#107 How can your side interests help in you UX career?
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Just map out everything you've done, everything it translated into, and then you'll have a bigger, clearer picture of your definition as a designer and what are the transferable skills you can bring. Look at them and wonder what of these things are important to me, which of these things I value, which of these things I will want to do more of, and then map them against the UX role.

So the UX role, what does it entail? Understanding people. So do any of these things fall under the bigger bucket of how to understand people? Well, yeah, being polite is probably a great path to helping people open up in front of you in the research process. Most of the things have a reflection in the design role because the design role is so accommodating. It's very large. You can do a lot of things as a designer.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa, and today I'm joined by my lovely co-host, Ioana. And today we're going to talk about a curious topic, which is how can our site interest and our site project help us in our main job in UX design? And this conversation was actually started by the very notoriously famous LinkedIn post, which was, how did proposing help me in my B2B business? So I wanted

like, hey, let's do it playful. Let's figure out how can our side projects or things we do outside of our business help us in UX. And this will probably help a lot of people who are transitioning from other backgrounds or just beginners and trying to understand how they could leverage their side skills, things they have learned in the other industries in the pursuit of their UX career. So with that being said, Ioana, as always, let's catch up real quick. And I'll ask you, how was your last week?

Hi, everyone. Yeah, my last week was pretty nice. I was very chill for some reason. I'm welcoming that state. It has something to do with summer. And I'm spending more time in nature because it's very warm in the city. So I keep leaving the city and enjoying my daughter. And yeah, I feel a bit more balanced mentally. So props to June or July, whatever month we're in now. How about you? How was your last week?

Nice, nice. I'm happy to hear you're in a better mental space. My last week was also pretty cool. Actually, we had the config last week, so I believe the whole industry was very focused. All eyes are either on recording or being off-site in the venue in the config in LA. A lot of people I know from Czech Republic fly to config.

I don't know, next year, I'm really hoping I'll do this as well because I'm almost dying to go there as well because honestly, it's been like the biggest FOMO of the year and because I had last year baby and this year is too early to go. I'm just hoping next year I'll go there. Maybe, maybe you do. I don't know. But otherwise, yeah, nothing else. It's just business as usual, community work. We're doing the new accountability group.

At work, we are preparing for the employee conference at my company. So around 1000 people fly into Prague and there's a lot of party going on next week. So yeah, I think it's a good timing right now. It's pretty chill, but also full of events. And that's a good timing. Anyways, talking about our topic of today's and trying to unpack how our side projects, side interests help us in UX. And let's start.

kind of high level, very general, try to unpack. If you think about some use cases and if you reflect back on your career, do you remember any other skills that you were kind of honing, you were interested in that helped you in your current design job, right? For example, when you only transitioned, I know you worked in finance a little bit, if I'm not mistaken.

How did that background help you and shape you as a designer? What skills do you feel like you moved or what skills helped you progress in your UX design career? If you start from the beginning, maybe you can also move into current days. And I know that you have sometimes outside skills, like today you're more interested in the art. Does this really help you? So let's talk about this high level. How do you feel other skills in your life helped you in design? I love the question. I love the topic. I love

this conversation is something that I'm very, very keen about personally, that this kind of ecosystem of things that we are as a person and how the connections that happen between different parts of our system, which are not necessarily directly related, like, for example, a passion for art and your role as a designer or your

passion for art and your role as an accountant, like seemingly completely unrelated, but still they can end up informing each other. So I believe a lot in the power of just a person's ecosystem and this concept of transferable skills. So you learn some things. And I think the most powerful example of transferable skills in my life has been becoming a mother, which is

maybe not on point of your question, but it's the best example, the most powerful one I've experienced personally. So when I became a mother, I had to build all these new skills, new toolbox was offered to me and go around and play with it. And then I had to learn

things and become essentially grow into a different person. And so the new instruments, the new tools I had available, the new internal mechanisms started to reflect in my full-time job, in my roles, in my work as a designer. And that was very transparent, very tangible in a way. It just showed me that this is real.

Other examples, my career started in a call center. So I was just a call center operator answering the phone. So you would think, how does that help you as a designer? But it helped me a lot because it kind of infused me with this mentality that, okay, someone's calling, they have a problem. How do we unpack that problem? How do I get to the bottom of the problem? What are the questions I need to ask to understand what this person struggled with, to figure out what would be the best way to point them towards a solution or...

involve cross-functional teams to help me articulate that solution. So it was very much a design exercise. I just didn't know at that time, right? I didn't acknowledge, I didn't have the concept of UX design, but it was very, very interesting to just work with problems. So people came angry, put a

problem in my hands and then go ahead and help me with it. And so it was just foundational to my 10 years later career as a designer. And then I can find multiple examples in my career, content creation and this kind of figuring out the entire research process that goes on into becoming a content creator.

Sometimes it's not even intentional research, but it's just being so in tune with your audience and understanding what people are interested in, what you're happy to talk about, where's that intersection between what you're excited about genuinely and what people find interesting. And so how do you deliver that value on something that genuinely excites you because you want to be authentic. So a huge problem space of being a content creator made me a better designer as well. So again and again, throughout my career, things that are

more transparently linked to design, things that are completely unlinked to design like motherhood or even sports. Even this year trying out snowboard, right? It was the first time in my life and I postponed it for my entire life because I don't consider myself a winter sporty person and I will never be. But trying out something new and

uncovering, tapping into those learning mechanisms when you're in the beginner mentality, when you're like, oh my God, what am I doing here? I have no idea what I'm doing. It seems I'm doing something. I could die any moment, but I'm just going to push forward. And so that kind of learning beginner, basic new thing mentality was something that kind of was reawakened in me.

and then I could feel like, what if I do this in my career now again? So I became more curious to learn new skills. So it opened this function that was dormant. And then it reflected also in my curiosity towards learning a new tool or a new process. At that moment, I was in this very curious mindset triggered by trying something new. So I can find like I

could talk for 10 hours about how things have informed my career but I do believe that at the bottom of it is that we're systems as a person I'm a system and this is a very rich complex system of relationships personal life professional life hobbies relationships other jobs so there's just a

wealth of connections that can be made between different parts of the system. And we show up as a reflection of everything that's in the system, not just a part of it. I can't isolate my life and my personality from who I am as a designer. So whatever influences my life and my personality will reflect in my design work.

I have a quick follow-up question. I feel like those are some fantastic insights, and I feel like maybe some of our listeners have similar backgrounds or even stories, but then they're asking themselves, okay, I'm a parent, but how does this really translate into UX design? What's the practical...

application of the skill set I'm building as the parent. Can you maybe give one quick example? It doesn't need to be parent. Maybe it could be a call center or whatever is your past background content creation. It could help our listeners shape their mind around using that story and leveraging their way in. Two things are top of mind immediately. One is from the call center. I remember very clearly that when I started, what your instinct says is when someone is complaining and saying that they have a problem and you're like, no, but did you try this? And did you try that?

You should have pressed that button and you jump into solutions like many designers still do. So I was jumping to solutions. I was kind of in a way arguing with the client, but not arguing, but like not listening very actively. And then I realized, well, wait, this is not about who's right. This is not about if the system is broken or not, if the product is broken or not, or if they discovered something. This is just about pure listening.

Just listen. The client doesn't have to be right. It doesn't matter. You just have to listen and look for those cues of what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how we can improve it. And so I became a much better listener. And I learned to kind of not listen to my instincts that would like jump in and interrupt them. No, no, wait, wait, you have to push that button. And so it essentially made me a better researcher in a way. And then from parenthood, I'm still in the mindset of pause before you react. So as a parent, when your child yells, you don't yell back, or at least not immediately. Right.

I think at some point in your life, you might yell back, but it's not the first thing you do. You just try to keep your calm and observe what's going on and look at something very emotional as like something rain coming and going. And I'm doing this in my collaboration work as a designer very much as well. So I see people who are stressed out and now I'm looking at them as toddlers who are having a tantrum and it has nothing to do with me. It's just going to pass. And it made me a better manager of relationships, if that makes sense.

And I think that's an important, it's a core skill as a designer. You have to be able to collaborate proactively because you have to put all these different perspectives into something meaningful. And so you have to collaborate very well. It made me a better collaborator, more patient, more empathetic, and even just this aspect that

Everyone is a kid dip down and sometimes that kid shows up at work, which is so weird to see people. Every ego thing that happens at work is essentially a toddler having a tantrum. So for me, like work became much more, I don't know, observing than getting involved emotionally or reacting or like getting stressed about things. And it's just like I'm observing more and I'm more patient. So, yeah, these are top of mind examples. I hope they have meaning. Yeah.

No, wow, this is really, really good. I feel like it's such a great reflection on your past examples and you were so articulate. I feel like a lot of people would say like, nah, man, I can never be so articulate in my reflection and my story. How did you do that? Well, probably Ioana is a great example of people reflecting on their journey, which we always love to talk about.

But when I look back, I don't think I have the same beautiful articulated story and immediately top of mind think about the examples. But what I tend to do in looking back in my story, I feel like the things that shaped me as a designer were related to my X-Pac background because I was transitioning into UX design, but like in X.

accidental way because I wasn't very intentional around this. I was looking for a way to live abroad. I found this master's degree that was seemingly related to my profession. It turns out it was completely different because I was thinking about industrial design. It turns out to be UX design. I didn't know what it is, blah, blah, blah.

But my internal motivation was really about moving abroad and experiencing the world outside of Ukraine when I was 20 years old. As I started doing this and we had this visa sort of fear that my visa is going to run out of time. Back then, we didn't have the three months sort of visa-free border control thing. So I was like, OK, I'm very limited in my time, how much I can spend my time in Europe.

So I started traveling a lot. I ended up living in seven countries, semi-speaking five languages, as well as working with multiple freelance clients from multiple countries, which made me very curious about culture, about differences, about business etiquette and how people usually work with each other and how to be effective working with different people. That made me much more agile. So I feel like looking back into the story that is not related to UX design, right? Just traveling abroad, going out there, experience

world, seeing people, trying to figure out different stories, that looking back made me, like Ioana says, a much better communicator, a collaborator, because I could be much more agile in the way I'm talking to people because I can understand they're better, I can understand why they're reacting emotionally, their managing culture, the authoritarian bottom-up, the way people give feedback, all that, right? That made me a

much more conscious and aware of the situation person. And I feel like, like Joanna mentioned, there are a couple of other cases where that started contributed moving on to the design persona I am today, for example. Just like with Ivana, we have the same at which point, which is a contrasting

and creation. Maybe you start out of passion because you have just interests you can hold in you and you want to start sharing those with the world. That happened to me. I was traveling, traveling, traveling. Then I closed myself in a room and I said, oh my god, it's so calm. I don't see people around me. I just feel bored. I want to talk to someone. And I started posting like random, random basic things like what I did today as a designer. And that kind of attracted some like-minded people and

And okay, in the beginning, it was out of passion. Just, you know, I wanted to connect with people. But it turns out to be a very long journey. It was about five, six years. And that, in a way, like Ioana says, made you realize the impact you're doing by creating so much content. And that made, okay, I have to do the research. I have to learn this topic better. I have to frame my learnings better. I have to improve my storytelling skills. I need to improve my angles and presentation skills.

As you are becoming a better storyteller, as you are researching your stories and you are researching the information and you're teaching them, that obviously makes you a much, much better communicator and contributor to the design. That also led me to the teaching background. I started designing with teaching, but not being a strong designer back then yet. But slowly, slowly, slowly with the creation, again, teaching, even though it's not directly related to the design work we are doing.

Later on in my career, I realized, okay, a lot of the things we're doing is actually education, educating our partners, educating people we're working with, different departments about the value of design and helping the whole team, the whole company, the whole organization became more UX mature. And you are doing this essentially by doing what you're doing as the content creator or trainer or mentor, because you're sharing the same knowledge, but you're doing it in a more associated way, right? You're using pictures, you're using similar ideas, concepts,

and framing them in a way that is shaped more like a story that could be translated, not specifically like, hey, do this button here and there, but you're shaping an understanding and the concept in a more abstract way. And then you are kind of scaling this whole notion of UX maturity design value broader to the whole organization. So again, that contributed to becoming a better designer, I guess.

And then I want to also mention parenthood. I still feel like I'm figuring it out. I don't know yet if you can become a good contributor to UX design as a one-year-old child parent. Well, we are in a situation where the baby is only starting to interact with the people, with me, and so we don't really interact yet very strongly. We are only like

starting to run, starting to kind of shout some letters, some words, syllabuses, whatever it is right now. So it's not really about like becoming a better communicator. But I feel like what helped me is really realizing the passion I'm having for the work is because when the baby is taking a lot of your time and you have this itch of

oh my God, I really want to do this. You become much better as a time manager in a way, because, okay, if you have one hour while the baby sleeps, you need to manage your time. You need to start ruthlessly prioritizing information or things on your plate and become way, way better with managing your time expectations and communicating this to other people who are dependent on you. So in a way, you also become a better, at least, time manager.

And so long story short, I feel like, yeah, there are a lot of those small, small skills that slowly framing and wrapping you in a much better package as a designer. So I feel like this conversation brings us to the next very logical question. And I'd love to ask this from you, Joanna. What are the questions that our listeners could ask themselves to kick off this reflection? What are the things that could help our listeners to start thinking about their past background and realize that some of those skills are related?

to your design, especially those designers who are just transitioning and haven't been in the field and couldn't see the full story of what it is to be a designer and how their past backgrounds could influence the design work. So is there a way to figure it out without being a designer just yet?

I remember when I constructed my Domestika course, learn how to create a learning strategy for learning UX. So the point was to create your own plan for learning UX. And there was this initial exercise that's called the Who I Am Canvas, where you answer a couple of questions and you map out these, let's say, kind of skills that you are probably not reflecting a lot on, but they're worth reflecting on. And the questions were mostly around

What were the, let's say, more important experiences that you've had both personally and professionally and just list them out? Being a bartender, being an Uber driver, being my mother's daughter or anything. What were the things that happened in your life that had enough time length or meaning that you can look at them, right? It's not like I went with a boat from point A to point Z one time.

Maybe, I mean, those things could also show you something about yourself, but I would start with the things that have some value in your life and mostly focus on the professional things. Like I've been a bartender and so. And then once you map out, you make this list, you start wondering what were the skills that were required for each of these things. Like for a bartender, you had to be very organized, very quick, have great reflexes to not bump into people, carry a lot of things on your hands. It was like a coordination exercise, methodologies.

Memory, being nice to people. So map out all the things that went into that role and you kind of experienced or played around with. And same for your Uber driver, right? Being on time, being polite, all the things. So and then look at them and wonder what of these things are important to me, which of these things I value, which of these things I will want to do more of and then map them against the UX role.

So the UX role, what does it entail? Understanding people. So do any of these things fall under the bigger bucket of how to understand people? Well, yeah, being polite is probably a great path to helping people open up in front of you in the research process. Or just being very well organized as a bartender or working well under pressure is something that you'll get a lot of times when you're designing business.

in big companies where you have deadlines and stuff. Most of these things have a reflection in the design role because the design role is so accommodating. It's very large. You can do a lot of things as a designer. Yeah, just map out everything you've done, everything it translated into. Look at

the parts you were excited to do again, like that's also an important indicator. When you do this exercise, something will pop up that you, oh my God, I want to do more of that. I like that. And some things will be, I've learned how to work under pressure, but I don't want to work under pressure again. And so it's also a kind of internal mapping exercise. What do I want to do more of? What do I want to do less of? Who am I? Who do I want to become? And

And then you'll have a bigger, clearer picture of your definition as a designer and what are the transferable skills you can bring. And also make sure to communicate those in your narrative when you're applying for roles in your portfolio as much as possible. Reflect them in short stories, reflect them in maybe images with short captions, something like you can even post a photo of you bartending and then having some sort of

small lines there that say, I've learned how to deal with people under pressure. And this makes me a very excited designer or a very patient designer. So tell these stories. Don't just keep them for yourself, but share them with your mentor, your employer, the person who's hiring you in the interviewing process and so on. So yeah, those are my thoughts around it.

What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I love this. I'm running right now the job hunting community. I'm always recommending people in their portfolios to mention where they're coming from, what shaped them as designers, what is their transitional path background and mention this right away as soon as people land on your portfolio. In your bio section, you want to say not just like I'm a designer, I'm passionate about creating usable, user-friendly, whatever prototypes or like designs. You kind of want to say your path

background shaped you as this person and that builds the persona and it shows that you know what you're doing and what you're good at it shows you did your homework and did the reflection and you're also probably growth driven person you understand what it takes to grow and so yeah mention this in your bio mention that you were a bartender in your portfolio first things people see in your home page

And I love that you want to mention also mention this story or like a picture of you in the bartending. It's amazing, really. And I like this exercise that you said, okay, reflect on all those experiences you had that influence the way you're thinking or the way you are as a person today. And then if you struggle with like, okay, I've never really worked as a designer. I don't know how those skills kind of helped me in a UX design, how related they are, how far away they are from UX design. Then my recommendation would be to ask

a mentor to kind of go through those mapping that you have done as your homework. And if you don't have anyone in the design industry as a friend, ask the mentor. Ask them to sit with you for one hour, go over this exercise and see how those different experiences could make a story as a UX designer transitioning to UX design.

Alternatively, I should mention this, that you can join the community and participate in different events and then get people to see you in action. Either it is the community members or the mentor of that community, but people will start seeing who you are. It almost feels like you are active collaborator when you are in the community because you start helping out people, giving design critiques.

you're asking for the feedback. It's this loop of the same what's happening in any design teams of asking feedback, giving feedback, sharing with each other resources, having fun. It's all the same jazz that's happening in the companies, but it happened in the community. And so you can get yourself in front of the design people, in front of the action. And then after a while, after you've met people and collaborated with them for a little while, then you can ask them for feedback and see what

people mention about you, which again would help you to shape the understanding of what type of a collaborator you are, what do you bring to the table as soon as you're looking for the actual job. As well as the other alternative methods could be, for example, joining the hackathon, seeing yourself in action in the middle of this mess, not knowing what's happening. And then after the mess is over, after the 48 hours or how many amount of hours are over and you sleep well after that experience, and then you kind of wake up

Then you maybe want to reflect on your hackathon experience and realize, hey, what was my role there? Where do I feel like I was an effective collaborator? Was it me helping with the brainstorming? Was it me, I don't know, doing the research on the side while people were like messingly prototyping things? What was your role?

influence on the project in the middle of this stressful 48 hours time-constrained experience. And then it will help you under the pressure. We sometimes thrive and we realize here are seems to be our naturally good sides that we tend to do when there are constraints, right? So under the pressure, sometimes personally me helped me to realize my strong sides. For example, I know that I'm a very analytical person. I would jump into looking for the data and validation just to find anything that would help me to communicate my ideas better.

Under depression, I'm like a resourceful person, I'll always find some information to leverage in the story. What is it for you? That's something that you have to figure out and we just mentioned a couple of things we can look into. And just to finish this on the high and kind of inspirational note, I want to also mention that most of my students, maybe one also can back me up, everyone I remember was transitioning to UX design in the last two or four years were people from other backgrounds, very radical, very interested backgrounds, be it medicine, legal system,

science and then juris prediction. Psychology, obviously, it's a very common one. But I do remember all those stories have a bunch of skills you can transfer and leverage in your searching for the job or transitioning to UX design. My favorite story is from people transitioning from science because turns out in science, you work with a lot of people and you arrive to an interesting insight, some conclusions that you can use as a designer, right? So think about those aspects of

that shaped you. And don't worry about your crazy background. Like Ioana said, even Uber driver has a lot to share with UX design, which is a very accommodating industry. So on that high note, I hope it helped you to understand where you should look for, what steps you can take in order to reflect.

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