Interview with Lulu Pachuau, UX Advocate for Code Blacks

19 June 2010 | admin | 0 Comments

Hi Lulu. Thank you for joining us and giving us a few minutes of your time. We won’t keep you for too long.
Lulu: No worries.
So tell us what’s been going, and what you’ve been up to.
Lulu: Well, I’m the one who is trying to elicit the requirements from the client, which also means that the guys have had to wait for me to give them the instruction of, “This is what’s required,” and try at the same time to prioritise it for her. Because from her point of view, they haven’t had a website before. She’s worked with websites, but it can be a little bit tricky to think about what’s more important than the other. So we try to help her through the process of thinking about what’s more important, or what to think about right now. So it’s a little bit challenging from that perspective.

But I think Julie’s really, really good. She seems like a very organised person, because that’s what she does — her day job is working at New Zealand Archives, so she understands metadata and she understands the importance of standards and things like that, although she doesn’t say it. She was not very confident at the start, but I think she’s starting to get more comfortable, because the stuff that we’re talking about is actually quite familiar to her. So she’s very focussed on this stuff as well.

So it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be, working with somebody that I’ve never met, and haven’t done any background information or research. Because usually you’ve got time to do some research about that specific genre. From that perspective, with Julie, it’s been really good. She’s very practical, and the volunteer work that they do — she, her husband, her daughter, they all work together — they’re very passionate about their work, and they’re really trying to help these young kids to get back on the path of whatever they’ve got potential for.

So I don’t even have to convince her to imagine that the site is for end-users. It’s not like that — you show her the rough sketches, and she’s like “Oh, if I was this, and looking for this event, I’d probably go like this.” The type of scenarios that you try to get your client to think about? She’s already in that mindset. So that’s really good.

So it sounds almost as if there have been even fewer challenges working with a client who doesn’t have a website for their organisation at the moment than you would have expected?
Lulu: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s a little bit of an anti-climax — this build-up of “What if?” and then you get this person who listens, and she answers in a way that she understands. If she doesn’t understand, we can quickly tell. So it’s been really nice working with her, and she’s really helped me personally to understand that communication — instead of talking using our language, to talk to her as a person — as a friend, almost — trying to relate to her as much as possible. For me, it’s bringing out that importance a lot more. Interpreting clients is always different — every single one.

And how’s it going with the team? Is the team working well together? And do you guys feel like you’re moving forward at the expected rate?
Lulu: Yeah, I think so. I feel a little bit that I’m holding back things. I don’t know how everyone else is feeling, but I’m trying to churn out the site structure, the page layouts … just drawing them out as opposed to doing them on the computer, because they can see what I’m doing. And if I have to change something — for example, half an hour ago, I said “Guys, we’re changing something,” and they were like, “Whoah, what’s going on?” I said, “We’re changing a section from here to here.” And they all stopped everything and turned around, and could see what I was doing.

What I’m trying to do is reduce the number of things that I have to do. Because with websites, it can be as long as you want or as short as you want, but it has to have a nice balance with usability, plus having to be practical around what can be developed and what can be designed. The guys are really great — again, a lot better than I’d expected, because we’ve never worked together. I mean, I’ve worked with Sam before, but not the other designers. And I was worried that we’d overlap too much. But we placed ourselves straight away. We never said “You’re going to do this, you’re going to do that.” So it’s falling into place quite automatically.

I guess it’s got a lot to do with our own experiences in our own areas, I guess. But it’s been really good.

Well thanks very much for your time. We’ll let you get back to it.
Lulu: No worries!

Tags: , ,

Leave a Reply