Specifically Who am I Trying to Help With UX Design, Coaching, and Games

The title of this post is so daunting to me and here's why. Specificity to me always felt like I was trying to not serve people. In my recent coaching and other product development as an independent creator I'm starting to see specificity differently.

I'm a bit along into my career of adventures, about 25 years now maybe a couple more depending on what event to start from, forming my first game company, starting web consulting, first corporate gig or what have you.

Most adventures I encounter are because of being a mix of both lucky and prepared. Part of that has helped me avoid learning more about specificity. I've been often fortunate to focus on learning about an audience by being hired to help. The nature of that arrangement vs making your own products and services directly to an audience is what I'm exploring in this post.

What I mean when I say specificity in my business.

My mentor teacher in coaching has a business teaching yoga and coaching athletes in a specific form of horse competition. In my summary of it as combining: yoga + spirit + horse + athlete + coach. It's clear who her market is and what messages she has to reach them.

I have a friend who provides therapy to middle age men who have ADHD. That's also very specific.

I have another friend who teaches and makes comics for kids who need healthy examples of adults using their power with a sense of adventure. Specific.

All those are my paraphrasing which I feel I'm able to do because each has a specific clarity. Learning from those kind of examples and encountering the need to promote my work with anything from clear titles, product pages, networking, and advertising I see how it could be useful to me if I had more specificity for each of my products.

Specificity in a new light.

Specificity was always an icky thing to me. Why would someone say hello I'm here only to help people who are this way, from this place, know this thing instead of saying I'm here to help anyone with this need. With UX design, teaching, coaching. Any of those skills are things I can use to help all kinds of people. I know this because it's what I've been doing on adventures working for other organizations.

Needs-focused

Once hired, I look for needs and dig into learning from the team, the organization, and the audience/users. On any project at any employer or client, I'd start from the needs and then discover the individuals, groups, and cultures.

But somewhere along the way, in order for me to be present as a consultant or employee someone had to recognize me, trust me, and choose me to be there. To get to the common needs as a building block of understanding and service first we have to be asked to be there.

So to be hired to help, similar to selling a product to someone you need to be:

• recognized
• trusted
• chosen
• hired

Only after that are you actually present with your audience doing the work you or your product was hired to do.

Focused on a truly specific group of people

Needs-focused approach works fine until you want to make your own products.

Our needs are wrapped in layers of context of how we recognize ourselves and relate to the world around us. It pisses me off based on my own baggage that I'm about to make an argument for perception is reality. Yet here we are. How about this: perception is if not reality, it's a matter of great importance.

Let's go on a cognitive walk.

Think about how you feel when you are going to a place where you have a lot of trust vs. when you're going somewhere that you don't feel safe. In this context "safe" meaning psychologically safe. Places where you feel psychologically safe are where you are willing to speak up, connect with the group, recognize and appreciate others while you are also being recognized and appreciated.

Let's consider some specific safe places you've been part of, try to list one to three examples of psychologically safe places.

• Was there a team you worked with that seemed to really get you?
• Did you feel useful, learn, and grow in a particular class project?
• Do you have a group of friends that when you hang out with them, you feel home and you belong?
• What are three things you can think of as to why you feel safe in that group?
• What does it look like to be in a safe place?

Now let's consider specific places you've been where you don't feel psychologically safe. You might feel reluctant to go to a meeting there. Maybe leaving there you have a pile of feelings or negative stress to sort out afterward. Could be a class, workplace, or a social space.

• What are three things that happen in a psychologically unsafe place that make it feel unsafe?
• On the surface, what does it look like to see or be in a psychologically unsafe place?

And we're back from our walk.

We've gone on that walk, gathered a few ideas about psychologically safe and psychologically unsafe. Let's take those things we gathered and consider what might help with marketing to your audience in a way that shows you're psychologically safe.

Specificity Isn't a Barrier, It's a Bridge

Bridge metaphor! When someone drops a common metaphor I feel we should get a loud silly moment like the secret word of the day in that old show Pewee's Playhouse. Bridge metaphor! Okay moment passed. In this case, the metaphorical bridge exists because of clear messaging that matters to both the creator of a product and to the specific audience.

The recognition step is a big one. I'm wondering if I found a way for me to get specific that's not about me and a barrier as much as it's about being clear for an audience I know I can help with a particular product.

I've seen specificity for a long time as a way to ignore others. Why would it be appealing to me to ignore people I can serve? I think this framing was a mistake and my way to fix that mistake is to consider psychological safety as an important part of evolving my products and related marketing messages.

If someone is marketing to you with only a message of skills for needs, does that message give you a reason to trust or choose then them more than someone else with those skills?

Marketing is a message about something you're not yet part of or to celebrate something you are already taking part. Marketing skillfully helps you help others because you're sending a signal that you are psychologically safe and also can help with what your audience needs from you.

Safety might be the biggest useful signal for specificity marketing that makes sense to me. I wish I had someone explain it to me like that a long time ago.

How I'm Working to Improve Product Specificity

In my portfolio of creative business products and services, I think each individual product needs its own specificity. Here are a few work in progress examples:

• UX Teaching: I teach collaboratively frustrated yet hopeful makers who want the empowering tools of UX to be part of their art, business, and software engineering.
• Coaching: I coach males over 30 who are working to level up as kind collaborators and share their power and privilege. Update 3/16/2021: Let's try again with that. Working against toxic masculinity and encouraging growth as kind collaborators instead is important. Also important: balancing specificity while being inclusive. Here's my new coaching specific pitch:
• Coaching: I coach mid career professionals who are working to level up as kind collaborators and share their power and privilege.
• Guitar Fretter: I made this game to help guitar teachers teach and starting guitarists playfully learn the note positions on a fretboard.

Some of those are more specific than others. I'll keep at revising and making use of these marketing messages and share what I learn.