News

On Wednesday 9 June 2021, we had our third Women in UX online meet-up sponsored by Askable.

Our program was led by 5 women talking about their careers in Human-Centred Design, and how the path they took to get there.

First up was Kate Kieran who works for HBF Health in Perth. Kate took us on her journey from an art student to working in a call centre to business analyst to UX researcher.

Key highlights included:

• Kate made frequent suggestions on improving the information for the call centre staff, which resulted in an internal promotion to just focus on the content.
• The  ‘ah-ha’ moment attending Nielsen Norman Group training by chance; there was a spare ticket, which brought UX to her attention and changed the way she thought about her career.
• Using her used her skills to focus on app development, and in particular, working out how to test remotely. Her efforts paid off as it is the top health insurance app in Australia, made that way by over 10 rounds of usability testing and 290 participants. 

Next up was Michelle Bell, a Customer Experience and Innovation Manager for Uniting Carer QLD. Michelle’s journey into design was not straightforward. She started in marketing and multimedia, with marketing roles in architecture, real estate, and government. 

It was after her maternity leave that she realised that her skills could be used for more than sending out EDMs. After mat leave, she moved into a role as a Change and CX manager within the same organisation. She realised that her design skills could be applied away from digital marketing and into the way the business operates and is engaged with customers. 

Key learnings from Michelle included: 

• Turn your weakness into superpowers – her superpower is empathy
• Focus on a growth mindset; learn from your successes and failures. Treat failure lightly, use logic to understand what went wrong and then apply the learnings
• Do self-directed learning to get to the next place in your career – keep reading, listening and learning 

Our third presenter was Rachel Mesler. Rachel took us through her journey of design and data visualisation student to games designer via the medium of a game. It engaged the audience with the twists and turns of the game and every games decision point mirroring Rachels own’s career path.

The key decisions for Rachel were:

• Deciding to incorporate data visualisation, design and user experience into her degree
• Using her 12-week internship as a way to learn about the industry and start her network by finding her mentor 
• Created multiple portfolios tailored to each opportunity that presented
• Looked at three opportunities – each had a different offering -  salary, flexibility and company culture. She chose work culture as it met her values. It was a grad program with Head Full of Heart.
• Keep developing her network, including meet-ups as a way to find interesting work and grow her skills. At one event, she met Nathan who was building a UX team at Mighty Kingdom where she started as a UX Designer in April.

Amanda Ralph from Melbourne works for Australian Super. She talked about being a Product Manager who loves and does UX, focusing on developing and designing products that customers love and value.

Like many people, Amanda fell into product management when she needed to manage the Internet as a product in Fiji.

Her key learnings included: 

• Identify the customer value to create a product that customers want and love 
• Use opportunities like the pandemic to take a big leap that the business may not have considered before and rapidly prototype and test to get the right combination of business and customer value
• Don’t get hung up on status and the job title, but focus on what will add the sprinkles to the vanilla ice cream of your role, being open to whatever opportunities come your way.

Lastly, Itiah Thomas talked about her journey from commercial construction project management to becoming a UX consultant.

Itiah talked about her five-step framework for making the change into design.

1. Reflect - Explore your life goals, skills and strengths to find the right role for you 
2. Research  - both online and offline research, building a 'people of influence network' as early as possible in your career 
3. Refining – display yourself in a way that attracts opportunities for your new career, making use of the network 
4. Run – create and execute a plan of attack. Be methodical in the way you track and respond to opportunities  and be ready to negotiate by knowing your value
5. Results – getting the job and stabilising your career by continuing the networking in your organisation outside of your direct reporting line 

It was wonderful to hear from five women at different stages of their career who were willing to share their journeys, lessons learnt and advice for the audience.

A big thank you to Askable for sponsoring and UX Australia for hosting.

Our next virtual  Women in UX meetup is hosted on Wednesday, July 14. Registration is free, sign up now!

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This news article is written by our Women in UX partner Mags Hanley. You can connect with Mags on Linkedin.