2022 year in review – the professional part

2022 was, well, a lot now that I look at it. I decided to follow the trend, and I prepared a little “year in review”. It was very long, so I split it into two articles. This article is about my professional year: my work, conferences, workshops, articles and the brand new shop where you can get templates and resources to save time in your daily UX research and design activities. You can also check the “craft and creative year” part.

Another year as a UX Researcher and Designer consultant

I’m still working for Maltem in Luxembourg. I have a long term mission with EIB (European Investment Bank). I’m helping them migrate an 18 year old tool, and 2023 is the year we decommission, so, yeahy, this should be fun. Wish me luck with the 2023 change management coming my way.

I launched a UX Template and Resources shop!

I ended up playing with Payhip. I created a shop for my UX tools, templates and resources. I haven’t put all my content there yet, but it will grow.  I plan on having some special bundles with resources and templates to help you with: user research plans, user interviews (including some printable cards for your user interview and follow-up questions), usability testing, accessibility, etc. I’ll send a newsletter when there will be more resources in the shop, for now, I’m just happy to share with you the brand new place!

Visit my Shop!

I wrote a Book on User Journey Maps

I partnered with Sitepoint to write a 5 chapters ebook on User Journey Maps. If you want to dig further, on that topic, you can get it at different places:

• Check the  Free public first chapter on Sitepoint
• Get the full User Journey Mapping ebook with a Sitepoint membership
• Buy the  User Journey Mapping ebook on amazon (sponsored link). There is also Google Play and Kobo

I Shared my Knowledge at Conferences, Meetups, in  Workshops and with Students

2022 was also a big year for conferences and meetups, especially remote ones.

2 new workshops

• Designing Better Products, a remote workshop with Smashing Magazine. 10 hours (5 x 2h) + Q&A, 5 sessions, 10 practical exercises, a BIG miro board, a nice figma file, and 18 more resources for participants to keep learning and practicing! It was a very nice experience, I loved the “2h30 in the evening over multiple days” format. Participants were awesome
• I facilitated a remote workshop on Information Architecture and how to build better reusable components, with a user centered process for Concentric. It was also a very nice experience, with a lot of participants from all around the world. That is a very cool thing with remote workshops!
• I also helped SNCF (French railroad company) with a workshop on remote workshop on cognitive biases

Sidenote: I am preparing a “Getting better at User Interview” (title in progress) that will use my future UX Interview cards. If you are interested in the workshop you can leave me your mail here and I will let people know about the first iteration.

2 new Conference talks

I created 2 news talks for 2022: one on accessibility documentation and one on enterprise UX research.

• A Designer’s guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions: at Axe-con video(you need to log in), at webaim (video), ID24 (video), Clarity. and in French at DevFest Nantes (video).
• A talk on UX Research for Internal Enterprise Tools (slides) that I shared with the UX Research Meetup group (video) and the UXChange Meetup group (video)

Meetups

• I spoke at Friends of Figma Washington DC about Designing reusable adaptive components for design systems (video)
• I shared “Things I learned while growing as a UX Designer” (video) with participants of the TECH(K)KNOW virtual event
• I hosted a “An Introduction to UX (Design & Research)” webinar for Maltem where I explain the value of UX Research and UX Design on a project
• I also spoke about accessibility and design documentation at A11yMTL meetup and the CapCHI meetup.

Teaching and sharing with students

• I talked about my work as a UX Researcher and Designer (video) in front of students of the Google dev students club Tokyo
• I explained my job in a 1 hour masterclass to ladies from the Girleek digital school in Belgium
• I continued teaching  Mobile Strategy and UX at the University of Strasbourg (Caweb and LP DWCA) and for University of Brussels (Certificat inter-universités en User Experience Design and Research (UX))

I’m looking forward to new collaborations in 2023, so, let me know if you are interested in me coming to speak at your meetup, conference or facilitating a workshop!

I wrote more Articles and spoke in Podcasts

Articles

I keep on collecting the weekly links on the blog. On top of that, I wrote a few new articles:

• A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions, a full transcript of the talk on the same topic (and I translated it to French: Documenter l’accessibilité en phase de design !). Also available in French: Illustrations de la formation Accessibilité  d’interfaces d’Access42
• And I created 5 illustrations to understand and promote accessibility (based on a “Designing Accessible interfaces” training in French I attended)
• I shared My favorite 10+ free eBooks for designers (and a trick to access more books for a small fee) because I think everyone should have ways to access education
• I wrote for the Condens blog: User Diary Studies – An effective research method for evaluating user behavior long-term
• I published a FAQ for this site, hoping to help you navigate some of the things I do and can offer.

Podcasts

• I talked with Vitaly from Smashing Magazine’s Podcast about enterprise UX, user journey maps and more
• I was invited to the Design Journeys to talk about my work and career (in French).
• I talked with Darren Hood about the UX hiring landscape and my experience with recruiters and educating recruiters about how to optimize their hiring and candidate engagement efforts: Episode 121: The UX Job Hiring and Seeking Landscape, Part 4 (with Stéphanie Walter)
• I talked about pushing accessibility forward, education and communities in AXSChat podcast: check the video or get the transcript.
• I talked about cranes and how to build trust with users in enterprise UX in the UXtweak podcast. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast and as a transcript
• I recorded a “Wacky and unethical UX horror stories” episode of the DeltaCX podcast
• Jack Chambers-Ward invited Myriam Jessier and I to SEO horror stories podcast,  and we spoke about all the shady techniques SEO people use to try to sneak links into this blog

The social media mess: my growing need to bring my content back to my own platform

This year, my LinkedIn exploded, I now have more followers there than on Twitter. Which is strange because I’ve always considered Twitter as my “home social platform”. I met awesome people there who became real friends and it brought me a lot of job and speaking opportunities. I’m not leaving yet, but, well, it doesn’t feel like home like it used to anymore. In December, Twitter wanted to ban links to some external tools. They went back on that decision. But, I see this as a warning sign of what might happen. I expect those platforms to start shadow banning content creators like me, who mostly posts links to other places. Because, they do not want the users to leave their own platforms.

So, I’ve decided to re-opened a Mastodon account. So far, I have nice conversations and I like the slow pace of the platform. Let’s see where it goes. I’m still missing a tool to schedule posts. Yeah I know Mastodon scheduler exists but it’s far behind Publer (and I hope they will support Mastodon soon, please vote for the feature).

I am also starting to get slowly tired of feeding algorithms that prefer to push shitty content because it’s controversial and engaging than quality one. So, I am questioning whether I will keep on sharing the links on a daily basis on social media, or just put them on the blog.

In 2023, I will start with a mix: I will keep on posting some resources, tools and articles  on social media. BUT, I will post extra ones here, on the blog as well. Which means: the Pixels of the Week will have more content on my blog, that what you will find on social media. If you fear you might miss links, I have a newsletter where I send every new article on the blog. I also have RSS for the English and French blog in the footer.

And for 2023?

Well, that’s a lot. But, I already have some cool things planned for this year. For now those are the things I plan:

• I want to work on more workshops (please contact me if you are interested)
• I want to publish some of the articles I have in mind but postponed because I was preparing some resources for my students
• I also want to bring back some UX in Lux events

I will add more templates to the shop 

The craft part

If you enjoyed this, you can also check the “craft and creative year” part.