Flux Content

I’ve had time to reflect on the 100 ADPList content and design mentoring sessions I’ve had so far in 2023. And these are the trends I’ve observed:

1. A desire for human connection – maybe out of COVID, maybe out of the luxury of having a platform like ADPList that makes connection instant and easy. I got the feeling that a lot of people enjoyed connecting and talking. Perhaps even with no goal in mind.; to be heard; for validation. A mentee-mentor call is a safe, quiet space where there are no distractions – not like a networking event or a forum. In a what is now quite a remote world, these video sessions fulfil a need that was pretty poorly served up until now. Yay for people and talking.

• Damn, people are flaky. Are you a flaky kind of person? Do you move meetings at the last minute with no explanation? Do you just not show up to things? Are you forgetful? Please try not to be, in life and with your mentors. I’ve had days where every single one of my mentees didn’t show up. 5 or 6 sessions. When someone’s setting aside their time for you, for free, that’s really disrespectful.

• And people have balls: As a junior I would never have dreamed of approaching more senior mentors with some of the requests I get. Casual and careless messages. Arguing with a mentor who has politely declined your request. Not showing up, not once but twice! To me, this is very ballsy behaviour indeed. On the flip side, yay for equitable access and breaking down hierarchies.

• Bootcamps have a lot to answer for. I often heard people saying they weren’t applying for junior level roles because they’ve done a UX bootcamp. And maybe these people do have advanced knowledge. BUT you don’t know what you don’t know. There is a huge opportunity here (educators and course creators take note!) to fill the gap between ‘fresh out of bootcamp’ and ‘starting first UX job’. How might we help newbies get the real life experience and feedback they need, at low cost?

• The vicious cycle of EXPERIENCE. You need experience to get a job, and it’s only by having a job that you get experience. By experience, I mean real examples to put in a portfolio, methodologies, opinions , anecdotes, and soft skills. Knowing how to present your work, negotiation and compromise, working with difficult people, dealing with an unclear brief, manners and email etiquette… All of these skills need to be learned but no course teaches you this.

• Is Design becoming a closed box? A tiny fraction of design is ‘doing the design work’. The rest of it is getting buy-in, collaborating with others, negotiating changes, presenting work… The invisible but oh-so-critical glue work. One way to expose the reality of the tasks involved is for all of us to talk about our work more – what we delivered, how we did it and where we struggled. While success stories make us look good, what I’ve realised from these conversations is that sharing our failures, processes and learnings is critically important for any discipline.

• One size doesn’t fit all – The shape and maturity of UX and content design is simply not the same outside of the US/UK/Europe. My experience of content in a mostly European context over the past 20 years is going to be massively different from your experience of content in Africa over the next 20 years. Sure, I can share all the lessons I’ve learned, but the lessons you learn will be different, because your audiences, your markets and challenges are different. Let’s accept and celebrate that. I think this is a really interesting area and as mentors we should really question whether it is right to apply our methods to non-US/UK/Europe content and design practices.

(an aside: I did some interesting work for Ingenico about 15 years ago which showed that users in African countries were bypassing desktop experiences and moving straight to smartphones (cheaper, lighter, better coverage), so banking was mobile-first. Could the same happen with UX and content design? What parts of UX will LDCs leave out, and where will they leap directly to?)