Justin Asks...

Q:
I have no idea what "coaching" means. You just go to places and give a pep talk?

A:
I get this question a lot. I think just going places and giving a pep talk might be more like cheerleading. Which I am more than happy to do if anyone wishes to hire me for such a thing. Along the same line as, "What is coaching?" I also hear, "What’s the difference between a consultant and a coach?"

Here's the short answer: 

When I’m consulting, I’m helping a client create a product. It’s like, “Hey, I can fix/design that for you.” or “Let’s workshop this and solve some problems!”

When I’m coaching, I’m working with teams and/or individuals on the process of changing behaviors. We explore challenges and goals, and come up with the best choices for them based on where they are at and their vision for their future. I don't do the work for them, I guide, inspire, listen, encourage and advise.

My coaching in greater detail:

CORPORATE COACHING 
This service offering was born from the pretty standard UX consulting arrangement, which I still do offer. What I found time and again in most engagements was that there were deeper challenges to work through than just getting said product out the door. Communication challenges within teams, across teams and departments, there were challenges with processes and understanding, professional development challenges, team-cohesion challenges, and in many cases I’d end up addressing many of those challenges as a part of the engagement just to get to the actual consulting/product makin' part. And wouldn’t you know it, I LOVED the people part. Even more than making the products in most instances because I am genuinely interested in the health and well-being of the people making these products. I've been studying coaching for longer than most people realize, exactly because of my human interest and my desire to make business and products more "human." I think in our iOS world, folks think of me as "a designer." That's OK, but I've actually got a whole lot of other experience to offer.

I’ve heard different Chefs say that what you’re feeling, your mood and spirit, cooks right into the food you're making. The same applies to artists, designers and developers for the things we make. If the team making the products is not happy and healthy, the products will reflect that. Thusly, corporate coaching focuses toward building-up and strengthening teams, their communication, practices and behaviors. I offer tools, skills and perspective in addressing challenges and growing from them.

INDIVIDUAL COACHING
My coaching engagements are designed to help people create positive change and forward momentum in their lives. For some clients, the positive change they most want may be in the realm of personal goals such as financial management, time management, work-life balance, stress reduction, simplification, health, overall “Life Design” stuff.

Other clients may be more interested in professional or business goals such as developing a personal brand, improving leadership skills, getting a promotion, starting a business, charging more, etc. I work with my individual clients to help them live a better, richer life - regardless of their type of goals. 

Please let me know if this answered your question! And thank you for asking.  :)

Rachel S. Asks...

Q:
How do you make a living? Every time I see your Instagram and Twitter posts, it seems like you're always somewhere on vacation? How can you afford that?

A:
Awesome question and I actually appreciate it, because I didn’t realize it looked like I was always on vacation.

I am lucky enough to be an independent consultant and coach. Just because I'm traveling doesn't mean I'm not working. In fact, it probably means I am traveling because I'm working. 

And working independently, at least for me, has taken some practice. I suppose, if I can offer any insights, here are 7 things (Maybe we should call this, 7 things to make it seem like you live on vacation?):

1. Know what services you offer.
I make most of my income through coaching and consulting. It has taken me some work and rework, and redefinition to really be able to articulate my services clearly. But I’ve got a really solid set of coaching and consulting offerings now and I’ve been really lucky to stay busy. 

2. Have more than one revenue stream.
For me, supplementary income comes from a mixture of speaking engagements, writing articles or blog posts about things I've learned or can teach in UX, design, and fumbling through burnout and back again. All things I hope can save others from having to go through, or if they are "in it" on similar situations, maybe some good tricks for getting through. Oh, and the occasional selling of coffee stain art pieces. I've also considered offering rides to-and-from the airport for a small fee. :D


3. Have some savings.
You always hear, "Prepare for the unexpected." How much savings one needs really depends on your individual circumstances. I’m great at helping people figure out what those are, though!
I Like Suze Orman's advice, of 6-8 months living expenses in an emergency fund.
You want savings in case things get slow, or other awesome expenses crop up, like all of your 12 yr old appliances break down at the same time and each need full-on replacement AND your adventurous 5 yr old decides to jump off the big slide at school and needs stitches from an ER visit. These sorts of things are realities that happen to the best of us. The better prepared you can be, the easier negotiating a well designed life will go. 
My personal perspective on savings: "Having savings is giving yourself the gift of time." Feel free to pass that on. :D 

4. Constantly improve your self-discipline.
This line has come up about 6 times in the past two days for me, "A person that wants a thing will find a way; a person who doesn't will find an excuse."
Making sure whether at home, someone else’s office, at an airport or in a hotel, that actual work gets done for a minimum amount of time each day. I’m constantly working on improvements to my own productivity and I really feel like I’ve made a lot of progress that has stuck. I’ve started using the Pomodoro Timer app for Mac, and it’s been AWESOME for me. 

5. Have a Plan B.
This one is fairly straight-forward but seriously, have a Plan B. Outline what the worst case scenario looks like. Be really clear on what actions you can take, to not flounder or get stuck in a downward spiral. For me, my guide is my bank account balance. I have an amount that I live on, I know my monthly expenses to the penny and what effects spending over my defined budget will have on my timelines of comfort. I have built buffer for unexpected misc, and an amount that sends off the alerts to BUST A MOVE. And even if I hit bust-a-move mode, I still have some time before things get dire. And if things get dire, I list my house, and initiate: PLAN B. 

6. Make your mental/physical health a priority.
For me, the trick is really finding something that gets you into a rhythm that is repeatable. And I think that a huge part of self-discipline includes making time for healthy activity. It’s really been a struggle for me to come back to that one, but I feel really positive about the progress I’ve made in the last 3-4 months. And my brain feels the benefits.

I've always said this about living in Las Vegas, it's one of the easiest, cheapest places to get in and out of. Everything is about a 30-45 minute drive for me, many of the hiking/nature pics I post to Instagram are literally a 30 minute drive from my house, at either Mt. Charleston or Red Rock. When I’m home, I can carve out an hour and a half to go on a gorgeous hike, because it is important to me and the end-product of the work I do and the type of person I am/want to be. And if I simply cannot take that much time, there’s a 2 mile loop at a park that is a 3 minute drive from my house. I can knock that out in almost no time at all, right between dropping my kids at school or summer camp and making coffee.

7. Remain flexible.
This is in reference to as many things as you can make it apply, while still remaining clear on what you do and why. I offer a fairly defined list of services but I remain open to conversations about what people need or are looking for.  I like dialogue, if it gets us where we want to be.
I work within people’s budgets, I simply request knowing what the budget is, so that I can tailor services to match. 

I hope these answer your question and thank you again for asking! I’m not always on vacation but as an advocate for Life Design, I’m getting things figured out so that there’s not a lot of separation between work and life. It’s just… Life. And loving life. There are ups and downs, but you know what, I’m working hard to keep what I've got going, and growing!

<3

Agustin asks...

Q:
I'm doing the design and development of a video game store that is about to open. I'm thinking on giving it the full UX/personality treatment and document it. 

How would you go about documenting the whole process? What would you absolutely include? What would you leave out?

By the way, I'm one of the owners of the store.

A:
First, congratulations on the store, sounds cool! Here are my thoughts regarding the documentation of your product review.

When documenting a process, I tend to lean toward over-documentation, that way you have a hearty record of as much detail as possible. I say this, though I tend to be pretty crappy at actually DOING this. ;)

When communicating or sharing the documentation you've gathered, edit it down to the most important points. There can be a lot of interesting or fascinating discoveries along the way. It might be great to pull a few key points where applying a personality caused some significant changes, and similarly, it would be great to see if/when/where rethinking things with a personality approach maybe did not change anything. I believe it's important to capture good things as well as things that maybe didn't work out. Learnings are important, both positive and negative.

For example, you may showcase where some of your UX micro-copy underwent rethinking/rewriting, in order to give it more personality. And by contrast, you may do a full review of your product and find that the wording for error messages should need to remain as they are in order to avoid confusion or diluting the seriousness of certain actions. 

Like we do with the products themselves, it is also incredibly useful to get feedback on your documentation. Ask some colleagues or potential users, friends, family, etc to review your documentation and talk about the pieces they found to be the most interesting, surprising or helpful.

There are tons of ways to document things, finding your own style could be a fun part of this whole activity. I have a friend (@thomasknoll) who’s just started a really cool thing, you may want to check out what he’s doing here for inspiration: Setting up a lab-notebook for a scientific-method approach to marketing

Keep me posted on what you do here! I'd love to watch it all unfold. :)

Jeremy asks...

Q: 
What sort of advice do you have for an independent mobile app developer looking to switch to a product design/interaction design career?

A:
I love this question. As a product/design person who’s spent the last several months shifting into focus on writing and helping people reach their personal and professional goals, and self-proclaimed heart-follower, I couldn’t be more thrilled to offer a few thoughts. 

I’m going to take a leap and make an assumption that if you’re looking to switch career focus, it’s probably coming from some burning passion within. Right?

It’s of my nature to always ask and wonder the big ‘why’ about everything, and I have to make the disclaimer that I’m jumping right into an answer without really knowing your specific situation. I sure hope that’s what it is for you, though. A burning passion! Because I think that’s where it starts. Something in your guts that you believe in and love, and can’t stop thinking about. You want to make the world better somehow, through the tools people use. 

I think it’s important to be realistic to your current situation, whatever that may be.  All I mean by that is to take the leap of faith responsibly. Me, for example, I’m a single mom of two very young girls. I tend to take more calculated risks than if it were just me, solo. In the realm of me solo, I’d throw caution to the wind a heck of a lot more than I already do (which is actually kind-of a lot.) But at the same time, don’t be SO afraid to give up perceived “security” that you let it hold you back from reaching your goals. Dreams and happiness come from hard work, focus and taking some risks. You know your situation and I totally trust you'll make good healthy decisions that take you as far as you want to go in life.

Whether you are in the ‘just starting out’ or ‘been doing it a bit for a while’ category, my advice is fairly similar. If you’re already taking on work as a product/interaction designer, it’s really a matter of continuing to take more and more of that work on until you entirely shed the development work (if that is your bigger picture plan) and never look back. Your experience as a developer will bring so much value to your work and expertise as a product/interaction designer. Conversely, it can occasionally box-in your thinking, too. I was never a hardcore coder or anything but I have to admit, I struggled for a while back in my web design days (where I used to design and code my website projects) I often designed knowing I was going to have to code it later, and I’d occasionally shy away from pushing my own coding boundaries/abilities. DON’T DO THAT! 

If you’ve not yet started taking on work as a product/interaction designer, look for opportunities that will allow you to participate in this sort of work. That can be in terms of volunteering time with team members, co-workers or friends you know already doing this sort of work, learning all you can and actually jumping in to doing as much as you can, and sharing your work for feedback. Getting into the habit of gathering feedback early and often in this line of work really can’t be stressed upon enough. Read, study, learn, listen and most importantly (imho) observe. 

Another thing, if you’re interested in a little more reading, I wrote an article a few months back that talks a bit about the shift I’ve been going through this year and how I approached it. It’s almost due for an update but I may wait until year’s end to get on with that.

I’d really love to hear more about where you’re at in your process and to stay in touch about how it’s going. The struggles, the wins, the unexpected stories that shake out. Seriously, please keep me posted.

Hope this post has offered something useful to your journey. I wish you all the success in the world!