I am new to UX and have tried to digest as much info on the subject as I can. I am stuck. I am having a hard time translating all of the info into actually doing a UX project of my own. I may be over thinking it. The few sites I have asked general questions on ask that I be more specific. I feel I just need someone to talk through all the non specifics. I requested membership to a UX chat room on slack designer hangout I think it was weeks ago and haven’t heard back. I can see where a mentor could help but I don’t have resources for a paid service and don’t know anyone specific to ask. Any thoughts? Thanks
I know you said that you just want to talk through the non-specifics, but are you getting stuck on anything a little more specific than UX in general?
It’s harder to give a valuable answer with some action items that you can apply on a project without being a little more specific. 
A couple examples of a specific topic could be:
- User testing
- Wireframes
- User flows
- Personas
- Research
Do you have a project that you are working on and hoping to apply some UX principles to or are you just wanting to create a project for practice?
Thanks for the repsonse. I am considering trying UX principles on VBS (vacation Bible school) 1 week event 600 kids 200 volunteers. One person told me to survey, to then affinity map, then make persona’s.
My questions are
Is this a good event for UX.
What are good questions to ask
I know what affinity maps do but not exactly how to use here
What can I hope to contribute when I present this to the leadership
Like I said I have seen and heard a bunch but just talking through the process and what the goal may be would be helpful.
Unfortunately, I’ve never affinity mapped so I can’t really help you there. In regards to the rest, I don’t think that there is ever a bad time to practice UX. I will prefix this with that I’ve never done UX for an event, but for a product, so just keep that in mind as a couple of things you may want to do differently.
The whole purpose and your end goal is to try and improve the experience whether that be for the kids or the volunteers. So something that you’ll want to take away from all of your work are areas for improvement from your research and presenting those to leadership.
I’d definitely start with a mixture of interviews and surveying to get to know your users (whoever you’re trying to focus on improving the experience for), what they enjoy, what they don’t, figure out maybe any issues they’ve had in the past, maybe processes that they thought were successful or weren’t; basically trying to uncover areas for improvement.
Here is a really great article on interviews and questions to ask (It’s geared towards a product as opposed to event, but I still think it’s relevant) : https://medium.com/interactive-mind/5-steps-to-create-good-user-interview-questions-by-metacole-a-comprehensive-guide-8a591b0e2162#.7uh7b3ntc
I’m not sure if you do these events frequently or rarely so you may want to skip these two next steps for time’s sake, but normally from the interviews you would group information to create personas. You’ll want one make one to represent each type of user or person involved in your event.
Now that you have your key people in mind, you can start to work on areas to improve. Create a customer journey map and go through the entire experience that each type of person has with the event from start to finish. If you’re unsure, interact with people during the event. Watch them work and see where they struggle and where they don’t. In your map, list any frustrations or successful moments that they might have. From this - come up with a list of opportunities to really help those ‘low points’.
As I said, for time’s sake you may want to skip the personas and the journey map and stick to interviewing / surveys and really just watching people work and how everything goes down.
It gets a little tricky putting these steps into action as you only have one week to work with, but if you have time, test out some of your solutions, see if the experience improves.
Definitely create a document with all our your findings so that they can be applied and tested in future events.
Thanks so much for taking the time with the detailed response. I will check out the link and keep thinking through the process. I’ll reach out to you if I have any further questions with what you suggested if that’s okay.
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Hi Brian,
I know of a couple of amazing mentors who work at an hourly rate. If you have budget for professional development I’d be happy to put you in touch.
If not, we can do our best to support you here.
I think that any event is going to allow you to hone your skills, so the answer to your first question is yes.
And here are some resources which will help you with the process:
This video will support you in researching using surveys
This article will help you with the journey map/affinity diagram.
This video will talk you through creating personas
As will this article by @deprecated which is an extract from his book
And here are some templates for creating personas
Thanks for the response. I do not have the resources for a paid mentor. I will watch the links you sent and I have checked out some of the beginner stuff on this site, which was helpful.
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Thanks for the resources and the kind redirect to something I should have looked at before asking. I am in the middle of going through all of these and it has been a huge help. The resources on this site are way more comprehensive than I thought at first. Thanks for the help.
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Totally welcome!