Understanding the user is key

I started my Semcon journey in 2019 when I did my internship at Semcon as part of my UX designer education. The internship led to an employment and during my first years at Semcon I mainly worked inhouse at Semcon Studios. It gave me the opportunity to work with several projects within different areas and with different customers. I also got to work with many colleagues from different departments. I feel it was a good starting point since I learned a lot and got to know many Semcon colleagues.

Understanding people makes the job so much easier

I primarily work with user research and understanding the needs, problems, and context of the user. I have a background as a speech and language pathologist and before I started training to become a UX designer I worked in healthcare and schools with children having communication difficulties. Even if UX designer and speech and language pathologist are two very different professions there are a lot of similarities. For example, in both professions you need to understand who you are trying to help and what you need to take into consideration. You also need to test different solutions and evaluate if they work for the patient or user group.

As a speech and language pathologist it can be intervention methods, individually tailored training materials, communication aids etc, and as a UX designer it can be different concepts, user interfaces etc. One major difference is of course that as a speech and language pathologist you work directly with the patient and family but as a UX designer you can’t meet everyone that will use the product or service that you are working with. Instead, you must base the insights on findings from a smaller group of users that can represent the whole group.

One of the reasons that I really like to work with user research is because I feel no matter what project or customer you work with, if you know what the user needs, understand their context and problems, then everything will be much easier. Then you can base your design on that knowledge instead of guessing.

CSR-program at Semcon

Another role I have at Semcon is CSR-coordinator for our department in Gothenburg. CSR stands for Corporate Social Responsibility and at Semcon we have a CSR-program where Semcon every year sets aside hours for the program. The hours are then used, in collaboration with external non-profit organisations, for projects that connects to one or more of the UN’s seventeen Global Goals for Agenda 2030.

I first got in contact with Semcons CSR-program when I got my first inhouse project as an employee at Semcon. It was a CSR-project together with Clean Clothes Campaign and I have since then worked with several of Semcons CSR-projects as a consultant and mentoring UX designer students. The CSR-projects can vary in scope and include everything from user research, usability testing, creating design for digital or physical interfaces to programming and development of websites and apps.

I think the CSR-program is a great initiative and it is really interesting to work with the projects. One positive aspect of it is that it is a way for Semcon to contribute to making the world a better place, but it also gives us a chance to work with different organisations that we might not have worked with otherwise since they are non-profit organisations and might have very limited budgets. The response from the organisations that we have worked with so far has been very positive and they have expressed that they appreciate the initiative.

Get involved in our CSR work!

I would like to take the opportunity to encourage Semcon employees to reach out to their CSR-coordinators if they have an idea or know an organisation, that they think would be a good match for the CSR-program.

About Aili

• Title: UX Designer/User researcher and CSR coordinator for EDS Gothenburg

• Education: UX Designer and Speech and language pathologist

• Has worked at Semcon since: 2019

• I have the most fun at work when…: I get to collaborate with my colleagues.

About Semcon Stories
A series of articles for everyone wondering what it’s like to work at Semcon. With Semcon Stories our employees get to highlight certain exciting aspects of their jobs.