Smile for Your Client

When you’re working with a client, they’ve hired you to fulfill a goal. To this end, you want them to have faith in your skills, so that they’re more inclined to listen to your recommendations and research. Thus, if they catch you looking like you're dead tired and running on little sleep during a video conference, your client might take it to mean that you're generally unenthused and/or don't care about their brainchild. Regardless of how you actually feel.

And you don’t want to insult your client’s brainchild.

Thus, while your actual work and research on a project is important, how you present that info to your client can make all the difference. So smile, be well dressed, and hide your tiredness until you get off that video call.

Run Surveys' Wording Past Non-Team Members

While examining a survey's data, my team noticed one respondent who gave consistently contradictory answers. Unsure of the cause, we consulted a UXer with more survey experience. In turn, they highlighted the knowledge gap between us and our respondents, also pointing out that our questions may not be read as intended. Basically, there was likely confusion over our questions’ wording.

Gather Data, Don't Solutionize

A customer service team member I interviewed had a lot of previous experience in a similar field. He told us about the solutions he was used to, in comparison to his current teams’, and even showed us some sketched prototypes. And through all of this he was very friendly, very sure of himself. It was so easy to forget that his opinions were just that - opinions. And while the data was valuable, it was just one brightly hued thread in the pattern's greater whole; valuable in its intricacy, but unable to color an entire picture on its own.

Label Your File Layers

While annotating my team's prototypes for client perusal, I noticed that a teammate's pdf was missing part of the text and imagery I could see in their Sketch file. I consulted my team, but a probable cause didn't come to mind. So, I did a bit of digging in Sketch. Turns out, some of their layers weren't on the proper artboard. So when the artboards were exported to pdf, those layers weren't included.

Later when working on another teammate's prototype, I discovered that their labeling was inconsistent. Additionally, their groupings for each prototype's page either left several layers out or continued across pages, so that when I selected one page to drag to a new artboard, elements on another would also be selected. So before I could putting each element of the prototype on its own artboard to simplify exporting them to pdfs, I had to consolidate their groupings.

While these issues were an easy enough fix, overall I spent more time troubleshooting Sketch files than actually annotating them. So even if properly labeling and grouping your layers might take a bit of extra time, in the end, gosh darn is it worth it.