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Learning too much at once

When I first started learning about UX again, the amount of topics I wanted to learn overwhelmed me. Fortunately, the booming education technology industry has led to plenty of courses available online and for free. However, that same plethora made my head want to explode. Where would I start? How many could I have going on simultaneously? Should I dedicate time to reading up supplementary materials?

It was basically the breadth versus depth conundrum. Do I learn a lot but little about each, or build one first and slowly add in others? For beginners, both make sense. The former allows us to see the large picture while the latter lets us really get our hands dirty and actually create something of value.

Through my recent brief Coursera course on typography from CalArts, I relearned an old lesson. We should learn deeply about what we need to produce, and add in other skills as needed. In that way, I am truly exercising each skill I’m folding in.

For example, it would be an unwise use of time to focus weeks on typography while neglecting user research. However, now that it’s time to produce customer journey maps, while I put it on the backburner for processing, I can spend some time on typography to help me layout the information on the map easier through visual hierarchy and placement.

It’s a mix of depth and breadth. I will go deep first into one subject first, the one that will help me deliver soon. Then, as soon as I get enough to make a minimum viable product, I can spend a little time looking into other subjects that can enhance this product, before deciding on digging deeper into the first subject or shifting to another.

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Refocusing, from negative to positive

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?“