I’ve had the idea for a while now to reach out to great minds in different tech-related fields to see if they’d let me pick their brains a bit. Given that Samuel Hulick was really cool when we set up our Christmas Giveaway a few months back and gave away a copy of his ebook on user onboarding, I wondered if he’d also be willing to talk about his experience getting started in UX.
And he was!
Needless to say, I’m really grateful to him for helping me get this series started! Thanks for your support, Samuel!
I’d love to do the same with other experts working in UX, Ruby on Rails development, UI design or growth hacking for example. The wisdom you guys can provide in an interview would be amazing for anyone starting out or looking to improve their career, so please get in touch if you’ve got advice to give!
You can listen to our chat below or read a transcript if you prefer. Enjoy, and let me know what you think 🙂
Interview
Hi Samuel, welcome, and thanks for joining us, it’s a pleasure to have you as our first guest!
It is a pleasure to be here!
So let’s begin with you background.
Sure, so I started charging people for me to do things that had to do with the Internet as a developer initially. And so a lot of the projects that I was taking on would be kind of a Waterfall Approach where they would have a strategy meetings, then they would generate content, and put the content into Photoshop and I would just inherit everything at the end when all the decisions had been made and they just needed the things to be coded up.
There’s a lot of things where I didn’t really think they were representative of what the best UX could be, but it was too late to go back to the drawing board on anything because we were so far in the process. So, I thought I really need to start calling myself a UX designer and get as much influence as I can early in the process instead of just inheriting everyone else’s decisions in the end. That was about 10 years ago and I started calling myself a UX designer, studied about it as much as I could and eventually was able to shift my career to that. Then a little over a year ago I went from being a general UX designer to focusing on user onboarding. That’s probably why I’m here today to talk to you.
Yes it is! Cool, and what did you study?
I didn’t go to school for it or anything. I just picked up as much material as I possibly could. UIE had, and actually still have a podcast called the Spoolcast, that I listened to every episode and just absorbed as much as I could. There are books out there like Don’t Make Me Think, which was one that was really educational. Also looking at psychology and what influences behavior, things along lines. Those are the biggest touch stones.
You said UIE?
Yeah User interface engineering, I just looked it up. You may have heard of Jared Spool, hes’ the person behind it. Hes’ the one who started the podcast and things like that.
Great, thanks. So basically you’re self taught then correct?
Yep.
And you went from development to UX design?
Correct.
And before that you had no design experience?
You always have the opportunity to give yourself whatever experience you want. I would do a lot of side projects, or there were times where I was either an independent consultant or worked at an agency and looked to structure my involvement in projects to be as much of what I was wanting to gain experience in as possible. It was a gradual transition but the more you can talk away that kind of experience, or even just say I want to be more skillful in this particular thing, like running a usability test, you can just approach people and say I’d like to do this and I won’t charge you for it, but then I’d be able to say I’d done it.
Nice approach. So the motivation to move into UX was you wanted to be able to influence a project from the beginning?
I don’t want to sound to full of myself, but it was just kind of a thing where I was the one who cared the most about what the UX was gonna be and making sure people who were gonna use the site weren’t gonna get frustrated and got value out of it and thought it would be a good idea to position myself earlier so I could represent the user more fully.
Great, and do you have an idea why you care so much?
I don’t know if I have a snappy answer for that one. It’s really important to me that I pour myself into doing things that are done to a high level of quality. I think a lot of times designers can get caught up in how novel or beautiful their interface is, or how much they like this new feature that they rolled up. And to my mind that’s never been an important unit of analysis for what I was working on. It’s always been — was the thing that we made helping other people be more successful, and did it work the way they expected, and were they delighted with the outcomes it engendered, and things like that.
So it stems a lot from your own bad experience with other websites.
Yeah exactly, a lot of times when I think of a beautiful website, I think of it as being beautifully helpful not just something that is really attractive to gaze at.
Cool. Who were some people that influenced you a lot when you started out?
When I first started out, Ryan Singer, lead designer at Basecamp has been a really big influence. There are a whole lot of people. It would be hard to name a few names at the exclusion of others.
Alright. So lets say you’re tasked with hiring a UX designer. Which technical and soft skills would you look for in a candidate?
For UX, I would ensure they have a high degree of empathy for the user experience or the user that is going to be experiencing the product, but you would kinda assume that would be the case though. I’d also look at what level of enjoyment and experience they have at running user research: conducting usability tests and putting out surveys. Having an inquisitive mind as to what the surrounding context of the product is in the user’s overall life and what the user is trying to get out of the product.
It’s kinda funny how UX designers are brought on and expected to invent wireframes or interface patterns without a high degree of knowledge of what the people are actually trying to accomplish when they are using the product. User research is something I would look a lot at. The other thing I d recommend evaluating a UX designer by, that would really set them apart in my mind, would be a high degree of curiosity around how well the thing that they are making is working. Being able to define: we’re gonna make this better and better, it’s going to look like this in terms of what kind of user behaviour we can expect to come out of it. Anything along the lines of taking the approach of actually measuring the effects of the changes, approaching it as an iterative process instead of just cranking out wireframes and prototypes. Those are all things I think would make a very strong UX designer.
Awesome. From your point of view, what do you think is a better to start from, a development or design background?
Boy, I don’t know. I guess its useful from a design perspective to really know the plumbing of a website and how things just work. It gives you a richer vocabulary for communicating with other people. It also sets your expectations and grounds them in reality better as opposed to just inventing you know like we’ll have a search box here then we have to figure out how to involve search. It’s kind of a big deal not just putting a rectangle on a screen. So having a dev background has been useful to me.
I typically find — and this is getting very subjective here — but the UX designers I tend to consider as being weaker are people that have a graphic design or visual design background and kind of thought of UX design as being one level higher than that. A lot of times maybe they don’t have a lot of user research experience, maybe they’re not paying a lot of attention to what the effect of the changes they are making are. If you’re approaching design as a thing where you just sit down at a computer and come up with cool stuff, that’s probably not gonna lead to a really strong background in UX design.
Right, and how did you approach developing your own skills in user research and usability testing?
Just doing it. Reaching out to people. If I could convince them to pay me then great and if not then just getting that experience under my belt, was just kind of investing in myself.
Great. Hope you managed to convince them to pay you in the beginning! And how would you convince someone to invest in user research?
Well, there are typical arguments against it like, “it would slow us down too much.” That’s a common one. My response to that is: “we can run really fast in the wrong direction sure, but when done right user research actually saves us a lot of time because were not spending a lot of time building the wrong thing.”
Taking some steps early in the process to ensure that what you’re making is even the thing you should be making is in my mind a huge time saver. That’s one common area of push back.
Another one would be thinking that what you make is obvious and you already have all the answer that you need. One thing thats really effective is recording usability tests and showing this is what someone looks like when they’re using the product, and this is them using curse words because they are so frustrated, and things like that. That and just having someone sit and watch someone else struggle in video form can be really really motivating as well.
Cool tips! Any warnings you’d like to share about UX as career? You consider UX design a dream job for you?
Warnings about UX design? Not really sure. At this point it would be hard to divide my mindset and approach to life in general with what I’m doing right now. I guess that’s a good thing but at the same time it makes it hard to evaluate it as something into itself.
So you don’t see yourself doing anything else?
Yeah! I hadn’t thought of it in those terms but now that you’re asking I guess that’s true!
That’s awesome, congrats! And what do you do on a daily basis right now?
On a daily basis right now I run around like a kitchen with my head cut off. I continue to put out tear downs on useronboard.com. Continue selling the book. Fortunately, it’s also lead to a lot of fun things like being on a podcast like we are right now or speaking at conferences, so that’s been really cool. Something I’m really focusing on right now is developing some software for user onboarding to sell as an SAAS product. Kind of like coming up with a startup unto itself has been a huge area of focus lately, that’s kinda been the primary thing.
That’s interesting. So it’s going to be like a guide?
It is something that you can embed in your product that helps guide people to taking actions that are highly valuable and lead to engagement and retention.
I’m guessing this stems a lot from patterns you’ve extracted from all the teardowns you’ve done?
Yeah, exactly!
Sounds cool! I was wondering, there aren’t many books on user onboarding are there?
No, not really, there’s kinda just the one! When I decided to write the book I thought I should read everything I can on it. I was pretty surprised to find there really wasn’t anything, so yeah, if you happen to come across anything I’d love to check it out! But yeah, it’s kinda occupied by just the one right now.
That’s because user onboarding is really new?
Yeah, people would call it like a niche. On the surface it seems like a narrow thing to focus on but once you really dive into it turns there’s a lot to cover there and it’s a really deep subject. I definitely think that people are gonna be realizing more and more as time goes by and I do genuinely think it as a space and as a problem its going to be something that’s gonna become much wider and considered to be much more important.
Was interesting to see a job opening for a user onboarding engineer the other day. Hadn’t come across it before.
Oh, really? That’s interesting. I’ve had conversations with a couple of people with “user onboarding” in their job title but I’ve never heard of user onboarding engineer. Do you know which company it was?
Can’t really remember right now, but I stumble upon it a lot so next time I’ll note it down!
Please do! I’d love to check that out.
Ok. If people would like to keep up with you, useronboard.com and your Twitter are the places to go?
Yeah, either of those are good, useronboard.com, its the site where i post the teardowns and its also where the book is available, and I have a couple of articles on there as well. @useronboard is the twitter handle. Same name across both, that’s definitely the place to follow.
By the way, how do you decide who your next teardown “victim” will be? You have a huge list?
Yeah, there’s a really long list. People have been really forthcoming with recommendations, which has been very cool, but the list is super super long right now. There’s not a whole lot of science behind which one gets picked at any given moment right now. I guess the biggest thing is if there’s a product that people are really talking about at any given moment, that would make it more likely to cover them just to be part of the conversation or just because people might be particularly interested in it at the time, but beyond that not a whole lot of reasoning.
Maybe an upvote system could be nice, where you pick the one with the most votes.
Yeah, that occurred to me, but I thought it would be pretty easy for people to game the system. There might be something like that in the future but right not I guess its more like whatever I feel like doing I guess.
Cool. I’d like to thank you for your work on the teardowns, Samuel, it’s been really useful for me, I think I saw pretty much every one of those.
Oh cool!
Alright well thanks a lot for taking the time to talk with us. Good luck with your startup idea. I’m eager to see how it turns out!
Absolutely it was a real pleasure!
Cheers,
Zoran Vitez
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