by Leah Buley
A less formal way to leverage your organization is to create a voluntary peer-to-peer learning community where you and other people who are interested in user experience commit to learning more with each other’s help. (See the “Peer-to-Peer Learning Community” method in Chapter 9, “Evangelism Methods,” for more details.)
Finally, your organization may be able to provide support for your growth in the form of resources—resources such as time to learn, money to take a class or group conference, or, the biggest coup, people to help you. If you can get help in the form of other people, you’ve taken the first step toward transitioning from a team of one to a full-fledged team. When your workload becomes heavy enough that it’s more than one person can handle, resist the urge (if you feel it) to try to take on more work and prove how industrious you are. Ask for help. Can they open up headcount for a fellow user experience practitioner, or even a temporary allocation for a freelancer or contractor to help until things ease up? Any feint in this direction (even an unsuccessful one) starts to position UX as a legitimate hiring concern and not just your personal pet project.
Making a Case for Career Growth
I know a team of one who actually has to sustain her own position and budget by writing grant proposals to fund her work. A budget sounds like an incredible luxury to most teams of one. But for this team of one, the internal grants process is smart (if painstaking) because it makes it very clear that UX initiatives take time and money, just like any other organizational initiatives. In writing the grant, she must make the case for why to do the work, what the work will entail, and what outcomes can be expected. And she can put a dollar amount next to that. In business-speak, this is called being numerate (literally, the ability to understand and work with numbers), and it’s usually what is required before anyone will entrust you with the budget to build a team. To be numerate, you need to understand how your work contributes to the company’s profit, and how you’re going to sustain that over time.
• Align with business goals. What sometimes happens when you start digging into this question of business goals is you learn that your organization doesn’t really have any. Or, it has a lot of them, and they’re all set at the individual business unit level, and in fact, some compete with others, and good luck dealing with all that. If your work doesn’t align with business goals, or you can’t explain how what you’re cooking up will support what the business is trying to accomplish, there’s a good chance that others won’t be able to see its value. Sending out a “UX Questionnaire” (see Chapter 5, “Planning and Discovery Methods”) can help you assess how your organization sees UX goals aligning with business goals (or doesn’t, as the case may be).
• Measure your progress. If you can get everyone to agree to a minimum but standard UX measurement process and then diligently and regularly measure it, your colleagues and managers will have a better understanding of the impact of user experience. For a simple way to start measuring your progress in user experience, try a “UX Health Check” (see Chapter 8, “Testing and Validation Methods”).
• Strategic planning. When it comes to product development, businesses often plan and budget around projects. They deliberately attempt to manage risk and minimize complexity by scoping things as narrowly as possible. They put a lot of effort into defining what’s in and what’s out. With your broad, how-people-really-work purview, you may be seen as the harbinger of scope creep. Here is where having some long-term strategic priorities can help. Combine a “Strategy Workshop” with a “UX Project Plan” (see Chapter 5) to create a big picture vision, and then plot out what needs to happen now, next, and later.
Moving Out and On
Hey, it happens. You may at some point decide that you’ve exhausted the learning opportunities and resources that your current situation can provide. If that happens, the most important thing a UX team of one can do is to take his or her career into their own hands and decide the next step. At this point, there are a few important questions to ask yourself.
• Team of one, or team of many? Do you prefer to continue being a solo UX practitioner, or do you want to work with other user experience folks and learn from them? There are pros and cons to both situations, so there’s no one right answer, just the right answer for you right now. Some people even like to go back and forth between big teams and teams of one to keep their skills sharp.
• Innie or outie? Do you want to work inside an organization, or do you prefer to consult with a variety of organizations? Being on the inside can give you lots of practice in owning and evolving your own product, not to mention the interesting interpersonal and political muscles you flex in an organization. Being an outie can give you an opportunity to work on a variety of new and challenging problems, though sometimes you don’t get to see them all the way to market.
• Employed or independent? Do you prefer to work for a company, where the work is steady (if not always of your choosing), or do you prefer to be your own boss, making your own hours and running your own show (but also responsible for drumming up your own business)? Note that certain parts of the world may be easier to freelance in. Urban centers with a sizable UX community tend to provide more opportunities to work with UX-friendly companies and to subcontract for firms that specialize in user experience services.
• What topic or touch point? Are you passionate about mobile? Social? Search? Consider whether there are certain areas of user experience that you are particularly inspired by and where you would like to focus your work. Or you may like working on a variety of touch points and problems, and that’s okay, too.
• Specialist or generalist? Finally, what do you want the balance of your work to be? When you are a UX team of one, usually you don’t have a choice. You’re doing your own research, creating your own designs, running your own validation testing, and even managing your own project. That makes you a generalist. However, you may find that there are parts of the work you enjoy most or that you do best, and in that case, it’s fair to ask yourself if you’d be more fulfilled (and have more impact) by going deep into one specialty rather than staying broad.
All of these questions are basically filters to help you clarify and focus on the right next step for you personally. While many of us are thrilled just to have the opportunity to start doing UX work at first, make no mistake: our skills are needed and in growing demand in an increasingly digital world. For yourself and for the people who will use the products you create in the future, be deliberate and choosy as you grow your career and plan your next steps.
NOTE USING TWITTER TO FIND WORK
Joe is a UX team of one who got laid off on a Friday, tweeted on a Monday that he was looking for work, and has been in business for himself ever since. Somewhere along the way, he paid a small fee to become incorporated. Here’s what it takes: 1) some past experience, 2) a good network, and 3) a Twitter account. The rest takes care of itself.
Considering Going Independent?
The UX field has a lot of independent practitioners. One reason is that many organizations can’t yet justify hiring a full-time UX person, so an expert on call is just right for them. Another reason may be that UX independents can command a relatively high wage, particularly if they’ve been doing this for a while and have a strong portfolio to show for it. Being new, the field suffers from a supply and demand problem. There’s often more demand than there are people, particularly in some of the more established markets for UX. And another reason is that we’re a highly networked community, with strong professional affiliations, regular meet-ups, and a chirping Twitter back channel. That makes it surprisingly easy for independents to market themselves and broadcast their availability—in short, to get work and keep it going (see Figure 4.15). So, in the UX industry, going independent is a very viable option. If you do, you just want to be aware that there are some things you may find yourself dealing with.
FIGURE 4.15
Twitter is an effective tool for independent practitioners to notify their community that they�
�re available and looking for work.
Getting Paid
Your rate will be affected by several factors: your experience level, norms in your local market, and how aggressive you are about it. The following techniques can help you make sure that you’re earning enough to keep yourself in business.
• Calculate your rate. UX professionals who go independent and stay independent have figured out a rate and a schedule that puts enough in the bank, even if they encounter a slow period. Be thoughtful when you set your rate (see Figure 4.16). Spend some time thinking about how much you actually plan to work, and how much of that time you can reasonably expect to be billable hours. And be sure to check the salary surveys regularly published by the professional associations like the UXPA to get a sense of standards in your area.
FIGURE 4.16
This is a general formula you can use to create a ballpark estimate of your hourly rate. some people pad their rate an extra 10 or 20 percent to leave room for negotiation.
• Negotiate. If you don’t have to negotiate, you’re probably pricing yourself too low. See the previous guidelines for pricing yourself, and then, no matter what they offer, promise yourself you’ll haggle a little.
• Establish a fee schedule that protects you. It’s common to ask for some money up front and then the rest upon completion (or to coincide with the delivery of major deliverables). Some may argue that this kind of formality isn’t really necessary if you have good relationships with your clients. You’ll ultimately have to decide for yourself what is right for your business. As principles go, though, it’s not a bad idea to commit to protecting yourself over serving your client relationships. This ensures that you can stay in business to serve those relationships longer. If your client isn’t paying you, the strongest leverage you have is to withhold or stop work. Asking for some payment up front or along the way means there’s in-progress work left for you to stop. Otherwise, you can find yourself in the powerless and uncomfortable position of begging for payment for services already rendered.
Position Your Engagements for Success
Let’s face it. Some organizations have serious problems. Some take forever to make decisions. Some are so politically fraught that nothing ever gets done. Some are just not nice environments to be in. Any of those things can certainly impact how successful and enjoyable the engagement will be for you. Here are a few tips to make sure you really know what you’re getting yourself in to.
• Do a project brief. Ask good questions about the project and the organization up front. Take a moment to ask yourself and your contacts hard questions about timelines, team, goals, your role, total team skills, ultimate decision makers, how success will be measured, and biggest risks to success. Then ask yourself if you still want to do it. When your gut tells you “no,” respect it. Taking the time to complete a “Project Brief” (see Chapter 5) can help with this.
• Be choosy about what you call yourself. If you can position yourself as a consultant rather than a freelancer, your time and work may be perceived as more valuable. It’s a semantic sleight of hand to call yourself a consultant instead of a freelancer, but I believe it makes a difference. As a freelancer, you run the risk of being perceived as staff augmentation. And because the company has no long-term commitment to you, it’s okay to give you the dirty jobs. As a consultant, however, you’re enhancing what they can do by bringing a particular expertise into their office—one that they perhaps could not afford to hire full-time. Try to think of yourself and talk about yourself as a consultant. The key difference is that consultants bring a unique expertise. You might ask yourself, what is yours?
Manage Your Time
In design work, there are usually two things that contribute to how long something takes: 1) how much time it takes you to make the thing, and 2) how much time it takes to communicate about, revise, and get buy-in on the thing. Ideally, you want to be able to bill for both. One of the biggest threats to scope creep (and your profitability) is when you have accurate estimates and agreements for the first part, but not for the second. To manage the first part well, know thyself and know thy process. To manage the second, know thy client.
• Estimate conservatively. There’s a popular misperception that going independent makes life less busy. You’re doing 60 hours a week in your current job, working for the man? Scale back! Become your own boss! In an ideal situation, independents can make as much as a full-time employee in 75% or 50% of the time. But that requires formidable time management skills, a keen sense of focus, and a very healthy client list. It’s very common, at least initially, to find yourself working a lot. The key is to make brutally realistic estimates about how long something will take and track your time well. That will allow you to recalibrate your estimates, learning as you go. To develop realistic estimates, don’t just guesstimate how many hours it’ll take. A far better predictor is how complex the problem is. A complexity index (as described under the “UX Project Plan” in Chapter 5) can help you gauge where in the work there’s the greatest chance for a slowdown in the schedule. Then you can plan extra buffer time accordingly.
• Create timeboxes. Your own perfectionism can be another risk to timely completion. It’s dangerously easy to lose yourself in your work and suddenly realize that something has taken far longer than it should have. That creates problems whether you work for a company or for yourself, but it exacts a particularly personal toll when you’re working for yourself. Ultimately, it comes out of time that you would otherwise have for yourself and the people you love. It’s also sometimes questionable whether you’ll get paid for that time. Time-boxing can help. In other words, give yourself small chunks of time to complete discrete, well-defined portions of your work. Personally, I am a terrible procrastinator and will take every opportunity to put off finishing my work, so for me, it helps to have immovable boundaries boxing my time. (Such as a train that I absolutely can’t miss, lest I am stranded. Sometimes, setting an alarm can also help.)
• Manage feedback loops. Managing that second category of time—the time it takes for others to digest, give input, and approve—can be its own full-time job. At a minimum, you should assume that there will be some communication time at major decision points. Often, it’s not just communication time but full-fledged freak-out time. That’s OK—natural, even. However, because it’s charged with the extra energy of humans discussing and in some cases disagreeing, you don’t want to exacerbate it by pinching or curtailing the discussion to protect the schedule. Instead, plan ahead for it to ensure that there’s time for necessary conversations (and that you get paid for them). Plan for triage periods, as described in the “UX Project Plan” method in Chapter 5, and include reasonable estimates for discussions, weekly check-ins, presentations, and client review time in your project plans.
If You Only Do One Thing...
This chapter hopefully reinforces that UX teams of one are not alone. Far from it, you are part of a dynamic and growing community. How you choose to engage that community is a matter of personal preference, but whether to engage should not be. Keeping yourself connected to other user experience professionals outside your organization is especially important. It will help you experience continual growth and greater professional satisfaction.
So if you only have time to do one thing from this chapter, focus on finding your community and getting plugged into it in whatever format makes sense, whether that be a digital discussion list, or live and in person.
PART II
Practice
Up to this point, I’ve been focusing on the UX team of one philosophy—why you do it, how you build support, how you can identify and handle common challenges, and how to keep growing. Now, let’s turn our attention to the nuts and bolts of user experience work. These are the practices and methods that make this philosophy a reality.
While passion and vision are what bring many people to user experience in the first place, it’s the successful practice of the craft that keeps them here. And yet
, user experience teams of one often have the precarious balancing act of learning their craft, involving others, and improving it, all at the same time. Part II, “Practice,” gives you tangible tools for managing this balancing act.
You can think of Chapters 5 through 9 like a cookbook filled with recipes for the UX team of one. But here the recipes are UX methods. These methods have been chosen or in some cases adapted specifically for teams of one. For ease of scanning and to serve as a quick reference tool, each method follows a standard format. This format includes:
• An overview of the method
• How much time it will take
• When you might want to use the method
• A detailed explanation of the process to follow if you want to try this method for yourself
• Tips and tricks to keep in mind when using this method
• Sample visuals or deliverables
The methods you’ll find here also share the following characteristics that are critical for teams of one:
• Inclusive and participatory: Many of these methods are designed to create opportunities for participation and discussion with a cross-functional team. Why the big focus on conversations? Because you will get more done and go farther if you get people’s help.
• Focused on prioritization: Rather than explore and document everything that’s possible, these methods help you understand where 20 percent of the work will bring 80 percent of the benefit.
• Lowest fidelity possible: These practices discourage time wasted on perfectionist polishing of deliverables.
• Self-documenting: As you’re working, you’re also creating the pieces that you need for the deliverable. For the most part, nothing is created that can’t be shared and used.