2020 Top 5 Lessons and Reflections with Drew Bridewell

Hey everybody. Drew Bridewell here, CEO and founder of Next Level UX. And I just wanted to leave you with a 20, 20 year in review. Well, not really a year in review, but five things that I've just captured that were my five biggest takeaways for the year and five really important things that I want to leave with you to consider jumping into the new year and jumping in to your, your next big giant goals and milestones and dreams and UX adventures and your product adventures that you're on right now. And I want to share five things that are, I think are going to really help with that. And before I do that, I just want to wish you a happy holidays and a Merry Christmas. And if you do, if you don't celebrate, if you don't celebrate Christmas, then whatever you're celebrating, happy holidays. I'm so honored and grateful that you've been a part of this network and, and that you subscribed to Next Level ux. But I'm also grateful that you're just trying to get to your next level and you're building and learning and growing. And I think this is something to be really proud of, especially going through Covid and going through all the challenges that we're faced with this year from having to stay inside of our homes and just, you know, have to really adjust to this industry and to this market. So I just want to honor that. Like, good job. Congratulations. It's amazing. So without further ado, let's jump into five, five videos I'm going to share. Five videos that will help you and that helped me as far as like my reflections for the year. So without further ado, let's get this thing going. Let's look at this. Number one is the power, the power of clarity. Now in a lot of my programs now I'm starting with clarity as far as action planning, even mapping to learn and the career accelerator. I'm starting with clarity because what I've learned so much in 2020 is, you know, you can have all the greatest ideas in the world. You could have all the, you could have all the things planned out that you want to do. But if you don't have clarity as far as like, why you're doing, the purpose behind that and how it's going to be serving you and your team and your community or family, then it's really challenging to see the success in those things. And it's really challenging to feel motivated and encouraged when you're trying to take on new challenges. If you don't have clarity and Then often you'll find that a lot of, a lot of fights or a lot of challenges you might have with your team come because you don't have clarity on either the thing that you're trying to build, or the problem you're trying to solve, or the people that are involved, the roles and responsibilities that you have at your disposal, like, what's going on, who's responsible for what. Like, you need clarity for those things. So I think the magic word for me this year was trying to find clarity. And I have a couple strategic ways I do that inside of action planning, you know, capturing, you know, what your priorities are, capturing what your goals are, capturing what, how you want to show up every day and a couple other things. But it really helps you reflect and understand like what you want in your life and where you want to go. So I'd encourage you for 2021 to find clarity when you're feeling confused or when you're feeling anxious about something. Like get clarity about why you might be feeling that, or if you're starting a new project, make sure you understand the whole project and get clarity around the business side and get clarity around what your role and responsibility is, and have fun with it and get clarity. And I think a couple of the things that I added in my notes around clarity is like, you know, we're thinking about the election that came, that came through, thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement, thinking about COVID And it's just as important now to remember, remember our history so we can make sure that we don't repeat that moving forward. And you know, it's cliche to say that, but like, we need to, we need to set good examples for the future. We need to set good examples in the designs and our approaches that we take and have reasoning and purpose behind those things. So they're, so they have purpose and so they have, so they're, they have meaning. And they're not just like, you know, we're not just going through the motion and designing things because been given a task to. Right. We're not, we're not feature driven designers. We're outcome driven designers. So what is the outcome that we're trying to create? What is the environment that we're trying to expose to the world? What are we trying to do? And I think we'll talk a little bit more about this in the third and third tip. But what I want to bring to you is just think about how you can find more clarity in everything that you do every day in 2021. Right? That's a challenge for you. So I want to leave you with that for our first tip, which is clarity. All right, Number two, framing conversations. So framing conversations is something that I learned this year. Just having to deal with more high scale, big, big giant projects that the power of framing is so, so critical. So let me break this down for you. So, so you have projects that come into your, into your realm, maybe by a project manager or maybe from your design manager or whoever it is, they give you a project, or it could be your wife, or it could be your parents, or it could be anybody. So you get these projects coming in and your job as a designer is to take that information, process that information and then share it back with your team or share it back with your partner, or share it back with your parents or, or share it back with your teacher or educator, instructor, whoever, share it back with me, your coach. So you get these things coming in and it's an art, it's a practice to be able to share the information back to the people that are helping you drive your projects forward, helping you move something from a draft to a version one, from a version one to a version two. Right. We have this constant process where we are iterating, making things better, processing information, regurgitating that information back, and then helping bring everyone along for that journey. So my big lesson for 2020 is to get really good at mastering the framing of a conversation. So how do you do this? So a couple ways to approach this is one is to do a little preparation before you're going to present something or you're going to meet somebody to complete a task or complete an action or do a worksh. So play this out with me for a second. Let's say you have a presentation coming up and you're presenting the whole entire product. You want to think about who's going to be in that meeting, who's going to be, who's going to need to be brought up to speed about certain topics, how much time and bandwidth do they have? How long is your meeting? Is it going to be a 15 minute, a 30 minute meeting? And then you want to get really good at framing your information, which no doubt highly valuable work, lots of information, but you want to simplify in a way that you can regurgitate that back to the audience and make sure that they can understand it and read it. Because if you're talking at your team level, you want to make sure that you're bringing the information to your team in a way that they can process it at their level. And if you're presenting something to an executive team, you want to make sure that you simplify it in a way that they can understand it, where they can process that information and give you better feedback. Right. So you're getting better feedback because you're framing the conversation in a more meaningful way. Same thing when you're going into a design critique. How can you frame the problems that you're trying to solve in a short two to three minute window so you can get that feedback for the next 27 minutes of your presentation or for the next 20 seconds, seven minutes of that critique. So this is what I'm talking about, framing. And it's something that has been really powerful for me this year and something I want to, I want, I want to help you with and coach you with and can we do more content for this? So if this is something that you struggle with, definitely reach out and let's, let's see how we can make it better for you. But framing your conversations and framing your work and how it's progressing is an incredibly powerful, powerful learning lesson. So that's number two. Yeah. Another thing that I added for this that I had in my notes was it's also important when you're presenting your work, how to like bring people along for that entire journey. So framing helps you level set at different levels of the organization so that you can be on point and be a lead for how you're relaying information so you can help the project move forward further, faster, better, smarter, more intelligent, more systematic, more strategic. That is why it's so important to start thinking about, okay, what are these individuals going to be asking, asking out of me? What kind of questions can I anticipate? How can I better prepare for those things ahead of time so I can be better prepared? So that's another thing. We'll leave it at that. Number three is something which actually started next level UX in the first place. And this is design clarity. Now, design clarity, I've talked about this a couple times, so if you haven't caught any of the content for that, I'm going to give it to you right now. Design clarity is about helping you and your team and your stakeholders and your business understand where the design is at, where is it going, why is it going that way? And also how are you iterating, how are you learning, how are you designing? So this is the whole world of design clarity because it's our responsibility as designers and makers to be able to help bring people along for the journey. I kind of talked about this in number two, about framing, but it goes way beyond that because as creators, we're not the only people. We're not the only people in a project. We're not the only people thinking about ideas and new creative solutions and all these things. So what we need to do is be able to bring engineers, product managers, content strategists, researchers, bring them all along with us, bring them all along for the entire journey and enjoy that moment. Enjoy that. Those five, six other minds that you get to facilitate to help you build and help you design and help you understand that you're focused on the right things and bring those along and, and then having strategies and tactics and in weekly syncs to be able to make sure that that happens. That is Design Clarity. That is helping people understand where you're at so they can participate with you along the entire project life cycle. So that's really exciting. I'm so excited about Design clarity. We talk about that in week six of my career accelerator. And it is just a, it's a lightning bolt of energy around how you can accelerate your project and help everybody feel like they know what's going on and they can just enjoy it. All right, number four is to have fun and to bring. Have fun and bring the joy. Like, having fun and bringing the joy is so critical. And I've been thinking about this all year. So one of my styles for how I like to work and, and how I like to show up with my team is I like to make sure that one, we're having a good time, we're making progress, we're accelerating. Obviously, if things aren't progressing right and things aren't going well, we need to get those things back on track. We need to get those things so we can initiate some fun activities to do that. But thinking about how you celebrate your team on Fridays, thinking about how you celebrate your team on Mondays, getting into the room and be like, let's do this, let's design this thing. Let's have some fun. We're making products, we're building things for people to make their lives better and connecting to that greater mission and that greater purpose. If you can find a way to do that within your project and find that silver lining for what you're working on, then you can find some more joy and some more fun so you can stay motivated and purpose driven and excited about what you're doing and why you're doing it. So bring the fun, enjoy it. Try to find the love in solving those problems. And yeah, and why not? Why not bring the Joy in the things that you do. You have to do it every day. Why not just prepare a little bit more for that fun, for that joy. I wish that for you in 2021, I know you can do it. So. Alright, number five. And I got this from one of my coaches, but I was not so open to sharing my dreams and ambitions with my friends and what I'm encouraging you to do. My biggest tip for 2020 is to actually share, to share more. Share your dreams, share your ambitions, share your purpose, share what you're doing with your family and your friends and your work circle. Like the people that are helping you advance, the people that are helping you grow, the people that are helping you get to your next level. Share your dreams and share goals with those people so you can have somebody to reflect off of, to make sure that you are actually holding yourself accountable and you're working towards your next, your next ambition, your next dream, your next vision of what you want, where you want to go and what you want to do. Now this was, this is something that I started doing 2020 and I'm starting to see and get so much more support for what I'm trying to do. And you know, over the years and all my career, in all my career and all my roles as a product designer and as a leader, I would, I would share this with my team, but I wasn't sharing it with like family, I wasn't sharing it with my friends outside of work. And what I've realized is that you need, you need to have that support. You need to be able to have a circle of friends and a support system that can help root for you and cheer for you and you can do the same thing back to them. So I'll always be your cheerleader in this, in this and this network of next level ux. But I encourage you to find some groups or your friends or another circle to be able to share your dreams and your ambitions. You can share with me and I'll look at it as soon as I can, but that's a huge, huge, huge thing. So that's just something I want to leave you with. So share your dreams. So let's go through these again. So number one was clarity. Number two was framing your conversations and what's going on. Number three was design clarity. Right? Get that. Design clarity. It's huge, can be huge for you. You're going to accelerate so much more. Number four was to have fun and bring the joy in the things that you're doing so that you can stay motivated, stay energized and stay excited for where you want to go with your life, where you want to go with the work that you do and how you want to show up. And then number five was to share your dreams and ambitions with your friends, your family and your circle. And oh man, these are five things. And I'm sure I could keep going on and on and on, but I think these, these bubbled up for me as like I go into this, this Christmas break and go into the holidays and get January 1st started and just cranked and ready to go. I'm building some brand new products and experiences and I just can't wait to share that with all of you and oh my gosh. So this has just been like an amazing, amazing moment to be able to keep making videos, to keep sharing content, to keep teaching and educating about UX and thought leadership and design leadership. And I just want to thank, thank you for all your support and thank you for subscribing and thank you so much for just being there for 2020 and just know that I'm here for you and there is a community of people that are there for you as well. So reach out if you need help, if you need support, if you have questions and you need additional just support, there's somebody out there that's going to help you if it's not me. So you just got to put yourself out there and get that support. So I hope this served you. I hope you have an amazing, amazing end of the year and I hope you have an amazing 2021 now. That's it. I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you later. We found a way, found a way oh we found a way Found away oh.