hours and beyond. Over the following few months, I continued interviewing folks to see where we needed tweaks.
Ultimately, I realized this project was an experiment into whether I enjoyed UX design. I did, so I ended up taking the next step into a bootcamp…
Why do I share this story?
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was getting my first taste of UX before I even invested in a single bootcamp. I got a feel for interviews, usability testing, and synthesis by applying it to my existing role, and gauging if the work felt right. It required zero financial investment, some help from mentors, and a lot of thinking about my end users.
If you’re considering a career switch but feel uncertain or wary of the financial investment, see if you can apply some UX methods in your day job. How can you make your day-to-day more user-centered? Is there a problem you or those around you are facing that you can potentially solve? Maybe ask yourself, “who are my end users” and go from there. You can probably apply some of these methodologies to your work:
If you have a whiteboard and a notebook, you can start now. There is absolutely no need for you to learn Figma if you wish to give UX a try. Who knows? You might find it’s the perfect fit.
A big thank you to all of my ThoughtWorks mentors during this phase of my career: Nathan Zeplowitz, Annie Conn, Anthony Maitz, Ana Rodrigo, Fiona Lee, Tim Brown, Jerome Bennet, and anyone else I might have missed.
