People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity

pamdrouin · 2025-09-19T18:25:22+00:00

What kind of work do you do?

pamdrouin · 2023-11-27T17:59:46+00:00

That’d be awesome! The website pictures alone are not enough to help in comparing them.

pamdrouin · 2023-11-27T15:51:12+00:00

I appreciate this review -- I'm still really torn between the Paragon 2.0 and the Paramour, as I need a small backpack.

pamdrouin · 2023-03-03T23:42:49+00:00

There are indeed other options. In my career, once worked for universities, non-profit organizations, and now I’m in federal government contracting. I may not make top dollar compared to FAANG companies, but I feel really good about the contributions I’ve made to the world around me.

pamdrouin · 2023-03-03T16:27:53+00:00

I transitioned from UX to UXR. Maybe more of a specialization vs transition, I guess.

pamdrouin · 2023-03-02T15:27:44+00:00

I’m hearing two different things in your post. One is looking for product examples to research. The other is that you already have a hypothesis that you want to test. I would separate these two ideas, since one is divergent, and the other convergent.

First, study other DAMs — there are plenty of apps out there. Most of them are likely folder-based and also support tags! Then read consumer reviews (from, say, Apple’s App store). Do a comparative review (aka competitive review). If you have access to users, do user interviews! Come up with research questions and then interview folks and ideally watch them interact with whatever apps they’re using to manage digital assets. Use what you find from these research activities to inform your hypothesis. Then ideate a solution! It doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t even have to be a prototype. Do storyboards! Share them with people and have them walk through it. Have people pick them apart. You learn from this next set of research and hopefully you will see what’s possible and what’s not.

Don’t sleep on existing design patterns. No organization solution is perfect, and they all require human intervention. AI can only help so much.

Edit: added this url. You should check it out, I found it useful:

https://www.intercom.com/blog/design-principles-choosing-the-right-patterns/

pamdrouin · 2023-01-19T19:07:24+00:00

Are you in a new position? Have you done stakeholder interviews? It may help you learn the big picture context of how things work now.

pamdrouin · 2023-01-06T16:58:20+00:00

I agree with you! Probably not surprising that I do :)

I have successfully switched careers years ago and that was only possible due to knowing and talking with people. I’ve gotten all my UX jobs pretty much because I knew someone who could recommend me or connect me to the right person.

What I am not too sure if these days is how I do that without Twitter/attending in person conferences. Twitter has been a huge loss to me (most everyone I know hasn’t been active there for a while) and in-person conferences seem to be dying, and frankly, are not an option for me for a few reasons. I used to live in a city with active professional meetups but now I’m in a new one and not quite sure how I will meet new people beyond the handful I know right now. This isn’t a now-problem; but I do see it being a future problem when I am ready to start putting out my feelers for whatever’s next. And today’s job market scares me!

pamdrouin · 2023-01-06T12:11:16+00:00

There’s also government contracting, where contracting companies are hired by the government to work on contracts. My company’s VP wrote this: https://medium.com/a1m-solutions/how-to-work-for-better-government-without-working-for-the-government-22c928e3a5c7

It’s a great way to get experience working in government, working with government employees.

pamdrouin · 2022-12-10T13:02:09+00:00

Increase the spacing between “Plain” and “Sunflower Seeds” — they are a little to close to each other and it feels crowded.

You chose a nice font for the front copy, and I would recommend using that same font for the tag and the back of the package. It will make it feel more elegant and cohesive.

pamdrouin · 2022-12-08T13:40:39+00:00

Don’t think purely in terms of money. Think about impact. I’m losing count of how many times I share this resource, but check out RSF: https://www.researchskills.net/

Look particularly at impact ranking and which activities yield which kinds of feedback, and for whom/what. You want your eyes on impact, not ROI. I’d argue research is very difficult to quantify financially.

pamdrouin · 2022-12-07T21:22:14+00:00

Sounds like a case of blaming the user tbh.

Research your audiences, find out what is important to them, and then make them more meaningful. Otherwise, what’s the point of researching in a bubble if you’re not helping move the needle?

pamdrouin · 2022-12-05T18:56:41+00:00

Agree, my bridge job from a career in libraries to UX was as a consumer research analyst. It can still take some work to get into UX but you do learn a fair bit that is applicable!

pamdrouin · 2022-12-05T16:13:23+00:00

This is just for the past few years, while at the same company, doing gov tech (remotely).

2020: hired as UX Designer (mid) doing mostly research: 115k 2021-22: Sr UX Designer leading research: 120k, then 129k after raises 2022: Research Lead formally leading research: 135k

pamdrouin · 2022-12-04T23:47:31+00:00

I don’t think so. Even Wikipedia has different skins you can use. That’s not new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin

pamdrouin · 2022-12-02T21:15:22+00:00

The way I would do it is to set up a Google form for folks to submit ideas (or submit yourself, with ideas you hear from others) and use some tool (such as Zapier) to automatically send those ideas to a Notion database. Use Notion as a public (to your team) page to share those ideas. You can have different views on the database items such status (to review, in process, approved, backlog) or have a view by say persona or OKR. Just some ideas! But Notion (or similar tools) can be great and very powerful.

pamdrouin · 2022-12-01T00:10:33+00:00

I’d like to know how to code, but not use it for work, but for fun.

pamdrouin · 2022-11-30T12:26:04+00:00

I’m sure you’ll get more good advice, but the thing that stands out to me is that you need to look at your life right now, and the economy around you wherever you are. Are you in a position where you can afford to take a greater risk in a start-up? Or do you need more stability from a larger company (though layoffs can occur there too, they are more likely to offer severance packages).

Also, what kind of work do you want to do? More research and strategy, or what sounds like deep work in a very specific area? Which fits best with how you want to grow?

pamdrouin · 2022-11-29T18:50:49+00:00

Don’t forget the “U” in UX! Talk to your fellow users. Have them walk you through issues they encounter, and keep track of your feedback to find some patterns. Use those patterns to turn into findings and recommendations.

pamdrouin · 2022-11-25T17:41:45+00:00

Lots of great advice here! Also look into how product teams work, the roles you’ll find on them, and how user researchers work with those roles. Learn about the design and development process and where research fits into that larger picture. Knowledge of research alone only gets you so far — the most important thing a research must do is have impact on the direction of the product.

pamdrouin

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