Interview with Aleksandra Melnikova, Head of Experience Design at Inviqa

We interviewed Aleksandra to learn how to look after the well-being of our own and others, the close relationship of system thinking and user experience, her storytelling approach and passion towards planet-centric design. Enjoy! 🍄

Aleksandra Melnikova

I really loved what your LinkedIn bio says! It says the essence of how your design is ‘designing meaningful methods and artefacts, mentoring, and looking after the well-being (and progression) of people you work with and generating value for businesses’.

1. Any tips to look after the well-being of people you work with but also yours as well?

To look after someone else’s well-being, you need to get to know them, to see what you’re working with such as their daily rituals and how working from home has impacted their work-life balance and reality.

Since March we’ve had this unimaginable situation where we said goodbye to each other at the office for what we thought was a few days of working from home, which turned into a very long-term reality for most (design) companies.

Offices are reformatting to allow flexible working, so we are trying to learn and assess what are the most favourable conditions we can create for people to be happy and productive. In fact, having just completed a study on this subject, I can certainly say there are some findings that stood out for me: it has become harder to connect in some ways, and easier in others.

Working from home has created a lot of challenges, particularly with the constant “frontal-view” when speaking, where we can’t read each other’s body language, as well as generated a lot of “Zoom-fatigue”. On the other hand, connecting to people across the globe has become much easier thanks to Miro, Mural and other tools, enabling us to act in the same digital space. That digital space, in turn, shifts balance — so people who are usually on a quieter side, can get much more vocal in this, somewhat less personal, context. I’ve seen it contribute to flattening unnecessary business hierarchies.

Working from home allows us to collaborate easily but also gives us zoom fatigue.

You’ve asked me “how do I take care of my own well-being”, and it’s not a great answer in terms of work-life balance, but it’s a sincere one: I dive into work and try to create meaningful experiences, something that I feel may be useful at the moment. It’s also a great breather as there are no client constraints, just us and the possibility of creating some positive change.

To give an example, we (Laura and myself) have recently completed a project called “Bookversal” to enable parents to easily find books with diverse character representation, linked to BIPOC-owned stores where we could. This was our way of trying to stay useful whilst confined within four walls. Also, it was a nice piece of research to undertake as a parent: now I know exactly what to read to my daughter so that she can relate to the narrative — narrative of being beautiful, on your own terms, rather than dreaming to have Rapunzel’s golden hair (true story).

I was lucky enough to work with teams where mental health and wellbeing are very high on everyone’s agendas: a lot of us are MHFA ambassadors and/or first-aiders, and we’ve been encouraging people to reach out to each other. With the loss of spontaneous conversation — a human connection beyond the daily projects (like people spending a few minutes chatting in the kitchen) it can sometimes feel like everything revolves around very functional work calls and family duties. So creating (physical) moments of spontaneous connection is high on my priority list (next passion project?…)

2. As you explain in your bio, “I also believe that society is very complex, UX designer’s role is expanding”. I was wondering do system thinking skills help untangle the complexity

By system thinking, practitioners very often mean very different things. So it’s important to contextualise this term within projects, programmes, or client relationships. As a service designer by training, I feel the way to look and design for systems is changing, but it’s a sign of a space maturing and discipline morphing all the time.

I like to think of system thinking as one methodology within experience design…and I like to think about experience design as an all-encompassing discipline, where UX, CX and SD nest.

The way I explain what I do to my family is to say it’s rooted in psychology and understanding people on the business and customer side and finding solutions to answer the needs of both, taking into account cultural context and technology. It requires macro-thinking and strategy, more than any other skills, really.

If we take UX as a discipline, it has definitely changed since its appearance, and I’m happy to witness it — whilst design Twitter is arguing over job titles, this freedom and absence of specific definition enables us to work on so many dimensions of originating experiences. That’s the reason I prefer leading/working with experience design teams (not UX teams, when UI and strategy form a different cohort) — I don’t want the teams to focus on micro solutions within an interface and limited set of interactions, I’d like us to understand the context and design for complex reality, have an impact on the business level, as a start. That’s why our scope spans EVP and employee journeys; design for inclusion; ethics, responsibility; business strategy and products and services designed for long-term use.

3. How do you use storytelling skills with clients?

Myths are the oldest mechanism we live by, so of course, we create stories on a daily basis. In the experience design world, use cases vary, from pitch narratives, where we have to distil our process, to project parts where we have to work to a certain audience in order for, say, our research findings to be memorable and actionable.

The simplest way to think about a product or a service story is taking a traditional narrative curve from kid’s classics like The Red Riding Hood: Trigger/Suspense/Climax, Falling action, a hero comes out changed, and replacing it with the ‘world before your product/product happens/world after your product’.

Use story to explain the world without the product and one with the product

A huge part of our job is to help people imagine — scenarios, needs, outcomes, so bringing it to life via storytelling mechanisms mostly works.

Heroes of those stories deserve another mention. The way we define traditional UX artefacts like personas is not by templates or best practices, but by how much they serve the business, or how they bring customers into the world of business decision making.

Personas will never be a 100% representation of all customers and there’s no template for “what’s right”. Making them data-informed yet memorable is what has worked for us, so far. Sherlock Holmes is an archetype of a detective — but would we remember him equally well if Conan Doyle were to not polarise his features to the level of someone we can truly relate to, or easily imagine?

Sherlock Holmes is an archetype of a detective — but would we remember him equally well if Conan Doyle were to not polarise his features to the level of someone we can truly relate to, or easily imagine?

4. How do you design for the long-term?

Generalisation here, but a lot of businesses reflect our current dominant culture — we are looking for things in the now, we want them fast, we are focused on a specific result. It has to be a part of our role as Experience designers to broaden that perspective beyond short term gains.

I’m not a fan of user-centricity when it comes to designing the future. Only because we don’t take it upon ourselves to design for a person in the future, or for their transformation — we very often observe and target immediate user actions, capturing the attention (thanks to engagement being defined as dwell time).

However, I feel this man-is-the-measure-of-all-things approach has given way to a whole load of experiences we would have, in hindsight, constructed differently, if we could imagine the consequences of some of them (decreasing attention span, anyone?). So in my personal opinion, practicing system-thinking is much more important than designing this game of life for a single player, and then paying the price for a narrow focus.

I’ve started using aspects of planet-centric design canvas, which helps consider the wider impact of the design decisions made on the planet, the context, and humanity.

Some brands are not ready for it, but other companies are adopting the practice by designing for it and being accountable for it. As we design more tools to measure the impact of experience changes, hopefully more businesses will follow, moving from abstract “we want more customers” to “we want to be helping our customers” to “we want to be a decent part of this complex global system so that we still have a place to run this business in the future”. Sustainable development goals, as a framework, are working in that same direction. I have done, and am hoping to do more work in that space.

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Interviewed by Misato Ehara

Edited by Misato Ehara and Aleksandra Melnikova

Illustrations by Maria Nikla

Edited with Google docs

Published on 6 Oct 2020

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Interviewee: Aleks currently leads the Experience design team at Inviqa, her role being to drive experience excellence and human-mindful, systematic approach to challenges, helping clients with digital transformation and inclusive design practices. Over the last 11 years, she has built successful design teams across multiple agencies, led and delivered (digital) experiences for companies like VISA, Lloyds, TSB, SKY, Aviva, VSO, GSK, British Airways, EE and Virgin Voyages.

Interviewer: Misato Ehara is founder of The UX Review, former design Strategist at Gensler. She is currently completing a Masters in Curating Contemporary Design and is open to UX research roles starting in October 2020.