Ayan and Evan introduce the Ascend UX podcast and give some background on the profession of user experience (UX) design. They share their own professional journeys into UX and reflect on overcoming “impostor syndrome” when trying new things.
Helpful Links
History of human factors – A short video by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority explaining some of the history of human factors engineering.
What is a UX Designer? – Nick Babich gives an overview of the UX Designer job.
Impostor Syndrome – Tiffany Eaton discusses working through feelings of professional insecurity as a designer.
Don’t Make Me Think – the classic introductory book on user experience design by Steve Krug.
More Ascend UX Content
Visit the Ascend UX podcast’s website for more episodes.
Contact Us
We love your questions and feedback! Please send them to ascendux@pros.com. We read every message and may use your question in a future show.
Ayan Bihi or Evan Sunwall are always happy to connect with listeners on LinkedIn. Just add a note mentioning the show in your invitation.
Credits
Thanks to Ultravice and Lakey Inspired for the use of their music.
Thanks to our producer and editor Brandon Robinson.
This show is created by PROS and the PROS UX Team.
Copyright 2020 Ascend UX. All rights reserved.
Evan: [00:00:00] Howdy friends, this is the Ascend UX podcast. A show about the experience of user experience. I'm Evan Sunwall.
Ayan: [00:00:41] And I'm Ayan Bihi.
Evan: [00:00:42] Ayan, this is the first podcast. This is exciting, huh?
Ayan: [00:00:46] Yeah, it really is. We made it. Look at us.
Evan: [00:00:50] For people who don't know, buying audio equipment is kind of an ordeal for the uninitiated.
It took a lot of careful planning for me anyway, to make sure that I'm buying the right pieces to record this. So ,what about you? Did you have any issues Ayan?
Ayan: [00:01:06] For me, it's just mostly making a makeshift studio in my kitchen for the moment.
Evan: [00:01:11] I think we're all kind of getting by with makeshift arrangements in this day and age that we're living through right now.
What are we going to talk about today Ayan? We're going to talk about this podcast. What is this about? What is UX? Just a little bit and talk a little bit about ourselves because ... who are we? Right? (Laugh)
Ayan: [00:01:30] That sounds good to me.
Evan: [00:01:33] So this is a UX podcast. And for people who are like, what does that stand for? I wanted to give you the Wikipedia definition, right? So I'm helping you out here. I've already done a little bit of research. What is UX? I love this definition. User experience design is the process of manipulating user behavior through usability, usefulness, and desirability provided an interaction with a product.
What strikes you in that definition, Ayan?
Ayan: [00:02:14] To be honest, the first thing that came to my eye was manipulating.
(Laugh)
It's not what I really think about what we do in our everyday practice, but I think, you know, we take that word into a larger definition. Sure. But no, I think it seems true to a certain extent. Multi-facet usage, make it useful. Also, desirability - it's not just function. There's also an emotional aspect behind what we do.
Evan: [00:02:43] Yeah, I mean, so this is an industry, this is a profession, that has had a long, long history, although it doesn't kind of feel that way sometimes it feels like in the past 20 or 30 years, it really kind of came into its own in the Information Age, right. With computers and the internet.
But the idea that very smart people who create businesses, who engineer systems are perhaps not always the best people to create them in such a way that their audience, their users, can use them successfully. I remember doing some research years ago on human factors engineering, which is a profession in its own right, but it definitely has some shades and influences in UX.
The idea in World War II where they would go through and they needed lots of pilots and they needed them to fly planes in the war. And they would manufacture these planes and create all these systems and they train all these pilots and put energy into, you know, producing them.
And they needed a ton of them. And then the pilots would try to fly the planes, and because of the way they were engineered and designed they would crash. And they were like, well, this isn't very sustainable. This is a problem. We need these people to actually fight the war and actually successfully fly these planes.
And they would blame the people at the helm. They'd blame the pilots. Oh, they're not trained right. Right? And it's kind of amazing that from some of those roots and in a little bit before, but the idea that, you know, it takes a lot of work and diligence to make systems, especially complicated ones for the average person who doesn't have that kind of connection to how it's engineered or how it's planned. I think that's a really fascinating space. And that's kind of why I've been attracted to user experience design as a profession myself.
Ayan: [00:04:39] Yeah, I wonder should the experience be seamless? Should users not even think that we went through that process to create an experience for them? That really responds to their needs as well. You know? Should we be invisible?
Evan: [00:04:52] Yeah. I mean, that's a very common refrain, right? Oh, if you're doing your job right, no one ever thinks about what you've done. No one ever thinks about the design. They're just doing their tasks. They're just trying to accomplish their goal, and you are truly invisible if you're actually really successful.
And so what we want to do is kind of part the veil a little bit. We want to kind of talk about people who may be doing this as their job today, for people who are curious that, I know this is something I'm trying to have happen as a career change. And for people who are like - I just found out what UX is about 30 seconds ago when you were starting to describe it.
We're just touching on the surface. This is very, very, very, very high level. But yeah, we want to go on this journey. We want to talk about what is it like doing this job? What are the techniques that are used? What are the kind of the people in your neighborhood, right? The people that you work and collaborate with, at least in the context of software design, which is what we do professionally. And help explore that a little bit, get a little more perspective and give guidance and tips on how to do it better, or to make it even happen at all.
Ayan: [00:06:11] Yeah, I agree. I like the aspect, you said, uncover the veil. Nowadays our lives are so intertwined with our computers or phones and behind each app, each interface, there's a designer who thought of it, hopefully for the best of how the user would interact with it. So. I think it's going to be fun to uncover that bale and scratch the surface to give him more idea of what we do by exchanging with other designers to figure out how they perhaps solve different problems in their everyday work process.
Evan: [00:06:40] Yeah, so we're going to embark on this journey. We're going to record these podcasts, and we're going to not overly rehearsed necessarily. We're going to kind of keep it authentic and real, and hopefully give you some helpful advice, give you some helpful perspective on user experience, UX design, and hopefully have a little fun.
And maybe we'll be even a little amusing here and there. I don't know, that's kind of a high bar high, Ayan, I'm not sure.
Ayan: [00:07:15] We're just going to see how it goes. It's an iteration. It's a work in progress.
Evan: [00:07:19] My wife says I'm not as funny as I think. So, we'll see. All right, so we're going to transition our discussion. Normally we'd be talking about a particular topic for these different podcasts. But for this introduction for you dear audience, please forgive us. We're going to talk a little bit about ourselves for this episode. Just so you know - who is this person and why? Why should I listen to them? And what do they know about UX? So, Ayan and I have already settled on a couple of questions and we're gonna do a little bit of interviewing of ourselves and hope it gives you a little bit of that background and perspective.
Ayan: [00:07:59] It's quite rare for us to talk about ourselves usually...
Evan: [00:08:02] I know!
Ayan: [00:08:02] ... deflecting the attention onto others, saying, you know, when a user asks you a question during a test, it's like, Oh, what do you think? Oh, how do you feel?
Evan: [00:08:12] Yeah, that's certainly a key part of the job, but it's really having that empathy and compassion for other people.
And actually applying that in your work, you really kind of depersonalize yourself, right? You have to like keep tamping down that desire to make something that you like or that you think is best. And so, yeah, this is going to be slightly uncomfortable. That's okay. This is the only one where we're going to do this. So...
Ayan: [00:08:35] Thankfully...
Evan: [00:08:36] Thankfully...
Ayan: [00:08:37] I think even in the process, we're often forced to be objective, so it's really distancing ourselves from ourselves to do our job properly. So, yeah, let's try again. Let's talk about ourselves.
Evan: [00:08:48] All right. Well I'm going to take the initiative here.
Ayan: [00:08:50] Okay.
Evan: [00:08:51] I'm going to ask you, Ayan, tell me about yourself.
Ayan: [00:08:54] That's a big question. Um, well, I'll give you a simple and hopefully we can go deeper into myself as you go along with the questions. So as you already know, my name is Ayan Bihi. I am a user experience designer. And I've been practicing in this field for over five years now. I love the aspect of design that is creative, but also very slightly scientific in its process.
So I like how I get to work with my left brain and my right brain depending on the tasks at hand. How about you, Evan? Do you wanna tell me about your yourself?
Evan: [00:09:25] Well, I grew up in New Orleans. It's true. People always comment on my lack of accent, but I did grow up in New Orleans. I was there till I was 18 and I moved over to Texas to study Computer Science at Texas A&M University.
I didn't give it a lot of thought, I have to say. I just kind of liked to computers and I went through that program and - it's getting better right now - but there was not necessarily a career path for user experience. It was not really well defined. And certainly at my college it was very engineering-centric and so I didn't like, love it.
I was kind of okay at it, but I was kind of determined to get through it. And I think grit and determination, uh, that's also a key attribute for this job as well. We'll get into that sometime in the future. But I wanted to just complete it. I'd set on this journey and I wanted to do it. I had some great advisors and mentors along the way to help me do that.
So. I did that and it was the dot com bust. So for those who are unaware, that was the coming down off of the high of - hey, cool, the internet, we can sell things on the internet. This is going to be amazing. It was really hard to find a job. So the market was poor, and it took me probably about 18 months to land my first job, and my first job was actually doing software development.
And so I was doing that down in Stafford, Texas. A suburb outside of Houston. And I did that for about two years, and it was great to finally get that job and get that experience. But ultimately the company was acquired. We were all laid off, and I made a commitment to myself, like "Self, you don't want to do software development."
This isn't as fulfilling as you as you need it to be as something you're gonna be doing eight hours a day, every week for the rest of your life. So I decided I wanted to do something that kind of hybridized psychology, which I studied a little bit in college, in undergraduate and try to meld them together. What is that? Can I do this? Can I figure out the people element? And I stumbled upon. Usability, uh, human factors, human, human computer interaction. There's a lot of different terms, user centered design. And I was like "Oh, oh, this is actually a thing. Okay!" So I applied to graduate schools. I got into a few and I was about to go ship off and study it for two years.
And I happened to find a job at PROS, which is where I still work today. And that was 13 years ago. So. Every time I say that, I kind of like, uh, my eyes twitch a little bit, like (laugh) wait, how long has it been? And so I got started at an enterprise software company doing user centered design.
And it was more or less kind of a team of one. I had colleagues here and there along the way, but it was never more than like two or three at the most. And usually at times just myself. And that was a very formative experience, dealing with a lot of that complexity. So that was kind of my journey to user centered design. And today I manage a team of UX designers working on enterprise software for PROS, a pricing and AI commerce company.
Ayan: [00:12:43] And when you transition from one to the other, where there are some similar skills that you could apply to give you some of the knowledge in this new field that you went into?
Evan: [00:12:52] Ah, sort of, cause I started from computer science, so I had an engineering software development background. And so when I first started, I leaned pretty heavily on that. I leaned heavily on making prototypes with code, and I did not have the training and the knowledge and the experience of, I would say, qualitative research, interviewing people, developing insights, presentations. Those were things that were just not emphasized a lot in where I was coming from. And so I had to do a lot of development and education - a lot of it self taught, just the nature of where I was - to build up on the skills, because those are very important skills. And I just kind of leaned into well, I can express things in code with my development skills and get started that way and start showing some value, and start at least creating concepts that could be tested or gotten feedback from users and stakeholders and lean into that and work on those other parts that I had not been trained or well-developed.
What about you, Ayan? What were you bringing to the table when you started?
Ayan: [00:14:02] Yes, so my background is, at the time it seemed very different, but looking back now I see that it kind of connected very naturally. So after high school I had that big existential question of what's next, and I was really interested in just how society functioned. To me it was kind of this machine and I wanted to understand the manual. So I went to sociology, I did a bachelor's in sociology, and that was super interesting. I got to learn a lot about how this machine that we live in functions actually. And also during that time we learned a lot about interviews and using research methods.
So I finished that part of my life, which is my bachelor's degree. And there was the other question again that came back. What's next? So I worked a bit actually in somewhat of the social work field. Which is really interesting actually, and very touching to work with others and kind of, you know, your efforts are helping their lives. But I also want to go further. So I had again, that question of what do I want to do?
And I started looking to design and I was super interested in it. I was reading a much into it and it was kind of, as you were saying earlier, Evan, of uncovering that veil. It was this Eureka moment where I noticed that all of the objects that I interact with in my everyday life was once conceived by someone's ideas, and that was super interesting to me and I wanted to participate in that as well. I wanted to be a maker.
So I decided to go and get my masters in industrial design. So I moved from Canada to Paris. I went into the field with pretty much little knowledge of how to create a product. I did some pre studies before out at my local college just to get kind of a base, but I really threw myself into a different culture, a different country in a completely different theme of what my practice of learning was.
So that was a huge learning experience and very growing. And during that process, I realized that I found design very interesting. But the process of creating objects was not what I wanted to do as my contribution. So I started to look at different types of design that was existent. And at my school at the time, they are very product based.
You know, I did projects where we were redesigning paint guns for mechanics to do new covers for cars. Like they could paint cars.
Evan: [00:16:16] Wow, yeah?
Ayan: [00:16:16] Yeah, it was super interesting, but I was like, I don't know if this is for me. So I started to look around and I got an internship with a design agency that specialized in user experience design. It was a word that I had heard of and I'd seen often, and I was like, what is this about? Why not give it a try and see what it, you know, how could it interest me. And it was there that I got to see the bridge actually between my past, which was in sociology and my interest of being, you know, sociology is really interesting as you get to learn, you get to study and observe, but I was frustrated that you just stopped there.
You don't get to go further. And that's why I went to design. I wanted to be a maker and I thought - and I felt at that time - that I got to see how that those points were being connected in UX. We get to observe, we get to meet, we get to interview, and then after that the next step that you do is you propose something. You create a prototype or you create a product. Digitally. So yeah, that's how I got in. And from that internship I was offered a job and that led to one thing to the other. I worked mostly in agencies in the past year. I transitioned to working with you actually at PROS and just a different continent. And so that's been an interesting transition. It's no longer working from little projects or big projects and then you hand it off, but it's really following the evolution of a product from A to Z and watching it grow.
Evan: [00:17:36] Yeah, that's awesome. You're kind of the world traveler. I moved about a state over that was about enough for me. It sounds like you've been kind of all over doing it in a lot of different places, huh?
Yeah, movement
Ayan: [00:17:47] is part of my story, but it's great for empathy. Like to understand others and how to observe and how to adapt.
Evan: [00:17:57] Alright, this is getting a little stuffy. Let's do something fun. What did you want to do when you were growing up, Ayan? What job did you want?
Ayan: [00:18:08] That's a good question. I think it changed from different parts of my life.
I think when I was a kid, like a little kid, I was really interested in veing a veterinarian as I loved animals and we had a lot growing up, so I kind of just wanted to hang out with cats, dogs, horses, cows, and just help them. But as I got more into a teenager, I played basketball competitively, so pretty much five days or six days of the week I was playing basketball.
So I thought kind of a personal trainer or a physiotherapist would be interesting as it could be a great bridge between the two. And I love everything creative. So I wanted to, for me, design was mostly fashion design at that time when I was younger. So I thought maybe fashion design or a photographer or a video, but it was always using my ideas as a tool of communication.
How about you Evan? What did you want to be when you grew up?
Evan: [00:18:59] I had far simpler ambitions. I think I went to a zoo one time, maybe the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, and I saw people feeding some of the animals and I said "Wow. I want to do that. That looks really fun!" Like being like a chef for animals, like cooking up steaks for or mixing up food for elephants. I thought that was the best job in the world. And they're not going to necessarily complain like, "Hey, this steak wasn't cooked to my liking. Sir, could you change this?" I just thought that just was super fun. And so when I was really young, I wanted to be like a zookeeper or some sort of zoo dietician. I'm not even sure what the exact wording for that is, but I thought that would be just the best job ever.
And I definitely don't do that right now. I do feed two cats who do have opinions about what I feed them, and they are very picky. And so I have a little more empathy now for what that job may be like than I did when I was maybe 10. So yeah, it's kind of fun sometimes just to see what people kind of saw themselves.
I like the idea that we both wanted to care for animals. Like that was some sort of connection there.
Ayan: [00:20:08] Yeah really, it goes back to the empathy.
Evan: [00:20:10] Yeah.
Ayan: [00:20:10] Helping others.
Evan: [00:20:13] That's going to come up a lot I think, cause that's definitely a big part of this job. it's easy to say and it's a lot harder to do. Let's do two more. Let's do some harder ones. What was your proudest moment professionally?
Ayan: [00:20:28] Ooh, that's a big one. I think it wasn't a moment specifically through an experience with a client or achieving of that sort, but for me, I think it's that moment where I noticed that the dots were connected, like saying, okay, the time that I did sociology and the time of that inkling to go into design were not lost.
When I realized that I was on that right path. I think that was something that I felt really proud of because sometimes we can be moving forward and not understand where the journey will take us. So I think after I finished my internship and was working professionally in agency and I had a better idea of what was user experience design, that was just like, okay, I was led a lot by these little feelings, intuition, but okay, now it makes sense.
Evan: [00:21:16] It finally came together...
Ayan: [00:21:18] Yeah, exactly, and I think to go into more detail, it was probably at the moment I liked the most, is whenever I get to interview, be it with a stakeholder, which is somebody who can be in the client and or with somebody who can be a potential user. I love those moments cause you really get to step away from your computer. You get to really understand how this product that you might be redesigning or creating might affect somebody's life. It could be maybe maintaining their job if the product's successful in the business end, or it could be helping them find their next home, or finding a trip that will facilitate them to go see their parents who they haven't seen for 10 years. So those are moments that I really cherish.
Evan: [00:22:05] And what about your most discouraging moment?
Ayan: [00:22:10] That's even harder than the proudest. Just try not to go deep into those moments. Discouraging? I think it kind of goes back into the reverse of what I was saying of the moment where I saw the dots connected for me wouldn't be professionally, but maybe more academically when I was in industrial design.
And I was feeling that, no, this is not what I wanted. Um, I don't think the world needs another chair. I don't think the world needs another table. I think design has the capability to do something that can really affect somebody's life. And this is not the way that I want to do it. So that was definitely a challenging moment, was saying, okay, I'm here. I don't want to be here. How can I get to where I want to be? And that was the moment I decided to go into. The professional aspect and do an internship to really see what this field of UX I had heard so much about.
Evan: [00:23:01] That's cool.
Ayan: [00:23:02] How about you? What was your proudest moment professionally though?
Evan: [00:23:05] I gotta do the hard ones too. Huh? Alright.
Ayan: [00:23:07] Yes!
Evan: [00:23:08] My proudest moment, so I think it was last year we had done an Ascend UX conference for people who were just starting out, who are UX-curious about this profession and doing the job. And we had this goal to put on a conference last year and it was kind of absurd.
But we wanted to try. We hosted it in Houston, Texas. And not only did we sold all the tickets. We actually had an overflow. We had more people who wanted to attend and the team rallied together and they put themselves out there. They held workshops, they reviewed people's portfolios and their resumes and gave them feedback and professional feedback and their skills and try to help them level up.
And, at the end of it after like kind of months of planning, but from a lot of people, and not saying, I didn't do this, it was a whole team that did it. At the end of it, it was really magical. It was like, wow, you guys are really hard to challenge. You really step up and accomplish these amazing things. And the feedback was 98% positive.
Like, I mean, we serve it everyone cause we're designers, right? We want to get data and insights and perspective on things. It was. It was truly a remarkable thing, and there's nothing prouder that I'd done. I've made software that's like, you know, it's worked out well and some stuff that didn't work out and whatever, but that, that was really encouraging. That was really magical.
So the hard thing, one that comes to mind, there is an innovation project that was happening in the company. And we will probably touch on that at some point. But you know, there comes a time if you are someone who can think abstractly and you can kind of piece together kind of vague requirements and you're trying to create something out of nothing, that's a pretty useful skill for a company.
And so we were working on a kind of an innovation project. We had gone through three rounds of testing and 35 interviews that we had conducted, a lot of it is qualitative. We used a lot more qualitative techniques here at our company. But, we put a lot of work into it. It was a lot of complicated requirements and we were getting a lot of positive feedback.
We're getting people like, this is really interesting. You know, I'd like for you... It was funny, like we were doing a usability test and at the end of it people were like "Could you call me? I'd like to get a follow up. Could I have a sales call?" And we were like "When does this happen? This is kind of crazy and weird
And for whatever reasons, the project got canned. Leadership changes, priorities change, whatever the case may be. And it was really discouraging and the whole team had put a lot of effort into it and we really feeling good about it. And it got canned. It's those moments like that of like we talk a lot about creativity and creating stuff, and it's the dark side of destruction and throwing the stuff in the trash that really hurts if you're not prepared. If you don't have a good mindset to kind of look at it as a learning experience. So it took me a while to kind of come to a reconciliation on that and had learned from that.
Alright. It's time to answer some audience questions. We try to have a time in this podcast where we're going to invite you, the audience to send us questions about design, about user experience, and we want to talk about that. We want to answer them, give you some tips and advice and help you out. So please send your questions to ascend ux@pros.com. We'll read them out on the show and we'll try to do the best we can to give you some advice or tips or how we can help you. Are you ready, Ayan?
Ayan: [00:27:00] I am. Should I begin with the first one?
Evan: [00:27:03] Please do.
Ayan: [00:27:04] So, Evan, for you, what are the signs that accompany is supportive of UX?
Evan: [00:27:11] So that could go pretty deep, but I think some of the things that are, do they have job roles that have good job descriptions?
So the job description is kind of focused on - you'll see UX Designer or maybe UX/UI Designer - and what they're describing involves users in some way. Like, okay, and you go talk to users, you go talk to the people who are supposed to use an experience. So the fact that they have that role to begin with, well that's a start.
And if they can articulate something that isn't a magical unicorn of, yeah, you're going to do software development and you're going to work in the marketing department - and that's necessarily a bad thing - but like if you're trying to make product experiences and you try to do this job, then you need to involve users in some way.
And so a job description for what I'd be looking at, do they talk about getting insights and data from user behaviors or talking with users? That's a key one. Do they have a budget to do any of these types of things? That's another key sign. Do they have a kind of any kind of leadership structure? Who do they report to?
Like I mentioned - marketing. Yeah, it could be okay. There are people who do UX design in marketing. But if you're trying to develop product experiences, you want to be part of being in the department or the area that makes the stuff. And so do they have leadership representation? Do they have a director or a VP?
I mean those are pretty common ones. Do they have any kind of someone who is orchestrating the program and is speaking about its value to the leaders of the organization. I would also say if they have a researcher, if they, they've codified research or user research as a program and they have maybe a researcher or maybe their responsibilities are in the job description that you're looking at. That is something that would be at least some good clues that user experience is taken seriously.
And I would also encourage anyone who's looking at that to ask some good questions of the hiring manager, about, you know, what have you been doing recently? Do you have a budget? How do you report out what you've accomplished to the rest of the organization and how much outreach do they do? And so I think those are some good signs, some early clues about their relative maturity. And that can be a much deeper conversation. But that's a few tips for you.
Oh, let's do one more, Ayan. This one's for you. What resources helped you as a new UX designer?
Ayan: [00:29:37] So I think never underestimate the power of observation, so that can be observing how your colleagues who might have more experience, how they go about doing their work. So I did a lot of that, just observing and asking questions just to understand, you know, what skills I had and how that could be applied to maybe the tasks that I was asked to do.
We're very lucky nowadays to have so many resources at our fingertips. So just go on the internet. You can go onto Nielsen Norman. They have lots of resources. Mostly more on methodology, which is always good to have - a good foundation. So they just teach the differences on usability and what makes a good experience.
And also just reading. So like design of everyday objects. That was a really good one. So it was a good bridge between my object background and my getting into the UX realm. So just also looking at what works, we interact so much, as I said earlier, with products. Applications. So why not just take an app, put in your hand and say, Oh, this works, this doesn't work.
And then maybe ask a question of why and why not re-engineer a tool that you use every day. I remember seeing, um, there was a girl who wanted to get into UX design, didn't have much experience to include her portfolio. So she got on Instagram, interviewed maybe a couple of hundred people in her network and ask them why they use it, what's good for them with it.
And then she took that, all that insight and redesign Instagram and it got her a job at Instagram. So, you know. Yeah. So, you know, never just play around and learn, get so many resources. Because as designers, we play many roles. You know, there's the research role. There is the creation role. So just play around with a lot of different things to kind of, you know, get you to better understand what it is to be a designer.
Evan: [00:31:24] I think that's really great advice and I would actually add, if this is a new thing to you or you're just slightly curious about it and you really haven't done much research on it, "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. That's the one that everyone kind of mentions. But it truly is a great book in the sense that. It's really short and it's really colorful. And I think even that is a good kind of user experience cause it doesn't look very intimidating, but it actually is a great one to kind of get that primer, that kind of introduction of why is this important? What is this all about? That's the way the first book that I read, and I think that's something to get started.
And yeah, I read Jacob Nielson's useit.com - their blog - for years. That's always a great one for just understanding how humans with their limits and how much they're willing to tolerate or where they tend to look for, you know, controls and things like that. If you just read it once a week and you just pop in and see what kind of research they're publishing and putting out there for free, which is the big thing, it's free. It's just there. That's a great way to get started. Just to get a little familiar
Ayan: [00:32:31] I think those are great resources because they touch the foundation. Cause also within our field, things are always changing. There's always like "Oh, the call to action should be this way or that way." But if you start with the basics, then you can also take that and reinterpret it in your own way.
Evan: [00:32:46] Awesome. Well, Ayan, I think that's going to do it for this episode. We did it.
Ayan: [00:32:52] It went by so fast.
Evan: [00:32:53] I know, right? Yeah. Time flies. When you're talking...
Ayan: [00:32:56] About yourself? About ourselves?
Evan: [00:32:58] Yeah, let me just go off the soap box I'm standing on. Hang on. All right. That's going to do it for this episode and for the Ascend UX podcast, so we'd love your feedback because we are designers after all, so please send it to ascend ux@pros.com. Also, rate follow, subscribe, or leave comments on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or whichever service you're using to listen to us. We definitely appreciate that and spreading the word out there. So Ayan, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Ayan: [00:33:33] Thank you. I look forward to hearing what you guys will have to say and questions. So don't be shy. As Evan said, we love feedback.
Evan: [00:33:41] You know what, if you're contemplating making a career change into UX and it seems kind of scary and it seems kind of difficult to do, you don't know where to start. I just want to encourage you, take the plunge, do it. You can do it. We are not professional podcasters.
This was scary. This is something that probably put us out of our comfort zone. Maybe delve into the imposter syndrome. Fight it! Or you know what? It's okay. You should probably feel imposter syndrome a little bit throughout your entire career. That means you're probably growing. You're probably doing things that are challenging and difficult to do, so you can do it.
All right. Well, Ayan, I'll see you next episode.
Ayan: [00:34:28] Yeah, this is just the beginning.
Evan: [00:34:30] Just the beginning. All right. Take care.
Ayan: [00:34:33] Bye.
Evan: [00:34:54] Thanks for listening to the Ascend UX podcast, a show made by the user experience team at PROS, a software company in Houston, Texas that develops AI powered solutions for businesses. Learn more at pros.com/ux. Our main theme music is by Ultravice. You can listen to more of his work at soundcloud.com/ultravice. Also thanks to Lakey Inspired for his music as well. You can listen to more of his work at soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired. And special thanks to our editor and producer Brandon Robinson.
Stay gritty friends!