Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2otwPpK">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Codi Funakoshi <img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2nvqgFs">
Two years ago, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering. Armed with a newfound sense of accomplishment, I was ready to pursue my entrepreneurial ambitions and conquer the world.
At the time, I just so happened to be interning for a small, relatively young construction company (for those of you who work in tech, a 20-year-old company is considered young in the construction industry).
But this isn’t a story about me — a young, ethnically-diverse, woman — working in a male-dominant industry during a politically- and socially-charged era. In fact, it has nothing to do with the fact that I was a minority, in every sense of the word possible (although that probably would’ve made for an equally interesting story).
This story is actually about what it was like for me as a millennial to work in one of the most “old-school” industries around today and what I’ve learned from my experience.
The company offered me a full-time position after graduation and since they were “young” and young = basically a startup (haha), I took them up on their offer because I thought it’d be a great opportunity for me to gain some entrepreneurial experience.
As an ex-iPhone 3 user, I was one of the first people to have a smartphone in high school. I represent a generation that grew accustomed to tapping on screens during class and posting #tbt pics on the reg.
I use keyboard shortcuts in my sleep and never understood why people would spend five seconds clicking Edit&gt;Undo, when they could spend one second tapping Ctrl+Z. (Side Note: If you belong to the former group, please do yourself a favor and learn ctrl+z).
Cue in my beloved construction colleagues. Really nice people, mostly. Average age? Somewhere between 45–60 years old. Weapons of choice? A notepad and a pencil. And not even a mechanical pencil. I’m talking about those wooden pencils that you have to sharpen manually. I honestly didn’t even know pencil sharpeners still existed…
Generally speaking, when it comes to technology, working with professionals in the construction industry can be frustrating at best.
Something that takes me five minutes to do on a computer will take my middle-aged counterpart 30 minutes. Saving a file to Google Drive? Forget it! They’d rather watch a file get lost in the black hole of a cave that I like to call the local hard drive than figure out how to work “The Google Drive”.
Over the past two years, I’ve established myself as this mystical “tech unicorn” within my company.
“Codi, can you put together the project report for John?” my boss would request, giving me a task meant for a Senior Project Manager, just because I could complete the work in a fraction of the time. This became a pattern that — while it helped me quickly become an asset to the company — prevented a lot of my coworkers from doing their own jobs.
A few months later, I realized that doing all of that work just because I could finish it faster wasn’t a sustainable practice.
How could I redirect my energy and focus towards something that would actually make a difference in the long run?
Then it hit me: I could deconstruct the systems currently in place to figure out where project managers were finding the most issues, then reconstruct the processes in a way that enabled them to do their jobs more efficiently.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2oc7bXm">The equation to take me out of the equation
I was sold. My thirst for startup experience kicked into overdrive and I — the unassuming, little (literally… I am 5&#8242; 2&#8243;), surfer girl from Hawaii — got to work.
Faced with one of the biggest challenges I had seen yet, I set out to understand and simplify the Project Reporting process first.
<h4>The Problem</h4>
As part of the services that we sell to clients, our project managers (PMs) are expected to produce a weekly project report to update their clients on progress. Project reports contain various elements, including a schedule, an open issues log, and photos. In the past, PMs used Microsoft Word to produce the reports, which frequently invited inconsistencies in reporting between different PMs.
Many of the PMs would spend hours and hours creating reports every week. This discouraged them from producing project reports altogether, which in turn negatively affected the business, as we were not delivering what we sold to clients.
<h4>The Challenge</h4>
Streamline the project reporting process for project managers to encourage regular reporting, while also creating brand consistency across all project reports.
<h4>Tools Used</h4>
Typeform, Photoshop
<h4>User Pain Points</h4>
After a sending out a quick and dirty survey to all of the PMs, I found that most of their frustrations dealt with not being able to format their reports properly:
<blockquote>“I can’t get these images to line up properly.”</blockquote>
<blockquote>“How do I put the updated schedule in this report?”</blockquote>
<blockquote>“Don’t know how to get the bullet points to be numbers instead of letters.”</blockquote>
This feedback showed me that Microsoft Word probably wasn’t the best tool for our PMs because it disabled rather than enabled them from completing the task at hand.
<h4>The Solution</h4>
I decided to find a tool that automatically formatted our project reports so that PMs didn’t have to worry about fiddling with a Word document for hours at a time.
Luckily for us, our project management software company offered its customers the option of building custom tools. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to build out a new reporting tool.
I pulled together various form elements from existing tools and created a very basic mockup of how I thought the new project reporting tool should work. The basic idea was to give PMs as little choice as possible, so that they could focus on inputing the content and nothing else.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2nvo1lC">Mock up that I created in Photoshop for a custom tool to be built by our PM software company
Tasks that used to take multiple steps to complete turned into simple one-step processes:
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2oc8Zzv">
With the help of the custom tools team, I was able to build out a fully-functional project reporting tool that could be used company-wide.
<h4>Result</h4>
The revamped project reporting process was a success. Project managers slowly started using the custom tool and the feedback was great. One of the principals eventually decided to incorporate the new project reporting process into new hire training.
User experience designers are professional problem solvers. At the time, little did I know that I was utilizing UX design skills to solve a problem within my organization.
I conducted research (interviews) with a specified user group (project managers) to identify a problem (project reporting process) and propose a solution (custom project reporting tool).
To become a good UX designer, you don’t need a flashy new mobile app concept to start practicing your skills.
UX designers discover problems and come up with solutions. They empathize with users to understand what their motivations, frustrations, and goals are, then find ways to meet their users’ needs.
When you have a moment, take the time to stop what you’re doing and look around you. I bet that you will find a process that can be simplified, or a problem that needs fixing.
The crazy thing is this: People will continue to live their lives without ever understanding the importance of UX design and the impact that it can make.
Take a look at my construction colleagues, for example. They were spending hours at a time every week creating project reports for their clients. Nobody ever took the time to step back and think to themselves, “There’s got to be an easier way to do this.”
I challenge you to be the person who comes up with an easier way.
This alone will make you a better UX designer than 95% of the UX designers out there today.
Codi Funakoshi is a UX/UI Designer located in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to contact her via her website: <a href="http://ift.tt/2n4xXz4">http://ift.tt/2n4xXz4</a>.
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<a href="http://ift.tt/2oc906x">How working in the construction industry made me a better User Experience Designer</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">Prototyping: From UX to Front End</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How working in the construction industry made me a better User Experience Designer

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