How a Live Online UX Course Gave Me Practical Experience
Growing pains
The great Scottish philosopher Bertrand Russell famously said, “the fundamental cause of trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
No, I’m not jumping into a self-congratulatory essay about how intelligent I am. Unfortunately, it’s quite the opposite.
I am saying that when I first started working in UX design a couple of years ago, I felt great about my skills and knowledge of the field. I was reading John Maeda and Golden Krishna and generally felt like a UX hotshot who could take on the design world in one fatal swoop.
I was going around emailing massive tech companies to tell them about usability issues I’d found in their products. I guess I thought I was some sort of UX freedom fighter, William Lidwell’s protégé in the making.
Yes, for a brief honeymoon period, I was the cocksure wally that Bertrand Russell describes.
Then it hit me. Like a tonne of bricks.
I was shot down from my deluded ivory tower, after realising that I knew a lot of tools and methods, but lacked the practical experience to know how and when to apply them. The plant-based butter was spread thinly so to speak. My weakest point was probably UX research.
It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect - I overestimated my abilities, because there had been too few occasions where I could see the qualitative difference between my UX research abilities and those of other designers.
I work for an early-stage startup and the precious hours I have each month for user research are already a hard sell to my team. I really can’t afford to f**k things up.
So I did some research on online courses and came across The Fountain Institute. I’d followed them a while back on Linkedin and dropped into one of their design talks: ‘Designing Career Growth’ with Dee Scarano, which I enjoyed.
This was a springboard into the world of the Fountain Institute and led me to reading their blog posts online and their Youtube Channel.
I signed up for the weekly newsletter and was refreshed by the no-nonsense, actionable UX content sent by the course leaders Jeff and Hannah. I was already gaining really helpful pointers on juicy topics like avoiding “The Delivery Trap,” and the benefits of being a UX generalist.
After browsing the courses, the curriculum for the new Continuous UX Research course stood out to me so I signed up for the February 2022 cohort.
Why? Because the course promised to:
Help kickstart my research habits - I wanted to be more systematised in conducting user research, in order to shoehorn it into my busy work schedule.
Help build customer expertise - Up until now, I was only familiar with traditional project-based research methods. I needed a more sustainable way to connect with users weekly and know their pain points.
Help me better handle data - I wanted to be more systematic in how I tackled data. (Especially when working with large swathes of qualitative material collected by someone else!)
Help me step back and see the bigger picture - Above all I wanted to regroup and scrutinise my current methods to better serve our users.
First impressions
I started the remote course with a mild case of COVID-19, and frankly was not feeling massively enthusiastic for the first session. However I was pleasantly surprised at how casual and down-to-earth Hannah and Jeff were, and indeed my fellow students. It was a relaxed vibe from the very beginning.
It instantly felt like I was somewhere in contrast to some other online learning experiences I have had, immediately the environment felt intimate and fun. It has personality, something, to be honest, I had never really come across in an online course.
The graphics are thoughtfully handmade and the music policy from the start was top banana! (think Jai Paul, The Durutti Column…)
Week 1 of Continuous UX Research: Initiate
The first session (Monday 1800 CET time) consisted of some fun icebreaker sessions in disco breakout rooms. It was just the right amount of fooling around to loosen up and get comfy.
Jeff then gave a brief run-through of the course structure, which seemed clear and logical. This was also outlined in the disco curriculum overview, which we got access to just before the course started. (We used Miro, Zoom and Disco from the start and these came to be the main tools of the course.)
After that, we focused on some of the fundamental differences in the methods, facilitators, and outputs of continuous and traditional UX research methods. This was really handy in understanding the distinction and set the scene for the week.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I felt quite empowered even after that first session at the apparent ease of integrating weekly customer interviews. Is it really that easy? (I was falling back into cocksure wally mode - uh oh.)
Above all I found the first session accessible and practical, using meticulously curated material delivered in a relaxed setting. The assignment was given to us on the third weekly session on Thursday night. I did it all on Sunday afternoon and it only took an hour or so.
In retrospect, it was necessary for me to do this and actually fully absorb the week’s materials. So rather than being an interruption to my usual Sunday afternoon, it actually just felt like a natural refresher of the week. So far so good.
Week 2 of Continuous UX Research: Execute
On Monday we just did an hour-long session and went through each of our weekend assignments. This was all done in a workshop setting, so each student could raise their zoom hand and walk the rest of the class through their work (nobody was put on the spot to share though, which I thought was a nice touch).
There was a lot of variance between each of our research cards, but Jeff and Hannah seem to strike a perfect balance between being warm, supportive and challenging us to get stuck in.
Tuesday we went into the different types of desk research. Like a lot of the stuff we covered, it was a term I was familiar with, but if someone had grilled me on it prior to the course I would have probably started talking about a trip to IKEA. I got up close and personal with the method, and learnt how to apply it in real time to my own company on my company’s own terms.
I was starting to find it pretty wild that the course seemed so uncannily tailored to my needs as a working product designer early in my career. I just wasn’t expecting that. It felt like I was avoiding months of “learning the hard way” in a few carefully curated hours of tuition.
I was starting to feel like I could confidently apply my learnings and feel more attuned to my users.
For the first time, I was pushing myself to stay in the problem space, and not jumping to solutions. There was even a neat ‘Solution Parking’ area on our Miro boards - which was very memorable!
It’s important to say though, this course isn’t all applied. I enjoy tackling theory so was happy to see slides dedicated solely to theory and references to psychological concepts peppered through the material, e.g. recency bias.
Jeff clearly has a deep affection for certain authors in the field. He talks a lot about Jeff Gothelf and Teresa Torres especially! Most topics we covered were backed up with sources and further reading, and different perspectives were supported and welcomed.
Hannah and Jeff seem to have really reflected on the digestibility of the curriculum, particularly one day when they referred to the ‘illusion of mastery’ and that repetition and practice would likely be required to actually retain this info.
The assignment in week 2 was to conduct interviews, and create a data wall in Miro with it - which again seemed like a logical way of ending the week. It was good to feel a little bit of pressure with this while it was still fresh in my mind, and another step closer to having a project to present to my colleagues at the end of the course.
Week 3 of Continuous UX Research: Facilitate
By now I had gotten used to the Monday hour-long session, and was really looking forward to seeing how everyone else had managed their assignments.
There were some serious data walls to be seen, and we each shared our experiences creating them, and discussed methods and insights (having discussed different interpretations of the meaning of “insight” earlier on).
For the rest of the week we tackled the gap between research and design and learnt more about the theory behind this grey area.
Again, it was refreshing to grapple with our conceptions of different related ideas. The theory on collaborative synthesis was super helpful in framing this misunderstood area and helped me step back and reflect on the process of understanding research and applying it to design - one of the reasons I signed up.
We then tackled some methods and strategies from the product management world to help visualise opportunities. The assignment was to apply these methods to our own gathered research from the customer interviews, which proved to be a nice culmination of learnings - I was looking forward to sharing it with my company.
Overall thoughts
The UX of the course is on point. It feels authentic, self-aware and created solely with students in mind.
Important to mention that Hannah and Jeff both stay after class each session to answer any questions, which felt like a nice touch.
The course seems to distill vast swathes of literature into atomic nuggets for designers-after-work to consume in bitesize portions.
But that doesn’t mean further reading isn’t highly encouraged, it is.
Although this course requires a prior knowledge of basic UX terminology and processes, everything felt really accessible. Designers, product people and founders could all gain something from it without feeling out of their depth.
It’s also just nice to work collaboratively with others in this setting. I found that really rewarding - one student was working as a service designer and another as an LX designer, so it was helpful to see their respective approaches to the work, and be in an environment where we could interact casually.
From my perspective, this course ticks all the boxes and it’s great to be a part of the Fountain Institute community. I’ve already attended one ‘happy hour’ event which was a great laugh.
Above all, Continuous UX Research felt fresh, authentic (not just the music policy) and really relevant. There wasn’t a moment of stagnation or questioning whether this was perhaps outdated material.
Thanks, Hannah and Jeff!
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