Setting yourself up to interview

Setting yourself up to interview — uxdesign.cc was originally published in I Love UX/UI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Death by Hamburger

Death by Hamburger — uxdesign.cc was originally published in I Love UX/UI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UI Interactions of the week #74

UI Interactions of the week #74 — Muzli -Design Inspiration was originally published in I Love UX/UI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX Study: The Search for Wine

UX Study: The Search for Wine — Muzli -Design Inspiration was originally published in I Love UX/UI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Free Gradients Collection by itmeo.com

Free Gradients Collection by itmeo.com was originally published in I Love UX/UI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s better to be lucky…

Luck is a strange thing. We often forget what a large role luck plays in our lives. It’s easy to attribute all of our success to skill, hard work, and persistence. Luck, however is an essential ingredient for anyone successful.

Hard work makes you luckier

I’m not advocating laziness. Sitting around and waiting for luck to fall into your lap is a bad idea, it won’t happen. Hard work is essential to being successful or good at anything thing in life. But hard work alone will not guarantee success, rather it will give you a much better chance. At the end of the day you still need some luck. Someone to say yes when you ask for a job. Someone needs to take a chance on you when no one else has.

Life is like one big raffle, the more tickets you acquire the more likely you will win. Hard work helps you buy those tickets. If you work hard enough and earn enough tickets, your chances of winning get much better.

Don’t believe in luck?

You maybe the type of person who doesn’t believe in luck. If you have convinced yourself that luck doesn’t exist and everything happens because you worked for it, I would encourage you to ask yourself just a few questions:

1. What if you were born to different parents?
2. What if you weren’t as talented (or good looking)?
3. What if you were born in poverty or a war torn country?
4. What if you had a genetic disorder or disability?
5. What if you didn’t have a family to support you?
6. What if your parents were drug addicts?
7. What if you had no education (and couldn’t read)?

Any of those scenarios are possible and are actually quite common. Would that change anything in your world? Would you still be exactly where you are? Perhaps. It’s still possible to be successful under most of those scenarios but it would be much much harder. The point is to remember that there are many harding working souls who don’t have the same opportunity. Many people have been dealt a very tough hand.

I’m not trying to discount your success and dismiss it as luck, it’s not. Hard work is a major part of success but it’s important to remember there is luck involved too.

Be Humble. Be Grateful.

So what’s the point? Does it matter if you had a little luck? Yes, it does matter. Be grateful and humble for the fortune that has been bestowed upon you. No matter how hard you work, remember that there are others that work just as hard, some work even harder. If you’ve been dealt a good hand in life, be humble, be grateful. Most are not as fortunate.

How teaching taught me User Experience

My first job in tech was working for an educational startup. I was hired as a “Training Associate” and my job was to teach School Administrators and Instructors how to use our software. I would spend countless hours on the phone each week walking customers through our platform and answering questions. A few times a month I would fly out to different locations across the U.S. and conduct onsite training sessions with anywhere from 50-100 instructors.

Those were tough days, I made next to nothing and worked my butt off, but I gained a deep understanding of our users that I could never have achieved otherwise. I knew every button, screen, and flow in our system but most of all I knew my user. I could predict when people were going to run into problems and why, I could feel their frustration at software that was much too difficult to use. I knew the instructors I was teaching were extremely smart and most of them had a level of education that was vastly superior to mine.Quite simply, our software was failing them.

Eventually I got a chance to redesign our software and help those instructors I’d been working with for so long, it was very rewarding.

Years later I look back on that experience and think how important it was for me to truly understand how people use software. Since then, I’ve made it a part of my design and development process to sit down with users and regularly watch them use the software I build. Sometimes they love it, sometimes they don’t, but every time I learn something new.

Learning From Users was originally published in I Love UX/UI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.