Starting a new UX job? You need to learn to unlearn
In January of this year, I changed jobs. From a 400-person French startup to Shopify — a 4,000-person Canadian behemoth. From a company with a single UX team working on a single product, to a company with several hundred UXers working on a complex platform spread across multiple product lines. It was a big change, and an even bigger learning curve.
Of all the things I’ve learned in these past few months, one stands out as the most valuable lesson of all. And it’s something I think we need to talk about more.
I learned how to unlearn.
The power and danger of learned beliefs
We go through life with a set of beliefs that we use to navigate the world around us. Some of us believe in the power of individual freedom, others in the collective good. Maybe you believe family is more important than friends, or that tea is healthier than coffee. These are beliefs we’ve learned from those around us, and they act for each one of us as anchors in the ocean of life, setting the center of our worldview and informing every decision we make.
We also use learned beliefs in UX — we follow a vision for our company, design principles for our product, methodologies for the way we communicate. They’re very powerful. Take a moment to think about the beliefs that inform your work. I suspect that you have quite a few, and that they significantly affect the way you work and the solutions you create.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin
As UXers, we get very comfortable with our visions, principles, and methodologies. And with good reason — these beliefs were learned, built and refined over time, perfected to help us solve problems in the space in which we’re operating. But when you change jobs and move to a new space, many of your beliefs simply no longer work. They can be dangerous if you hold on to them — you need to adapt.
When I came to Shopify, I came with experience — much of which has served me well. But I also came with a stack of beliefs that, once I arrived in an environment different to the ones in which they were cultivated, I quickly needed to unlearn. I want to tell you about two of them.
1. “Closed project teams make faster progress.”
My previous roles had been at tight-knit companies that were in many ways more like communities. We worked in small, self-contained project teams, but the whole company ate together, drank together and played sports together. We often talked about our work, so I knew exactly what was happening on other projects. When I was working on a new feature, I knew the potential inter-dependencies between our feature and the ones my colleagues were working on. When I was helping to build a design system, I knew what the other UXers thought about it and what they needed from it.
I started to believe that small project teams were able to make faster progress by keeping themselves walled off. No need to share early-stage work, no need to gather feedback from a wide range of people. It would only slow us down. We already knew the context, and if we needed someone’s opinion we could just ask them the following evening over a beer.
Even at a small company, this belief could be seen as a risky one, but it generally worked for me. However, at a large company such as Shopify, with dozens of highly independent product lines and a plethora of moving parts, such thinking would be ruinous.
When I started my new job, I was blown away by the number of people involved in every piece of work. Our team’s project briefs were littered with comments from people in teams I didn’t even know existed. Mockups were shared to what seemed like half the company. 200-person Slack channels were abuzz with discussion about the latest problem my team was trying to tackle. I believed in streamlined and compartmentalized ways of working, and to me this was chaos.
What I soon realized was that my old approach would never work at a company like Shopify — there’s too much going on. You might spend weeks working on a problem that someone else has already solved, or design something for a use case that another team has proven not to exist. This information can’t be harvested from casual conversations in the basketball locker room. You need context, and for that you need as many eyes on your work as possible.
Unlearning is about getting out of old habits. And much like getting into new habits, it requires self-discipline. In his excellent article about unlearning, Mark Bonchek advises us to “create triggers” to alert ourselves to the fact we’re working from our old beliefs. In my case, I set triggers that go off when I’m becoming protective about my team’s work. Whenever I find myself worrying what another colleague might think about our explorations, I now ask for their feedback immediately. Whenever I think our work is incomplete and no one else will understand what we’re trying to do, I bring it to one of our regular “Show and Tell” meetings. It often feels uncomfortable, but that’s normal. Discomfort is part of unlearning.
2. “Simplicity trumps everything”
In previous years, I’d become a zealous convert to simplicity. I believed wholeheartedly in the need to simplify everything — that to create a simple experience is to create a product that fits usefully into people’s busy lives and that they will actually use. I insisted on using the plainest of plain language. I reworked designs with the sole purpose of stripping out everything that wasn’t completely necessary. I even fought to entirely remove subheaders from the design system I was working on.
Of all the beliefs I brought into my new UX job, this has been the hardest for me to unlearn. Not only was it ingrained into my way of thinking about UX, but it was extremely useful in my previous role, where I was working on what is essentially a one-task app. It’s a carpooling app, which people use to find a ride with a driver or offer a ride to passengers. They want to open the app, do the thing they have to do, close the app, and get on with their lives. Making this possible required an obsession with simplicity, and our product was all the better for it.
Now, consider Shopify. It’s a Software as a Service platform that merchants use to run their business. For many, it’s the first program they open in the morning and the last one they close at night. They can use it to create an online store, track inventory, fulfil orders, accept payments, market their products, analyze their customers’ behavior… the list goes on. Simplicity is important, but it cannot be allowed to trump all other considerations by default — if we want Shopify to harness its full potential as a piece of software, we need to allow for a level of complexity way beyond what I’d been used to.
I set myself triggers for this too. Now, whenever I start slashing the content in my latest design explorations, I force myself to consider how many merchants might need the information I was about to remove. Will they misunderstand something if I cut it? What tasks might I prevent them from completing if I simplify too much? Equally, when I’m asked for feedback on someone’s work and my instinct tells me it’s too complex, I stop myself from immediately spurting out my pro-simplification rhetoric. Instead I ask more questions, seeking to understand why that complexity is necessary. In this new environment, I still aim for simplicity, but no longer at the expense of everything else.
In conclusion: cast away your anchors
Doing UX is hard. We need visions, principles and methodologies to help us navigate what are often exceptionally muddy waters. We need anchors to stop us drifting. But there’s no guarantee that the anchors that served you well in your previous jobs will do so in your new one. Learning to unlearn, learning to cast away your old anchors to find others better suited to your new environment, is the only way to avoid being swept away.
Also — Shopify is hiring content strategists in Ottawa and San Francisco!
