Take a risk and use your skills

In August 2019 I started a global crowdsourcing effort to define some of our UX industry’s crazy cluster**** of terminology. I’d never crowdsourced anything before but there was confusion everywhere and I wanted to try to do something about it.

This experience introduced me to hundreds of enormously special, caring, and talented people all over the world but two, in particular, take the cake.

Janet Standen not only led one of the five teams defining the terms, but she successfully and rightfully increased our scope to include MRX terms too. We continue to meet regularly to flesh out more definitions. She is now one of my closest confidants! I cannot count the hours we’ve spent together over the past 18 months! In addition, she introduced me to QRCA where we unveiled the work now referred to as the UX Lex. Janet named it. (Lex is short for lexicon.)

This month QRCA magazine featured a six-page story about this important work and I couldn’t be prouder to share it now! The link is in the comments.

The article features an illustration created by Milly Schmidt, based in Melbourne, Australia. I also met Milly as part of this project. She was an extraordinary contributor. Fast forward, and now Milly is the Director of Product at UsabilityHub, and also one of my favorite clients. She and her team sponsored the entire Spring cohort for the Ask Like A Pro students and were are planning future collaborations.

Moral of the story? Take a risk and use your skills to contribute to something beyond yourself.

Pls check out the links below.