Category Archives: Nadyne

Nadyne

the jerk matrix

There’s always a difficult colleague. When trying to understand how to work with that difficult colleague, I think of the jerk matrix.

The jerk matrix is something that I came up with a few years ago when I worked with a particular cluster of difficult colleagues. I realized that some knew that they were being difficult, but others didn’t. I further realized that some cared that they were being difficult, while others did not. The matrix helped me better understand the difference between them, and to come up with coping strategies.

Those who don’t care that they’re difficult are, simply put, assholes. The difference between knowing and not knowing is whether they’re an outright asshole or an oblivious asshole.

Most importantly, the jerk matrix helped me understand when someone is difficult but working on it. If they both know and care, they’re awkwardly improving. They’re on the road to recovering from being a difficult colleague. On the other hand, someone who cares but doesn’t know that they’re being difficult is simply oblivious. They could get on that road to recovering if they can find enough self-awareness to know when they’re being a jerk.

Another good use of the jerk matrix is if you have that group of difficult colleagues. If you map where they fall on this matrix, you might find that they cluster in one quadrant. In that case, you’ve identified a failure mode of your company or team. It’s worthwhile to consider whether there’s a cultural problem that causes people to become that difficult colleague, or whether the culture has something that makes it attractive to people who are already that difficult colleague.

career

the discovery problem in your career

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A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager’s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly true when you’re leading a team, the more that your success is measured in terms of others’ perceptions of you. You cannot wait for recognition to come to you. You have to tell others why you deserve recognition.

I know that this is not easy. It’s hard to know where to start. It’s sometimes hard to know when you’re being successful. It feels like getting people to understand the impact of your great work is taking away from you being able to do more great work. Not being able to concentrate on doing more great work makes you worry that you really are selling snake oil. But that’s not true. What you’re doing is enabling people to discover your great work and build on top of it. Help them understand why it’s great. Help them understand how it contributes to them doing great work.

In user experience, we know that one of the common challenges of any product or service is discoverability. I’ve experienced this many times. You get user feedback that says that the one way that you could make your product or service better is to do this thing really awesome. “But it’s already there! I spent months delivering that feature!” Not only is your user frustrated that they think they can’t do what they want to do, but also you’re frustrated that you spent all that time and energy developing the very feature that they need and they’re not actually using it. You’ve got a discoverability problem. You’ve got to figure out how to fix it so that your engineering effort isn’t wasted and your user can accomplish what they want to do. Fix your discoverability problem, and you’ll fix two different frustrations.

And it’s the same with your great work. It’s not enough to do great work. You’ve got to make it possible for other people to discover your great work, to understand it and how it’s a contribution, to be able to build on it. Don’t think of the time that you spend changing perceptions as a waste of time. Think of it as solving the discoverability problem in your career.

career, Grand Rounds

10 Lessons learned about job hunting

Joining Grand Rounds has been an educational experience in so many ways. In the 16 months that I’ve been here, I’ve interviewed more than 200 candidates across all levels of user experience, product management, and engineering. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about the hiring process that I want to share to help folks who are looking for a job.

As a result of all of these interviews and conversations with my colleagues about these interviews, I’m sharing my top lessons learned about looking for a new job.

  1. Looking for a new job is frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult. Find or create a support system as you look for your new role. You need folks who can hear your frustrations, give you feedback, and help you keep your morale up as you’re trying to find the right next role for you.
  2. Don’t treat the job description as a list of absolute requirements. Under the best of circumstances, it’s written to describe the most ideal candidate. There is no real human being who actually matches that entire list.  If you meet ~50% of the requirements and you think you might be interested in the company, apply for it. 
  3. Get feedback on your resume and LinkedIn profile. If you’re in design or product management where portfolios are common, get feedback on those too. There are a lot of different resources for resume feedback, such as professional groups and mentoring circles. Many of the professional Slacks that I’m on have channels for resume and portfolio feedback. If you’re still in college (or boot camp) or a recent graduate, your college might offer resume and portfolio reviews through their career center or alumni association.
  4. Have appropriate expectations for each part of the job searching process.  Cold applications to a job through LinkedIn or their careers website have the lowest rate of responses, whereas an internal referral often gets more attention.
  5. If you can find find someone in your network who works for a company you’re interested in, check in with them to tell you more about the company and the culture. They might be able to give you an internal referral, too.
  6. Practice your opener: what’s your short (~60 second) response to “so tell me about yourself”? Say it out loud. Preferably say it to an audience and get feedback about it, but at least say it out loud to yourself often enough that you feel comfortable saying it.  I usually start by writing it down so that I remember all the points I want to hit, then reading it out loud a few times. I edit it as I practice it. Then I give it to someone and get feedback. As I say it more, I learn how to riff on certain parts of it, depending on the context where I’m giving my opener.
  7. Take some time after an interview to reflect on your performance.  What went well?  What didn’t go well?  If you feel like you answered a question particularly well, jot down some notes about it so that you can reproduce that great answer in the future.  If you feel like you didn’t answer a question very well, come up with a better answer for it, and then practice saying it out loud. 
  8. … but keep yourself from spiralling into shame or frustration or worry or any of the other negative emotions associated with job hunting.  Don’t beat yourself up if you flub a question, or even flub a whole interview.  Interviewing is a skill.  You get better at skills through practice. Flubbing a single question in an interview doesn’t necessarily remove you from the running.  Flubbing a whole interview, as painful as it is, is probably a learning opportunity for you to determine what went awry and how you can prevent that from going awry in the future.
  9. The job interview is a two-way street. You are evaluating the company and the team to see if you want to work there. Make sure that you gather information to help you determine whether you want to work at that company, with that team, and for that manager.
  10. Finding a job is difficult in a normal situation. Finding a job during a worldwide recession is even harder because there is a much larger candidate pool. You have to find a way to keep your morale and self-esteem up through this process. Job hunting can test your resilience, so know some ways to help recharge yourself as you find the next great role for you.

Now that I’ve dusted off this blog, perhaps I can make some writing momentum and share more here!

Grand Rounds, Nadyne

new adventures

I have been frightfully remiss in updating my blog. As a result, I’m now eight months in to my new role and haven’t even said anything here about it.

In April 2019, I joined Grand Rounds as Head of Research. Grand Rounds is a healthcare startup on a mission to raise the standard of healthcare for everyone, everywhere. I’m responsible for knowing all there is to know about our members — which is to say, the people who use our services. I wrote a piece introducing service design on the Grand Rounds tech blog.

Let’s see if I can dust this blog off and do some more writing this year.

career, women

Systers at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

I am a long-time Syster, and I have attended and spoken at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing a few times before.  This year, I’m speaking again, and wanted to support my fellow Systers as well.  To that end, I have compiled a list of Systers who are speaking at GHC.  Come see us! (Last updated: 2017-10-03 13:02 PT)

Wednesday, 04 October 2017

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Engineer’s Journey: Choose Your Own Adventure
Panelists: Cindy Burns, Pi-Chuan Chang, Leor Chechik, Mary Dang, Nadyne Richmond
Panel discussion of engineering career paths and important decisions along the way

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Myth of the Unicorn: Perspectives of Native American Women in Computing
Speakers: Amanda Sharp, Kylie Bemis, Nicole Archambault, Squiggy Rubio, Sarah EchoHawk
These extraordinary women in the tech industry identify as members of indigenous tribes from across Northern America. They will discuss their experiences, what it means to be a unicorn— a “mythical” or “non-existent” figure in tech—and what the tech communities can do to increase support and visibility.

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater
Speakers: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

1:50-2:10pm
Interactive Media Research Presentations: Inverse Procedural Modeling for 3D Urban Models
Speaker: Ilke Demir

3:00-3:20pm
Demonstrating Value Presentation: Managing Up: Managing Your Manager with Compassion, Humor, and Data
Speaker: Steph Parkin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: Systers Celebrates 30 years Supporting Women in Computing
Panelists: Angel Tian, Danielle Cummings, Laura Downey, Neetu Jain, Dilma Da Silva

3:00-4:00pm
Workshop: Consciously Tackling Unconscious Bias
Speakers: Lilit Yenokyan, Amala Rangnekar, Saralee Kunlong

4:30-5:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater (repeat session)
Panelists: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

4:30-5:30pm
2017 Systers Pass-It-On Award Winners

Wednesday poster session, 1-4pm

Framework to Extract Context Vectors from Unstructured Data using Big Data Analytics
Presenter: Sarah Masud

Race against Troubleshooting: Predictive Maintenance for Data Protection
Presenter: Dhanashri Phadke

Thursday, 05 October 2017

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Why and How to Prepare for Hackathons?
Panelists: Bouchra Bouqata, Rose Robinson, Sana Odeh, Shaila Pervin, Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Virtual Humanity
Panelists: Erin Summers, Jenn Duong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni, Elisabeth Morant, Charity Everett
In this panel, industry experts will share knowledge building and creating virtual reality (VR) experiences, games, and tools centered around the human experience.

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Hello, It’s Me! Differentiating Yourself With a Multidimensional Career
Panelists: Jenna Blaha, Vidya Srinivasan, Kelly Hoey, Ilana Walder-Biesanz, Cassidy Lara Williams

11:30am-12:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

11:30am-5:30pm
OSD Code-a-thon for Humanity with Project Jupyter
Organizers: Carol Willing, Jamie Whitacre

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Get Out of Your Own Way!
Panelists: Mayoore S Jaiswal, Carolyn Rowland, Maybellin Burgos, Lilit Yenokyan, Lulu Li

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Social Impact as a Techie
Panelists: Sharon Lin, Yada Pruksachatkun, Daniella Cohen, Gwen Wong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni
This panel will tackle approaches to creating social impact with technology, from eliminating social stigma of ‘civic technology’ to merging product paradigms from tech startups and philanthropic work.

1:30-2:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:00-3:30pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner
Speaker: Amy Yin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: How Male Allies are Supporting Women in Computing through the Local Community
Panelists: Natasha Green, Anthony Park, Edwin Aoki, Evin Robinson

3:00-4:00pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:20-3:40pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

4:30-4:50pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner (repeat session)
Speaker: Amy Yin

4:50-5:10pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide (repeat session)
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

Friday, 06 October 2017

9:00-9:20am
Open Source Presentation: Getting Started with Your First Open Source Project
Speaker: Mandy Chan

9:00-10:00am
Panel: Highlight and Recognize Your Organization’’s ‘Hidden Figures’
Panelists: Tamara Nichols Helms, Mona Hudak, Rachel Shanava, Larry Colagiovanni, Yolanda Lee Conyers

9:00-10:00am
Workshop: A Hands-on Dive into Making Sense of Real World Data
Speakers: Xun Tang, Jamie Whitacre

9:00-11:00am
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

9:00am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: From Passion to Product: How a LEGO Fan Learns Data Science
Presenters: Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: Importance of Internships and Strategy to Get One!
Presenters: Deveeshree Nayak, Mayoore S Jaiswal

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: You were hired to be you!
Presenter: Angela Choo

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: How to Successfully Apply to Graduate School
Presenter: Laura Dillon

10:30-11:30am
Workshop: Designing Intelligent Hardware: A Day at Nest
Presenters: Jung Hong, Lulu Li, Soja-Marie Morgens
Hands-on experience of the decisions we make to build IoT intelligent hardware with close integration of cloud services, data pipelines and algorithms.

10:30-10:50am
Security Operations Presentations: When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Network-packets and System-logs
Speaker: Awalin Sopan

11:10-11:30am
Finding Your Fit Presentation: Finding the Right Fit: Discovering a Job You Love
Speaker: Kelly Irish

noon-12:20pm
Putting Yourself First Presentation: A Stay-at-home Mom’’s Guide to Continuing Your Career
Speaker: Adina Halter

noon-1:00pm
Panel: From Here to Internity
Panelists: Melissa Ann Borza, Kelly Irish, Marissa Alexandra Schuchat, Jenna Blumenthal, Chang Liu
Panel discussion of current/former interns and hiring managers on how to succeed in your internship

noon-1pm
Panel: Wonder Woman and the Amazonians: Build Your Local Community
Panelists: Bushra Anjum, Abigail Shriver, Melissa Greenlee, Maigh Houlihan, Marian Tesfamichael

noon-1pm
Workshop: Getting the Glass to Half-Full: Managing Your Moods at Work
Presenters: Mamta Suri, Beth Budwig, Harika Adivikolanu
Are you stressed out or negative at work? Do you react to situations at work impulsively? Being positive and well-balanced is a learnable skill. In this workshop, you will practice mindfulness and learn to apply techniques from Cognitive and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to the workplace. You can use these tools daily to help manage your stress, stay calm, and improve your mood.

12:30-2:30pm
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back (repeat session)
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

women

why your conference should have a code of conduct

I’ve been asked many times why a conference needs a code of conduct.  Depending on who’s asking, and whether I feel like taking on such basic education for a conference organizer, I give many answers: to increase attendance of women, to have a documented procedure of how to handle a situation, to do the right thing.

There have been many articles written about the problem of harassment at conferences.  The most recent to cross my radar quotes Leigh Honeywell:

“I’ve had enough crappy experiences at security conferences that I no longer attend them alone,” said Leigh Honeywell, a security engineer.

And that, conference organizers, is why you should have a code of conduct.  When people have bad experiences at your conference, they stop attending it.  When women have bad experiences at your conference, they stop attending it if they can’t come up with a way to guarantee their safety.  And when we have bad experiences at your conference, we talk about it.  I’ve avoided attending conferences because I’ve heard about bad behavior that goes unchecked.

If you don’t have a code of conduct that you enforce, you’re losing attendees.  It’s in the best interest of your conference, including best financial interest, to have a code of conduct.

Apple, software

the state of the independent developer

I’ve been shipping software in various roles since I was an undergraduate student in 1997.  I’ve done tech support, technical writing, software development, and user experience in the intervening years.  I’ve shipped code in at least 8 languages, including Smalltalk and VAX assembler.  I’ve contributed to and helped organize several tech conferences, ranging from programming languages to women in tech.

Although I had been a Mac user for some time, I officially became a part of the Mac developer community in 2005 when I joined Microsoft to work on Office:Mac.  I was excited to join that team.  Not only did I finally get to work on Mac applications (and with people who had been doing Apple development for 20+ years!), I was part of a vibrant community.  I attended MWSF first as an engineer, and later as a speaker.  I met many people who have long since crossed the line from fellow developer to friend.

I was a part of the community for the transition from PowerPC to Intel and the corresponding transition from CodeWarrior to Xcode.  I was part of the community when the iPhone was announced.  I was a part of the community when iOS really took off, and when being able to attend WWDC was not just a matter of getting employer approval but also the luck of a draw to get one of the relatively scant handful of available tickets.

When I started working on Office:Mac, I observed that there weren’t a lot of large Mac development shops outside of Apple.  There was the Office:Mac team of ~250 at the time, and Adobe too, although I didn’t have a good estimate of how many Mac developers they had.  Then there were smaller teams, like Quicken for Mac, VMware Fusion, and The OmniGroup.  And then there were a lot of very small shops and single developers releasing great products.  One of the challenges that the Office:Mac team had when I was there was the dearth of software engineers who had both Mac development experience and very large codebase development experience.

Both the platform and the development community have evolved, resulting in significant impacts to independent developers.  As is obvious from the near-impossibility of getting WWDC tickets since it first sold out in 2008, the Apple developer community has seen an unprecedented influx.  Companies large and small have added iOS developers.  Independent developers have flocked to the platform.

A major point of change has been the App Store, first for iOS and then for Mac.  The proliferation of apps has made app differentiation difficult for developers, whether they are a large company or an independent developer with a great idea.  To attempt to gain users, not only has there been a proliferation of apps, but those apps are  likely to be free.

Free apps are, of course, not free.  Apps require developers, and developers have bills and a desire to keep paying those bills.  For a large company, the cost of developing a free or inexpensive iOS app is often absorbed in the costs of developing other products that are well-funded and that the iOS application supports.  The App Store has evolved other methods for developers to make a living, including advertisements and in-app purchases.

Which leads us to the state of the independent developer.  It was possible to be an independent developer and make a decent living at it.  Some developers, through a combination of skill and luck, found themselves doing more than just making a decent living.  As the price tag of applications has trended towards zero, it’s been ever-harder for an independent developer to be only an independent developer.  A good idea for an app, the skill to develop a great app, and a sprinkling of luck is no longer sufficient to make a decent living.

Independent developers often have to diversify their income. They might have to keep their day job and work on their app on evenings and weekends.  They might have to become writers or podcasters to ensure that they have sufficient income.  They might become developers in a corporate environment, taking advantage of all of the iOS developer opportunities that are available now.

I was overjoyed to see Samantha Bielefeld‘s take on the state of independent developers as she considered Marco Arment‘s move to make his iOS app Overcast available for free with an optional patronage model.  Her point that he is able to try this as a result of his unique position in the community and his other income streams is one that resonated with me.  If a well-known and well-regarded developer isn’t reaching an audience with a well-designed and inexpensive iOS app and thus chooses to make it free, what about everyone else?

It’s distressing to see a well-known independent developer seemingly throw in the towel on independent development.  It’s doubly distressing when that independent developer doesn’t seem to understand that the model of patronage isn’t necessarily one that will work for independent developers at all, let alone ones who don’t have thousands of Twitter followers or close friendships with well-placed members of the tech press.

What is the state of our community?  Are our options limited to either working for a big company or hoping that ad revenue continues to limp along?  How do we have a vibrant community of world-class apps and developers creating those apps if our users have become conditioned to free apps?

These are important questions for us.  Attacking Bielefeld for asking important questions is the wrong thing to do.  For all of us, whether we’re in big companies or independent developers, we have to consider our place in the community and how we’re supporting both ourselves and the long-term success of the community.  I’m hard-pressed to see how this constant drive to zero is going to ensure our long-term success.  We must stop shying away from important and difficult questions, and we must stop attacking anyone who questions this status quo.

healthcare UX, user experience

the user experience of healthcare

I’ve worked for software companies for my professional life.  Coming to work in healthcare has been eye-opening for me.

The user experience is … well, let’s be generous.  Let’s call it “challenging”.  And it’s challenging for, as far as I can tell, everyone involved.

It’s challenging for the patients themselves.  Getting care is no simple matter.  There are decisions to be made, providers to find, waiting lists lurking.  There are healthcare and wellness apps which promise to help the patient in some way.

It’s challenging for healthcare providers.  We’ve seen an explosion in everything related to healthcare.  There is an ever-increasing amount of data.  Some of it is specific to a single visit with a patient, such as the results from blood work or an MRI.  All of this data, not to mention whatever notes are jotted down or diagnoses given or prescriptions filled, are aggregated into a patient’s healthcare record.  Any given patient likely has multiple of these health records, even if you only consider that a patient probably has a different health record with their primary care physician than they do with their dentist.  Keeping up with all of this data is difficult and time-consuming.

And that’s just the medical side of it.  We haven’t touched the administrative side of matters, which involves the patients, family members or other caregivers, the patient’s insurance company 1, administrators and office staff at the healthcare provider, and so much more.

All of this adds up to a bad user experience.  Some of the bad user experience is just annoying.  But, since we’re talking about healthcare, a bad user experience has risks far beyond annoyance.  A patient could choose to delay treatment because navigating the system just to get an appointment is too difficult and time-consuming.  A clinician could miss an important detail in the patient’s health record and prescribe the wrong treatment.  A data-entry clerk in the doctor’s office could make a typo that results in the patient’s insurance company rejecting the claim.

I’m sure you can imagine that I read “Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad” with much interest, and I agree with almost every word of it.  The only point that I disagree with is that it’s not enough for physicians to be unable to live without a given technology.  There are many technologies that physicians today can’t live without.  Whatever technology is part of getting the user experience of healthcare right has to make the whole process better for everyone, not just the physician.  If my doctor thinks the technology that gives her my health record is something that she can’t live without, that is almost useless to me if she refers me to another doctor who can’t access that health record.

There are too many moving parts in the system, too many stakeholders.  It’s not sufficient to get it right for just one of them.  We’ll probably get there in a piecemeal fashion, improving experiences for different sets of stakeholders at different points.  We can’t stop because we’ve gotten it right for the physician.  The user experience of healthcare goes far beyond the physician.

  1.  I’m being lazy here, there’s also public payers like Medicare or the Veterans’ Administration. ↩
Genentech, user experience

finding my people

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the US Digital Service.  I got a last-minute invitation to attend, I didn’t have any plans, I didn’t really know what the US Digital Service is but I rarely get email with the seal of the White House on it, so I figured I might as well attend.  It was so very much worth my time.  I learned that USDS are my people, which is something that I’ve been kind of lacking at Genentech.

My new role is pretty awesome.  I work on Genentech Access Solutions, which is a program where we help patients get access to the medicines that they need.  At first gloss, this doesn’t necessarily sound like it’s a good fit for someone with a UX background.  It’s actually a perfect fit.  We’ve got people who understand how to deliver great services to patients and their healthcare providers.  We’ve got people who understand how to run such services internally.  We’ve got an IT team to deliver the software that’s necessary for patients, their healthcare providers, and our internal team.  What they don’t have is an understanding of the overall user experience for each of the different types of people who use our system and services.

On the other hand, I don’t exactly fit in with my direct team, who are all very focused on business and operations.  I don’t exactly fit in with the IT team either, who are very focused on delivering a solution to my team.  I’m the one who’s tasked with understanding the experience of everyone who comes in contact with our system and services, and ensuring that we’re delivering the right user experience for each of those groups.  Patients have different needs than healthcare providers, and both have different needs to our various internal users.

From a UX perspective, this all makes perfect sense.  As a UX professional, it’s my job to understand not just what people do (or don’t do) with our software and services, but the context in which they do it.  I have to understand what they’re really trying to accomplish, and what else they’re using to accomplish it, what works and what doesn’t about their current method, and design a solution that meets their needs.

I’ve spent my time so far getting up-to-speed on Genentech and Access Solutions: what we do, how we do it, who interacts with us.  I’ve spent some time in the offices of healthcare providers, talking to everyone from doctors to nurses to office managers to front office staff to billing managers.  I’ve learned so much in the past few months.  It’s been amazing.  And I’ve shared what I’ve learnt with my team, to help them see our services through the lens of UX, and to consider ways we can better meet the needs of our patients.

I get to use my UX skills in a way that we often don’t get to.  It’s been fun, it’s been eye-opening, and I have high hopes for the future.  But I also don’t have a built-in UX community that I can turn to.

And then I got to meet the US Digital Service team and hear about projects that they’ve worked on, and suddenly I realized that I’d found my people.  They understood the challenges of doing UX in an organization that hasn’t exactly considered UX before.  They understood the challenges of doing UX in an organization that has deep ties to processes and technology that are often considered outdated elsewhere.  They understood the challenges of communicating about UX in an organization that knows they’re missing something but isn’t quite sure what it is. And they understood how deeply satisfying it is to improve the UX of something that is used by people not because they want to, but because they have a very different driver behind their usage.

There are other UX people out there who are trying to do the same thing that I’m doing.  It was a great feeling.  I’ve already had coffee with a couple of people that I met that night, and it was so exciting to have found my community again.  Thank you, US Digital Service.  You’re doing awesome work.  I can’t wait to share with you the results of what I’ve been doing.