Design habits, UX trends and UX career. Brian Pagan Interview

Photo: BalansLab

About Brian Pagan (Brian Pagán) has repeatedly told me colleagues who returned from European UX conferences. Actor and psychologist, UX and the owner of the company answered some of our questions about his path to UX, ethics in UX, trends and favorite applications.

Brian, how did you get into UX, because your first education is acting + psychology?
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I have been interested in technology and human behavior since childhood. When I was seven, I programmed on BASIC on my Commodore 64 (yes, I'm so old :) I programmed a character for Dungeons & Dragons. Such a nerd. And people admired me because I could hardly understand them :) While I was studying to be a psychologist, I earned my living by graphic and web design. Having already received a master's degree, I came across an ad for the User-System Interaction curriculum in Eindhoven. It was a great opportunity to combine my love for technology and my passion for people. Since then I have contacted UX.

2. Do psychology and acting skills help you with your UX work?

Great question. Yes, it helps a lot! Good products and services improve the quality of life of people. Starbucks makes my morning ritual enjoyable and acceptable. Fitbit helps me to become healthier and fit. In order to create great products and services, UXs need to understand what kind of reference points people need. From psychology, I learned the understanding that it was necessary to work with human perception (cognitiveness). And acting skills, thanks to emotional techniques, give me access to human sensations.

3. You often talk about honesty and ethics, as the most important qualities of a UX-specialist. What qualities, in your opinion, should a UX-pro have?

Oh, I wrote an article about this for UX Magazine . The best of us care about people, professionalism in doing work, the question “why?” And about doing what we believe.

Interest in people helps us empathize and - help them improve their lives. The desire for professional performance allows you to pay attention to detail and make efforts to make the product better. The significance of the question “why?” Helps us to move away from our own ego and apply all the skills to solve real problems. And taking care to do what we believe helps us recognize our own vulnerabilities, and we can develop products that eliminate the weaknesses of others.

This is why ethical aspects are important in UX. We work in industries such as automotive, banking and medical, and our work significantly affects the lives of people, including our own.

4. You have been working in specific areas for a long time, for example, in medicine. In your experience, how deep should a UX-specialist go into a specific subject area?

There is a difficult balance. On the one hand, we need to know enough about this area to make decisions and avoid catastrophic mistakes. But, on the other hand, our “ignorance” allows us to look at problems from a new angle. We can see solutions that experts in this field do not see, because we are free from the burden of knowledge, which often narrows the review of the specialists themselves.

5. How did you come to create your company?

The more I studied acting, the more I thought how little we, the developers, use our emotions in our work. And our power is unparalleled when we engage intellectual and emotional forces together. Everyone who creates products and services, be it a designer, developer, or engineer, is the creator, and he can use his mind and emotions together to activate his superpower. For this, I created my own company (“THE GREATNESS STUDIO”) to help people and teams create like superheroes.

6. Always curious about what is happening in other countries. Tell me, what prejudices do you most often encounter in your work? And how do you cope with them?

I managed to work both with corporate systems and with startups, innovative projects. Perhaps this is a biased judgment, but I notice that people with a new idea are ready to make big investments at an early stage of product creation, instead of making small investments and testing whether they are building the right product.

For example, I worked with a new business group in a healthcare technology company in a mental health service. The group worked for two years and completed the mobile application completely, before testing it with potential customers and users. Testing revealed a lot of errors. Therefore, after all the time and money spent, we reworked the concept almost from scratch: when I started working on the project, we built cheap digital and paper prototypes that our research team tested with potential users. These fast and inexpensive prototypes revealed errors and allowed us to improve the concept without having to write code. Within two months, we had an approved product vision, with which the entire team, including developers and people from the business, could start working.

7. What trends, trends do you notice in User Experience lately? Is there something promising? Or something that you just like personally?

Now is an incredible time, and a lot of things happen in UX, which I am very happy about! More and more designers take into account individuality and ethics. People more than ever master emotional design. The idea of ​​DesignOps also inspires me: when designers and engineers work closely together, real magic happens.

At the moment I am studying universal design and accessibility. It inspires me that the product or service will be available and useful to the largest number of people.

8. You are going to hold a master class on designing habits here. And what applications have you formed habits?

Oh, another good question! I use Fitbit to track my activity, sleep and heart rate. MyFitnessPal - to track what we eat, and an application called Zero to track short-term fasting.

Oak, The Mindfulness App, and Headspace help me to meditate, but I openly admit my unhealthy dependence on 9gag and Facebook.

9. Do you think the HOOK model will be 100% suitable for users from Russia, or maybe some aspects need to be revised to change one way or another to fit the local mentality?

The HOOK model is the basis of human habits, so the principles apply to all people. However, the method must be adapted to each new context.

When we develop products to help people create habits, I think it is important to analyze what obstacles these people face, what beliefs hold them, and what makes your product or service thoughtful for these users.

10. Will you be the first time in Russia? What do you expect from the trip?

Yes, this is my first trip to Russia, and I am very happy! I heard exceptional things about St. Petersburg, so I look forward to discovering this city for myself.

Thank!

Questions and translation: Anfisa Letucheva, Julia Juls Kryuchkova
Original interview (in English).