so How did I get here?

It’s a long haul from Japanese Studies to UX Design. But hear me out!

My department unites its philological roots and anthropological/ethnographic tradition with reflexive social sciences, which is big talk for we thoroughly know how to research people and their specific cultural settings in a way that generates insights about them. Sounds a lot like user research, right?

With too much time on my hands, I enrolled in Google’s Career Certificate program for UX Design.

Within 4 months, I completed 3 peer-reviewed projects and learned everything from empathy mapping over design sprints to presenting my design work to my peers in case studies.

For the first 2 years at university, I juggled 2 bachelor programs at once. Although I didn’t stick with it, my second choice transcultural communication studies, taught me a fair share of theory in the meantime. Knowing the basics (and by that, I mean more than only Schulz von Thun’s four-ears) helped a lot with my first attempts at UX writing.

Although working on the A1 Accessibility Guidelines made me realize how many people have to be involved for one webpage to be fully accessible, it also taught me, that I as a designer am still limited in turning my designs into experiences for everyone.

Unless it’s in the code, it’s not truly accessible.

This is why I have started learning HTML and CSS, with special attention on semantic HTML of course! For now, my short-term goal is to improve my communication with front-end devs by speaking their language. But my more ambitious long-term goal is to be able to refactor code to make it accessible for assistive technology.

In September 2022, I attended UX Con Vienna, an international conference for UX Research and Design. It was hard to pick just a few from the rich choice of workshop and talk topics, so I decided to go with the ones I knew the least about to take away the most.

On Day 1, I visited workshops about How to build up DesignOps and User Psychology. On Day 2, I got to listen to talks about AI tools vs collaborators, Machine Learning and how to disclose it to users, Social Intelligence and How to research using Social Listening, the design process and regulations for medical devices, Data driven Experiences, and Content Science from the court of content: Instagram.

I am very happy with my choices. I was able to get a good grasp on each topic in a very short time. I’m definitly looking forward to visiting again next year!

It was a huge personal goal for me to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Since I studied Japanese at university, I want to maintain my language skills even while I am not actively using them at work. In order to do that, I first took the JLPT N3 in July 2022 and after passing, immediately signed up for the N2 test in December 2022. Now that I have passed N2 (on the first try), I want to take the highest level N1 in December 2023.

Even though I don’t plan on working in Japan, I want to keep on challenging myself. The N1 is my personal moonshot goal.

As you may have guessed, the A in A-Tag stands for accessibility and was hosted by the advocacy group Accessible Media. I have to admit, I had never before experienced a presentation with sign language interpretation and the speaker introducing themselves with a description of what they look like!

But my personal highlight was definitely the sneak preview of what WCAG 2.2 will have in store. From the start, web accessibility has focused on physical disabilities, such as visual impairments like (color) blindness, deafness, motoric disabilities, and all known kinds of assistive technology that come with them. The next update will include more guidelines about cognitive disabilities! The impact of cognitive and sensory overload on customer experience and especially joy of use is still so so so so underestimated!

Erste Bank hosted this conference for professionals specializing in fintech. With my telco background, a lot of the information was new to me, but a few trends among the presenters stood out to me:

Fintech is becoming more accessible in the way it presents transaction information. There is a collective effort to encourage users to improve their financial literarcy, and online banking as a whole is shifting towards app banking.

EBCONT opened one of its regular training sessions to external participants, which resulted in 3 presentations plus a get-together for designers and frontend devs. The speakers did a great job splitting the one colossal topic into definition & a11y mindset, UI design & testing, and how accessible code would look (the example of choice being a generic form).