Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you're looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast for you. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. If you've ever heard of the term UX or UI design, today we are going to talk about that and how it can merge with soft skills.
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because my guest, Trevor Alexander, who is a UI UX designer and the author of an Agri Design Career is here to talk to us about that today. So before I go any further, let me help welcome Trevor. Hi. Hi there. So wonderful to be here. Thanks for being here. First of all, what about technology makes people so afraid? It can feel so complicated. And that's honestly the funniest thing as being a UI UX designer, because in some ways it's kind of our fault.
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designers because we haven't done that great a job of really thinking about the users and just figuring out how to make it as easy as possible for everybody. So in some ways when I hear that it's almost sad and kind of a call to arms for us to do better. No pressure by the way. Yeah. All right, tell us a little bit about yourself. Of course. Yeah, so I've been a UI UX designer for 16 years in the tech industry. I've had...
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Very fortuitous career. I've had the real luck of working with some wonderful people. I've been part of three successfully sold startups and was prompted to write my book because one of the most wonderful things about my career is I've never applied for a job or really even had a UI portfolio. Because what I found is very much why I was so excited to speak with you today with soft skills and communications is when reflecting back upon things, it was everything else outside of the design allowed me to do so. And I think that other people can do.
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So the thinking of others, promoting others work, humility, thinking about people besides the users, thinking about the business and the engineers and the coders and how you can assist with them. Arriving at this point in my career, being very humbled and grateful for everything and just trying to think about how I might impart some of those ideas of communication and soft skills very much what you talk about here. It's very interesting. You say that in addition to the fact that you've never been on a job interview. So how is it that
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you know how crucial self skills are. What's very good about startups, and especially when I was young and going through them, I had some really great mentors. So with a startup and especially back in the early 2000s when I was starting up, it was a very different type of world. It was 80 hours a week. It was incredibly difficult work. I approached the career very humbly. I felt I didn't really know very much. I wanted to learn as much as possible.
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And I had some really amazing guiding hands as far as mentors that really kind of broke down what I was doing, its portion of the business and the kind of value I could produce. One funny story is one of my best first mentors. I remember I was almost embarrassed to say so I was trying to lecture him about how important design was. And I don't know if you ever tried to lecture someone much more senior than you doesn't go very well. It was like, Oh, I'm a designer and I know users and like, I think you should really listen to me.
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Turns around, he says, if it's ugly and it makes a million dollars a month, I don't care what it looks like. Is that why your book is titled Ugly? Partly for sure. Because it was about all the ugly parts of it. His tutelage and mentorship, along with many other hands, during my career, just kind of kept reinforcing it that what you do is great. Like UI is important, UX is important, aesthetics, like people like beautiful things. But ultimately, it's a business. It's a team of people coming together to do something.
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So the prettiness, like your portfolio, the UI is not the most important thing. You're in a team, you need to work with everybody. You need to think about so many different facets and not get so concerned about portfolio UI. I think it just shaped me into the person I am that allowed me to have this wonderful career. Just for the benefit of our listeners, explain a little bit about the portfolio part. So very often, like, so most UI designers will have a portfolio and it's just a showcase of work.
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So you'll go to their website or maybe they have some other version of it somewhere. And it's just a catalog of the things they've done. And it's basically just showing this is what I'm capable of. Here's the output that I can produce. Here's a beautiful application. Here's a beautiful website. Here's a brochure design I did. I just show somebody like, this is my aesthetic. This is what I'm capable of. I think the real part where I think a lot of designers get tripped up is they think that's it.
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Like that's the most important part of my portfolio is great. If my case studies are great, where I explain what, why I was thinking about, I'll just get jobs and it'll be great. But I've ultimately found it, unless you're in like the top 1% of all designers, your portfolio is really just table stakes. It's basically just saying, okay, this guy can design. Now let's talk to them and see if we can actually work with this person. Where this- Like their picture resume. That's a great way to put it, is like the visual picture resume, exactly.
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one of my guests, she was in HR for over 20 years. She says what she found was a lot of people, the resume looks great. And that's why they got to the stage of the interview where they now speak to the panel. Okay, I've seen your resume, now talk to me. And that's where things start to get tricky. Do you find that sometimes a UX designer can have the most amazing looking portfolio, but then we wanna find out whether we can work with you. Absolutely.
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It can really go off the rails. And one of the ultimate truths of the industry would be an A plus designer who is a jerk and you don't want to work with them. We'll lose the job to the B plus designer. Who's just a real great person that I want to have on my team with that type of authorship. Like if they're going to be that particular, that difficult, that driving on or that singular in their vision and not work with the rest of us. That's actually a problem.
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Their designs may be some of the best in the world, but if they can't come into this group with the rest of us, work together and achieve something that's actually not an asset, that's a liability. Not only do I have to work hard to code something and build it, I have to coddle a designer who thinks that their stuff is the absolute greatest. So it's interesting to see the better portfolio attached to the worst person will lose every time because ultimately your pretty designs aren't the thing we're building, like we're building something together.
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people want to work with people they like. Absolutely. Or at least can empathize with or have some compromise that aren't going to make their life more difficult. They're going to add value to their day to day. Yeah. I think you're exactly right on that. I don't know if I'm being fair about my next question because it's probably something I should ask the therapist, but when did we become this society of whether we feel like we need to exercise our power or our ego comes into play? We don't dig deep into that.
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human part of us. We're dealing with other humans at the end of the day. Simon Sinek had an interesting presentation on this. Who'd the author of Leaders Eat Last? Which is a fantastic book, by the way. I love Simon Sinek, yeah. Now he's talking about millennials specifically, but it broadly appeals to everybody. But just where they would come in with this undue confidence about like, well, this is what you got to do, and then this has to happen. But they wouldn't really have anything to back it up. But they just felt like they had to have that bravado, right? Because you look at social media and there's no great rewards for being...
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quietly curious, empathetic and probing, as opposed to strong and opinionated and bold. Those are the ones that go viral, that's right. So when it comes time for my portfolio and my persona that I'm gonna put out online, I think a lot of it would trend towards it while I have to be big, bold, brash and noticed. And I think a lot of those accounts would probably get a better social media response. They probably wouldn't be pulled along with a core group of people who love working with them.
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when you apply for a job, they check your social media. Absolutely. I'll say things like, if you don't do XYZ for UI, I don't even want to talk to you. And it's like, well, sometimes for certain situations, you have to compromise and do that. So that statement is very problematic. Like it's hard to be so absolute sometimes. You have the UX designer, the company, and the commission, and those must merge. The UX designer must now design for me, who's going to be the user.
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How does the designer satisfy both? Cause it looks like they're caught in the middle. Oh yeah. The best way to grow in this industry is navigating those difficult waters because your natural impetus as a designer will be to think of the user at all costs. So the person who's going to use the application, I do anything and everything for them. And that's good. That comes from a good place. That's a great place to start from.
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But ultimately, and one of the examples I like to give when I talk about it is there's two versions of a design and the one version is your perfect vision for the end user or a guy or girl who has to use the website. This is the best possible version. Super easy, beautiful. It's everything you want. It's going to take eight months to build. Super difficult. It's going to take forever. There is a good version. It'll work very well. It looks pretty good.
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Not nowhere near as good as the full version, but it's going to take four weeks to build. As soon as I say it, like out loud, it feels obvious, but every single time you should go for that four week one. Yeah. Right. Ultimately that even serves the user better. What that really represents is you're navigating all of those layers for the end user who's going to get a worse experience, but they'll get it sooner. And now they can provide feedback about how they actually use it as opposed to waiting eight months to get your perfect vision.
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Because then until you get something in people's hands, you don't really know if it's that good or not. Right. Isn't that the similar principle they apply on this online coaching, online course creation? They say, don't create this perfect course that you think people need when you should ask them first, what do they wanna learn? Yeah, I hear that a lot, like build in public, let people know what you're building, like grow with the audience that you would eventually sell that to.
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Cause it'll help inform where you're supposed to go. The user gets something faster. They can tell you exactly like you said, what they actually want. Cause it's in their hands. Your coworkers are better served because it's something they can actually build relatively simply so they can achieve something. They don't have to kill themselves for eight months to build your vision. And then the business gets something out so they can now invoice or they can delight their customers.
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everything across the board benefits. And all it took was your willingness to compromise and think about the whole picture as opposed to just the user. So the designers who can navigate those very tricky waters for sure do the best in the industry. It's definitely what I've seen, especially with startup culture. There's always the release fast and break things, iterate, kind of keep moving. I think a lot of it stemmed from Steve Jobs and the success of Apple.
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I think somebody would read about Steve Jobs and Johnny Ives and their incredible, huge, unwavering focus on the absolute quality of those products. Steve Jobs became very much the design icon for how badly he wanted every single design piece to be just perfect and amazingly refined, like a gorgeous piece that everybody could hold up and look at. And I think everyone really empathized with that and almost molded themselves after it. We'll all just be Steve Jobs.
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who's also very well renowned to be very difficult to work with, like very temperamental, very mean to people. Think about that. But then designers go look at the first iPod. The first iPod was awful. For all of his flaws and whatever you might think about his absolute steadfastness in design and desire for quality, the man shipped, the man released products, right? He ultimately, he came up with compromises and really release things that actually went out the door.
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That's important to remember and it's just important to not conflate yourself with him changing the world with technology versus you releasing an application to order food online. I think that kind of notion kind of took hold in the design industry and it kind of melded into it. The design is the most important thing as opposed to the shipping and working together with a team to release great things is the most important thing. We don't work in the industrial revolution. We live in a different period where we've come to realize that the human...
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aspect is very important. Coming from places where you're more likely to be in the spotlight if you're big, bold and brash, big, strong individual, big characters that came through like Steve Jobs. And I think it was older thinking as opposed to the kindness and the empathy and the teamwork and the camaraderie. I'd like to think that will spin back around and start to get to a better place. I'm a leader and if I encourage my team, they do well. I take the time to put them as a great job, Trevor. You're doing great.
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it makes them want to even do better. Yeah, absolutely. And sharing the praise around anytime praise comes in, even if you had the most impact on something, the thought that you can spread it to everyone. There might've been some older type of bad business practice, not even bad business practices, but I mean, you were rewarded with promotions to take as much credit as possible. You were rewarded with promotions by pushing others down to, or stepping on others to like lift yourself up.
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And while I imagine that still exists now, I think I would like to think in a more connected, empathetic world, that's the type of stuff that slowly starts to bleed out as... Oh yeah. Yeah, one could only hope. There was a lot of terrible business stuff that would happen, like glass ceilings for women that they had to fight against. As the old guards kind of slowly start to pass off and people who come up who have seen this type of thing have recognized it to be awful. Ideally, again, I just have a lot of hope for the future that just keeps getting better and better where it's empathetic workplaces.
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hardworking, but for good value workplaces, fairness across the board for everybody who wants an opportunity when they work hard. Down to the smaller stuff like this, it's just where praise comes in, it gets spread around to everybody that deserves it, and a rising tide raises all ships. All right, so let's talk about the actual process. You mentioned your boss earlier who said, I don't care how ugly this is, it could bring millions. We're good to go. So take us through what is the first thing that happens when the UX designers get the assignment, how they see it.
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playing out for us, the end user? Yeah, so lots of different phases and different processes, depending on the scale of the project, exactly what you're building. But a general sense would be, we see requirements and goals. Like what are you trying to achieve? We need to build a new application because people wanna buy food online. We're trying to build a new website to sell clothing over here. And you're just trying to get through what is the purpose of this? Like what goals are we trying to achieve? And the better ones, of course, are also asking,
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What does the business want to achieve? Like what's the business metrics? We want to increase click-through rates by XYZ. We want so many other people to sign up to our newsletter. We want to do so much extra sales. You look at capability, like, okay, what can we actually build? Do we use for coding? You'll have kind of some code systems. You'd mentioned before we were chatting like Python, but there's like groups of coding. So that would be like, there's Python, there's a react, there's view. And with them comes certain limitations and certain libraries you can leverage.
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So, okay, what space am I working within? So I don't kind of go outside the bounds so I can best help my team. And how many code or resources do I have? And then you're also trying to find out who the end user is. So who's going to be using this thing? You know, if it's under 18 segments, so younger people, they're a bit more tech savvy, so we can design things in a way that would speak naturally to them. You know, they grew up on TikTok and Instagram, so there's certain interactions they're used to, as opposed to maybe this is a medication app for older people.
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refilling their prescriptions. We don't want to be very careful about how we design that. We would design it much differently for them than we would for a youth. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. As opposed to like my parents, your parents, like how would they possibly use a smartphone to get something permission? Right. So you kind of lay out all of those parts in and then where it goes kind of depends on the team's process. Often you'll do something called user mapping and that's just, you want to walk through the experience for the user where they've come in and it's like, okay.
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This user wants to achieve this. They'll click on this screen and then they have to kind of go to this. And by the end, I want to achieve X, Y, Z. So at this point now we have a good sense of what it is we're buying, who we are, the tech kind of situation, who's going to be building with us and who we're building it for, we have some of the kind of user journeys as far as understanding flows that they're most likely going to want to do and what are the key ones. Right. So I want to fulfill my prescriptions. I'll probably do it once a week or I'm a youth. I want to post.
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videos online of doing some really cool stuff. Then at this point you might do what's called wire frames. So this is kind of ugly drawings with just gray squares to try and get an idea of like, what could the various screens look like? What are like the big blocks? So we think that given the target market, the menu at the bottom of our screen would look better and let's have four of them. There'll be a big header here, big photos, like here's where our video would show. And then from there, you might actually start doing some testing with that. So you'll.
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have it so that becomes interactive and you'll show it to people and see if they use it. There's an amazing series of books. It's a don't make me think by Steven Krug. If you ever have to build anything, even if you're not a UI designer, if you have to put together any series of things, that's even slightly interactive, it's an amazing book to read and very straightforward. You do not need to be a designer to read this book. It very much talks about this process and even better, just watching a person use it, which is so daunting.
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Because usually they just explode your expectations, looking at the thing that you designed and you thought about carefully, and they'll say, well, how do I add something? And inside the back end, you're screaming. It's like, there's a huge button on the bottom. Just click it. But they don't see it. And so you're wrong. So you take the feedback. So now at this point, you have a kind of working prototype that looks really good, and people seem to be able to do what you need. And now you look into more of the aesthetics. So you'll kind of layer on the pretty looking parts, like to make sure it speaks to the end user.
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It's funny that people would like to cast off the good looking nature of apps, the aesthetics as it's called, as not as important, but you know, research would show that that's a thing. And then research backs it up. People will see it. Like if you have two things that do the exact same thing, even if the pretty version is worse, it's harder to use. People will favor it. That's how important the visuals are. Like people, people gravitate to the pretty thing, even if it's harder to use.
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less features, if it's pretty and it's a nice interactive experience, people will flock to it. Interestingly. So then at this part you release, take some feedback and then learn all the most terrible mistakes you made iterate and then keep making it better. So you keep adjusting, you keep being flexible, get the feedback. Yeah. And from a true startup perspective, they usually deal with what's called an MVP, minimal viable product. Ultimately in our full version.
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of this application, we want to have all of these features. It'll be amazing. But what is the absolute most important features you have to have and how fast could you release it? You strip it down to the most basic thing. And it goes back to what you'd mentioned before about getting that feedback from people when they're actually using it. Cause that'll inform like what you actually build next. And maybe the thing you thought was most important, nobody wants.
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Which means all those times I did not care about giving feedback on those websites, I should actually have. It helped the designers and developers on the other side appreciate it greatly. Yes. Now I remember actually didn't realize how much impact it could make. Oh, it's huge. And then what about the bosses? What kind of pressure do they trickle down onto the US designers? There's a lot of push and pull. And again, there's that ability to communicate and navigate the various forces.
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because the boss might have a very hard vision on how something's supposed to work. And ultimately they have the final say, so they might have to go that way. So if you're able to communicate with them though, empathize with them and understand what they're actually asking. Like hear their words, but understand their meaning of what they're trying to achieve. You can use that to explain how maybe their vision for how the...
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UX will run how the user's experience will happen and be able to navigate them to one that's actually better. It's better for the user. And actually the developers can do this one faster and it'll hit the goals that you're looking to achieve in a much faster way. One of the biggest problems, especially from the UX perspective, and especially as you come up into positions of leadership is that everybody has an opinion on how it looks most.
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bosses of products will not have a opinion on the class structure of the code and how the variables are named. It's like, whatever, like what type of database is it? I don't understand it. I don't care. But whether this button is purple or blue, I have an opinion on. So one thing that you're working on within this realm is the fact that everybody can have an opinion on what you're doing. And that's something you have to be able to work within.
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And accept it really, it's fun because you can have a lot of people working on it. It's dire because everybody who has any type of authority will try to like wean it onto what you're doing because it's something they can actually understand. Cause I just don't like, you know, menus at the top or something like that. There'll be a lot of pressure coming in and then you're doing your best to represent not just yourself, what you know, to be the better experience. As long as you've actually empathized with the business, what they're achieving, but also hopefully for the developers too, where if you have an understanding and a rapport with them.
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You can kind of head it off in the fact that like, so boss, that is an interesting user experience you're suggesting. I've talked with the developers that will take two extra months. It's actually very difficult. And again, how much the developers love you because you've done that. And then when they go off into their next adventure, which designer are they going to recommend the next company? So you can go with your soft skills and the way you interacted with them. That's the kind of feedback that could potentially give you. Absolutely.
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Yeah. Yeah. You know, so there's tremendous pressure because it's how visual it is, but if you can rise to it, your value can accelerate exponentially. It's amazing because if you're able to navigate the difficult waters that that position represents, there's a lot of key parts of leadership that come out of it. You being me, me, me, it's all about my portfolio. It's just not the way to go. If you truly feel that you can be one of the top 1% of all designers and you're going to be an auteur.
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You know, you're going to redefine the industry, go for it, but more likely than not, you're not in the 1%. And you should really look how you can work with others to really build a strong career. What is the one big lesson you learned from the three startup businesses? Oh, that's amazing. The fighting through ambiguity. Anybody can bake something when they have an absolute perfect recipe, when they have
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every little single piece of information readily available, or you have every ingredient listed out, exact steps, exact time. Anybody can bake anything, but a master chef and especially one that's sought after can work. It's like, I want something lemony. It's going to be a cake, kind of like to do XYZ. What can you do? And they're able to pull together the necessary ingredients and pull something together that's amazing. And I think that's true with design too, is designers tend to want to be very precious with their time in that, well, I don't want to start
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until I know everything and until I get this answer or this answer, I don't want to start. I don't want to get going. But like how a UX UI process usually starts. Right. I mentioned a lot. I was talking about user journeys, business requirements, prototypes, like all these little parts of it. Cause I'm huge value to be created where if you can throw yourself into those instances, whether it is an imperfect information, you don't know everything. And in fact, the work that you do helps clarify it.
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So as opposed to being a designer who is incredibly precious with their work, like I don't want to spend my hours until I know everything. It's like, no, no, bring me your general problem and let me design some things together interactively. And let's see what solutions we can come to. If you think about where you want to be for leadership and growing your career and expanding yourself, do you want to be the person who follows exact directions, who can follow directions, or do you want to be somebody who's asked for help?
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coming up with solutions and for the product can be. And if you open yourself up to put in the time and the hard work to work through ambiguity, when you have imperfect information, it is unbelievably valuable. And I think it's probably one of the biggest opportunities for someone to expand themselves as a designer is using your design as a tool for clarity to help define what the business could do. See a lot of new design grads trying to perfectly master the tools. Adobe XD there's a Figma that you use as design.
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And it's great. It's wonderful. I get, it's very, get good at your craft. You have to being good at Figma is not your career. That's a tool. And in five years, it might be dead. So you don't want to build yourself up on this app. You know, you don't hire a carpenter because of how good he uses a hammer. You know, you use it because of what he builds with a hammer and product. Yeah.
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So, you know, you want to be a catalyst for these amazing products and solutions. So you use those skills, your empathy, your design abilities to be this fire that like absolutely changes anything that comes your way and you'll be sought after and pulled along for some really great adventures, I think. So Trevor, one last thing when it comes to the merger between soft skills and being a UX designer.
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It's really understanding empathy. And in this field with UX, empathy often is only pointed at the end user. The only person you think about is that end user, the person has to use it. And you don't think about the business. You don't think about the big boss. You don't think about your manager. You don't think about the product or the project manager who has to hit timelines. You don't think about the developers. You don't think of anybody except the user. And I think that's a waste of your natural gift of empathy and creativity.
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to not really understand that they're all parts of the whole. And when you're working in synergy, that's when you're gonna be producing the best work for that end user in fact, which I think is a bit unintuitive. So you're telling me producing a worst result is better for the user ultimately. And I would suggest yes, if you're serving everybody around there, they're gonna be much better served in the end. I think looking at the whole is a leadership skill actually. Yeah, it's kind of taking your head up from.
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away from your desk, not looking at the one piece you're doing and just looking around and seeing like, how does this fit into the whole and how can I make it so much better for all? Trevor Alexander, author of Ugly Design Career. Thank you so much for being here today. Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful to speak with you. And where can we find you if you want to know more? Absolutely. So you can check out the book website itself is uglydesincareer.com. And we'd love to hear from anybody at my Twitter at Alexander Trevor. Yeah. I think it was the best spots.
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Heard it for yourself, Trevor Alexander, UIUX designer for 16 years, who was involved in three startups that were very successful and how you can not only focus on being the best designer that you can be, but how important self skills are, especially if you want to be in leadership positions. Thank you so much, Trevor, for sharing your time with us today. That's a pleasure. Thank you so much.