Writers’ Rough Drafts – Episode #49 With Alex Proaps

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Alex Proaps is a design psychologist, consultant, entrepreneur, professor, and speaker. She uses what she knows about human perception and cognition to help design and development teams who create human-centered technology. This means that, while a lot of her writing is extremely academic and technical, she often needs to write and present in a way that takes these very high-level concepts and processes and breaks them down into easy-to-understand conversations.

Due to the nature of her work, and her location in Norfolk, Virginia, Alex ends up working on a lot of classified and NDA-laden projects, where she serves as a conduit between different teams and departments to make the whole thing come together in a way that serves the end user. When she’s not getting super techy and applying human psychology to the user experience, she still gets her creative juices flowing with occasional blog posts and “fun” articles, and her online Etsy shop, which prominently features some pretty shiny pieces, with a heavy focus on dinosaurs and robots.

What You’ll Learn About Writing This Week:

• The ways that humans consume and use information completely differently from what the creator may have intended
• Distilling down huge projects and academic papers into takeaways for a broader audience
• How hard it can be to step back into the experience of your audience when you’ve become an expert on a subject
• Balancing your creative side with your technical side by using creative problem-solving
• Why it’s always so important to talk to your audience, and jump into the trenches with them, to understand their point of view
• Reading different materials in different settings to help you reset your mind
• Why painting dinosaurs and reading comics can help you stay on top of your professional game
• Asking the right questions to get the information you need from your audience

Mentioned in This Episode (Links and Resources!):

• Six Fifty Eight Design Studio, Alex’s online Etsy shop
• Old Dominion University
• Human factors psychology
• Usability.gov
• System Usability Scale
• UX vs UI
• What is UX design?

You Can Find More of Alex’s Research and Writing on:

• Her website, AlexProaps.com
• Her Twitter account, @AlexProaps
• ResearchGate (Contact Alex to read her work!)

Special shoutout to RevolutionConf, the non-profit Alex works with in Norfolk, VA.

Tweetable Quotes From This Episode:

• “We shouldn’t try to fit the human to the system. It’s more about designing the system around the person.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• “Especially if you’re writing about something you’re not an expert in … you’re trying to translate some information even YOU aren’t 100 percent familiar with … in a way, you relate even more to the reader.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• “Sometimes, it comes down to being the mediator … in order to say, ‘Let’s make this even better.’” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• “One of the goals of research is to share your knowledge with the world … so I love that I’m in more of an applied science so I can translate that work into actual design requirements.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• On talking about what she does for a living: “I have to distill it down to what makes sense to me as a person, not as an academic or a scientist.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• “Any time you’re trying to communicate, you have to think about who is actually on the receiving end. If it’s not someone who’s a subject matter expert, you kinda have to reign it in.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• On finding the best place to read for work-related reasons: “I can do my work in a coffee shop … or a library.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts
• “Give yourself a break when you start feeling burnt out, or when you feel like your writing isn’t good enough. That might be a signal that you need to take a rest for a little while.” – @alexproaps on #WritersRoughDrafts

Thanks to our Season 4 sponsor: Coworker.com