4 Lessons Learned From My 4th UX Y’all
Every fall, I spend two days surrounded by some of the brightest, most curious UXers in North Carolina and beyond. We listen to insightful keynotes, drink tons of coffee, and watch a few break dancers.
The UX Y’all conference is the annual flagship conference for Triangle UXPA, the local UXPA chapter I’ve been a part of since I was a senior in college. I’ve attended the conference four times since 2019, and I’ve been a volunteer for the past three years. Last year, I was even one of the conference’s co-chairs 😅 Suffice to say, UX Y’all has been a major part of my life over the past few years.
And even though I’m not currently a UX designer or researcher, I still benefited greatly from listening to some of the best speakers from around the Triangle area. So, as a non-UX developer professor for HubSpot Academy, here are four lessons I learned from this year’s UX Y’all.
Don’t be afraid to break things
This year’s conference theme was “The Breaks.” Learning from others’ breaks — whether that be ground-breaking research or career-related breaks — gave me renewed vigor to bring new experiments to my own team.
For the past few months, I’ve been chatting with my manager and other coworkers about how we can experiment more. I’ve been lucky to have a manager who cares about experimentation and giving me the space to test out different hypotheses.
But, I’ve held back on trying new things because I didn’t want to fail. These talks helped me to re-align, to remember that failing is a part of learning. Breaking things just means we can find a new way forward. It reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where potters repair broken objects with lacquer and gold, creating a beautiful new piece of artwork.
AI is here to stay; we need to focus on being human
This year, three of the speakers spoke on the impact of AI. 2023 has been the year of AI, with the rise of ChatGPT, the relaunch of Bing, and so many more AI software. While many of the speakers spoke about what AI can’t and can’t do, it’s my former professor Laura Ruel’s insights that struck me the most: AI can’t replace human emotional intelligence.
As an instructional designer, my job isn’t just to teach a principle to someone — it’s to teach a new way of solving a problem. An AI video could approximate my face, my voice, and my writing style, but it couldn’t make the video come to life with the same warmth and heart.
If we want our jobs to remain valuable in the age of 20-minute AI-created website builds, it’s our soft skills that’ll win out. And for all of you out there that want to learn to think more critically and creatively, I recommend you check out my colleague Crystal King’s course, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving in Today’s Changing Workplace.
Instructional designers should make use of UX practices
Every day at HubSpot Academy, I’m thinking about how to make my education more engaging with our learners. In my role, I teach a specific subset of our audience, and I’m always working to improve how I teach code. But even though my role isn’t specifically UX-related, most people I chatted with at the conference told me that instructional design was just as important as UX.
One of my personal takeaway from this year’s conference was the importance of user research. We had an amazing presentation on trauma-informed research processes. They spoke about how we, as the researchers, should lead with empathy and design our research to take into account how trauma can affect research participants’ reactions. It was extremely eye-opening.
HubSpot Academy’s education is free for everyone, but we only have a few different formats. While our education has been valuable for many, it’s also in our best interest to better understand our learners and the ways in which we can tailor our formats to their learning modalities. Learning from our UX designers and conducting our own learner research can help us create more inclusive and helpful education.
Having a community is more important than having a portfolio
This year, I was lucky to speak to several college students in attendance. As someone who’s been a part of this community since I myself was a student, I love to know more about what they want to do after they graduate. Many of them have a general idea of the roles they want, but they don’t know how to get the job. And I always give them this advice: make connections and invest in relationships.
I’ve had two full-time jobs since graduating UNC in 2019, and both of them were through personal connections. While I told the students to keep their LinkedIn and portfolios up-to-date, I’ll be the first to admit that my own portfolio isn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. However, by making strong impressions on different people I’ve met in my life, I’ve been given opportunities I never thought possible just a few years out of college.
And personally, the UX community in the Triangle has become a strong community for me. I’ve made a good group of friends by volunteering and just getting to know people on a personal level.
Being a part of this conference has been so rewarding and fun. It takes a village to bring a conference of this scale to life, but every year, I always learn something new, meet amazing people, and feel connected to a community that’s welcomed me with open arms.
