UCB Overview

Rookie Mistake #1

The Market Research team needed its own SharePoint site to disseminate all of their research artifacts, compliance documents, and interview recordings to it's internal members. The need for SharePoint became prevalent because the previous method of using a shared drive became too messy and disorganized. The Director of Market Research thought that the answer for this chaos was SharePoint, however the problem was that no one on the team was well-versed in creating a SharePoint site.

This is where I came in.

I came across a few UX articles and learned all about wireframing. I was eager to apply these concepts, and with my free trial copy Axure, I quickly whipped up some wires for the director before doing any user research. Here are some wires that I created:

I had a pretty good understanding of the limitations that SharePoint had. This was my major influence (and flaw) when creating these wires. Instead of being user-centric, I was being system-centric, and really fenced myself within the program rather than focusing on the user's problems.

Rookie Mistake #2

My director was overall pleased with the wires and I got the green light to start building out the site. I was busy day and night constantly building pages, web parts, and migrating data from their shared drive into SharePoint libraries. I only asked my director for feedback, rather than any of the members of the team. I guess this rookie mistake stems from mistake #1.

I had completely abandoned the wireframe approach and instead, I began to build out pages based on the closed-door conversations with my director and our own assumptions.

Here are what some of those pages turned out to be:

Pages became chores and like most chores, they were done one after another without any thought. The pages weren't validated and I assumed that I knew the users better than the users themselves.

Rookie Mistake #3

After the site was completed, I finally began to get it in front of the users. However, it wasn't a very formal session. I only recruited 2 of the team members. Then I would observe their interaction with the site. Whenever they would make a mistake, I intervened and showed them the "correct" way. I told myself that this is how SharePoint was so this was all it could do. I failed to validate and turned the testing session into a demo session. I was literally guiding each user how to navigate the site that I had created.

Retrospective

You may be wondering why I'd put this train wreck into my portfolio. I'm a firm believer in learning from mistakes. I think making mistakes makes you a better learner, because now I know what to look out for and why I need to avoid it. I had 0 process, 0 methodology, and 0 UX skills; I just knew I had to start somehow. Looking back on it, there's a million things I would change about this project but the past is past. I've definitely refined my process since my time at UCB, and I think the mistakes I made here were a catalyst in propelling my career further into UX. I wasn't disheartened, rather, hungry to learn more about this mysterious field.

If you want to check out a project with a little more foundational approach, here is my internship project from The Home Depot.

Thanks for reading.