Made by Laura Rillera: Design Your Best Self With This Personal UX Evaluation
an argomade series
UX and interaction designer Laura (Lala) Rillera thoroughly understands how to help clients go from a vision of the future to a fully realized product or service. She’s worked on software solutions for clients like Dell, Caesar’s Palace, John Deere, Pizza Hut, Lowes, Tag Heuer, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Will.I.Am, and she designed the Webby nominated Disney Movies Anywhere app that shot to #1 in both the Apple and Android app stores.
Not long ago, Lala decided to apply the same processes she uses with clients to achieve her own goals. In this argomade designer profile, she shares the personal evaluation framework she developed to become a top achiever in all areas of her life.
What inspired you to develop this personal UX evaluation framework?
A while ago I was not feeling on track with my personal goals. It felt like I was just floating around in space. I needed a way to visualize each goal so I could ensure I was making progress.
After designing dashboard after dashboard for clients and observing the trend of the format for personal metrics — from miles you run, calories you eat, to hours you sleep and money you spend — I wanted to know:
“What if you want to track important personal qualitative data that can’t be measured in numbers? How can a design strategy be used to set and measure personal achievements?”
I evaluated the tools in my designer’s treasure chest and ultimately decided to leverage my affinity for affinity diagrams to solve my problem. For clients, affinity diagram exercises work well for group alignment, prioritization, and sprint planning. For me, this format helped align my fanciful self (who wants to accomplish a million goals in one lifetime) with my reasonable self (who knows there are only so many hours in a day).
So I set out to construct a self-audit process and qualitative data dashboard to visually map my goals, progress, and successes. In other words, I UX-ed myself!
Ok, so what exactly do you mean by “UX-ing yourself?”
The structure I developed is simply a way to achieve clarity in your life through prioritization, personal goal tracking, and personal data visualization.
The great thing about starting with affinity diagramming is that there really aren’t many rules in affinity-diagramming-fight-club. You can complete the exercise with just a pen and paper or get fancy with sticky notes. Every idea gets its place on the diagram for later sifting and prioritization.
There are no judgments. It’s a chance for you to get everything in your head on paper and get real about your goals by mapping out a plan to achieve each one over time.
The same exercise works wonders in business, so with the notion that it would be effective for wrangling my personal life, I cleared an afternoon, grabbed a margarita, some Torchy’s queso and a great jazz playlist, and went on a sticky note spree.
Walk us through the process. How do I design my best self?
Easy. There are six basic steps to the process, and of course, snacks and margaritas make them all more enjoyable:
1) ideation, 2) organization, 3) planning, 4) tracking, 5) measurement/visualization, 6) evaluation/adjustment.
Materials
- Timer
- Sticky notes (three colors)
- Marker
Optional Materials:
- Chips & Queso
- Margarita
- Jazz flute music
IDEATE
- Give yourself 2 hours to complete ideation. Start the timer!
- Write down any goals that come to mind: one goal per sticky. Use all the same color for this step.
- Place each sticky on a board or a wall where you have plenty of room to “dance” with your plethora of stickies.
ORGANIZE
- Sort the stickies into clusters of ideas within common themes; remove any duplicates.
- When all possible groups are clustered, give each group a category name. Write the category names on your next color of stickies, and place each category sticky next to its group.
- Prioritize each category by level of importance. Move the important categories and their goals to the top.
- Then look at your highest-priority category and rank the top three goals within it.
PLAN
- Determine what actionable steps need to be taken to reach all your goals.
- Write the steps for each goal on the third color of your sticky notes and place these action stickies under their corresponding goal sticky.
TRACK
- Enter each category, goal, and actionable step into your personal dashboard. (You can make one like I did, use Excel, or simply track with pen and paper.)
- Take action and mark your goals complete when you successfully perform each step to achieve them!
- Be sure to focus effort and energy on the top three goals from your most important category.
MEASURE & VISUALIZE
- Aggregate data over time to check for progress in your key categories.
- Use pie charts and other data visualization formats to synthesize your personal data. (Excel works well here, and there are free data visualization tools online too.)
EVALUATE & ADJUST
- Observe if your top three prioritized categories are where you’re spending most of your energy. If not, make a plan to adjust this.
- What other adjustments need to be made? Should you add more goals? Have your priorities shifted? Evaluate your performance against your plan and add or remove steps where you need support or no longer wish to focus.
What do you do with all the data? How has this evaluation changed your life?
Structuring and evaluating my behavior using design strategies has brought a new level of understanding of myself and an easy way to make changes instead of excuses.
This exercise continuously enables me to give visual order to goals that usually float aimlessly in space so I can logically sort them and systematically achieve each one.
It also gives me a visual representation of what I care about most at the time of data capture. I can see that in 2016, my highest priority was the “People” (relationships) category, with “Creativity” not far behind.
When I first conducted this self-audit, I realized that although I placed a lot of weight on these areas, I wasn’t actually dedicating an appropriate percentage of my time to them. The prioritization and the action-planning helped me to focus on the things that surfaced as most important, and this literally changed my life (over time and hard work) for the better.
Conversely, I noticed a very small percentage of the chart was dedicated to the “Financial” category. That was eye-opening for me. Since then, I’ve added more focus and energy to financial goals and have now paid off the majority of my student debt, my cars, and my credit cards!
After conducting the same self-audit a year after your first evaluation, what did you notice?
I performed this exercise again a little over a year after my first assessment, and the comparison is interesting. Some areas from year one shrank in year two because I completed so many goals over the first year. And then, some categories grew due to new areas of focus.
I discovered additional categories as meaningful. The category “Kitten” on my chart for year two emerged after completing a goal from year one. “Community” on my 2017 chart emerged from a blend of “People,” “Creativity” and “Learning” goals from 2016. Observing this evolution and having the power to track change is super rewarding.
What’s the verdict? Are you a measurably better person that you were before UX-ing yourself?
The data speaks for itself! I can calculate the percent progress I’ve made by category and see just how much I’ve improved. Here are my stats from my first year using the system:
It’s actually pretty gratifying to see that I’ve completed well over half of my goals in each category. I had 100 or more goals to begin with! I’ll be doing this year after year for sure.
Want more of the argomade designer profile series? Check out these articles made by: Laura Seargeant Richardson | Matthew Santone | Ian MacDowell | Hayes Urban | Desmond Connolly | Michael Shea | Martha Fierro
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