Today was the first day of my pairing tour for my Design Apprenticeship. A pairing tour is something that happens before an 8th Light apprentice’s final assessment or challenge, and consists of pairing with existing Designers or Crafters. The purpose of the design tour is to gain first hand experience of life after the apprenticeship, and an opportunity to apply the skills that the apprentice has learnt in a new context in real client situations.

I spent my first pairing tour day pairing with Julia Murray, who is a designer that specialises in User Experience. Julia and I will be facilitating a UX workshop to a client in June, so we spent a little bit of time discussing the agenda for that first thing. Afterwards we started working on a competitive analysis for a new client - a cannabis producer and vendor. I should say that this client operates in the United States, where in many states cannabis is legal to sell and use under particular circumstances. It is a very interesting project, as there are many legal requirements around the sale of cannabis, and these requirements change from state to state. I learnt a lot about how such vendors operate in different locations.

For example, in Florida, it is legal to buy cannabis online and have it delivered to your residence. In some states you can order product online to a particular dispensary, without purchasing it, and buy it in person upon collection.

In some states cannabis can only be purchased for medicinal use, and so is marketed to patients and physicians, and in other states it can be used recreationally, so the marketing focuses more on aroma, strength, and recreational situations where cannabis use could enhance.

For our competitive analysis we looked at 4 different competitors and how they market and/or sell their products. We also looked at examples of e-commerce in general, such as Amazon.com and Asos.com. We were interested in how such sites leverage UI features to make their products discoverable, and also the flow from homepage to purchase. We were interested not just in how different competitors market their product, but also how they upsell and suggest other products based on current selections. We discovered that some competitors do not provide a simple journey from landing page to product, either by making the journey long with many clicks, or by diverting users to entirely different websites to view or purchase product. There was a really interesting tension between ease of use in terms of view or buying product, and differences in legal requirements per state.

This location based difference in user experience was really different to any UX problem than any that I had come across before, and as something so specific to the sale of cannabis, was more difficult to research as there were not obvious precedents. One positive was that all competitors seemed to have difficulty solving this issue, which meant that our client could really stand out if they got it right.

Later in the day Julia and I had a call with the client that we are facilitating the June workshop with, in order to conduct organisational research around their new product. These stakeholder interviews were to gather client assumptions on the current state of performing tasks and how a proposed product would solve any issues. Julia asked about goals, user assumptions, what success would look like and if there were any risks associated with a new product. This was really interesting for my to observe and take notes for, as the questions were very thorough and thoughtful. It was also great to learn more about the product itself, in order to be prepared for the workshop kickoff.

Now I am writing this blogpost the jetlag is finally kicking in, but today was very enjoyable and I learnt a lot from both client experiences. Tomorrow I will be pairing with Gina Valdez, who is an excellent Visual Designer, on some front end implementation. I am looking forward to it!