Pia Klančar is the head of the product design team at Userlane and a career development and mindset coach, accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). She puts people, not pixels, at the heart of her work, so her time is dedicated to exploring soft skills, helping others change careers and progress, and she has been teaching at CareerFoundry's UX Bootcamp for the past 6 years, educating new recruits in user experience design.
Hey Pia, my first question is always the same :). How did your design career start and how did you end up in UX?
Hey Amedea! My design journey started out of pure necessity. I was a co-owner of an online shop and helped build websites, learning everything we needed in a given situation - design, marketing, social media... Somehow, through those early days, I started doing what I still consider to be the foundation of UX. After about two years, I started wondering how I could make a career out of it and, quite by chance, I saw the title 'UX designer' from someone on LinkedIn. After doing some concrete research, I realised that this was exactly what I wanted to do. From there it was easier. I got focused and put all my energy into learning and my new career.
At the moment, there are a number of different job titles used in our profession. Which one best describes what you currently do and why?
Well, what do I know. I've always been a generalist, taking care of everything that helped bring a product to market, whether it was design, product management, project management (both in and out of the Scrum environment), coaching, research.... But still, even though I have my own team now and my title is "Product design team lead", I am most recognized as a User Experience Designer. That's who I am at my core, no matter the environment.
Can you show us 2 favourite projects you've worked on and tell us why you enjoyed them?
It's hard to give details because all my work is under contract, but maybe I can mention two projects a little more superficially. These are the two that stick in my mind the most. The first one because it was my first real UX job, and the second one is the one I'm currently working on.
Travian. The then 12-year-old online game was a unique challenge, as we were working with users who were extremely demanding. Once you've created a product for gamers, you quickly become a specialist in psychology, if you weren't already. Their reactions to change are instantaneous and very violent. Every time we changed something, we were holding on to our chairs to see if we were going to hear shouting in the forums or if everything was going to be quiet and people were going to be happy. I have been part of both. But it is the work in "gaming" that has shaped and sharpened my empathy. What came out of that project was an understanding that we designers don't design for ourselves, and that sometimes it's better to leave something "ugly" but functional. This project also gave me an irresistible passion for testing and talking to users. Even today, when "research" is no longer my domain, I regularly advocate the importance of understanding users and hearing what they don't even say out loud. Asking the right questions has incredible power, both in design and in work in general.
Userlane. My home away from home at the moment (although I actually work from home, so...).Userlane is a company that solves the problem ofdigital adoption - we help digital solution providers to explain how to use digital tools more effectively to end-users, or companies that are introducing a new digital tool and need to teach their employees how to use it. This is where I enjoy the most - in the whole context of the solution, not just the project I'm working on. I am part of the team that designs the analytical part of the product. Anyone who knows me knows that I am people-oriented, not numbers-oriented, which makes this project extremely complex for me. For 8 months I was the project lead and 'everything girl' - both designer and product manager.As the team grew, I took over the design team, while the product itself was taken over by a new product manager. Now we work together and create a team that works beautifully together. The project brings challenge after challenge, but that's what makes it interesting. Fortunately, we work with 'radical candor' in the team, but at the same time we have the confidence of the management that we can achieve what we have agreed on our own. This project proves to me time and time again that as designers, especially user experience designers, we can work anywhere. Our knowledge is universal. Of course we need to understand the context in which we work, but that is not the most important thing. What is important is that we understand the design process, which we then apply to the situations we are in.
You've been part of the CareerFoundry team for years. What advice would you give to those who are just starting out in user experience design?
It's true. If I'm not mistaken, I'm now in my 6th year with CareerFoundry. There are two themes that keep coming up in my conversations with students:
- UX is fundamentally much less complex than it looks. I often feel that we are trying to find the warm water in UX. As if that wasn't enough, we complicate our lives with the tools we use to do it. In the end, it is only important that we have solved the problem, not how.
- Nothing in UX is linear. Many schools teach a UX process that is linear. They present it as a step-by-step process, but in reality the process is like a kind of orderly-orderly dance. Linearity is key from the learning process side. But if it ends up being just that, designers are completely lost when they get their first job. Companies don't have the time or money for a step-by-step approach and expect employees to be able to solve problems with a combination of the knowledge they have acquired during their training.
I know you are very interested in the soft skills that we designers need in our work. Which three would you say are the most important and why?
I call them people skills because the focus is on people and if we work as user experience designers, we need to know users. Psychology is a key part of what we do, even though many UX schools don't pay much attention to it.
The most important soft skills for me are: self-reflection, empathy and the ability to communicate effectively.
You can't work with (and for) people if you are not willing to look inwards and grow first. How do we work in groups? Why are others the way they are?' are questions that are part of our everyday life. I am lucky that the environment I work in really supports the development of these skills. As a coach, I have the space to bring skills to the environment that help us both work better together and understand our users, alongside my work as a designer.
You also work a lot on impostorsyndrome and organise workshops on this topic. Can you tell us more about this? When is the next workshop and where can we follow you?
Oh, yeah. This topic is so tragic for me personally. There is a lot to say about this, especially in the context of design, where feedback is part of our work.
The syndrome (which is not really a syndrome at all, but rather a phenomenon) is that highly successful people doubt their success and feel that they did not earn it by their knowledge and work, but were just lucky to be where they are. "I was in the right place at the right time" is a phrase often uttered by people who feel as "impostors".
It is not about the feelings we experience when we start something new, but about the feelings we experience when we already have evidence of success.
The phenomenon does not choose between the sexes. It can touch anyone, but in which area it will strike depends on what is important to you.
Since I have been doing coaching, I have had countless conversations on this very topic. The tragic thing is that these conversations are usually with extremely successful people who don't even feel that they are successful. Many times these people come from quite toxic backgrounds, and sometimes it takes months or even years for these people to break free from these feelings and really start to enjoy their success.
We have done two workshops on this topic so far, one in May 2021 and the second in September 2021. You can follow me on LinkedIn, on my website or blog UXDgirl.com.
