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2022 in Review

December 31, 2022 by Tim Chan

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:

  • Evidence based imposter syndrome
  • 10 Lessons I learned working in a global bank as a designer

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!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: Review

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

December 19, 2022 by Tim Chan

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.

Filed Under: Career development, Framework, UX Design Tagged With: Product Design, User Experience, Ux Process

Evidence based imposter syndrome framework

December 19, 2022 by Tim Chan

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!

Filed Under: Career development, Framework Tagged With: User Experience, UX Design

Graduate advice for UX students

June 6, 2021 by Tim Chan

This post is dedicated for those that has just graduated from their UX design bootcamp.

Last week, I was really happy to be invite back to be a guest for my friend Michael Tam’s experience design course student graduation ceremony. Part of that ritual is that the students would be presenting their final work for their clients.

Seeing more and more people become interested in UX makes me really happy. As those close to me knows, I have a grand vision that one day, Hong Kong’s UX maturity would be at the same level as the United States. Passing on my industry knowledge is my humble contribution to this granular goal.

For the student’s work presentation, the guests where to look at the following criteria and provide constructive feedback:

  • Design thinking
  • Design craft
  • Business relevance
  • Presentation

I wanted to elaborate a little bit more on the above criteria and turn it into lessons I learned throughout my career as my advice for the UX graduates.

Design thinking 

People are good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them. You have probably learned about Double diamond or the idea about divergence and convergence, but why does it matter?

When you go to a doctor’s appointment, they always ask you how you’re feeling. Why? Because you’re the expert on you. No one else better understands how you feel. However, the doctor won’t ask you how to solve your problems because they’re better equipped than you to do that. The same is true in UX design.

Your stakeholders have a better understanding of how they feel about their business than you do. They can tell when something is wrong, but they’re not as equipped to solve it. They may say NEED to redesign their website, listen carefully, they are offering you a solution. Just as a patient might tell a doctor “I got flu”, will a good doctor go on and prescribe medicine right away? No, the doctor goes “Maybe, lets fine out”.

When client comes to you and say they have low conversion rate, that is a symptom. Redesigning their website might be one of the solution, but we need to first understand the nature of the problem. What are the possible explanations of low conversion rate? You are selling to the wrong audience, lack of trust, poor copy writing , you have a weak brand…etc. That’s why we need to diverge our thinking first in the beginning and converge it in the end, or we risk jumping into solution too quickly and solving the wrong problems. 

Use your stakeholders as a resource to help figure out what is wrong with their business, but take it with a grain of salt when they offer you solutions.

Design craft 

Design what users want, not what the designer want. As designers, we have a lot of egos, which is great, because creating things is hard, and it takes ego to will something into existence. We also have a lot of cool ideas, sometimes we want to challenge convention wisdom! Why does all app components look the same? Why does the Back button always has to be on top left? Lets make it top right or at the bottom!

The thing is, our users are not us. You might think and breath your product because you spend 8 hours everyday staring at it. The truth is, your product is not the user’s center of attention, they want to use your product to get things done so they can get on with their life. Like spending time with their family and their hobbies.

As a designer, you have a lot of power because you can make your users to do whatever you want them to do through the product you designed. They have to obey your rules. The problem is that the users have an even greater power than yours — they can stop using your product. If you don’t make the product enjoyable for them, they’ll move on to a product that does.

This is especially hard for me when I first started. As a junior designer, I was eager to prove my self worth. I wanted to show everyone my design was different. I thought I knew it all and wanted my design to stand out. As a result, I had created something that only me the designer wants. I build features that I felt would be cool without truly understanding whether people will like it. In the end, users were frustrated about the changes I made.

Make the users do something they inherently want to do, not something you, the designer, forced them to do.

Business relevance 

Stop selling design, sell the results. No one really cares about design or your design process. What people means when they say they “care” about good user experience design is what good design can do for them. For business, it means selling more products or services. For customers, it means when they are using your app they feel in control and they can do whatever they want without thinking about it.

It might be hard to hear, how could someone not care about design? You know what, that’s OK! They don’t have to love UX design the way we do. It is our job to love what we do, not theirs! But if we keep talking about design without making it relevant to our audience, we will never gain their buy in. Start talking about what does the design do for them, why is it relevant to them, and people will start to listen.

The right way to explain your design process

A challenge you 100% would face is how to explain the design process to your stakeholders. Most of the time I would hear designers explaining the design thinking process as “the ideal design process”. I beg to differ, I like to phrase it as a “Tried and true risk management strategy.”

Each process in design thinking is a way to help business to reduce their risk, as building a product involves a lot of uncertainties, we want to break down the steps into smaller pieces and de-risk each of them. If you think of the design process as managing risk, it helps you to speak the language of stakeholders and they will have a easier time understanding it. 

Can we dive into solution right away? Yes we can, but we might risk solving the wrong problem as the I already explained in the visit a doctor example above. Can we not do research? YES! If you are 100% confident you are doing the right thing, and so on.

Presentation 

Don’t be afraid to be blunt. Designers likes to be subtle because we’re taught that “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. Here’s the problem: sometimes subtlety doesn’t work. People can often miss the obvious.

Whether I was browsing through a candidate’s portfolio, or am sitting the presentation they are giving, I often find myself struggling to understand:

  • Who is the client?
  • What business and customer problems you are trying to solve?
  • How did you solve it ?
  • What is the Before vs After?
  • How did you know the new design is better?

I have to work really hard to pick up the bits and pieces of the above information and when I am doing that, I don’t have the cognitive energy to listening what you are trying to say. When the audience is not listening, you will not be able to convince them of anything.

In the first 30 second you should be able to clearly articulate the problem you are trying to solve, otherwise the audience will be constantly distracted. Sometimes we are too boggled in the work we do, we forgot to take a step back to think about how we can make it easy for the audience to absorb the information we are sharing.

You can have the best idea in the world but if people don’t get what you are saying, its game over. One way to help this is to create an outline or agenda for your presentation, that way your provide structure for the audience such that they can easily grasp what is coming. 

Closing thoughts

UX design is easy to learn, but hard to master. It challenges us to not only have the logical mind to solve problems, but also have the aesthetic sense to make beautiful things. At the same time, we must also understand people and their motivation, be it our stakeholders or customers if we were to success in this career. 

When you are in this business, you are in the business for change. Since people hate change, you WILL face resistance, and you WILL face push back. This is expected. Worst part about this? No one is here to save you. No senior designer or design lead will suddenly join your company and sort everything out with your stakeholders. 

You can choose to sit there and wait for the magical savior to join someday, or you can try to be the pioneer and drive changes. The good news is, we have a strong community of UX designers that is willing to support you. So STOP complaining about people at your company don’t get what UX is about. They didn’t pay money to learn about this thing, you did. It is your job to help them understand the benefit of UX design. 

Now you have the knowledge about UX, you will never see the world the same way as before, you are one of us now. In the never ending journey to mastery of UX design, there is no reward, because the journey is the reward.

Welcome to the world of UX design.

Filed Under: Career development, Most popular

How to plan a successful career in UX

May 2, 2021 by Tim Chan

I was invited as one of the panelist to my friend Michael Tam’s experience design course to share my industry experience to a group of UX students. Michael had sent me a list of questions beforehand and I have written down the answers I prepared. I thought it would be quite interesting to share it here because I always see myself as a better writer than a presenter!

I am the guy on the far right

How did you first enter into Expereince Design?

I wrote about that in my old post here.

Tips on First Steps/Interviews

First step is to acquire the knowledge you need. For me, the most effective way of doing this is by doing 2 things right — Read books & Ask smart questions.

Read — A lot of UX leaders before our time has put in the time to condense their life time learning into a consumable format, just read it! When I speak to a lot of wannabe UX designers, it amazed me how little people are willing to spend the time to absorb the knowledge that will actually help them get a job, most are just looking for a shortcut to get into UX. Let me be very clear, taking 1 or 2 course DOES NOT make you a qualified UX designer. The lack of basic UX knowledge is the main reason UX students is not able to define the problem they are trying to solve clearly or are trapped into solving the wrong problems. If you are solving the wrong problem, it doesn’t matter how good your UI or prototype is.

Ask smart questions — This requires you to have the self-awareness of understand the difference between:

  1. Things you don’t know the answer to and would be able to figure it out on your own vs…
  2. Things you don’t know the answer to and would not be able to figure it out on your own even if you try.

Never ask questions that you can figure out on your own. Senior designers like to help people in their shoes, but you should also respect their time. Good question demonstrates that you have done the work to try find answer in the first place and had but in the time to think about the specific in kind of help you needed.

Bad question: I have no design background, how can I become a UX designer? (JUST GOOGLE IT????)

Good question: I am a marketer whom recently took a UX design course and is very eager to become a UX designer. I am keen to position my knowledge in planning marketing activities as a way to standout to future employer that I understand service design and is able plan user activities. I am wondering if you were in my shoes, am I doing the right thing, if not, what would you do differently?

If you could go back in time, what’s the one thing you’d tell/change your younger self?

I would leave the start up job early because I reached my plateau very quickly and I felt too comfortable. I would also be more consistent about writing and sharing about UX because writing helps bring me clarity on my thoughts, and it also helps to demonstrate my expertize and establish a personal brand.

Me giving comments on the student’s presentation

How to plan a Successful Career in this industry

Have a clear defined action plan on how to reach the next step in your career. Lets say you want to be a senior designer, how? Well, you need to find out what companies are looking for in a senior designer. Learn what senior designers do, learn how to do that thing and do it. Do online research on jobs ad and identify what are the gaps between skills you have vs what soft/hard skills is needed for the next step, then come up with a detailed plan (I recommend monthly) on how to close that gap.

Show the plan to you boss and invite them to be part of the process, most importantly, make them accountable. Say something like “I plan to be a senior designer in 2 years time, here is the plans I came up with that can help the company, the design team and myself grow, is there anything you would like to edit?”. Then, update them constantly during your regular catch up meetings. When the time comes, it is very hard for them to say no to you for the promotion when you have met the criteria you set together with your boss.

What are some of the best moves you have seen some young designers have made?

The best young designers I have seen have a strong personal brand, they made themselves stand out among others. They…

  1. share their lessons learn along the way — Who are you and what is your story? For example “I am an auditor turning in UX designer” will be an interesting one (Listen to my podcast if you haven’t already). Make sure you communicate your story clearly in your Linkedin , your portfolio and every other form of communication! Start sharing everything you learn in the UX bootcamp on every social media as much as possible (read this book). Linkedin, articles on Medium, you own blog, twitter, Instagram stories and whatever you can think of. Not many people do this, it takes hard work and it is preciously why you should do it because it helps you get noticed, it shows that you are driven.
  2. built a strong network and add value to the community — Contributing to the local UX community and offer your help in their events. Winners always wants to help winners. Let people know you are interesting in UX for real, not just some wannabe that is slightly interesting in UX and wasting everybody’s time. Start inviting people out for coffee or on Zoom call. If people see that you are committed and driven, they will remember you and who knows? You might meet your future manager or employer in the design group, if they like you, they will also refer to their hiring manager friends, this happens all the time.

Experience Design & Business

How did you learn to define the real (design/or not) problems for a client/business?

If the problem is real, people will find a work around or a hack to do that thing. Microsoft Excel team just looks at what popular macros people are creating and they will get a list of burning painpoints. If it is a good to have or not a real painpoint, people won’t do anything about it.

Tips on handling non-designers’ challenging me?

Different situation requires different strategy to handle. My quick tip is to assume good intention from stakeholders and take the time to listen to the question behind the question.

Are they asking you because they have their own agenda? Are they saying things just because they want to sound smart? Are they genuinely interested? Or do they want to do this as a power play (boss want to show who is in control)?

Rex Wong (VP of research @ JP Morgan), Ellen Wong(UX/UI Manager @ AXA), me (Product Design Lead @ HSBC), Micahel Tam (Global Associate Design Director @ IBM iX)

Do you think you have imposer syndrome?

All the time. I had it every step of my designer journey, from before I got a UX job, I felt like a fraud, to when I actually got a job, all the way to getting a promotion as a UX manager to lead, I constantly feel like I am winging it.

Over time though, I started to “become comfortable being uncomfortable”, this means I expected it — imposer syndrome is like my old friend. The sign of having imposer syndrome means that I am growing in the right direction that I needed. If I don’t feel it occasionally, I might not be pushing myself hard enough or the job doesn’t offer me enough challenge.

I talked about imposer syndrome in early days of the career with my friend Anindita Saha (Service Design Lead at HSBC) in my podcast. Below is a transcript of what we talked about:

I remember I had written my CV…my very short CV at the time, on the top of my CV, I’ve written my name. In the second line, was supposed to say User experience designer. I remember I wrote down “user experience designer”, and then deleting it. Then writing it again, and deleting it. I was going back and forth about writing it. It took me 2 weeks to write down “user experience designer” and save it as a PDF.

This was 2012 in Hong Kong, UX was not a big thing yet. No one really knows what it is but I knew I needed to write it because if I didn’t, people will be very confused as to what I was trying to do. I felt like such a fraud, writing those words — user experience designer — second line of my CV, because I didn’t feel like I had enough experience to write those words down.

When I sent out my first job application, I was terrified. I had the impostor syndrome like “Oh my God, I’m writing this word down and what if I don’t live up to that terminology? What if I’m not embodying this term the way that it’s expected if someone actually interviewed me or even give me a job?”

I was terrified, but I had two minds. I had my terrified side of me and I had the logical side of me. The logical side of it was “if you don’t write this down, no one is going to know that you want this job, and then they can figure out whether you can do the job or not.”

It was really hard because normally what’d you put on your CV, is first you interviewed for that company and if you got the job, you got a title. Then you can put that title in your CV. For us, we have to make up our own title. We haven’t actually worked on a real job as a UX designer, so it was a very terrifying experience because we’re used to somebody else giving us that title, someone else giving us that label. Like you are this rather than us saying to ourselves, I am a [fill in the blank].

I think this is what we need — every individual needs to be able to say “I am this” not because somebody else tells me that I am, but because I know that I am, or at least I believe that I am. I want to be this, and you work towards that. If you want to be that person, you need to say it to yourself. It’s not something that we’re taught to do, we’re told we are something because somebody tells us that we are, and that’s wrong.

Future Trends in Experience Design

Where do you see the industry is going? How shall I get myself ready? Where do you see your future self would venture into?

I can’t predict trend, if I could, I would have already be rich with the bitcoins I should have bought! With that said, I think we should all focus on having a strong foundation ready such that whatever the “new big thing” is coming, we will be in the position to apply our knowledge to it.

If that answer doesn’t satisfy you and you are the kind of person that like to chase trend, another way I would answer this is you can start to pay attention to job boards occasionally to get a sense of what is coming and see is there something that you would like to learn, then proceed to acquire that knowledge.

For example, if you see there starts to be more chatbot designers job around and you are interested, then go ahead to build a chatbot on your own. Then when the trend actually became real, you will be away ahead of other people and would be in a position to say to your potential employer that you have done it vs other people that claims they would be able to learn it on the job.


I have a podcast called UXwanabe. A show that explores how to get into UX and navigate your design career in Hong Kong. The podcast is my attempt to solve the problem for the lack of resources for the local UX community in Hong Kong, you should check it out!

Filed Under: Career development, Most popular Tagged With: UX, UX Design

#2 – How to prepare for the real UX job after the design bootcamp

March 21, 2021 by Tim Chan

UXwanabe
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#2 - How to prepare for the real UX job after the design bootcamp
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Interview with Sally Li — UX/UI Designer at CASETiFY

(中文版訪談請按此, 翻譯:Siwen)

This article is a written summary for the second episode of UXwanabe podcast I did with Sally Li.

In the last episode, we talked about how to break into the UX field, but what happens after you broke in? How else do you need to learn? These are the topics we are going to explore in this episode with Sally Li, whom landed her first full time job in CASETiFY after graduating from a design bootcamp.

Sally is going to share her experience on:

  • How she survive her first month in a startup while feeling completely overwhelmed
  • How the real world is different from what the bootcamp has taught her
  • How to deal with uncertainty when you don’t know the answer
  • How to become more influential in the company
  • Advice on people taking a design bootcamp

You can find the full recording here. Read on if you prefer the written version!


Discovering UX

How did you get into UX?

My background is in landscape architecture, I studied for five years and then worked in the landscape industry for about a year. What brought me interested in UX was I started having a few friends around me that were getting into UX design and I got curious.

I started looked into UX and was really intrigued by the design process, mostly on the end part where we keep iterating and evolving our designs to make it more user friendly. That was something I felt it was harder in a landscape built project due to time and budget reasons. So that’s how I found my way to UX and decided to leave my last job and take on a bootcamp to start my career.

Settling in

How did your first month in CASETiFY felt like?

Things moves really quick in the e-commerce industry, you also have to pick up the office culture and the way they operate much quicker than you normally would in other industries. So the first month I was honestly quite overwhelmed with the stuff I had to do, learning the different parties I have to be in communications with and prepare for their job.

It’s at that time I spoke to my mentors, as a junior designer I was quite scared going into this role without a design manager. I report directly to the head of e-commerce and that was like one of my biggest fear for first month. How do I present my idea to my manager, where I would also eventually have to directly present to the CEO himself my design rationale and why we’re doing this? How are we going to implement it? What is the timeline and all of that.

The first month I definitely reached out a lot more to the UX community to seek guidance on how I should approach my day-to-day job instead of looking for senior designer from my current company (there are no senior in my company). Also, the first month we were working remotely as well because of COVID, that made the on-boarding process a bit more tricky, I had to be a bit more independent and figure things out on my own.

Photo credit: Casetify.com

What kind of help did you seek from the community?

The question I asked was how do I manage my first project. I was given a task and I felt like I didn’t know what to do. I ended up reaching out to learn how should I be thinking about and tackle this project. Advice to me at that time was: Just slow down.

Think about what is it that you’re trying to do? What resources do you need? What do you need to find out? How will you do it? Who do you need that to help you out? And that was honestly super helpful for me as a junior designer, to just have someone more senior in the design fields having to say: Calm down, it’s going to be okay.

How did you introduce the design process to your company?

I think not many companies in Hong Kong has an established process, that’s just how the UX environment is. It is like a hidden job role that part of your job as the only designer is to help the company to come up with a design process. On top of that, there’s not gonna be that many senior designers to back you up, and you’re going to have to figure it out and adjust over time.

Once I had an idea on how to do things, I spoke with the developers to figure out if what I’m trying to do is okay with them. Are we communicating clear about what the expectations are for this process? They would feed back to me and tell me to think about these other things, what is fine what is not okay…etc. As it’s a new process that I’m trying to implement with my coworkers, it requires a lot of back and forth and seeing what works and what doesn’t work, and understand what is most effective for our team.

Does everybody know what a UX designer do in your company?

My team has a good understanding of it because our Our CEO West had a design background and he is interested in having UX designer on board. However in terms of where my job begin and where it ends, it’s not as defined. For example, I’ve sometimes designed our festival logo. We do have a larger design team who are photographers animators and graphic designers, and sometimes they do that as well, but I also end up doing some of those during my day to day. I guess that’s normal for working in a startup. You need to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things.

Theory vs Reality

How is the real world different from the design bootcamp?

There’s a pretty big difference between how the design process is taught in a bootcamp versus how it actually is in the real world. In the bootcamp they start off with user research, secondary research, interviews surveys and then get to the design phase. Although this linear process is great, it’s not always like that. You might not always start off with doing a user interview, and sometimes I feel like the boot camp can set up a bit of an unrealistic expectation when it comes to a professional workplace on how you should be executing your job.

At my job currently, due to restriction in time and resources, we don’t always do user interviews at the very beginning of our design process. We might review existing user data and process all of that with the growth team. Then we jumped into a redesign of a feature, through AB testing we test out does it work against a old version. How are people behaving with this new implementation, is it worse as better? Then we go back and keep iterating.

Do not to go into your first job and expect that you’ll be running it how you did during boot camp, and be more flexible to implement different methodologies at different times or in different projects as you go. Some companies would have the luxury to do a “proper UX design process” mainly following the bootcamps way of design more closely, but I don’t think that’s for every single company.

The bootcamp sets up a good foundation, but there’s no one size fits all solution. You need to adapt to the reality, especially with jobs in the startup environments, time and money is at stake. They’re in such a rush to monetize and grow the business. The process inevitably gets shortened or readjusted and you just have to adapt to the company’s needs and work in their fashion.

Illustration credit: savvyapps.com

What new skills have you learned in a job that are not taught in the bootcamp?

Honestly it’s a lot of the soft skills. In my conversations with people who are interested in UX, I always bring it up to them that while part of the job is knowing how to design it in sketch and working on style guides and making sure everything looks nice, there’s also a lot of the soft skills that are involved in a UX role.

Like if you’re doing interviewing your users, the way you talk affects their results. Apart from talking to your users, the soft skills of talking to your team is also very important. As there are different stakeholders in the company, you need to become a very effective communicator.

One thing I’ve realize that’s really important is to make sure when there’s design critique, I can back my design decisions and also be a good listener to all the feedback and make sure the conversation is good between me and different stakeholders.

In terms of soft skills vs hard skills on which is more important, I feel like it’s equally, if not a bit more important to have the soft skills as a UX designer. Being able to communicate your idea and getting buy-in from different stakeholders for why we need to push for this feature or why is it valuable to the company is something you can’t do by just showing your design.

I would say that there’s not enough emphasis on softskills in the bootcamps currently, and I would definitely encourage early stage designers to also build on those skills. Also, think about how their current roles has already established that skills, and then use that to their advantage when they’re applying for new jobs to highlight how you used these soft skills and how it will help you in this role.

How do I obtain those soft-skills when I haven’t work in a real design job yet?

Finding a good mentor who’s in the field helps me reflect on my current situation and how I can do better, and they taught me how can I communicate better to my stakeholder. If you can’t find one, I think there’s so many resources out there on YouTube that teaches you how we should be talking about design and how to really get buy-ins from other people who are not in the design field to really move your design forward.

There’s also resources like the Futur that talks about the business of design and how do you present design to your stakeholders. I think the UX community is very supportive because the field is so young, and being more proactive reaching out to people or just finding resources on your own to learn is honestly the best way to get into UX.

On growing

How do you become more influential in the company?

Meeting with stakeholders more frequently. I don’t feel like I’m currently meeting with them frequently enough. Just tapping more into the questions about the different experiments that they’re running currently, what are their business goals for the next two quarters, showing them some of their designs earlier on and getting their feedback…etc. I think these kind of actions are what I can take to build more business knowledge as a UX designer.

Understanding the business is very important as a UX designer because we are supposed to be the gap between business and the user. It also helps a lot in terms of getting buy in. When you’re presenting your designs, you’re also trying to justify why they should be committing efforts and money to develop what you designed. So having that business knowledge is really key to your own career success in a company.

How would you encourage a shy designer to become more involved and understand how the business works?

I just think of my conversation with the business as a casual learning opportunity, being curious and asking them questions about how they do things.

One thing that’s very important to remind yourself is that there’s no stupid questions.

If there’s thing you don’t know, it’s okay to admit that you don’t know! You are a team with them so they’re also here to help you figure it out. Keeping that in mind should change the whole atmosphere in a conversation, it feels more relaxed, more organic. You don’t have the pressure of like needing to know, needing to meet a certain expectations. You’re okay to ask questions, you’re okay to not be an expert.

Especially for Asian people, we have this thing that we are afraid of making a fool of ourselves by asking stupid questions, but the truth is that we can’t be expert in everything. If we don’t know about marketing or we don’t know about the business, just ask. By staying humble, we are actually opening the opportunity to talk with other people and build that connection, and that’s what is important to navigate in a organization.

I had a call the other day with another UX designer who had 10 years of experience. Having heard that him admitting that “I don’t know everything. I have 10 years of experience, but I go into different industries as a UX designer without the knowledge of the industry”.

Why has it worked for him? Because he just admits that he doesn’t know and it’s okay. It’s his job to figure it out, but he doesn’t have to come in with those knowledge instilled already. That was a light bulb moment for me when I also felt a lot of relief that he is bright. I’m here as a UX designer. I am a problem solver, but I don’t have to already have the answers to everything. As long as I’m curious, I keep learning. I will get more opportunities to develop these skill sets and meet other people that can guide me in the right direction.

What else do you think would a UX designer should learn?

A bit of coding. Even just some basic understanding on coding would be helpful even though you don’t have to dive deep. It’s the language that the developers speak which you’ll definitely spend a lot of time with them, so making them feel like you can align them and befriend them will be helpful.

Closing thoughts

What advice you would give yourself a year ago when you were in the design bootcamp?

One thing I wish I had done more during my bootcamp was to get in touch with the local designers to get a better insight on what the current climate is like. I wish I did that much earlier in the process as it would’ve helped me focus more on the type of company that I wanted to join. Also, having joining and meeting the community much earlier would’ve helped clarify a lot of those questions I’ve had on the first month of my full-time position.

The other thing I’m curious is to learn more is how to host workshops. The idea of a workshop was introduced to me through AJ&Smart on YouTube. That’s when I see like the power of running a good workshop, it’s super important for aligning all the department’s needs and setting up what’s a realistic timeline for implementation.

Right now I feel like I’m stuck in between like delivering messages between different departments. I want to try to get everyone in a room to carve out one hour to talk it out and facilitate idea like brainstorming session, or prioritize all our features designs, I hope to do that within the next quarter.

Workshop does a couple of things. First you help stakeholders to align, second, which I think is actually the most important one is it helps you to establish your authority in the company. You became the center of attention by driving this thing, and bits by bits, you help to influence the company.

Workshop is also unique in the sense that no one else can do this but us. No one knows how to run a user centric workshop to figure out what’s the customer pain point and align stakeholders in a same meeting. Only trained designers know how to do that and that is our way to add value to the company.

That is something that would really benefit not just me, but the UX community as well. Just being aware of how to facilitate one, how do you set one up? How do you move people along when they’re stuck at a certain point? Sadly I don’t that that is taught enough in the Hong Kong UX scene.

How would you sell a big idea such as running a workshop to the company?

Start small, perhaps one person from design team, one person from IT, one person from marketing or business. In your first meeting, you might not be able to invite the most senior person and that’s fine. With this initial group four to five people, if you ran it well, words will spread if they see value in this kind of mini workshop.

Once you done that, document how the whole thing went, what you guys learned how this can benefit the company and then email it to everybody. If you play the cards right, other people will start to wonder what is this fun thing with post-its and whatnot, how can I join? Then step-by-step, people are open to invitation and eventually you could host like a company-wise workshop, but you need to start small. You need to start finding your ally to begin with.

END of interview.

Hope you guys enjoy reading this!


Vision for UXwanabe

My ultimate goal is to elevate the UX maturity of the Hong Kong market. A mature UX market has the follow components:

Mature UX market = Lots of mature UX organization + Lots of mature UX designers + Lots of UX opportunities

This can be achieved in 3 steps:

  1. Equip more people with the knowledge to become junior UX designers — This increase the talent pool.
  2. With increased talent pool, promising characters will emerge. For those that are willing to step up, equip them with the ability to influence their own company to become more design mature.
  3. As the company becomes design matured, it will produce positive results. This influences other companies to invest in UX as competitors noticed the strategic advantage of having superior user experience in their product and services. This will create more design opportunities for the market

The UXwanabe podcast plays the role of contributing to step 1 & 2 by extracting knowledge from experts and making it accessible to everyone. The podcast is just the beginning, but more is to come. Stay tuned!

If you enjoy what I am doing here, please subscribe to my news letter and share it to your friends!

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UXwanabe newsletter

About

Hi, I am Tim Chan, I want to help 10,000 people get into UX!

Previously, I spent 4 years working as a Product Design Lead at HSBC.

I’ll share my experiences, mindset & strategies on how to climb the design ladder on my newsletter.

Recent Posts

  • 2022 in Review
  • 10 Lessons I learned working in a global bank as a designer
  • Evidence based imposter syndrome framework
  • Graduate advice for UX students
  • How to plan a successful career in UX
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