To truly understand and appreciate North America, you need to get out there and experience it by car. To truly understand and appreciate your users, you need to get out and visit them. Seeing the parallels of these two loves, James Turner and Holly Kennedy quit their jobs in London, sold their belongings and set out on their epic UX road trip.

Blogging about it all on WanderingDesigners.com, Holly and James are driving across Canada and the USA, stopping off at the major tech hubs to meet up with top UX talent. They've met with a huge range of people, from the UX lead of a sports app with 3 million users, to the UX’er who has control of some design software most of you will be using. And to keep the supply of Sharpies up, they run their own remote User Experience design consultancy, KennedyTurner while on the road.

By the end of this year, they will have racked up 100 days, 12 countries, 16 states, 13 cities and a ton of UX knowledge!

And what's more — they're slamming on the brakes and making a U-turn just to be able to join us at Fluxible! We caught up with them for a quick pit stop exchange. Here's what they had to share.

What inspired you guys to do the #uxroadtrip?

The UX Roadtrip was the jumping off point for our new nomadic lifestyle. To start our new adventure, we wanted to see what our design colleagues in North America were doing. The London UX community is awesome, but can also be quite insular. We wanted to see if there were any big differences in approaches, methods or thinking on the other side of the Atlantic.

We traveled around 5000 miles across Canada and the US. We crossed 16 states, several deserts, lakes, forests and the Rockies (3 punishing times). We knocked on the door of AirBnb’s HQ in San Francisco, Hudl in Nebraska and the Federal Reserve in Kansas to name a few. Wherever we went, there was no shortage of interesting folk to talk to.

Are you seeing an emerging design trends as you cross the continent?

We met with designers from agencies, startups, billion dollar product companies and public service providers. No matter where we went, there was one common problem, there’s not enough designers.

In the major tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle, the problem was less pronounced. However in the regional cities such as Denver, Portland, Salt Lake and Kansas City there’s a big problem. Jared Spool says it’s a great time to be a UX designer, and we totally agree with him, but there’s a huge deficit of talent in the cities where really need them. Initiatives such as the Kansas City Startup Village are making strides towards facilitating change in their own region, but many of the more senior designers we met in these regional hubs were leading teams at much larger and more established companies.

We also saw that lots of companies in these regional cities were making use of full or part time remote staff. This was really exciting to see as we’re passionate advocates of remote team members. That fact that organisations such as Hudl are successfully employing these practises for UX professionals is fantastic.

Can you give an example of how this road trip has inspired design work?

We’re taking 2 lasting pieces of advice from the trip. Firstly, that remote design services are an important and growing need. And secondly, that as UX designers, it’s easy for us to prioritise the user’s needs over those of the business.

During the trip, we decided to refocus our business on remote UX design. When you think of remote UX, the default subject is remote research techniques. However we’ve seen that there is a much wider need for good, location independent user-focused design services. Even when a company can afford a full time UX’er on the team, finding one is difficult. If they can’t find one locally, they might start looking at remote staff, but with 15,000 vacant UX posts in the US alone, it’s a buyers market.

We’re focusing KennedyTurner on these companies, who understand the value of UX design, but are having trouble filling the gap. So far it’s working well, and developing strategies for doing remote UX is an exciting challenge.

Finally, meeting so many product owners made us realise that as UX designers, we’ve probably neglected the business side of the equation in our careers so far. Running our own business has reinforced this too. Working in an agency for multiple clients can sway you to prioritising the the ‘user needs’ over those of the business. User advocates are important, but so is making money.

What are you looking forward to most about Fluxible?

We’re really looking forward to hearing from some of the high-profile speakers Fluxible has in-store. We’ve read their work and followed from afar but our paths have never crossed until now, so we’re excited to hear what they have to say. We’re also excited to catch up with those designers we’ve met along the trip who’ll also be attending the conference.

This trip has taught us how valuable one-on-one conversations with our peers is. So as well as listening, we’re excited to talk with people one-on-one too. Although we leave North America in October, it’s certainly not the end of the UX Roadtrip. We’re heading to Asia for the winter and will be reaching out to our UX peers on yet another continent.

It turns out we designers are a sociable bunch and we’ve got a great idea for a tool to help facilitate those conversations too.

You can say that again! We're so excited to socialize with you, too. Until then — safe travels.

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