How To Be A User Experience Team Of One: Fill & Download for Free

Yes, that is the definition of "entry-level".Experience trumps schooling, so building up any experience you can will help. Unpaid internships, freelance clients, personal projects, etc. Build a good portfolio - and for UX, this doesn't just mean nice designs but case studies of how you approach problems, including wireframes and other supporting materials. In addition, try to read and absorb a lot of good books, such as Lean UX and Don't Make Me Think and The User Experience Team of One.

I created a new Quora design which lets users write a policy-friendly answer so there is no user oppression in the form of answer collapse later.I’m a UX Researcher/designer by profession. A few months back, Quora collapsed one of my ~22k upvotes answer on account of "needs attribution"- Anshul Agarwal's answer to What is it that we as Indians are collectively doing wrong?. This collapse touched me dearly. I had spent close to 30 hrs researching and writing this answer, and it was on an issue I care deeply about. I wrote numerous times to Quora’s moderators (all I could find) to review it once more after I had made the improvements, but they didn’t uncollapse my answer, their reasoning being I made the mistake second time. I highlighted that a lot of users must be making policy violations over and again because of the multiple factors (outlined below). And a user may not be the only one to blame for committing the violations, Quora’s flawed design which doesn’t help users write a policy-friendly answer is also the culprit. So I created a new Quora design which lets users write a policy-friendly answer so there is no user oppression in the form of answer collapse later.It is important to touch upon the factors owing to which Quora users make policy violations over and again, before viewing the mock ups.1. Policy violations are comprised of a number of pointers. A user has to jog his memory to recall them all. At times, she misses out on one. Here are a few that I keep in mind while writing an answer:Be nice, be respectfulAttribute source for imagesAll images captionedNo text-as-imageNo memeNo image-only answerNo image-heavy answerAttribute the source for copied contentUse blockquotes for copied contentMake the page helpfulNo jokeProper English/GrammarClearly, there is a learning curve involved in writing answers on Quora that don't violate a policy, since each policy includes a few items under it. When there is a learning curve involved, people learn gradually. It's undesirable to collapse an answer if they make these mistakes. Because they inadvertently will. What is important is that they should be given a chance to rectify their mistakes. Alternatively, and more importantly, Quora's design should help a user write a policy-friendly answer, so no need to collapse an answer arises in the first place.2. A user is forced to be familiar with policies only when one of his answer collapses. Otherwise, policies never appear on their own in Quora's design to educate a user. For something as important as to collapse a highly upvoted answer, they must appear to guide a user when they are needed, i.e. when a user is writing an answer. Not later in the form of collapse.3. Once a few answers of a user are collapsed, a sense of fear inhabits her. A sense of empowerment which comes from generating content (plus garnering upvotes) is replaced with a sense of oppression. Rather than making a user feel oppressed, a good design should empower the user. During the whole user experience journey, how users feel is of utmost importance. A website which provides the ease of use makes users feel pleasant, whereas a site with unkind surprises makes users feel unpleasant, and possibly even hostile. When I talk about ease of use, I am bringing home the point that a policy-based platform should make users aware of such guidelines upfront, and help them when they are needed i.e. during writing an answer, not later in the form of collapse. That design is clearly missing from Quora right now, and a user may not be the only one to blame for committing the mistake.4. I also believe that by collapsing an answer, Quora's aim is to make a user learn the importance of policies, rather than punishing her. I understand that sticking to plagiarism policy is important, but so is giving a user another chance to help her learn from her mistakes. Ideally, no mistake should be made again, but then no one is ideal.5. Plus, I come across normal (uncollapsed or never collapsed) answers with similar violations for which my answer was collapsed. I can either report it or do nothing about it. What if I don't want to go around reporting others answers and perhaps accumulate bad karma? What then? Just sit here and agonize silently? The absence of a streamlined system tears down a level playing field.Here are some mockups that I created for this design improvement:1. A user starts writing an answer.Quora Answer Screen2. There may be a policies icon (shown by a hammer) on the edit ribbon which shows a user the count of policy violations as she is writing the answer. When clicked, it opens up a Quora writing assistant towards right. This assistant mentions the violations in plain language in the form of cards. These cards layout is seen in quite a few designs these days, namely Microsoft Word Smart Lookup feature, and . For image policy violations, these card may show:• This image needs source attribution• This image lacks caption• Text-heavy image• Image-heavy answerThese cards are also capable of searching the web for any copied material.Quora Writing AssistantQuora Writing Assistant closeup3. When a user hovers upon one of these cards, the card gets highlighted and asks for source attribution for copied material. Once the user clicks on 'attribute source,' it automatically gets attributed, as shown in point 4.Policy violations/Auto-attributionPolicy violations/Auto-attribution closeup4. More policy violations show up as a user keeps writing.Violations like BNBR, English grammar can show up. A disclaimer option for user-created diagram with no source may also pop up.If you haven't noticed yet, there is an option for 'Submit for Moderator Review' besides 'Submit' button, which does as stated. Before submitting the answer for audience, a user gets it checked for policy violations by a moderator. This is to make sure that a user submits a policy-compliant answer, which won’t be collapsed by moderators later on.Submit for Moderator ReviewPolicy violationsI shared this answer with Quora’s writer relations team and their Director of Design. All I wanted was to underscore that answer collapse is a big pain point for user on Quora and if a design which lets users write a policy-friendly answer can be worked upon, it will not only save Quora moderators' time, it will take frustration and misery away from users. Nothing happened.Here’s the link to the ~22k collapsed answer: Anshul Agarwal's answer to What is it that we as Indians are collectively doing wrong?Disclaimer: All the images/mockups here are my own idea and created by me.

Alright.This has been said ad nauseam, but I'm going to say it again, because I'm not sure I've said it out loud.Quora needs to work on search, and Quora needs to work on filtering.It is absolutely maddening to want to reference an answer you wrote a year ago and don't remember the exact wording of the question.If you do remember specifically, you can usually search your own name and a close approximation of the question, and possibly find it..But come on. Filtering is not that hard. Filter by subject, date range, at least month/year.Truth be told though, even a moderately effective content search engine would improve user experience by a massive amount.