UXwanabe

Learn the softskill of UX and grow your design career

Tim Chan

Graduate advice for UX students

by

This post is dedicated to those that have just graduated from their UX design bootcamp.

Last week, I was really happy to be invited back to be a guest for my friend Michael Tam (Global Design Director @ IBM iX)’s experience design course student graduation ceremony. Part of that ritual is that the students would be presenting their final work to their clients.

Seeing more and more people become interested in UX makes me really happy. As those close to me know, 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 were 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 them into lessons I learned throughout my career as my advice for UX graduates.

Design thinking 

People are good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them. You have probably learned about Double diamonds or the idea of 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, let’s find out”.

When a client comes to you and says they have a low conversion rate, that is a symptom. Redesigning their website might be one of the solutions, but we need to first understand the nature of the problem. What are the possible explanations for the low conversion rate? You are selling to the wrong audience, lack of trust, poor copywriting, 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 solutions 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 wants. 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 conventional wisdom! Why do all app components look the same? Why does the Back button always have to be on top left? Let’s make it top right or at the bottom!

The thing is, our users are not us. You might think and breathe your product because you spend 8 hours every day 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 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 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 created something that only I 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 mean 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 the design can 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 an easier time understanding it. 

Can we dive into solutions right away? Yes, we can, but we might risk solving the wrong problem as 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 like 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 at 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 seconds, you should be able to articulate the problem you are trying to solve clearly, 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, it’s game over. One way to help this is to create an outline or agenda for your presentation, that way you 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 succeed 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 pushback. This is expected. The 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.

How to plan a successful career in UX

by

I was invited as one of the panelists to my friend Michael Tam (Global Design Director @ IBM iX)’s experience design course to share my industry experience with 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 lifetime learning into a consumable format, just read it! When I speak to a lot of wannabe UX designers, it amazed me how few 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 courses 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 understanding the difference between:

  1. Things you don’t know the answer to and would be able to figure out on your own vs…
  2. Things you don’t know the answer to and would not be able to figure 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. A good question demonstrates that you have done the work to try to find answers in the first place and had put in the time to think about the specific 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 who 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 stand out to future employers that I understand service design and am 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 learned along the way — Who are you and what is your story? For example “I am an auditor turned 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, your 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 offering your help in their events. Winners always want to help winners. Let people know you are interested in UX for real, not just some wannabe that is slightly interested in UX and wasting everybody’s time. Start inviting people out for coffee or on Zoom calls. 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 workaround 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 pain-point, 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 design 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!

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

by

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

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!

#1 – How to become a UX designer with no design background in Hong Kong

by

#1 – How to become a UX designer with no design background in Hong Kong
#1 – How to become a UX designer with no design background in Hong Kong
/

Interview with Anindita Saha — Senior Service Design Lead

(中文版訪談請按此, 翻譯: Siwen)

In this first episode of UXwanabe, I have invited Anindita Saha to share her experience on how she went from being an auditor at PwC to become a Senior Service Design Lead in HSBC. We talked about:

  • How Anindita discovered UX and the exact steps she took to become a UX designer
  • How to know if is UX right for you
  • Four benefits a UX course provided to help her switch career
  • How to overcome impostor syndrome when you feel like you are a “fake designer”
  • The correct mindset to interview for a UX position as a newbie
  • How to proof to future employers that you are ready for a career in UX without a design degree
  • Startup vs Corporate — where should a UX newbie go?

You can find the full recording here. If you prefer the transcript, read on!

Discovering UX

How did you get into UX?

This is a really funny story, basically, I kind of got into it without me realizing it was UX. My boss at the time asked me to handle a project around building a sales pipeline tool for in-house and they needed someone to spearhead that project. I told her I don’t know how to code and I don’t have the technical background, but she told me that’s okay, we have our engineers and technical specialists, they just need someone to tell them what to build.

I remember at one point when I was trying to do all the specs and wireframes on PowerPoint, I realized I should go and ask the people who are going to use this piece of software: What they want, what they do and what they’re looking for. What type of information that needs to be captured and how they use that information. I had this desire to do it from the end user perspective, and this was my foray into UX.

This was back in 2010, when we first started this project and the whole idea around UX didn’t even exist in Hong Kong. That was how I got into UX without me realizing it was UX.

What was the job market like at the time?

At that time UX was not really well known in Hong Kong. It wasn’t a job that wasn’t really sought after. I remember what it was like to go through all the job boards, it was not easy to try and find a job as a UX designer because it was literally the first year that the idea around.

It was a little bit of a challenge, but at the same time, I think I was also lucky because I was entering this field at its infancy, and I was part of that first cohort of people in Hong Kong that were really embracing what UX was and what the potential of it could be in Hong Kong.

What made you decide to learn more about UX?

When I was done with that project, I went back to my regular day job and thinking “Gosh, that was such a cool project to do! I really enjoy doing that project, I wish this was something that people actually got to, I wish this was a real job!”

At that time, my job wasn’t fulfilling, so I did some time off went traveling and backpacking. When I came back I knew I needed to figure it out what I’m going to do with my life. I just knew I enjoy design. I enjoy the idea of looking at experiences on a digital platform. I always wanted to do something related to art and design. It was always in my back of the mind, I didn’t have these words at the time, but I knew that inside of me and I knew this was something that I was passionate about.

One day I was going through my emails I read an advertisement for General Assembly’s first part-time UX course in Hong Kong. I click on it and as I read through the bullet-points on what is user experience and what does it mean and how does it work, I realized have done in 90% of the bullet points when I worked at PWC! It sounded like exactly what I want to do with my life and what I want to do every day. Then, I went to the information session and listened what they were going to teach us, when we were done with the session, that was the moment I knew this was what I wanted to do.

How did you know UX is right for you?

I took a leap of faith. I guess I’ve always been like that. Our future is going to be around a digital landscape, it’s where many opportunities are going to lie. I remember even well before PwC when I worked in other companies, I was always thinking about: How do I optimize this website? How do I make it better for the customer? How do I make it more delightful or more engaging for them?

If you’re asking yourself those types of questions and it’s very intuitive to you, then UX might be an area of interest for you. For example: Do you have empathy? Do you have a creative mindset? Are you trying to solve problems for somebody else rather than for yourself?

…

To me, one of the most important distinctions between art and design was that design was about other people and art was an expression of myself. That was really important for me because I realized that when I do mock up, I’m not doing it for me, I’m doing it for the person who’s going to use it, and if you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, or at least be patient enough and care enough to think about someone else’s life or what they’re doing with it, then it’s a really good sign that you should be at designer.

One of the entry questions you need to ask yourself is: Do you care about other people and helping them to solve their problems? Then the next question is: Are you interested in design and from a digital perspective, are you interested in the digital world? Then you can pair those things together: Are you interested in technology and understanding the technical capabilities on those platforms to help other people solve their problems?

Why did you take a UX course?

I took the course because it helped me with structure and also with confidence. There are two prongs to it: One is a soft and a hard skill. The hard skill is knowing what method, what tool to use. When and how you can use the same thing in different ways, and tips and tricks like stakeholder management and knowing how to facilitate conversations.

This pure confidence and believing in yourself and knowing “what I’m doing, I’m doing it in the prescribed way and the right way” is what the course gave me, especially if you don’t have a formal degree in UX design, you can have those gaps in your confidence. For me, especially when UX was so new in Hong Kong, I needed that extra confidence.

It also shows your potential employee that you’re serious about UX because you made a significant financial commitment to prepare yourself to be a UX designer.

The other thing is they do is they often give you connections. When I did my course in 2012, they reached out to different industry and different employers, startups, bigger corporations and NGOs. At the end of the course we could apply for roles and showcase our work. They have done the hard part for you, and then you could focus on making your argument of why you’re a good fit for that particular position.

Facing self-doubt

How did you overcome imposer syndrome — the feeling that you not qualified as a UX designer?

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.

On job search

What was your job search strategy at that time?

  1. Do as much work in UX as I possibly could. I worked for free. It doesn’t matter because you just needed the experience. That supplemented my journey of improving myself, so when I had to write down on my CV about my experience, I already had two projects to talk about.
  2. I networked with as many people as possible and telling them I was a UX designer and I’m looking for a new opportunity at the moment. I pretty much went to those events as many nights as I possibly could. Obviously not every single lead gets you something, but it was still good because I got to learn and know about a lot more people in the industry in that way, and also got some of them to review my work to give me pointers. This external validation helps you to know you’re on the right track and doing the right thing.
  3. I went to every UX forum, every page, every something that had anything to do with UX and basically contacted every single person that had posted in the last three months.

Tip: DO NOT discard your previous experience

In my CV, I wrote down that I had been an auditor and had been a financial advisor, but I didn’t write any bullet points underneath those positions because I didn’t think that they were relevant. Actually when I think back on how I do my work now, I realize how important and helpful those experiences were for me. In the moment, I just didn’t know. Being an auditor, as an example, gave me two things.

  1. Being an auditor makes you extremely structured. In some sense, being very structured in UX can actually help you in both the way you do your job, as well as how you look at a problem and how you structure a solution.
  2. There was one particular thing that we had to do as auditors, what I used to call it — controls. So what we would do is that we would interview all the people involved in a particular process end to end to see how it was done, to see if there were any breaks and to see how it could be improved.

I realized later in my career as a UX designer, is that that those skill is actually quite helpful when you’re trying to understand the experiences a customer goes through when they’re trying to finish a task in that structured methodical thinking.

How did you get your first UX job?

For my first proper gig, I did it for free. They were a startup so it’s not like they had a whole lot of budget, so they were making a compromise between high quality versus cost. I was very transparent about it. I said, “Hey look, I’m just learning. We can do it as many times as you want and you can be part of the process as much as you want to be, I’ll do as many screens as you need in order to get you into production, and I will work with your developers.”

So they took me on, we went through the process of designing, going to the developer, changing things, going back…etc. And so when I went into doing more freelance work, I had this very extensive portfolio of work.

What was your mindset for interviewing?

I went into those interviews with just a really humble notion of I’m doing the best that I can. I may not get this job, but I’ll learn something. I remember I got an interview with the head of an agency in Hong Kong. She had learned about this Accountant who was trying to be a designer and she was very interested to meet me out of curiosity. I thought I am probably not going to get this job, but I’m going to learn a lot out of this one.

As I was showing her my portfolio, she gave me feedback and her perspective on how to do this better. She might’ve been right or she might’ve been wrong, it didn’t matter, but it was so good to hear somebody telling me how I could improve this. I didn’t get that job but that was great because I still learnt something.

When interview for startups, my mindset was: I know that you’re probably not going to be able to hire the most experienced UX designer, but if I show you in sincerity and the genuineness of my intent and the fact that I have tried, and I’ve put so much time into doing UX for other people, whether it’s for free or out of my own interest, hopefully that’s enough to convince you.

Startup vs Corporate — What should UX newbies choose?

If you don’t care about money, benefits, number of holidays and assuming all those other things are the same, I would definitely work at a startup. That’s my personal preference, just simply because of the variety of potential roles and hats that you would need to fulfill.

You can always go into corporate later once you have a better understanding of what those different roles are. If you already know what you love doing, like I only want to do UX or only wanted UI, then go for it, but if you haven’t fully figured it out yet, think startups are a great place to go.

In corporate, they’re a little bit more strict maybe because of HR, whereas in startups they might be a little bit more flexible and understanding of the fact that a person has to fulfill multiple roles and they want to see people who are multi-talented. I always had really good experiences with startups so I would highly suggest them.

Closing thoughts

How do you embrace the unknown and commit to UX?

Once I realized UX was a real job, it was the only thing that I could think about. In the freelance work that I did, there were some days where I worked till three, four o’clock in the morning not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I enjoyed it and it fueled me in believing this path is my future. Something that made me so happy, how could this not be my future? It just drove me more and more. If it had failed miserably, if I was a terrible UX designer and if I was never meant to be a UX designer, I could always go back and be a CPA, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.

You need to commit to it, and if you were always thinking like “oh well I can go back…” which you can if you’re like a CPA as an example, yeah you can eat, but you can’t be happy. You can’t be half out, you got to really go for it and believe in it. Like if you would’ve gotten your degree in design, you would then go into the world and you commit to getting a job in that industry right? You need to make that same commitment in your mind like: I am going to be a designer. I’m going to do what it takes to get there.

Similar to a relationship, you really need to put in the effort to commit to it to see whether it works or not. You can’t just sit on the fence and stalk someone’s Facebook or Instagram and think you would be a good fit. You need to go out with that person and it can be scary because you have to put yourself out there.

Changing your job takes courage and the first thing you have to conjure on yourself, is whether you’re brave enough to do this for real, or if you’re just kind of do this half-ass. Anything that really matters in your life, you can’t do it half-ass, especially with someone who’s trying to hire you, if they think that you’re not really in it, they’re not going to hire you.

You need to prove to them that you are in it, and that’s why doing these extra projects as freelance projects is still important because if you do it for somebody else, it shows that you have a commitment to somebody else. Do it for something that you care about. For example, if you’re interested in charity work, do something for them related to UX . This makes a huge difference.

Any advice for people looking to follow a similar career path with no exposure to UX in their current job?

There’s an assumption that I’m making is if you know what UX is, you can Google it and read some of the fundamental steps of research, defining the problem, design, prototype, test, like basic design thinking 101 and apply it in your own way.

If you say you don’t have a job in UX like you work at the post office, they don’t have a website, I would then argue if it doesn’t have a website, design the website for the post office if it doesn’t exist. There’s no reason why you can’t find something to design for. You can use yourself, your family, the people around you as your inspiration. For design, there’s always something that you can design for. I’m sure if you really believe that you are a designer, you will find a problem in society that you can design for.

If you genuinely care and want to be a UX designer, go on design an app. Go and redesign it and show me why you’ve redesigned it in this way and go through the process. Don’t just tell me that you want to be a UX designer because ultimately it doesn’t matter if someone has paid you to do design or not. I want to know that you have done it and you’ve gone home after work and put in a few hours every couple of days and try to do something and learn how this actually works. I want to see the intention around wanting to solve a problem and testing it with the user, and potentially iterating.

You need to learn the logic behind this and the theory behind it, and then also experiment with a few different application. That’s the kind of thing that I’m looking for in a UX designer. That they’ve gone through the details of it and they’ve made the effort to learn about it.

…

What’s next?

My goal is to help wannabe designers to get into UX and provide knowledge to help you climb your design career in Hong Kong.

If you enjoy what I am doing here, please feel free to subscribe and share it to your friends!

How to design your own UX process

by

If you search for “UX process”, you can find thousands of articles written on this topic. As a new UX person joining a team with no established process, you might be struggled on whom process to follow. I have been there before, and it was confusing.

The problem with following someone else’s framework is that it hardly sticks in your mind and it is easy to misuse it if you don’t fully understand it (As everyone worked in an “Agile” environment can testify). Since each company’s internal process and its UX maturity is different, it is hard to just pick one popular UX process and follow it.

In this article, I am going to walk you through a list of questions you should ask yourself in order to lead a design project from start to finish, and also explain why these questions are important. Based on these questions, you can form your own process that will suit yourself and your company.

Lets deep dive into this.

What problems are we solving?

Before you start designing anything, you need to understand WHY are you doing what you are being asked to do. If you don’t know what you are trying to solve, you can’t judge whether your design solves the problem or not.

Sometimes we are scared to ask why, the environment might make us feel like it is not politically correct to do so because it feels like we are questioning decision from higher up. Our boss might say or think “Why are you asking why? Do you think I made the wrong call? Can’t you just do as I say?”

Decorative image on: Consider what are you trying to solve

The problem with the word “Why” is that it is not welcoming, it feels like an interrogation. It focuses on questioning the person that made the request instead of the intention of the task. Instead, I advocate for using the word “What”. Consider the following:

1. Why are you using blue?

2. What are you trying to achieve by using blue?

“Why” seems like you are questioning someone’s decision, it can be interpreted as “Blue is a bad choice” where “What” invites for participation, it is a discussion: “What is your goal and how does blue help you achieve it?”. Now that we are comfortable asking What, here are some things you should ask when a task is handed to you:

  • What problem are we trying to solve and for whom? What are the pain-points?
  • What do users currently do without our solution? Did they invent some workarounds? This is an important question because if your problem is real and painful enough, people will try to find a workaround for it. Conversely, if you don’t see a workaround, the problem probably is not painful enough. Microsoft Excel does this really well. They basically look at what popular micro is being created and added it to their next release. This exercise helps you eliminate the imaginary problem like “some people might find this annoying” and give you a glimpse on how your design might end up. Sometimes your user’s hacky workaround is a great solution that requires minor modification.
  • What triggers us to solve this problem now? Understand the thought process of your boss will help you greatly as you can tie it to how you present your work. When you understand your boss better, you can feel his frustration or her urgency, and it helps you to avoid presenting a solution that takes 3 months to build when what you boss wants is a hot fix in 2 weeks.

Output

By the end, you should produce some sort of documentation that outline:

  • Why this project exists
  • What are the requirements

I like to add this knowledge into a document called a Project brief and keep it in a share drive such that there is a single source of truth, and I would also email stakeholders as well to keep everyone on the same page. Surprisingly, once it is written down, things become more concrete, and stakeholders are less likely to change their mind.

What is the scope?

Nothing gets done if there is no deadline. There is always room for improvement, there is always the next “minor polishing”. This article itself is also a product of setting a deadline and just hit the publish button whether I like it or not.

Decorative image on: Schedule

I can always come back for the typo or add a picture or two, but if I don’t publish anything, no one can read it, and I can’t add value to anyone’s life. For your project, get everyone involved and ask:

  • How much time do we have? Are we expecting a quick-win or a total redesign? There is no point in designing the perfect solution that takes 2 months if you only have 2 weeks to work on it. Instead, spend your time coming up with a perfect 2 weeks solution.
  • What does good enough look like? When do we know when to stop? At a minimum, your design should satisfy some bare-bone goals. i.e. The user should be able to add items to their cart. Any other good to have stuff like “comparison feature” or “add to my favorite” are Good-to-haves.
  • What use-cases or target user is not covered as part of this project? Having alignment on what you are not doing is just as important as knowing what needs to be done. Make sure this is well communicated to your stakeholders to avoid an unpleasant surprise in the future. e.g. Boss: I thought we are also curing cancer with this release and have already told the higher-ups, now I need to get everybody OT to work on this!

Output: MVP documentations, Out of scope documentation

Has anyone solved this problem before?

There is always more problems to solve than time available, as a smart designer, you want to avoid reinventing the wheel. First, you need to find out has the wheel already been invented. This means:

  • Look inward. Internally, has any teams within your organization faced this problem and solved this? Is it applicable to your case? Is there something we can reuse? Failure to do this step is how inconsistent designs, duplicated pattern and wasted effort occurs. If you company is big enough, someone else from another department has probably solved this before. Make sure they are aware your project exist and talk to them.
  • Externally, how did other companies solve this problem? This goes without saying, if you work in a FinTech, look for what other Fintech company is doing, if you work in e-commerce, look at what other similar company is doing and so on. What can we learn from them? What can we apply to our case? What are they not doing well that should we avoid?

Output: Case-study, Lesson-learned

How does the existing stuff work?

If you are adding a new feature on top of an existing design, you better know how the thing works inside out, or you might break things. Look at existing documentations, play around with the live site, and speak to developers to find out about any tricky logic, interactions or quick fix from the past that has been put together that is vulnerable to big changes.

Decorative image on: Two guys discussing on a document

What is our solution?

Now we start to design the actual thing. You can create sketches, lo-fi wireframe or hi-fi designs, prototypes…etc. It really depends on what you think is best for your company. During this process, consider:

  • What are the different scenarios and use cases? What would your design look in other languages? What does it look like on different screen sizes? Different platforms?
  • What happens when users don’t follow “the right way?” Have we covered all edge cases? If users can add one item to the basket, can they add 300? What does it look like if they do that? Do we allow it? If not, how does the UI convey that to the user? How long are items stored in the basket? Do we need to tell that information to the user? Why or Why not?
  • What are our rationales to make certain decisions? Throughout the design process, we are going to learn a lot of things and make a lot of decisions, are we just going to let that sit in our brain or are we going to make the effort to document it such that other designers and future generations can benefit from our lessons?
  • If we propose this design, does it also impact other areas of the existing design? Who needs to know about this? Other designers? Other developers? Other product managers? Do they have resource to support you?

Output: End-to End user flow, High-level sketch, Decision log, Interactive prototype

How do we know our solution works?

A design proposal is considered feasible when it, at a minimum:

  • Achieves the business goal
  • Can be built within a reasonable time-frame
  • Can be understood by the user

This means two types of people need to look at our work:

  • Internal people — Stakeholders
  • External people — Customers/Users
Decorative image on: A women thinking

Has our internal people agreed to this?

Do developers thinks your design is feasible? Does it require a big change to existing code base? How long would it take? Are there other simpler way to achieve 80% of the result but can take much less time?

Do other designers think we are following the established guidelines? If the design is not part of the guideline, do we need to update the guidelines?.

Do product people think the design achieved their goal? Do brand people think the design is on brand? If you are working on FinTech or highly regulated industry, have you consulted Subject Matter Experts or Legal or any relevant people to make sure your design complies to regulations? e.g. Can you create a One-click to order button?

How much time does the approval process take from all of these people mentioned above? Did the project plan take into account the back and forth? One of the major reason for project slip is that project plan failed to recognize that takes time for people to come into consensus. This won’t happen to you as a smart designer, you will make sure to bring this up during meetings and talk to the right people.

Output: Review session, approval log

Do customers understand our design?

Normally, we want to make sure the answer is Yes to this question before the product goes live. Until we test our designs to the real people who are going to use it, the designs are not validated and we are living in our own bubbles.

In a lot of companies, testing is always thought as a luxury, but the nature of it doesn’t change. Users has to test it no matter what. If you don’t test the design before launch, the shift just became after launch. We are testing the live product to real customers instead of prototypes. Anyway, if we are commit to test before launch, we need to figure out:

  • What format do we want to test? Sketches? Lo-fi/Hifi wireframes? Prototype?
  • Who to test? How long does the recruiting takes? How many people do we need? Who runs the test?
  • How much time does it take for us to organize the findings? How do we present our findings? In what format? To whom? What do we expect to do with our findings?

Output: Usability testing

What do people downstream need?

Now that our designs are ready, it is time to send it to someone else to work on it. Branding people might want to pick the right images, copywriters need to know which area needs copy. In an ideal case, everybody required to make the project happen are involved during the inception of design, if not, we need to spend some time to explain to them how the thing works.

Decorative image on: People discussing around a document

Consider: When will they need it? In what format? Are there enough time for them to review the design and ask questions? For example, you need to tell them:

  • For Copywriter, this area needs a new copy, and we are trying to tell the user about how x works
  • For Branding people, this area needs some stock photo, and we are trying to do y
  • For Developers, this area we are re-using existing component and this area requires new ones, and this is how the animation should work

In some companies, someone else is charged of figuring this out for you, but if that someone does not exist, it is on you. In essence, make sure people downhill knows what it is expected of them and in a format that they understand.

Output: Final UX & UI specifications.

How do you know the design is properly implemented?

Once developers has build something, how are you going to find out it looks and works as you specified? Do you communicate with QA people on what to look out for?

If you are going you review the build, how will you do it? Are you going to eye-ball it? Or use Chrome Developers tools to look at the elements? What if it is a mobile app? What tools should you use than?

How much time do you need for the review? Where do you report the bugs? How do you report the bugs? Are everything tracked and documented?

That’s everything I can think of that requires you to think about when you want to see through a design from beginning to launch. Hope this article helps you in your process and please leave a comment if you have any questions.

p.s. I am aware that product development is a continuous cycle and the design shouldn’t stop when a product is launched. But as the scope of this article is about seeing through from start to launch, what after launch is out of scope.

How to find the right kind of mentors as a junior designer

by

I see this mistake a lot when it comes to design mentorship program. Junior people all wants to talk to the most senior person in the room, but are oblivious of the fact that such approach will have a limited benefit to their career development. This is a mistake because contrary to your intuition, picking a less senior person as a mentor is probably the better choice.

Here is why it is not a good idea to find someone with 20 years of experiences as a mentor when you first started out:

Although they can offer you general direction for your career, they far too removed from what is was feel like when they first started.

I learned this the hard way after trying to offer advise to someone that was trying to get into UX. When faced with a situational question, I realized that I started to mix up what I did versus what I will probably do, my memory was fading away. After all, it was almost 8 years ago since I got into UX.

I certainly lost touch on how it was like as a junior designer. The struggle had now became a distanced memory. Though I can still offer reasonable advise, they certainly did not come from my best thought output. If my advises were a tool to be used in a battle, it would be a rusty dinner knife instead of a sharp Samurai sword.

My brain has been preoccupied by current matters. My skills sets has been transformed to serve the managerial role, such as how to manage a UX team, setting design directions, stakeholder managements…etc. Those are the things that I have been thinking, living and breathing everyday. Those are the things I am most qualified to talk about and can have meaningful contribution to the conversation for anyone wants to discuss on such matter, or is interested to grow into this role. Anything else, I am not best person to talk to.

Who to look for instead

To gain the most from your mentorship program, you should look for someone that is just one level above you, someone that has just done it, or is currently doing it. For example, if you want to get into UX with no design background, talk to junior designers that just landed their job. If you are a junior designer, seek mentorship from a Senior Designer instead of the Director of UX.

Seek out the “just made it” person if you want immediate actionable advice, and the seasoned veteran if you want general guiding principle for life. Don’t mix up the two, or you will be wasting your time and theirs. Hope this helps!