A retrospective of the start of my professional journey as a UX Designer at QS Quacquarelli Symonds.
It was somewhere in February 2021. The virus had us all locked down for more than a year now. The Real Estate industry had crashed and taken down with it my adolescent dream of pursuing a career as an Architect. Painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel hanging upside down and dying off cancer from the chemicals in the pigments which dripped on you in the process sounds very romantic and patronising but I am not really Michelangelo. Also the whole situation with the Virus did not particularly offer me a Florence to start another Renaissance. Tech had taken over the world by a storm and the virus just fuelled the wildfire. When the entire human population of planet Earth had successfully resorted to either making or using digital solutions for problems they never knew they had, they ended up creating more problems than they ever successfully solved. Just like they always do. Bless them. Humans. Perhaps, having spent last seven years trying to solve problems arising at the interface of humans and their physical space by architectural design, it felt natural to empathise with these newer problems arising at the interface of humans and the digital space. Design (ever evolving in its very principle) now delved beyond the 3Ds and structural constraints, into the abstract dimensions of human factors and behavioural psychology. As technology became experience driven and the next billion users got hooked on to their devices for longer hours everyday, I sought to broaden my perspective of solving problems by design. Seeking a canvas not bound by gravity or fluctuations in national economies, I started designing for the users of the World Wide Web.
I had been actively seeking out an opportunity for a month now. Desperate times called for desperate measures and had made me apply to 65 job openings in that time. With an expected < 10% conversion rate, now lay in front of me the mammoth task of five design challenges in the next five days. One fine morning before my sprint week, I received a text message from Mr. Chandra, a professional tech recruiter based out of New Delhi who found my profile befitting for an opportunity as a UX Designer at an education management MNC called QS Quacquarelli Symonds, headquartered in London, UK . Of course, I knew ‘QS World Rankings’ from my innumerable attempts at researching top ranked universities and programs abroad while working as an Architect. He inquired if I would be willing to appear for an online aptitude test for the shortlisting process. I took the test at 11:30 pm on the Friday night of my sprint week after having sent out five design problems in the last 5 days.
I had never applied to QS myself and all the effort I did was to comply on time without taking that Friday evening off. I never got shortlisted for the five design challenges but I did clear the aptitude test. Opportunity strikes, you just have to be there to grab it when it does. Then went on a couple of rounds of technical and HR interviews, another design challenge, some negotiations and Voila! There was my job offer as a User Experience Designer at QS. I had found my canvas and it came with tens of millions of eyes on it.
This piece of writing is a retrospective of my professional journey during the first three months as a User Experience Designer at QS Quacquarelli Symonds. It follows the Sprint Retrospective framework we use in our UX team and clusters recollections under four buckets of Learned, Liked, Lacked and Longed For.
Learned
Learning is an ongoing process in the creative fields. At QS it started with a knowledge download on new work methodologies, process maps and brand guidelines in the form of documents and videos on existing products and file structures. The spectrum of learnings span from the abstract domain of user research with an international user base of potential students to absolute technical details of understanding engagement by events tracking, advanced page analytics and user session recordings. It includes understanding and optimising the information architecture and delivering data driven designs to account for the business needs. I am also learning how to remotely manage a team of specialists by observing the amazing design leadership I have the opportunity to work with. Some key highlights of my learning:
9 new tools in 90 days
3 professional courses on Agile work methodologies and Scrum
3 out of 7 modules of the Google UX Professional Certificate program
Heat maps, ScrollMaps and Attention Map analytics
UTM tagging and URL Event tracking
Creating and analysing a card sorting experiment
Framework for democratic prioritisation of design decisions
Liked
QS is a people first organisation with globally functioning teams. The aspect that on a normal stakeholder meeting I have colleagues from at least 3 to 4 different nationalities and time zones working on a common goal makes work so much more fun. Especially in the current times when in-person social interactions have already started feeling like a thing form a time past. It generates the opportunity to understand the work culture for international collaboration and has surely taken my soft skills up another notch.
If anyone on my team is working extra hours. I am the one at fault because it shows inefficiency on my part as a manager.
Quote from the Head of UX during my very first month, perhaps should be the cherry on the cake of things I liked on my new job. The design leadership is very supportive of innovation and receptive towards new ideas. The focus on industry standard UX processes within the team creates a progressive work environment and the opportunity to take ownership of the projects. This is exactly how I function best and am most productive. In addition to two daily sync-ups the UX team fosters the practice of constant downloads to and from the team on new learnings and project progress through the biweekly “Show and Tell” and “Best Practice Sharing” sessions. These sessions advocate transparency within the team and become an excellent forum for peer learning, review and feedback. It enhances the delivery quality of the team by creating a shared repository of ideas and expertise. I am a huge fan of these and have conducted 4 of these hour long sessions myself. Other things I liked:
Brainfood everyday
Professional Development of employees linked with KRA
Employee friendly organisation policies
The employee recognition portal
Cross team collaboration: Product, Dev, Research, Business and UX
Cross culture collaboration with international stakeholders
High-traffic on the existing web products = a canvas with an enormous audience
Lacked
Though my list of things lacked looks way smaller than the ones I liked on my new job, being a designer I believe that there is always room for improvement. I would want to highlight some personal short comings I am working on:
Better frameworks for design thinking and ideation process: I want to coordinate an online version of the Google Design Sprint and wish it would provide a framework to quickly test new ideas on an organisation level. (Refer The Design Sprint by GV).
Active Listening: This should help me better my problem understanding and accentuate empathy
Better workday routine on a personal level and maximising efficiency making more time in the standard 8 hour workday. (Refer ‘Make Time’ by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky).
Longed For
I have been eagerly waiting to take my work out for feedback from some real users. Very exited to start concept testing from next week for the user engagement design project with our researcher Ana from Romania, Mr. Mohamed Ouf the Product Manager and Mr. Dushyant Arora the Head of UX from the UK and persona-mapped potential graduate and post graduate students from Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, South Asia and Mainland China.
Looking forward to complete my ongoing project and taking it live for millions of real users. I sincerely hope my work is able to add real value and empowers students across the globe to make better informed choices for their future academic endeavours.
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