#TeamTuesdays: How Past Professional Experiences Led Us to UX!
There are so many talented professionals on our X Team at Verizon Connect, constantly working to better our user experiences! Our team recently had a conversation about what brought us to this work. Last week, Iris Barrera, UXC and Sarah Dennis shared how their formative experiences have shaped their UX work. Read the article, How Family and Culture Shape Our Practice, here!
This week, we are diving in with Paul Boshears, PhD , Stephen Doerfler, Ph.D. , and Clara Villa to chat about how their past professional experiences in other spheres led to interesting and unique paths to UX!
Meet Paul!
Check out Paul Boshears on LinkedIn!
“Full disclosure: I didn’t know UX was a thing until the summer before I was working as a UX-er,” Paul stated. “Somebody in my network was really patient with me and let me sort of blabber on about this bizarre career that I’d had; I’ve got an extensive collection of hair nets and name tags in my CV, and this person was listening to me and nodding and going, ‘Oh, OK, you know, you might be interested in…’”
Paul credits discussions like these within the robust UX network in Atlanta, Georgia to helping him find his role today. “I was really shocked because I’d been professoring at universities in the area. It’s a really strange industry. Less than 3% of the population have a PhD, and that’s just table stakes to get a job here in the US.” Paul further reflected on academia and the stresses that the publish-or-perish tone in academia can bring. This guided him toward networking with others in order to find a better fit in industry.
Meet Stephen!
Check out Stephen Doerfler on LinkedIn!
Stephen Doerfler, PhD experienced a similar discovery into the field. “I initially wanted to go down the teacher-education route,” Stephen shared, “and in university, I learned about all the opportunities in research and academia. That’s when the imposter syndrome started kicking in. Being a research assistant as an undergraduate for a big project, for a big lab, that’s going to be published in scientific articles, and then applying for graduate school and getting in, and then, in the first semester, wondering, OK, they’re gonna figure out I don’t belong here.”
Imposter syndrome has always been a topic of discussion within UX, perhaps because of how multidisciplinary UX truly is – there is no one standard of excellence, but many informed frameworks of how to provide excellent user experiences. But Paul and Stephen are shining examples of how being open to opportunities plus the openness of UX as a discipline led to perfect fits in industry.
We as a research team have reflected often on how we use the same muscles to do similar work. “I keep finding that my project management documentation reminds me of my class syllabi,” Paul recently shared, with his signature chuckle. And his reflection rings very true. Team management is essentially classroom management. The creation of meeting agendas and project plans feels very similar to the work done to create courses, exam schedules, and project due dates. Critical thinking skills are the heart of foundational research practices. Though our areas of expertise may differ, the overlap in these particular skill sets really sold UX as a home for Paul and Stephen. “A lot of us [on the team] actually come from that academia background,” Stephen reflected.
Meet Clara!
Check out Clara Villa on LinkedIn!
Clara Villa, a service designer on our X team, echoed this notion. She likens this to Slumdog Millionaire and the journey that the main character, Jamal, goes through. “If you have watched that movie, the way that Jamal wins the program is from all the experiences he had in his life. Experience gives you the next steps that you need to do. Everything that you learn in your life, you’re going to put into practice. This is exactly what is happening to me right now.”
As fate would have it, Clara’s recent projects have had close collaborations with marketing, and after having had first-hand experience in event and wedding planning, as well as marketing, she is uniquely able to understand and connect with her stakeholders.
Learn More About Their Work!
Just as with past life experiences, as examined in part one of this series, past career experiences have also helped members of our team hone their crafts and share their skills in new ways within the UX community.
Paul's Mentorship
Just like the Atlanta UX mentors who offered guidance to Paul in his early days, Paul now provides mentorship to UX up-and-comers through the ADP mentorship program. Paul has run over 200 mentorship sessions – just check out his ADPList page! And he has this to say about the ADP experience:
“It’s been really lovely. I schedule an hour or two 30-minute sessions every week on Fridays, and it’s the coolest way to end the work week. I really look forward to those conversations. I get to meet people trying to make a life-changing decision, like what we’re doing, and it’s such a privileged position to be in, to talk with somebody thinking about changing their life.”
Gain insights from Paul's ADPList work!
Funnily enough, though, Paul also shared, “I don’t really love the word ‘mentor’. One of the things I loved about joining this team is that I had some really wonderful conversations about level-setting and getting some perspective, having come from such a weird industry prior to this, and seeing our leaders create a more articulated career path.” Paul gave credence to a particularly resonant moment from our very own Alicia Nachman!
He reflected, "During a conversation about creating that career path, a teammate said, 'You’re talking about these years of experience, but you’re not gonna count my years working screen printing t-shirts, right?' And Alicia said, 'Well, of course I would. That was professional experience that informs how you act today.' And it was like being struck by a lightning bolt. I appreciated that Alicia said that because prior to then, I had been hearing recruiters asking, 'Do you have 15 years of UX Research experience?' And I thought, 'Did you even call it UX Research 15 years ago?'”
Upon hearing Paul share this reflection, I found myself feeling so grateful for leaders who see us as full people, and who value the formative experiences that we've had!
Stephen's Thought Leadership
Stephen shared how a genuine and empathetic culture on our team, and at the core of UX as a practice, has also helped him in his own evolution. “I like giving talks. I like teaching. I like sharing back with the community.” These are aspects of the world of academia that Stephen finds very energizing, and he continues pouring that energy into opportunities in industry. Stephen shared that he chose to take inspiration from academia and start submitting talk ideas:
About a year and a half ago, UserTesting invited me to a panel discussion, and during their most recent conference, UserTesting invited me to give a talk about mixed methods persona creation using quantitative clustering. And I figured, best case scenario, they accept me, worst case scenario, y’know, they say, (laughs) "Why are you sending this?" But it’s something I’ve just really enjoyed doing. It helps to share back to the community. It helps me get new ideas as well, share their questions, share their feedback, share their own experiences.
Stephen has definitely made an impact by sharing his creativity! Check out Stephen’s panel participation on personalization and curation in media and entertainment, and his comments on digital personalization.
Also, reach out to Stephen on notes from UserTesting 's conference presentation, Mixed-methods persona creation: Add quantitative clustering to improve accuracy!
Learn more about Stephen's approach to quantitative UX research!
As previously mentioned, and shown here, there is a lot to value from a UX teammate that has a background in traditional academia! We do often say that project management is essentially classroom management. We from academia know how to create syllabi, set due dates, scope work, change plans according to the course of a project, and assess value and impact. We also bring with us very technical and specialized skill sets, like Stephen has showcased here in his employment of factor analyses and other inferential statistical modeling. (More on that in upcoming #TeamTuesdays posts!) It's always beneficial when brilliant minds can come together!
Clara's Connections and Collaborations
Clara shared a similar passion for connecting with others in the field. “I really like participating in meetups. I tried to find ones particularly related to service design. My mentor pushed me to contact and connect people, and I realized that many other service designers also wanted to connect.”
Clara noticed that geographic location and time zones were really hard to manage the connections she wanted to forge. In addition to that, she was facing the lingering obstacles of the Covid shutdown. “I wanted to have a coffee chat with people in real life because it was right after the pandemic,” she shared. “What I realized is that I was feeling a little bit isolated. I know that I have my lovely service design team, but I’m the only one in Dublin, and sometimes you need a peer in the same time zone.”
After slowly connecting with people, Clara came to a realization:
I found out that I wasn’t the only one in Ireland who was feeling isolated. This happens with other service designers, especially those working in-house. It’s a new way of thinking, a new market, so usually companies only have one service designer. I started with a service design coffee chat. I met a guy who was part of Service Design Ireland before. He asked me to join the team and lead the Service Design meetings in Ireland.
This was a perfect opportunity for Clara and her colleague, as events and connections had slowed over the lockdown, and Clara could bring her past event planning and marketing expertise to more than her current work projects, expanding to meet the needs of many service designers like herself who were craving connection. “There was a community there, but it was quiet,” she shared. “This would bring more people together, energizing the community.”
Check out more from Service Design Ireland on LinkedIn!
From here, Clara decided to take this on as an interesting and exciting experiment. “What if I posted a meetup invitation online?” she wondered. “Let’s see if we have any responses. So at first, there were two people, but then it turned out to be twelve.”
Clara’s work has since grown into more events for service designers to be more supportive, share knowledge from day-to-day work, and also serve as a way to promote service design throughout industry. “The good thing about service design in Ireland right now is that the government is going to be implementing it; we’re actually going to be running a public service design event,” she stated. This mirrors recent efforts to promote service design in the UK. “I believe public service is an area that needs more service design. We really need to provide basic service design in our day-to-day life.” Click here if you’d like to learn more about Clara’s work with Service Design Ireland!
Start With Love!
Finally, Paul shared a touching moment, brought on by Alicia Nachman and our previous director of UX, Dónal O Mahony. Paul shared:
They both said that you really do want to come from a place of love, which I was not at all prepared to hear. You genuinely come from that space, and so it’s made doing that stuff on ADPList natural and seamless. I really want to meet with people and help people going through a tough time, and I’m grateful to everyone on the team for cultivating this culture.
This culture of sharing and connection is something that makes Verizon Connect’s X Team shine. I am so inspired by the members of the team who took part in this panel, the leaders who have guided them along the way, and our team as a whole. It’s a remarkable thing to see the difference that genuineness, empathy, creativity, and selflessness make in people’s lives, and we’re grateful to get to bring that value to Verizon Connect every day.