Curiosity Tank

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Progress Over Perfection + New Events

michele ronsen

Welcome to 2023! Isn't it awkward to type “2023? Curiosity Tank enjoyed a tremendous year in large part due to you! We sincerely appreciate you being a part of our community, the feedback and suggestions, incredible engagement, outstanding referrals, and ongoing support. Thank you for entrusting us to help you achieve your user research goals and evangelize user research around the world!

We reviewed 2022, our lessons learned (some were HARD), outcomes (some were TERRIFIC), and planned for 2023, and beyond. This is an astonishingly effective and humbling ritual. If you haven’t already set aside time to reflect on your 2022 (specifically what worked well, what didn’t, and why), and or where you’d like to focus your energy and growth in 2023, we invite you to use some of our favorite frameworks from Atlassian.

We use these retrospective tools in our Ask Like A Pro Orchestrate workshop. They can be applied to evaluate any aspect of your personal and professional life, quickly and visually. While they were designed for project and team retrospectives, they can absolutely be leveraged for individual and business use as well. Here is some inspiration:

  • Mindset and goal alignment

  • Experience assessment and improvement

  • Opportunity and gap identification

  • UX of working/living/partnering with you/someone else evaluation

  • Job search/career progress reflection and planning

We used this framework to help us evaluate Curiosity Tank’s past year and future:

Yep, we’re sharing highlights AND lowlights. Why? Because we’re real. Tradeoffs are made. You win some, you lose some, and nothing about us, our industry, politics, economy, job security, health, or any other aspect of our lives is static. Retrospectives should 100% reflect both the good and the bad. #truthbomb

What are the black boxes for? Unsharable hardships (we certainly learned from them) and super exciting work in progress ;)

And with that, we welcome you to look back on your 2022. Then write your 2023 goals and objectives! Think about it in a similar way to writing a research plan. Include what you are trying to achieve (e.g. what are you looking to learn?) and how you will go about it (e.g. how will the learnings be applied?). Wherever possible, add metrics to help make it even more tangible and measurable.

We repeat a few mantras In the Ask Like A Pro user research workshop series. One of my favorites is “Progress over perfection.” Keep this one in mind when reflecting on last year and creating your goals. It sure helps us keep a healthy perspective ;)

Upcoming Events

  • January 10th - March 29th: UXDX Community Events. Register here (various dates and times)

  • January 11th: Unlock Your Team's Research Potential. Register here 8 AM - 9 AM PT

  • January 20th: Curiosity Tank's Intro to User Research Day-long workshop. Register on Eventbrite 9AM - 4PM PST

  • January 26th: UXR Lounge Event. Register on Eventbrite [Details and event link to come] 9:30 - 10:30 AM PST

  • January 28th: Curiosity Tank: Independent UX/UXR Consulting Event. Register on Eventbrite. 10 AM-12 PM. Note: If you were recently impacted by layoffs and or the $35 USD event ticket price presents a hardship for you, please email hello@curiositytank.com for a discounted promo code.

Speak up, get involved, and share the love!

And that’s a wrap!

We try to alternate between a theme and UX/UXR jobs, events, classes, articles, and other happenings every few weeks. Thank you for all of the feedback. Feedback is a gift and we continue to receive very actionable input on how to make Fuel Your Curiosity more meaningful to you.

What do you think? We're constantly iterating and would love to hear your input.

Stay curious,

- Michele and the Curiosity Tank team

PS. We're only offering two public Ask Like A Pro cohorts this year, and the next one starts in February/March! If you’re ready to register, click here to grab your spot! Need a little more info? Stay tuned for our Live Info Session with Alumni date.