UXwanabe

Learn the softskill of UX and grow your design career

Are your design policies a “House rule” or “The Law”?

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If we want to continue to improve the UX maturity of our organization, we first need to be brutally honest about where we are on the totem pool, so we can plan strategically on how to increase our influence.

The problem is, we designers are often delusional. We confuse how we think the world works versus how the world actually works.

That’s why I always cringe a little bit when I hear designers use the word “should” when it comes to dealing with stakeholders.

They should follow the design spec! or…

They should come to us with a problem not the solution!

Nonsense, nobody should do anything unless it is The Law.

The word “should” implies a policy has already been established. It implies our idea of “how we want to do things” has been explicitly communicated, agreed upon, and documented with consensus from the other party, and now you are simply enforcing the policy as agreed.

When none of these has happened, your policy is not a widely accepted law, and you can’t expect other teams to follow it.

The design team’s influence reality check exercise

Here is an exercise you can do with your team for a reality check on how much influence the design team actually has in your company. 

Look at your design policies and ask this simple question: 

“Is this a House rule or the Law?”

House rules — are policies that only work within your social group, but have no effect on the outside world. In other words, only the design team cares, everybody else ignores this rule.

You can decide to play Monopoly however you want in your house amongst your friends, but if you play with strangers, they won’t follow your House rules.

If the designers agreed that “Pixel perfect is important” and every designer pays attention to it when they design, that is great! But if no one outside the design team cares, and if they don’t have to do what you say, it is a House rule, not The law.

The Law— Everybody has to obey this policy. In the real world, people have to obey the law or there will be consequences — like going to jail (well…at least in theory). For example, in my previous role at a bank, teams must meet a set of predefined accessibility requirements or the project won’t be allowed to go live (that means nobody gets their bonus).

In reality, your design policies probably fall somewhere between these extremes. To visualize this, draw a line, and write “House rules” on the left and “The Law” on the right. List your important design policies and place them on a slider to determine their position between the two extremes. It should look something like this:

This is more art than science, the point is to do it with your team so you know which area is solid and which area needs work.

Now you have a visual representation of whether a policy is closer to a house rule where nobody cares, or closer to the law where everybody respects. 

The idea is that the more design policies you have that are on the right side of the spectrum, the higher the influence the design team has in the organization.

If you are an aspirational design leader, one of your high-leverage activities is to look at how many design policies you wish to turn from “House rules” into “The Law”, prioritize them, then lobby them one at a time.

Hope this exercise brings clarity to your design organization and good luck!

How to choose which battle to fight as a designer

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As designers, we have been told we should “learn to choose which battle to fight” because we can’t win every argument. However, no one has taught us how to choose which battle to fight.

When I first became a design lead managing a group of designers, I found myself in meetings all day with designers trying to figure out how we should react in different situations. 

Team A did not follow the design system, team B insisted to push for a design that hurts the UX and team C decided that accessibility does not matter. Every scenario seems unique and we have to come up with a response every time. 

Without a framework, we felt like we are constantly fighting fires. We became reactive. We wasted mental energy figuring out how we should react. It was unsustainable.

Eventually, I found a way. In this article, I will share a framework that helped me solve this problem and gain back my sanity — I call it the “Rules of Engagement” framework, it helps you clarify:

  • When you should fight a battle
  • How much effort to spend on each battle
  • How to fight effectively

Let’s get right into it.

Rules of engagement 

In military speak, “Rules of Engagement” refers to official orders that describe when and how a soldier should engage enemies in a combat situation.

The idea is to proactively think ahead of how you would react when different situations occur, instead of passively waiting for it to happen and then figuring out what to do. This way, you avoid knee-jerk reactions and can focus your limited mental capability on truly unique matters.

When to engage & effort to spend

Imagine your design team as a country under siege by design-related issues. You have limited resources, so you have to prioritize which cities to defend using a tiering system. For example:

  • Tier 1 city would be your capital. Spend all blood and sweat defending it at all costs. This is the hill to die for, DO NOT retreat!
  • Tier 2 cities are important. Put up a strong fight and only retreat when the casualty is too high.
  • Tier 3 cities are the outer-rim territories, you don’t want others to take over them too easily. Put up a decent fight then retreat when the attack is too strong to conserve energy.

Applying to design, this would mean figuring out “How do we categorize our issues and How should we respond”?

Your tier list might look something like this:

The beauty of this framework is twofold:

  1. It forces your team to align on which area is important versus which is not. You conceptualize what matters. There is no individual guesswork, nor a designer going rogue debating stakeholders on things that just don’t matter.
  2. It is liberating to not have to think each time. Since you have done the hard work upfront to decide how you would react ahead of time, you know what to do 90% of the case. You avoid getting sucked into endless debates that don’t add value to your work. You conserve your energy to focus on the 10% outliers.

How to implement this framework 

  1. Get a whiteboard and draw 3 rings with a bullseye in the middle, label them Tier 1 to 3 starting from the center. 
  2. Write down common issues you face on sticky notes, then put them on the rings according to their importance level. Obviously, developers missing the checkbox by 2 pixel does not count as a Tier 1 issue. Well, at least in my team.
  3. Decide the appropriate response per tier. e.g. Tier x means putting in y amount of effort to argue with stakeholders before you escalate.
  4. Do this exercise with other designers and document the rationale so you can reference it in the future.

You are going to have disagreements and debates on which area is important, but that’s okay! It is much better to have an internal fight now than wait until the issue occurs and scramble to find the right response. 

Multiple tier list

You might find it beneficial to have multiple tier lists depending on your situation. In my previous role, the company was organized around international markets. The strategic importance market — the one that makes the most revenue — gets the most attention from stakeholders, so it made sense for us to consider this in prioritizing our responses.

I had two tier lists, one for the market and another for the nature of the issue. 

When an issue arises, I will follow this procedure:

  • First, look at the market — Which market does this issue come from? Is it from a strategically important market? i.e. Hong Kong or Singapore?
  • Next, I will look at the nature of the issue — What does this issue fall on? Accessibility? Design alignment?

Then I simply respond according to the pre-defined action.

How to engage effectively

From cold call scripts to product FAQs, the most successful teams would actively seek out repeatable solutions and systemize them. From my experience, the most effective way to help the design team engage with stakeholders is to provide them with the following:

  • Sample response scripts— These are successful scripts used in the past collected from wise designers that one can plug and use according to different scenarios. For example, a sample script on “ how to deal with stakeholders that don’t want to follow design pattern”. Constantly ask your designers to provide feedback on the scripts so you can continuously improve them.
  • Design policy & rationale — Decisions the design team made that designers can refer to. For example, to handle the situation where stakeholders don’t want to follow the new design pattern, you can say “Our policy is to apply a NEW design pattern on every new design”. Then if stakeholders continue to push, the designer can give out the rationale.

Don’t have a policy yet? Just start making one up now. I am serious. “Policy” is just a fancy name for how your team makes decisions based on grounded rationale. Once you have referred to your rationales enough times, it will become a de facto policy. You just have to start writing it down now so others can refer to it later.

I have included an example of what your rules of engagement document might look like. You can visit this Notion page and create a template for yourself.

Now whenever an issue arises, you can look at the table to identify how important it is, how much effort to put into it, and know exactly what to say.

Benefits of this framework

To recap, the “Rules of engagement” framework benefits the design team in the following ways:

  • Provides clarity — You know exactly when you should fight, how much effort to spend, and how to fight effectively. No more guesswork.
  • Empowerment — Your team feels empowered as they know how to handle different situations on their own. You can delegate decision-making to your team and free yourself from becoming the bottleneck.
  • Consistent response — Everyone on your team can act on your behalf and provide a high-quality response. You remove the scenario where Designers A and B will give different answers under the same situation.
  • Saves time — You can avoid unnecessary meetings since your team doesn’t have to come to you every time for answers.

I hope you give this framework a try. If you do please let me know how it turns out for you! 

Why you fail to influence stakeholders as a designer

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If you were like me five years ago, you didn’t know how to influence stakeholders to make changes. You might have tried to convince stakeholders to do UX the “right way” according to what your bootcamp taught you or what you read online. They listened (not really, they just nodded while secretly swiping their phone), but nothing happened.

I know how you feel, I sucked at it too when I first start out. Throughout the years, I realized there is a process on how great designers have done it and I am eager to show you how!

There are two parts of this article. In Part I of this article, we will first understand why you fail to influence stakeholders, then in Part II (coming soon…), I will show you the step-by-step process on how to influence stakeholders without authorities.

Let’s start with Part I — why you fail to influence stakeholders.

Why you fail to influence stakeholders

There are three common pitfalls why designers failed to influence stakeholders:

  • Wrong mindset —You think your way is the only way
  • Wrong approach —You expected to sell it in one go
  • Wrong timing — You propose a new processes in the middle of a project

Let’s break it down.

1. Wrong mindset 

You know that boss. They went to a conference, they read it on Harvard Business Review or — god forbid — they went to a leadership offsite where you were specifically NOT invited, but they had to tell you anyway what a wonderful time they had in the company’s email. Now they are back with a new “strategic” direction and they want everyone to do things differently. This might be Agile or SAFe, whatever new framework was popular at that tim

Nobody likes that boss.

I have bad news, you are that boss when you did a UX bootcamp and want to change how everyone do things your way. The only difference is you are not a boss yet.

It’s okay! I was that person too when I first started in UX finishing a bootcamp, I wanted everyone to do projects the “right way”. You know, the “Start with the research”, “double diamond” method they taught us in the bootcamp.

Put yourself in your stakeholder’s shoes for a second:

Oh you took a course in UX? Well, I did a course in PMP, SCRUM, AGILE, SAFe, PRINCE2…etc with “Indutry recognized” certificate as well. Why is your method better?

This is actually a really good question you need to be able to answer if you want to influence others. Is the Design thinking way really better in this company? Maybe, maybe not. In most cases, there is already an established ways of working before a designer joins the company.

You will have to find out why the current process existed in the first place and what are their Pros and Cons. Challenging the status quo without fully understanding the context undermines stakeholder’s trust in you and lower your chance of being listened to.

Mindset shift

❌ Instead of — I know THE right way and everyone should listen to me.

✅ Reframe — I don’t know more than everyone, but I will spend time to understand why we do things the way we do here and propose how we can improve it later.

2. Wrong approach

Another common mistake I see from designers is to think one or two conversations is enough to convince people to make changes, and are discouraged when nothing happens. This is rarely how change works in real life.

Influencing is about driving change, and change is a process.

Expect any big changes to take time. It takes time to involve different stakeholders with multiple conversations and it takes time for you to form a coherent argument and find allies on your side. Preparation is key, so prepare to play the long game.

Mindset shift

❌ Instead of — I expect to influence others in one go.

✅ Reframe — I acknowledged change is a process. I play the long game to form a coherent argument and find allies on my side.

3. Wrong timing

Finally, designers often fail to influence stakeholders because they picked the wrong time to bring up a suggestion. For example, the project has already kicked off and the Product Manager has reached out to a designer for a solution — say they want a search bar and development start in 2 weeks.

I can imagine a lot of designers already started rolling their eyes in this scenario. Some might be frustrated and decide to tell their PM they need more time to do research right away. While it is obvious the company’s design maturity is low and the process is broken, making changes in the middle of a project is counterproductive and only breeds anxieties.

Let’s pause for a second to think about what is going through your counterpart’s head when they hear: “we should do more research now”.

“Why do we have to do research? How long would that take? Why can’t we launch first and gather user’s feedback later? Do I have to go back to all the stakeholders and have those alignment conversations again? Do I need a new estimation from the engineers? Will the project be delayed? Will that impact my KPI/OKR? My bonus? My career?”

When you make an argument at the wrong time, stakeholders often become hostile because they think you would hurt their interest. Instead of working towards a common goal that benefits everyone as a team, you become a threat to them.

So what should we do instead if you find yourself in the midst of a crappy process? Accept it. There is a right time for everything. Realistically, you can’t change much for the current project you are in, but you can work towards influencing stakeholders to make changes on the next one.

Remember, change is a process. Use this round as an opportunity to document the consequences of following the existing process and collect evidence to prove that it is broken. Did the solution work? Did the team create user value? Was the objective achieved? Was the design high-quality? Why should they care if it was not of high quality?

Don’t just go to your boss and say the current process is broken without any concrete evidence to back it up, you want to present it as a fact, not your personal opinion.

These are talking points you can bring up when you pitch your proposed solution later, so don’t be discouraged when things don’t go the way you want yet. Be patient and plan for the long game!

Mindset shift

❌ Instead of — I am frustrated that I can’t change how things work now.

✅ Reframe — I understand timing is important, I will take time to collect evidence on why the current process doesn’t work and use it to my advantage later.

Recap

Influence is hard, but it is also a skill that can be learned. Like any skills, the most important first step is to set yourself up with the positive frame of mind. Here is a quick recap on the mindset shift you can start implementing today:

✅ I don’t know more than everyone, but I will spend time to understand why we do things the way we do here and propose how we can improve it later.

✅ I acknowledge change is a process. I play the long game to form a coherent argument and find allies on my side.

✅  I understand timing is important, I will take time to collect evidence on why the current process doesn’t work and use it to my advantage later.

Now that we have our mindset straight, we will dive into Part II — How to influence stakeholders without authorities which will come out…really soon. 

The quickest way to get notified when part II comes out is to sign up to my news letter! 

2022 in Review

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Another year complete. Time for a year in review post! These post are mostly for my own personal reflection to keep a record for my ups and downs.

I missed my 2020 and 2021 in review, with COVID and everything around the world I was a bit depressed and frankly lost my motivation and my writing habit, luckily I am now back on track 😀

Moving to Canada

One of the biggest highlight for this year is that my wife Vivian and I had decided to move to Vancouver Canada, with me taking a master’s degree in the Centre of Digital Media. It was a big decision to make and Vivian and I had fought about this a few times and eventually we decided it was the right decision to make. 

I was looked forward to start a new life in a new country and getting closer to the NA UX scene which is way more mature than Hong Kong. Hopefully I can learn some new ideas here that I can contribute back to the UX community in my hometown.

It has been almost 4 months now since we moved here and I have started getting used to school life and the country’s slow pace. We made new friends, tried new activities (carving pumpkin, ice-skated…), saw new animals (Racoon!) and Vivian got a good animator job making a decent salary. 

Obviously not everything is sunshine and rainbow. I also saw the bad side of the city (for example, the amount of homeless people on the street shocked me when I first arrived) but so far the positive outweigh the negatives. Only time will tell whether we made the right move.

UX community building

Coming from Hong Kong where UX is still in its infancy, it had always been my dream since I became a UX designer that one day Hong Kong’s UX maturity will be able to match the states.

The challenge is that there is a knowledge gap for a lot of Hong Kong designers since the medium for most UX knowledge out there is in English, whether it is in the form of articles, videos or podcasts. Those that are less literal in English had a much harder time to cosume UX knowledge than than those that speak both languages.

Having the privilege to study abroad and speak both Cantonese and English, I see it as my duty to contribute back to the city that raised me. The plan is simple: Learn as much as I can and bring knowledge back to the community. To do so, I need to build a community first.

Hong Kong Cantonese UX scene

This was a great year for my UX community building, before I left Hong Kong I hosted a first ever Cantonese UX in-person meetup with over 80+ attendees, with the support of sponsors and senior design leaders I invited as guests, we were able to secure a venue and also provide free drinks and snacks.

If I told myself 5 years ago I will be able to pull this off I would not have believed it! I am grateful for everyone that showed up and the volunteers to make this happen.

At the same time, I was quite emotional because while I did my small part to contribute to the Hong Kong UX community, I also had to leave due to the political situation there. It was a tough choice and I always thought there were so much more potential for the Hong Kong UX scene to grow.

Eventually, I thought it through. Even-though I am not physically in Hong Kong, I can still bring the Hong Kong designers together by building virtual communities and sharing what I learned in North America, which is exactly what I did. More on that in the next section.

North America Cantonese UX scene

I kicked started my quest to create a Cantonese UX community outside Hong Kong and had good progress so far. I originally targeted Canada only but thought it would be cool to expand it to USA as well because there is also a big Cantonese community there.

I promoted the Eventbrite event on LinkedIn, around 40 people attended and 30-ish people joined the private Discord server after the event. 

So far I have created two UX communities in two places and I think it might be a good idea to write down what I learned in the future. Both communities began as an experiment and hopefully as the number grows the community will become more active and we can create a closer bond with each other.

My blog and audience

This year, I have published 2 articles:

Not the most productive year so far, but the later article was doing quite well in terms of views and comments. I guess I have hit the right spot for people and promote it on the right platform. I followed up by DMing people that read my article for feedbacks and they gave me some suggestions on what topics I should explore in the future based on the points I made in the article. 

One of the positive side effect since I invested more time in writing is that I am able to inspire more people to want to write about UX, and one designer friend of mine did just that. I am glad my humble contribution to the UX scene has sparked the interest of people. That is great, we need more quality contents!

News letter

For the most part of 2021 my news letter has been dormant, mostly because I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Initially I set it up just for fun and to learn about how WordPress works because I knew very little about blogging and building an email list. 

However, I decided to send out a 2022 wrap up news letter to my 12 subscriber by the end of December because I want to get serious of building an audience. Going forward, I hope to increase my subscriber numbers and create automated email sequence that can enage them further.

Podcast

Back in 2019 I launched a podcast called UXwanabe with the aim to help wannabe UX designers to get into the field in Hong Kong. It was a fun experiment and I learned a ton about how to interview guests, editing and a bunch of technical stuff to set up a podcast.

The response was quite positive, I had a cumulative of 653 plays (total includes all downloads and any stream of 60 seconds or more across all platforms) so far. I am quite happy with how the result turned out, considering when I first started I was refreshing the dashboard everyday hoping the listening count to increase but it only grow by single digit per day and on some days didn’t grow at all.

Moving forward, I have decided to put the podcast on pause because my priority for 2023 is to create more written content and increase my email subscriber count because in-depth content is where my strength lies.

I am also eager to explore creating YouTube video in 2023 based on my most popular articles in both English and Chinese to test the water, just another experiment I want to run to learn the in and outs of this medium.

Business

Back in March 2021, I did two coaching session for 2 people in the UX community I created. I made around USD1,000 from these sessions which made me incredibly happy, not because it was a big amount, but because it was money I made outside my 9–5. 

Throughout my life, like most people, I haven’t developed ANY money making skills. Interview skills? Sure, I showed up to an interviewed and two rounds in I have a job. Then I show up to work and collect my pay check. I am not discarding the fact that I am skillful in my design craft, but I truly believe not having business skills makes me vulnerable and is always at the mercy of someone else.

Looking forward in 2023, I will look for opportunity to productize my knowledge (could be ebook, course, coaching etc.)

Health

Sleep

I have been staying up too late at night, usually until 3 am. Not sure when did I form this habit, maybe mainly due to the fact that I don’t have to wake up early in the morning in most days as a master student. 

I believe this is bad for my health and moving forward I intended to introduce a “no-screen-time” rule 2 hours before bed and spend time on reading fictional books (Dune). Self-help is a NO for me before bed time because my brain will constantly think about work examples if I read those books.

Working out

I also did less than 10 workout this year, which is really not ideal (actually quite pathetic), working out has always been an uphill battle for me since I lost the habit. Looking forward, I aim to reintroduce this habit and hopefully get rid of my growing belly.

Hobby

My favorite hobbies are origami and video games. In late 2022, I realized I was spending too much times on video games and it didn’t achieve anything meaningful for me as I am definitely not going to become a pro-gamer or streamer. 

This also meant I did not spend enough time on origami, so I made the tough decision to delete DOTA2, my favorite video game such that I can focus on other things that has higher priority to me.

I did hold a few origami workshops for my school, but I really want to focus more on creating my original origami models, I hope in 2023 I can give it more love.

My goal for 2023

My focus for next year revolve around creating more content and having a healthy life style. Below are my main goals for 2023:

UX community building

Create at least 4 event with guest speakers from major tech companies.

My blog and audience

  • Write at least 12 high-quality article about UX 
  • 10x my subscriber list (13 subs so far)

YouTube video

Create at least 4 videos in both Cantonese and English based on my most popular articles.

Business

Launch a product (ebook, course, coaching etc.)

Health

  • Go to bed by 11.30pm
  • Go to gym at least 3 times per week

Hobby

Design 3 origami models.

Closing thought

Overall I want to rely on systems and habits rather than will power to achieve my goals. I will spend some time later to breakdown my goals into monthly and daily goals, and make sure they exists in my calendar. Knowing myself well, things that are not on my calendar will not get done.

Looking forward to revisit this article in the end of 2023 to have everything check off. Wish me luck!

10 Lessons I learned working in a global bank as a designer

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To wrap up 2022, I am sharing 10 lessons I learned working 4 years as a Product Design Lead in my previous role at HSBC.

Working in a big corporation like this is complicated, I have to deal with a lot of stakeholders, understand the rules, the un-spoken rules and at the same time trying to help the design team gain more influence.

These are the lessons I wished someone could have taught me when I first started. Hopefully you found these useful and avoid the same mistakes I made!

Warning: It is a long read, but I promised you will find value in it!

1. There is a glass ceiling that’s ok!

Let’s face it, it is unlikely a designer will ever become a CEO in a traditional bank. Having a “Head/VP of Design” or “Chief Design officer” is as good as it gets. It doesn’t matter whether management truly support design team or not, there is a glass ceiling. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Nature of business
  2. You are not actually building the product

Nature of business

Instagram cannot exist without their product because the product is the business. A traditional bank doesn’t sell digital products, their apps is just a way to make your day to day transactions easier, it makes money through mortgages, credit cards, loans and all other kind of financial products.

Just because a traditional company “went digital” doesn’t magically turn them into a digital business. In simple words:

  • The bank is not too screwed if nobody uses their app.
  • Instagram is totally screwed if nobody uses their app.

Bluntly put, the app just needs to be good enough for a traditional bank. If the rates and fees are good, customers has a very high tolerance level to their digital products. Hell, they don’t even want to stay on a banking app for that long, who really wants to use a banking app anyway? Have you heard anyone addicted to their banking app? Me neither.

You are not actually building the product

When you design and UI for the bank for whatever product they are selling, you are not building the product, you are building the digital representation of the product they are selling. Their “product” is whatever mortgages, credit cards, loans or wealth portfolio they come up with. You see, their product already exist in a form of digital document that is 30 pages long, and what you build is a sign-up form or dashboard for these products.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the UX is really nice? Of course! But in the end of the day, the specific details on product such as “rates” or “returns” are what matters, not the design. 

To recap, the nature of business limits the impact you are going to make since you are not actually building the product. And that’s ok! Design team doesn’t need to make it to the top for every company out there. It is important to understand strategically what you can gain from each company you work for. The ceiling doesn’t matter as long as there is still room for you to grow and someone to learn from. 

For me, my goal was to become a better strategic thinker and a better presenter. I had a great manager, and worked with other Service Design Leader and Design System Leaders that I learn a great deal from and that’s why I stayed for a long time even though I understood eventually I will hit a glass ceiling. Always have a plan on what you want to gain for each role and move on when you have learned everything from there.

2. Learn to influence or you are doomed

It is extremely important for us as designers to understand the fundamental reason why influence is an important skill to master as a designer. Everyone said so, but why? For getting a raise or promotion? For a happier design team? For your mental health? I argue that it is a matter of survival for the design team. Here is why:

  1. A team needs resources to survive
  2. Every team wants to survive (aka have a job and don’t get fired)
  3. There is limited resources in a company

A team that doesn’t have resources does not survive by definition. Following the same logic, the maximum survival strategy is to have as much resources as possible, ideally ALL the resources of the company.

Realistically, you can’t control all the resources in a company, but the bigger the pie the better. To get resources, you need people that owns the money to give it to you. People usually do it by:

  • Convince decision maker to give them more (you should do this)
  • Undermine other teams so decision maker won’t give money to other teams (you shouldn’t do this)

Why can’t we just chill and not do anything? Why can’t you remain a small team and just do your own thing? Well, because the design team consume resources. Other team has the incentives to want to kick you out if they don’t think you are valuable so they can have a bigger piece of the pie (according to point #3 and the maximum survival strategy stated above)

Furthermore, there are 2 more uncontrollable factors that you can count on that are guaranteed to happen if you remain in the same role long enough. They are:

  1. Economy going south (already happened as per writing this article)
  2. Old management leaves and new management comes onboard

Whenever the above thing happens, the first thing the leadership team do is to see which team is non-essential. If you want to survive, part of your job is to constantly remind people with money why your team is essential. The art of convincing leaders and peers from other department is called Influence. The better you are at do it, the safer your team (and your self) is when things eventually go south.

3. Ask for forgiveness, not permission

It is a big company, if you ask for permission to do the right thing all the time, you can’t get shit done. The key is to do it anyway and think of a good way to say sorry if people complains. Make sure to inform your boss so they have your back before you do that thing.

For example, when I worked in the Staff digital team responsible for building tablet apps for staff to serve customers in the branch, I wanted the front-line staffs to test my design on their tablet. If I emailed the branch manager, I am 99.99% sure they will reject my request because it will “distract their work” and we didn’t have a relationship.

So I just went to the branch and have a “private” conversation with the staff there. Nobody knew I wasn’t a real customer and if the staff generally want me to go away they will just say so. Truth is, everyone in the branch is happy to be beta testers on new features and they didn’t report me to their boss because I made them feel important and I genuinely value their feedbacks.

A lot of times, what you think you cannot do is just a mental barrier. You can always do something, there are just consequences that may or may not occur. If you are in doubt, ask yourself “what is the worse that could happen?”, the reality is probably not as bad as you think. My general rule of thumb is do whatever you think helps your team as long as it won’t get you fired. Worked great for me so far.

4. Understand the REAL WHY

The difference between an order taker and a professional is the ability to take control of the situation. A professional knows what they are doing and won’t let other people boss them around. Have you seen a great doctor just let other people tell them how to do their job? No, they take control of the situation and ask questions.

Business said X, Legal said Y. Why? who exactly said that? Who the hell is “business” or “legal” anyways? Behind any enquiry, there is a real human behind it, why can’t we as designers apply empathy and understand their hopes, fears and dreams? What is their concern? What worries them? Is it a power move so that they feel they are in control of the situation?

In other cases, you want to show strength as well. Show people you won’t back down if the other side is not prepared for a fight. Anyone can throw out unsolicited opinion, very rarely do people work hard to form comprehensive statement based on facts. Have the courage to challenge what people say by requesting evidences to back it up! 

For example, if stakeholders insist to change a design that has worked in the past but they want to change it because they have a different OPINION, kindly remind them you do value their opinion (maybe not really, but you say that anyway because your parents taught you manner so you act nice), but this design has proven to work in the past, “what” are the evidence to support what they believe what they suggest will improve the UX? How confident are they?

If you change your design because other people demand it every time regardless of their seniority, you are a vendor, you are “just here to make things pretty”. You are an order taker. If you have a choice between being an order taker or being a professional, which would you choose? I know my answer.

5. Own your boundaries

You need to let other know your boundaries and stick to it, or someone else will set it for you. If you don’t want to join a lunch meeting, don’t join. If you don’t want to join a 7pm meeting, don’t join. (This doesn’t apply to teams that cross time-zone, in this case, do the fair thing where sometimes you have late meetings and other times the person in the UK does the same thing).

You have more power than you think. Sometimes we felt that we can’t say no to unrealistic demands, but what is the worse thing that can happen if you reject a stakeholders demand? Come and drag you to a meeting? Download Figma and draw it themselves?

Probably nothing.

The best they can do is complain to your boss, but if you have articulate your point clearly with evidence to backup your decisions and let your boss know up front, you have nothing to fear. 

Don’t let others dictate your workflow

Inevitably, someone will ALWAYS send an “urgent” email and demand a reply “ASAP”, as if whatever project they work on is always the most important project for the company. You will feel the impulse to pause everything you do and reply to that email.

Don’t do it. Two reasons:

  1. It probably isn’t urgent
  2. Rushing your reply will always make the situation worse 

It probably isn’t urgent

Think about it, what is really “urgent” in our role? Do we control the finance operation or the IT systems? Will the designers be able to do anything if someone hacks the system? Unless payroll made an accounting error where your CEO’s three-million bonus now shows up in your bank account and they want it back right now, nothing is urgent. 

Just because someone higher up wants an answer quickly so they don’t have to remember it and ask it again in the future doesn’t mean it’s urgent. It just means they will get annoyed if they can’t get an answer now. Just because someone came up with a deadline without consulting you doesn’t make it urgent either. It is their problem.

What happens most of the time is that nothing happens if you don’t reply to the email immediately, the other party will often send a follow up email a day or two later chasing you or send you a Slack message at 6pm the same day. As a rule of thumb, if the matter can wait until 6 pm or one to two days later, it is by definition not urgent. 

Have a list of priorities for your team and yourself. Everyday, create a checklist with no more than 3 items and work ONLY on those things. Mentally have a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on when you check your communication channels and how long it takes for your to reply. I set a rule for myself where I batch read emails in a specific time in morning and in the afternoon and never read it in between, this way I am free from distractions and focus on real work.

If an email comes it that do require your immediate attention, weight against your checklist and think “If I do not complete the tasks on my checklist and reply to these emails, will it benefit myself or my team”? Only reply to those emails if it is the later case. In the end of the day, you are not judged on how fast you reply to emails, you are judged on how well you can perform on your job. You work on your priorities, not someone else’s.

Rushing your reply will always make the situation worse

OK, let say the email is truly urgent and a project can’t go live today if you don’t reply to it right now. What do you do? Write a reply immediately and send it? Wrong.

Everything you wrote in haste are almost always not thoughtful enough and everything you wrote ill be used against you. I never had a good experience when I reply quickly to an important email, either my facts is off or the tone is wrong and I end up writing multiple follow up emails or have to eventually jump to a Zoom call to explain things. 

Take your time to collect information around the subject and compose a response but DON’T SEND IT YET. Send it to someone senior or someone you can trust for a second opinion to ensure you have covered things from different perspectives when the email is truly urgent. 

6. Process and documentation are your best friends

If you find yourself explaining same things over and over again to some people, it is time for you to create a process. There are two key benefits of creating a process:

  1. Process allows you to do more work with less time, why? Because once you wrote down how something works once you can point people towards that instead of explain things 1000 times. We are in business of deep work, this means that it takes time for a designer to warm up to get into a state of flow. While it may take you 10 minutes to explain how some things work, it will take you at least 30 minutes to warm up again to get into the state of the flow. 
  2. Another benefit of a process is it also helps other to repeat the success you had so you are making the team become more productive. For example, create scripts for the team to answer common stakeholder questions regarding design rationale. This is one of the ways you can scale your team and make yourself become more valuable because you remove yourself as the bottle neck.

Same logic applies to things like creating documentation on decision made for the project. I can’t remember how many times my team asked me for a decision I made about a design and it was a pain to go through all the email and Slack messages. Now I just simply wrote down important product decisions and ask whoever to refer to that document.

7. Policies gives you credibility

Do you hate it when you ask the same questions from two different person under the same department and getting 2 different responses? It happens quite often in a big company, it feels unprofessional and I certainly don’t want other team to feel the same towards the design team.

Stakeholders will often challenge your or are just generally curious — “Why did the design team made that decision and what was it based on?”

If your team had exist for a while and you haven’t codify your thought process, you are not running it very efficiently. Having a clear policy document helps free you the headache of coming up with an explanation ad-hoc, make your decision more transparent, and avoid giving contradictory answers. Ultimately, having clear policies will help your team earn respect from others because someone (you) has taken the time to think about how your team make decisions.

A policy is a way to articulate our thinking process. Once you articulate it, your rationale became clear. People can debate around it and you can work on improving it. If you have a good policies in place, you can save your mental energy to react to the outliers, not repeatable problems, the HARD problems. Most importantly, it allows you to scale the team because everyone on your team understand your rationale so they can act on your behalf. You remove the scenario where Designer A and B will give different answers under the same situation.

Creating a policy is not that hard, you start with the most common questions stakeholders ask and document what your team replies. Then, extract the most convincing argument or rationale from those replies and you have your version 1.0 of your design team policy. Basically, if someone asks your team a hard question. Ask yourself is this question likely to come up again/ has it already been ask, if so, create a policy to handle similar situations in the future.

8. It’s a marathon, pick your fight strategically

A real leader focuses on the big picture and pick their fight carefully. Your bigger goal for the design organization should always be demonstrating the value of design and drive design maturity of the business. You don’t need to win every battle, you just need to win the war. Otherwise, you will make too many enemies along the way and you will be so sucked into debates that you can’t work on the important things.

Picking a fight is an art on its own. Is it important to CC everybody when the developer misses the UI by one pixel? (Pro tip: no) What is something that you should never back down? Where do you draw the line? One helpful exercise you can do is to list out the design policies from your team. Then, as a team decide on which policies is the most important and rank them in descending orders.

For example, you might decide the following policy must be followed at all time: “We always conduct research on new features or when we work on project that lasts longer than x month” while the next one is negotiable: “all designs should follow the latest design system unless an exception has been obtained”. 

This way, you communicate effectively to your team what is strategically important and you can focus your effort on battles that are meant to be won and be okay to lose the less important ones without diverging from the big picture.

9. Make sharing your work your top priority

Share your work constantly instead of doing it as an after-thought — It is not other people’s job to know what you do. It is YOUR JOB to sell yourself and to educate other people the value of design, how it can help the business and how it can help THEM. 

In a big corporate, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound. One of the mistake I had was not putting enough time to selling our team to the wider organization, so our team are essentially invisible to the higher ups. Not good. As a manager, if you learned that your team didn’t have time to share their work because they are busy, guess what? It is your job to do it now. As mentioned in Point 2 above, this is essential to the long term survival of your team.

Think strategically on who you want to sell your work to, which project to sell, what is the message, the communication channel, frequency and what is the ask for the audience. What call-to-action do you want this person to do? More funding for your team? Public praises? Show up in the next usability session? You want to make it clear. Spend more time to figure out how to best position yourself in the organization and you will have an easier time climbing the corporate ladder.

10. Find the best and learn from them

It’s a big company, it is full of very bright people. However, by nature of normal distribution, 90% of people are mediocre, 5% are top performers, the rest are waiting to get fired. Focus your time on the top 5%. Analyze what they do, how they sell themselves, how they do problem solving. What are they doing that you are not doing? How can you close that gap?

I don’t have the brightness mind in the company, but it doesn’t matter. I can observe good people and learn from them. I used to keep a journal of top performers of the company and I constantly ask myself what is their mindset, what are they doing right now, and what would they do in this tough situation? 

If you are able to articulate WHY someone is good, WHAT makes them good and HOW you can close that gap, you will have a great lead in personal development.

Evidence based imposter syndrome framework

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The other day I was chatting with a recent design graduate, she felt like she is not a real UX designer yet because her course was not 100% focused on UX. She wasn’t sure whether she should be considered a UX designer — she had an “imposter syndrome”. As designers, we are no strangers to this.

So how do I handle Imposter Syndrome? Here is what worked for me and what I told her:

I want you to turn your feelings into action. You are not allowed to feel incompetence unless you can prove it.

I call this the “Evidence based imposter syndrome”

Why did I say that?

The principle is simple: Innocent until proven guilty. Feeling alone doesn’t help you solve the problem.

Maybe your portfolio suck. Maybe you are not a real designer. Maybe you don’t know anything about design and you are faking it.

Who knows? Until you find data to backup your claim, you don’t know what is the reality. You can do this by either talking to someone senior or look up what is the expectation for the next role online.

  • I feel like an imposter is not a fact.
  • I am an imposter IS A FACT.

If you found out that you are are actually incompetent — an imposter — NOW you can feel sad, but you should also be excited. Why? Because now you have a tangible goal. You can close the knowledge gap if you know what they are, but you can’t act on “feeling competent” when there is no substance.

This simple framework worked for me for my whole career. From becoming a Senior all the way to becoming a Design lead. Each step of my career I always felt like I weren’t ready for these roles. So I asked myself: What does a competent Senior/Manager/Lead does? Let me find out! Am I there yet? If not, how can I close those gaps?

The Imposter Syndrome will always come to you. Expect it. When it does, try this “Evidence based imposter syndrome” framework and turn your feelings into action.

Comment and let me know if this method works for you!