Be the Conduit
How to Explain Tech to the Non-Technical and Conversely How to Convey Your Needs to the Ultra-Technical
For the same reason, you’d never bring the code behind a mockup to your stakeholder meetings is the same reason you would never bring your journey maps to your dev team. It’s a question of knowing your audience, knowing their job, and finding a way to relate on their terms.
In the UX game, a UXer who can code is called a unicorn. Why? Because he/she/they are a one-stop-shop? Nope! The chasm that lies between those two skills means that in 99.999…% of the time, they do one well and understand the core fundamentals of the other. And that’s great! One-stop shops are ruining the main street of America anyway! Everyone has their skills, and those skills are padded out a dash of experience in what their colleagues do. Machines can’t work with only one cog!
Communication has always come easily to me, but that’s not the case for everyone. For some of us, the worst part of the day is when we have to interact with others. That’s why they chose lone wolf careers, but there is no such thing as a genuinely solo gig, maybe the guardian of a long-forgotten idol? (Forget it unless you know someone — impossible industry to break into) As user experience designers, we need the gift of chat, but more than that, we need the versatile gift of chat.
(It should be noted that when I constructed that pithy little paragraph above, I googled solo Jobs for People Who Dislike…People and software developer is number two! I call BS!- design teams and dev teams work WITH each other all the time 🙄)
So what’s the easy answer!? Learn code if you’re a designer? Learn UX if you’re a developer? Sure, it never hurts to know more. But when I had my first little eComm job and had to go to the scarry IT floor to chat with the developer about UX changes I wanted to make. Something would always go wrong. The developer had built that site from scratch years ago and has been maintaining it ever since. It was his baby. I came in red-hot about how various terrible features were. NOTE TO YOUNG CAREER FOLKS: Be very, VERY careful about being critical. Make sure you know everything about what you are talking about before you start attacking.
After that initial meeting, he didn’t answer my emails for about two months. During all that time of being frozen out and getting madder and madder, I realized that all the research I had amassed could be used to show him what I was talking about. Literally, show him:
“This is an example of the button I was thinking about.”
It wasn’t perfect from there on out either. A few times, I made the mistake of saying things like, “ya know how eBay does it?” He agrees, and I’m busted again because we were talking about eBays from different countries. Assumptions about my colleague’s visual references have been a harrowing saga that has plagued my career since day 1.
Quick moral: Talking tech with the ultra-tech; bring examples! Do you want to implement AR? Bring the 1stDibs App and the Houzz App (very different qualities of AR) — and have both fired up and ready to show precisely what you’re talking about, and then, this is key… listen. He/she/they probably know a thing or two about AR that you should know too.
Now let’s flip the script. Same job, and the same lowly auction coordinator who still wants to improve the UX, mainly because he is also doing customer service and people are really mean. His boss sets up a meeting with her boss for potential improvements. He looks at his deck and sees a lot of jargon. Everyone is busy, and this meeting is a favor from boss sr. to boss, and then the CEO shows up because the lowly auction coordinator’s name is Matthew, just like the company’s president… Not a great shock, pretty common name. “Matthew is giving an eComm proposal in conference room B” on the company calendar. Suddenly, my ideas for adding more payment options, filtering, and a handful of icons has turned into my personal iPhone launch. Just a little context.
I’m pretty good in those types of situations, but it was not NOT terrifying. Also, Boss Sr. had a saying that she was famous for. I’m a numbers woman. Meaning even though the deck discussed retention rates and abandoned carts, as long as it was peppered with quantitative data, she would glance up every few moments. Because I spoke directly to using resources to improve the UX, which would ultimately boost sales, she approved nearly 30% of my requests! It was a win. Everything is relative.
I’m in my mid 30’s now and in a career pivot, but certain things endure all industries.
1.) Everyone needs to know they have been heard.
2.) There is no such thing as too early, but there is such a thing as too late. (Ha! I literally made that up right now and was talking about being a morning person, but it’s so much bigger!)
3.) Read the room.
Know who you are talking to and come prepared with something your audience will understand. Visuals, examples, numbers, metaphors, relevant visual assets if need be, you are conveying your, or more likely your team’s idea, and being understood is the goal. You know what the interface looks like in your head — but your job is sharing your thoughts.
