User Flows

Welcome back to UserFlows Podcast on July 20, my name is Thomas Morrell and I'll be your host. This is a show where we talk UX Design and Careers. I interview other designers about their journey into the field of User Experience Design and how they've thrived in their roles. Share some tips and information you can use to advance your own career in the field.

Today, I'm speaking with a past colleague, friend, and all-around amazing person. Caryn Gallis is a Director of Experience Design specializing in Culture & Training. Caryn is also a professor of design at Keen University in New Jersey. I first met Caryn in my first week working at Prudential Financial. A big project I was hired for hadn't kicked off yet, but Caryn and UserFlows podcast guest Brian Evans from episode #2 were working on putting together a training deck for the team at Prudential on how to Facilitate Design Sprints.

They presented me with the idea of creating a fake project in order to use as the training material source. It was a really fun project and ultimately an amazing way for me to be introduced to Design Sprints. An activity I use often in my own design process now.

For those of you who don't know, Design Sprints are a fantastic 3 - 5 day design workshop meant to take a companies ideas from zero to prototype within a very short timeframe. They are highly collaborative, fast-paced and are a great way of getting ideas in front of your audience without spending months or years building the wrong product first. They were started by ex-Google Ventures member Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz. They made their findings into a fantastic book. “Design Sprints, How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days”. For all the hype around design sprints, at least from my perspective, the hype is well deserved.

Since helping Brian and Caryn create the training material for sprinting at Prudential. I was fortunate enough to go through their training program and facilitate six design sprints while at Prudential. All were hugely beneficial to the projects I was working on and a transformational moment in my own career. Having tools like this to help your team navigate through or break up continuous cycles of non-decision are a fantastic way to help your team push past where so many others get stuck.

Caryn is an integrative thinker who thrives on solving the big picture while remaining focused on relevant details through every stage of the assignment. She seeks to understand the user's needs while keeping the business goals in alignment.

Caryn and I discuss her career and transition from designing children's toys to UX design. What are design sprints? When to use a design sprint and possibly more importantly when not to use a design sprint. She'll take us through her process of selling Design Sprints in a large enterprise organization and how she went from a comment in an interview to scaling design sprint training to well over 500 members of her organization.

She shares some great tips around keeping a Design Sprint best practices wiki. Connecting with the decider of your sprint beforehand in order to ground them in their role. She also shares some great tips and advice for new designers looking to get into the field.

If you are new to the show or if you haven't already. Please subscribe to User Flows wherever you listen to Podcasts. Share this show or any of the others with your audience, friends, family, or anyone you know who's interested in a career in the field.

Thank you so much for listening or reading :) and I hope you enjoy the show.

TM

Welcome back to the UserFlows Podcast. A show where we talk about UX Design and Careers. I’m your host Thomas Morrell and I get to interview other designers about their journey’s into the field of UX and Product Design. Today I am speaking with Sam Harper, a former filmmaker and marine biologist turned passionate user experience designer, published Medium author, and frequent contributor to the UX Collective blog. Sam is also a UX career coach with some pretty great experience.

I was first introduced to Sam through his LinkedIn live shows. I found him extremely intriguing and I love how open, honest and helpful he has been for the UX community. Especially those just getting started in the field.

You can read Sam’s articles on Medium or join his biweekly live stream calls on LinkedIn.

Books and Articles we talked about on the show

What Color is Your Parachute?

Jobs To Be Done

2021 Edition: Your UX Boot Camp Will NOT Get You A Job: Unless You Do These Critically Important Steps

Article I couldn’t remember on the show :)

Lost your UX job during COVID? Look at the opportunities it presents

Steven Cohn is a father, husband, and serial entrepreneur and he tries hard to be great in all those areas. I can relate to that as I'm the father of two as well and husband to my wonderful wife of 10 years. I do hope to be an entrepreneur again in the future. Which is why I'm talking to Steven today. He has a marvelous track record of starting and selling fantastic digital companies.

For those of you in the UX space, many will know his venture, Validately which made it easy and affordable to conduct lean customer research on new digital products. Validately has since been acquired by UserZoom. Prior to launching Validately, Steven sold his first two startups to LivingSocial and TripAdvisor. He has also worked at DoubleClick, Quantcast, and IBM. He is a graduate of George Washington University and Harvard Business School.

I'm convinced that every designer dreams of starting their own product one day. I will not be shy about saying that I have this dream. So one of the great things about starting a podcast is that you get to talk to really cool people who do the things you want to do. So I'm really excited to talk to Steven today as he's 3 for 3 in creating useful, successful, and profitable products.

Steven is going for his fourth startup success with his latest and greatest company, ImpactProduct. ImpactProduct helps designers and product people alike make data-informed design decisions. Uncover usability issues faster. All without developer support. The entire tool is offered as a chrome extension. I installed it on my personal site. It took all of seconds to install and seems super easy to use thus far.

Follow Steven on Twitter @spcohn or learn more about him on LinkedIn.

Here is a list of people and products we discuss in the show:

Impact Product

Jeff Gothelf

Joshua Seiden

Becky Buck of Forge Studio

The Lean Product Playbook

Outcomes Over Output

Price Intelligently

If you haven't already, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. I'll be releasing a show about every other week or so. If you'd like to be a friend to the show. Leaving a review and comment on Apple would be very much appreciated. Share a link to this show with your friends and anyone else you know who's interested in UX design. Feel free to recommend topics you'd like to hear discussed and if you have any questions about Design, Design Careers, or anything else for that matter, you can DM me on Instagram @userflows.live

Now let's go create!

Hello and welcome back to the UserFlows Podcast. UserFlows is a show where we talk about UX Design and UX Careers. You should listen to this show if... You are a student of user experience or product design. You are a professional who is considering a transition to the field or if you're just someone who's interested in UX design and wants to learn a bit more about it. In each episode, I'll interview a successful, working designer in order to discover how they found the field and have managed to thrive in this highly competitive landscape. We'll break down the steps they took in order to land their first jobs, dive into the mistakes they've made while building their careers, and hopefully teach a bit about the processes, tools, and best practices that have helped them in their own design journey.

If you haven't already, please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. I'll be releasing a show about every other week or so. If you'd like to be a friend to the show. Leaving a review and comment on iTunes would be very much appreciated. Share a link to this show with your friends and those interested in UX design. Feel free to recommend topics you'd like to hear discussed and if you have any questions about Design, Design Careers, or anything else for that matter, you can DM me on Instagram @userflows.live.

Today I'm speaking with Ty Fujimura, CEO of Cantilever Web Design and Development. Ty is an extremely thoughtful designer and design leader. His career purpose (I mean, look at that, he actually has a career purpose) is to unite creativity and business. Cantilever is a mission-driven company and its mission is to harness the power of “Digital Hospitality". A term I absolutely love, it means they believe websites are spaces that users inhabit, not billboards they see from a distance. Ty is currently focused on building a great environment for Cantilever’s staff to thrive and deliver outstanding results for their clients.

In our conversation, we dive a little bit deeper into what Digital Hospitality means to Ty, his team, and their clients. Cantilever is a remote-first team so we talk a bit about remote working best practices for the rest of us just toying at remote working. How to make time to let designers design and some of his thoughts around building a successful design culture.

I can not thank Ty enough for sharing his time and ideas. If you'd like to learn more about Ty and Cantilever. You can connect with Ty on Twitter @tyfuji or by visiting cantilever.co. If you're a soccer fan, Ty also hosts a fantastic podcast We The Peeps focused on US Soccer, USMNT the World Cup and is an irreverent take on US Soccer. USMNT Gold Cup, CONCACAF Nations League, and World Cup Qualifying. Give it a listen.

TM

Howdy and Hello! Welcome back to the UserFlows Podcast. My name is Thomas Morrell and I'll be your host. It's been a couple of weeks since we last spoke. In the last episode we got to speak with someone totally fresh to the industry, right out of the UX boot camp, and this week we get to speak with someone with a number of years of experience. So I think this will give us a really well-rounded view of interviewing for UX design roles both from the interviewee and the interviewer perspectives.

You can go back and listen to the last episode where I interview freelance UX/UI designer Ivan Crego where he talks about landing his first UX role. That is episode 5. This week we'll be speaking with Mike Reed. Mike is now Principle UX designer for a company called Infromatica in Ontario, Canada.

Mike is an experienced product designer (UX/UI) and manager who has led numerous successful consumer apps, eCommerce platforms, SaaS products, and analytics and management consultant tools to market - with proven business results.

Mike provides leadership, guidance, and insights for large-scale platform changes and long-term product decisions and strategies. Mike has implemented human-centered design processes, UI change management processes and tracking, business-driven quantitative testing, product acceleration sessions, and more.

Show Links:

Mike Reed website: https://www.mikeuxportfolio.com/

Mike Reed LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-reed-62a4157/

Informatica: https://www.informatica.com/

Davy Wreck on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4h38ZRI4BD2RiWHsKnDBXx?si=jeY72NhMRACGPpSa9k08UA

Day Wreck Designer Music Playlist: https://soundcloud.com/sevenpercent/sets/designer-music

Want to learn UX design? I could be your mentor at Springboard.com https://www.springboard.com/invite/UP2DN

Hello and welcome back to the UserFlows Podcast. My name is Thomas Morrell and I'll be your host. It's been a crazy month for myself and my family. We packed up and sold our home in New Jersey and moved to Savannah, GA. We've been debating this move for many years, so we've finally pulled the trigger. It's been a dream so far, but of course, it's still the honeymoon phase. Continuing the podcast throughout the move though. We'll be bouncing around from rental to rental as we build our dream home on the coast here.

A little update of the podcast for those of you who continue to listen. We have listeners. This is really exciting and I can't thank you all enough. Of course, it's not thousands, but it is in the hundreds which for me is really exciting. I started this podcast to help those of you who may be considering the journey or career transition into the field of UX design. I did this not only to help people grow and learn but also selfishly to help myself grow and learn and my gosh it's been quite a learning curve. I had a slight snafu with recording this podcast so you'll notice the audio is a little off, but that's the only way to learn, isn't it. Trial and error.

Thank you all so much for continuing to listen. If you'd like to be a friend to the show, please share this with anyone you know who may be interested in the field of UX design. Subscribe and leave a rating on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. If you have any specific topics you'd like to discuss or hear discussed. Feel free to reach out with any topic requests, questions, or ideas. I'm all ears and I'm here for you.

Very excited for this episode, today you'll be listening to a conversation I had with Freelance UX/UI designer Ivan Crego. Ivan recently started his career after attending a UX boot camp offered through Career Foundry. Previously, Ivan had an amazing job as a University Recruiter for the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he got paid to travel the world. Nice work if you can get it, huh!

After the realities of Covid set in, Ivan realized he would need to look into a new career. Luckily a friend introduced him to UX design and got him pointed in the right direction. A big shout out to Brian Evans for introducing me to Ivan. You can listen to my conversation with Brian in UserFlows Episode 2.

Ivan and I talk about a number of his experiences throughout his journey to becoming a UX designer and for those of you considering that same journey. I think you'll find what he has to share enlightening. I hope you enjoy it.

Find all show links below:

New Jersey Institute of Technology: https://www.njit.edu/

Career Foundry: https://careerfoundry.com/

Springboard: https://www.springboard.com/

General Assembly: https://generalassemb.ly/

Brian Evans Interview: https://redcircle.com/shows/6fe0183f-8c8b-48f3-9e04-6675912c267e/episodes/62eca4c3-6d8e-42cc-97ba-07ac2e4fd6e4

If you'd like to connect with Ivan, you can find him here: linkedin.com/ivancrego or ivancregodesign.com

If you'd like to be a friend of the show, please remember to share this with anyone you know interested in User Experience design. Like, share, comment, etc... on all the social media channels. You can find me on Instagram @userflows.live

You can message me at linkedin.com/morrellthomas

If you've enjoyed this show, a five-star rating, comment on Spotify or Apple podcasts would go a long, long way.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy the conversation.

TM

Before you dive into anything. It's important to define what it REALLY is, what it means to you, and what it means to the people it will effect. I dove into this question "What is UX design? Really?" about 10 years ago.

"What is UX design?" is a question I’ve been asked a lot of times in job interviews, from family members, and from prospective clients. If it is a field you wish to participate in as well. It will be essential for you to establish an answer in your own words that means something to you and translates easily enough to the listener.

Wikipedia explains it as: "User experience design (UXD, UED, or XD) is the process of supporting user behavior through usability, usefulness, and desirability provided in the interaction with a product. User experience design encompasses traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users."

Don Norman who coined the term User Experience in 1993 while working at apple Defines it this way: "'User experience'" encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products." You can also hear him talk about it in this quick video.

In my humble opinion I define UX design in a couple ways:

From the perspective of the designer.

UX design is the iterative refinement of a product or service to bring value to a user. It focuses on the desirability, feasibility and usability of a product.

From the perspective of the user.

UX is the perception I have when using a product or service. Do I find it useful, desirable and can it be implemented easily into my life?

When I boil it down, this is what I come up with.

Essentially to me, UX design is about improving the human experience. Even it means you're just making someone’s day that much easier. It balances organizational objectives with human nature and needs. If your intent is to improve someone’s experience and you can achieve that, your organization could be successful. If you don't improve someone’s experience, then it will probably fail.

Therefore I now define UX design as:

The iterative design of digital products and services to improve human interaction.

So what does a UX designer do all day?

A big disclaimer to this one. Not every designer works the same, has the same responsibilities or roles to fill. This can look different depending on who you are, where your focus lies, and what your company, team, or clients expect from you. Also, it has a lot to do with the individual designer, where their strengths are, where they tend to focus their attention and how their team divides responsibilities.

Designing

Yes! A good portion of your day will be spent heads down in Sketch, InVision, XD, Figma, or any other prototyping tool you choose to use. This can be high-fidelity designs or low, but you should be prototyping and learning almost every day.

You should be prototyping and learning almost every day

By prototyping, I mean creating mock-ups that are as close to an interactive experience as possible. This allows not only the designer but the rest of the team as well to interact with an experience like an app that's similar to what it would be like for a customer to use the actual product.

By learning, I mean using the prototype to test with the business team to ensure it meets requirements. Test with the development team to ensure the feasibility of building this design and test with the folks who in the end will be using the app to make sure it's actually something they'll want to use.

Strategic Thinking

Designers need to help the business connect with users to gain insights into their needs and wants. This is an essential part of the designer's role. Also helping them develop the requirements of what you will be building is a good skill set to acquire. The designer's role in this phase is to really connect with the business team to build trust and establish goals, vision, and the desired outcome the team will be driving towards.

Actual day-to-day work may include crafting and participating in user or customer interviews. Analyzing customer pain points and highlighting opportunities. Crafting competitive research, creating user personas, collecting inspiration, journey map creation and again, the list goes on. The important part is that you and the team are forming a bond and a connection around who your customer is, what your strategy is to help them, plus how and on what time frame you'll do it in.

Divergent Thinking

Ideating, iterating, and collaborating are key to this phase. Design, Test, Repeat! You'll be sketching, wire-framing, card-sorting, plotting the Information Architecture, prototyping, testing, etc..., etc...

So you've helped the team gather enough information to know who your customer is and roughly how you'll go about helping them. Now it's time for the pen to hit the paper. Or marker to hit whiteboard, or sharpie to hit post it or mouse to click the screen. You get the point, now is the time to generate as many ideas as possible. Now could be a great time to walk the team through an idea-generating workshop.

Convergent Thinking

Developers need your final typography, spacing, grids, icons, and artwork ready to go. Also, you'll need to work closely with the product team to design for almost every imaginable scenario a user may encounter while using your app. So a designer needs to be good and fast at whichever design tool they'll be using. It's incredible how much time can be spent designing error states and messages to help your user when things break down. Get faster so it doesn't break you down.

Facilitating and participating in workshops

There are meetings, lots of meetings. Workshops are better, and if you can't get that. A meeting with a purpose and action will have to do. As a designer, you have to present you're work a lot! Designers need to get comfortable facilitating activities and presentations that don't suck.

Typical?

So as you can see. A typical day as a UX designer is not very typical at all. It is fun though 😉

What's your favorite part of the day?

So excited to connect with an old colleague Evan Tyerman. Evan is the Director of Design Operations at Prudential Financial and an all-around great human. Evan has a very interesting background that led him to User Experience Design.

Previously he was in the biomedical engineering field, Evan has always been passionate about helping people. His background in engineering drives him to discover the unknown, while his empathy and compassion in helping people helps him to understand the wonder of people. Ultimately, his understanding of users, along with his creativity, inspires Evan to create experiences to change the world. To Evan, User Experience is more than a job or a skill set; it is a passion.

Evan and I talk about his experience in discovering UX design, telling his parents he was leaving the Biomedical Engineering field. How passion fuels a great designer and his experience with General Assembly. I'm very excited for Evan and his new role and I can't wait to share his story with you.

You can connect with Evan at https://www.linkedin.com/in/evantyerman/

Transcript

Thomas 0:40

Howdy, welcome to the user flows podcast, it's great to have you back. This week, we're gonna be talking with Evan Tyerman, who is the director of design operations at Prudential financial, Evan and I worked together for some time, he was a really fun guy to work with. And I'm really excited about his new position and new role. And I can't wait to dig into that with him. Evan previously comes from the biomedical engineering field. And he's always been very passionate about helping people, which is what led him to UX design. And his background in engineering really drives him to discover the unknown, while his empathy and compassion and helping people help them to understand the wonder of people.

And ultimately, his understanding of users, along with his creativity, inspires Evan to create experiences to change the world. And to Evan user experience is more than a job or a skill set. It's about passion. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So welcome, Evan, it's great to have you here tonight. I'm really excited to talk to you. It's been a while since we've seen each other. So for everybody listening, Evan and I work together at Prudential financial, and Evan has just been named design operations director. Is that correct?

Evan 1:50

That is correct. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me.

Thomas 1:52

Yeah, no problem, man. So I wanted to talk to you a bit about it because you have a very interesting kind of background. And also, you were one of those people that I was, you know, very blown away by when I started working with you, because you kind of welcomed me into Prudential, I think you're the first person that kinda, you know, showed up at my desk, you had a whole kind of care package of Prudential gear and stuff, which was really cool. And you got me set up with my machine and everything going. And so very nice cards from everybody. And I think once you stopped doing that role, onboarding the people that came in after me was just terrible. So it was a very nice welcome.

Evan 2:31

It's funny bringing up because you were actually the first person that I did that to, as well. You were pretty much the first person we brought in, I think, after I started kind of revamping our onboarding system, and I think it worked well, on the first shot.

Thomas 2:45

Yeah. When great. It went great. That's great. Yeah, but you were definitely, you know, wise beyond your ears. I, I figured you had been working in UX for a number of years. And then I found out that this was like your first big role, which, in UX design, kind of blew me away. So if you don't mind, would you kind of dive into, you know, how you ended up at Prudential and how you went from biomedical engineering?

Evan 3:10

Yeah, biomedical engineering. Yeah, I mean, definitely a crazy journey. Over the past. I graduated college, and dirty as a biomedical engineer in 2017. So past, let's say, four years. Yeah, that's definitely a wild wild ride. I don't know how far you want me to go back. But you know, I could go back kind of, like what I started hearing about, about the world of UX and my kind of emergence into that. So you know, towards kind of the end of my college career, and you know, I went to NJIT. Thinking that I really wanted to be into like, problem-solving, and really kind of taking on critical problems, and putting, you know, my eyes on it and trying to solve in ways that other people wouldn't think about solving it. And that's just kind of how who I was as a person, you know, growing up, I really love complicated problems.

Both my parents were engineers, so, you know, more or less, I was kind of destined to go to an engineering school and kind of fall in their footsteps. But as I was kind of going through that, I did realize that, um, you know, the problems that I was solving weren't fulfilling, you know, I was doing kind of, you know, I went into the area of biomedical engineering because I wanted to help people to that was another motivation for me. But I feel like the problems we're so we're solving, we're solving at such a slow pace, and I wasn't really fulfilling to be, you know, on a project, I would see fruition in five to 10 years. I wanted to see, you know, immediate change, and I wanted to really work at a fast pace. And that's really what kind of made me step away from the world of biomedical engineering and look towards other avenues I can use like those same kinds of problem-solving techniques, but also in the same way, you know, try to really help people and get to know and learn about people. And a lot of my close friends, one of the previous ones you had on your podcast, Brian, good, good college friend of mine, he really, you know, opened me up to the world of UX and what it is, and he showed me, you know, you got to involve the users in creating these designs.

Actually, for college, I was very kind of design was a little bit of my hobby. So I like to, you know, I worked as like, you know, PR managers for certain organizations, you know, doing flyers and learning Photoshop. So like, I still have, you know, a little bit of love for design, I never really like kind of dove into it. But, you know, he showed me that like, UX was a crossroad of, you know, design and problem-solving. And also, you know, involving your users at the end of the day. And I saw that, and I don't know what it was like a light bulb kind of hit. Yeah. And, you know, that's when I realized, like, oh, wow, this might be like, more of a career for me than engineering. So, you know, by the time I made that decision, it was kind of towards the end of my college career. So I was like, Okay, let me suck it up. Let me finish college, and we get a degree, let me make my parents happy.

Hopefully, they don't hear this. But let me finish off college strong. And let me look into this career path. And I was actually very surprised to find that I wasn't, I wasn't alone, there were a lot of people that really came from very non-traditional backgrounds in UX design, and found their way into this field. And a lot of them did go through courses. So a lot of them weren't really coming out of right out of college. A lot of them were coming through these kinds of pipelines of I went to General Assembly, but there was a lot of other kinds of programs like that, that people were just kind of going doing a quick course, you know, over, you know, a couple of months, and having some sort of design document. And that's why I really, like really brought me into the design as I can, you know, for a very minimal amount of time, I can really kind of changed my career trajectory, and really find a way into this field, that I didn't need to redo college at all. And that, that was another big thing that really likes, made it worth it.

Thomas 7:19

Yeah. Yeah, it's a huge time and cost savings, right?

Evan 7:23

Oh, yeah, for sure. You know, and that was also a big seller for my parents to you know, it was pretty crazy for them, you know, they paid a good majority of my college to say, like, I'm not gonna use that degree anymore. I'm gonna go find something else. Yeah, and then I was, you know, sitting there ready to foot the bill. And I was like, Oh, wait, now I really need to think about how I'm going to afford this. And that actually made it you know, going to a school where it was just a few months really made it worth it. And then coming out of that, you know, I really did have at least the skill set to do what, what was needed to get kind of an entry-level into the job.

I didn't, you know, I didn't have like a full sense to be like a full, mid-level designer, but I did have the kind of the skill set needed. And the rest of it was kind of my drive and determination. Yeah, we got to get over the finish line and find that like, really kind of start to your career. So yeah, going through General Assembly definitely was the right choice. It definitely wouldn't have changed it to the world. And I met a lot of great people along the way to a lot of like I said, a lot of people came from non-traditional backgrounds, there were architects in our class, there was fashion designers, photographers, even a geologist was in our class learning to be a UX designer.

Yeah, she, you know, studied rocks, and then decided to shoot on this many people. And I thought

Brian Evans is a resident and worker in the flourishing downtown of Newark, NJ. Receiving a B.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from NJIT he has quickly become a defender of the user, advocate for the differently-abled, and destroyer of churn and red tape. Passionate about designing experiences to help people get control of their financial lives. He holds a CPACC certification from the IAAP, yay acronyms! This means he finds web accessibility to be an important part of his profession. His hobbies include woodworking and writing quirky bios.

I worked with Brian at Prudential Financial for a few years and it was originally a conversation I had with Brian which led me to start this podcast. So I was super excited when he agreed to be the first interview guest on the show. I have to thank Brian as well for being such a trooper as we ran into a number of technical issues and even lost a small snippet of the recording. Thanks, Brian!

Brian currently works at https://www.incedoinc.com/

Brian discovered and was turned on to UX design from Code for America. https://www.codeforamerica.org/

Brian and I talk a lot about web accessibility. I love his line about "Accessibility really comes down to decency". I asked Brian about accessibility specifically because he was my go-to resource when we worked together for all accessibility-related questions as he always had the right answer.

Some links to further your Accessibility education:

Deque Accessibility Training. https://www.deque.com/training/

Web Aim. https://webaim.org/

IAAP. https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/

Brian's Inspirations:

Jared Spool. https://www.uie.com/

Whitney Quesenbery. https://civicdesign.org/about/our-team/

Educating Yourself:

Center Centre. https://www.centercentre.com/

Just some bears brewing bears.

Bear Party Brewing. https://www.instagram.com/bearpartybrewing/?hl=en

Brian and some of his friends have been brewing beer to keep active during this pandemic. I got the oppotunity to sample some and it was delicious. Pockets and Polar bear plunge were my favorites. Follow them on Instagram.

Catch up with Brian:

LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianevansux/

Twitter. https://twitter.com/briana11y

Website. https://bevans.design/

Podcast Music:

My podcast music was created by Davy Wreck. David is a student of mine at Springboard.com, but he also happens to be an amazing musician, artist, and dancer. I can't thank him enough for making this track for me. You can follow Davy on Spotify or you can listen to some of his Designer related playlists on Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/sevenpercent/sets

Hello and welcome to the UserFlows podcast. I'll be your host Thomas Morrell, I am a father, husband, and designer. Thanks for joining me on this journey. I'm creating this podcast to be a place for us to discuss User Experience Design, getting started as a UX/Product Designer, and how someone would make the transition from their current field to the field of UX design. So I want UserFlows to be a place for those interested in UX design to learn more about the field and hopefully help someone find their first job in UX or help someone already working in the field to hone their skills a little bit more.

The reason I want to talk about this topic, in particular, is because this is exactly what I did. I transitioned from a career in Graphic Design/Visual Design which is fairly closely related. I've seen a number of other designers fail to make the switch or show interest in making the switch, but never quite get there. They may not have been sure where to start, intimidated, or any other list of reasons. So hopefully this podcast will give you some guidance on where to start, what's truly important to know and to learn, and what's going to advance your career the quickest.

Links from the show:

Adobe: Hiring Trends in UX Design: The 6 Things You Need to Know About Tech’s Fastest Growing Field

Cella: 2021 Creative, Marketing And Digital Salary Guide

Coursera HCI Course: Interaction Design Specialization

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