On airplanes, people are always advised to help themselves before helping others. However, for people feeling down, one adage proclaims that by helping others first, we help ourselves.
Today, I experienced that, or a smidgen at least, as I haven’t helped others… yet.
Over the last two weeks, I have thrown myself into learning all I can about user experience and related domains. I spent hours finding material and then going through it all, taking notes, comparing notes, and synthesizing the information I discovered. As a result, I would like to say my research, for a beginner, isn’t that shabby. Nonetheless, when it came to producing tangible deliverables– such as personas, scenarios, and customer journey maps– I began to falter.
Visible progress
Suddenly, my mini-projects were condensed into small objects that could be judged. I began to be scared. I would spend hours again rereading and finding new articles to answer all the questions I had when going from theory into practice. What made so much sense earlier now left me with so many questions when having to reproduce it. So when it came to customer journey maps, a newer UX method to express pain points to everyone involved that I had never heard of, I froze. I was scared of failing miserably. I procrastinated… by reading everything and by doing nothing.
So as I mustered up courage today, I decided to distract myself temporarily by going one step ahead into prototyping and wireframing. As a visual designer, I loved this aspect and it’s what originally drew me into user experience and the web. There, in one of the UI courses, I was shown all these means of physical, simple, and quick to create prototypes to test, to simulate, and to build interaction. The key really wasn’t to make something sleek and robust, but merely a testing of ideas. Not any ideas, but ideas to help others.
Refocusing
As I got excited about that, about playing around with diverse solutions to best solve current frustrations and pains, the act of making customer journey maps no longer frightened me so. I know that the ultimate goal is to create stellar user experience, and learning how to make a customer journey map, no matter how mediocre at the outset, is necessary.
As I forgot about me and my possible failure, and realigned myself to think of all the benefits a user could have, I remembered what was important.
As one interviewee on the UX Intern talks about when beginning a project, we should ask ourselves:
“How will we tell that we’ve made things better for the people we are designing this for?“