Tim Chan

What it’s like working in Agency, Startup & Corporate

May 2, 2020 by Tim Chan

An illustration of a group of people chatting

Picking an industry is hard when you first started out as a UX designer as you hardly know anything about them. It is even harder in Asia, as there weren’t many resources that is written around this region.

Having born and raised in Hong Kong, and have worked in Agency, Startup and Corporate, I want to share with you my personal experience and feeling on what it is like working in there, such that you have more idea to help you make a decision. Remember to not just take my word for it as every company is different.

Agency

Pros

Exposure to clients — The advantage of being an outside firm is that you can navigate around the client’s corporate structure and have chances to meet and present your design to C-level stakeholders directly. This forces you to become good at public speaking and if you can impress clients, you will be on a smooth path to promotion.

Experience the whole UX design process — You will have the opportunity to run user interviews, do prototyping, run usability tests… all the standard UX process. The reason you get to do all that is because nowadays firms charge clients for all these activities, so it is good for you that you can put all these UX artifacts into your portfolio.

Huge earning potential — The salary is competitive, and there is also opportunities to earn more. When you become a manager, your job became a sales person with design background, and you will have to fulfill a quota and bring in clients. You get commissions a for the clients you bring in and if you are good, the earning potential is much greater than working in-house.

Perks — To retain people, the company is willing to spend money on events such as boat trips, Hackathons, game nights…etc. There are also a lot of learning resources that you can tap into, if you have the time to read it.

Exposure to different projects — You don’t have to worry about getting bored or feeling stuck working on the same project for too long because there is always variations on the type of clients that comes from different industries.

A morden agency office — Photo credit: The Secret Little Agency

Cons

Stressful— Agencies in Hong Kong can be very stressful. Leaving work at 10 p.m. and working on holidays/weekends is not uncommon. I have had the unfortunate experience to witness someone worked 30 hours straight and another person worked until 4 am to prepare for a client presentation.

Workaholic culture — People in agencies are willing to give up their personal time to get things done. They would take weekends into account as workdays, and I have also seen people asking for manager’s permission to leave work “early” at 7 p.m.

Poor project management —For an agency, taking in all the clients they can when the market is good is all that matters. Higher up decides the deliverable date with clients and designers where not part of the project planning meeting. This leads to the firm taking in more then they can digest, and as a result the downstream suffers from impossible timeline.

Improper UX deliverable — On the surface, UX designer gets to do standard UX process such as user research. However, these activities are often not completed in a professional manner due to the lack of formal training on UX methodologies and lack of time to properly digest and analyse research findings. In the end, it just became a checkbox item in the deliverable that says “we done it”.

Lack of knowledge sharing — Due to the stressful environment, turn-over rate is really high. The consequences of this is that knowledge is not well documented and passed on. People are forced to keep reinventing the wheel on occurring problems such as “Techniques on handling clients” or “How to run workshop” since they don’t know what is the best way to do things.

Unclear project goals—People that pitches the deal to the client, the designers that do the work, and the people that represent the client are all different group of people. Hence, communication problem occurs as designers has no idea what the sales people sold to the clients. What is the project goal? What is the customer’s pain-point? The answer usually exist in vague form such as “The goal is to rebuild the client’s website and the pain-point is the website is really outdated”. In this kind of environment, designers is nothing more than glorified pixel monkey.

Startup

Pros

Get to wear many hats — In a startup, there isn’t a lot of people around, so you get to do a lot of things. Apart from design, you might have to work on the project plan, write copies and even do a little bit of QA. It gives you the learning opportunity to understand the different kind of jobs that contributes to make a software company work.

Flat culture —There very few layers in the chain of command, this means quick decision making process and often times this is what a UX designer need because this gives them the freedom to try new things, fail, and iterate their design.

Rapid promotions — It is much easier to get a promotion because there are not many people around, and startups is often more generous to offer promotion as a way to retain their employees, as an alternative to huge salary raise and as an incentive to make employee stay longer.

Encourage innovation — For startups, they are still figuring out what is the direction for the company, so the culture encourages innovation and coming up with new ideas. It is much easier to get management approval on trying out new technology or new frameworks.

Flexible working hours —Most startups don’t need your physical present, for that reason, more and more company has allowed their workers to work on flexible hours and work from home as long as work is delivered on time.

Cons

Low pay —Unlike Sicilian Valley or the western scene, startup around here is not known for their high pay, according to Startups HK:

Hong Kong startups will start off at HK $15,000 for fresh grads / junior level and will pay up to $60,000 per month for advanced designers, which works out to about US $23,000 and $93,000 a year respectively.

That’s why they usually make up for it in coffee machines, ping pong table, snacks, couches and beer Friday etc.

Weak brand —If your the startup is not well-known, people don’t know what you do and might also have wrong perception on your design ability because startup tends to have a more relaxed hiring restriction compared to big companies. i.e. People with less or no formal design experience is hired

Lack of structure —A company that is just starting out will not have a strong structure. You will be expected to figure things out on your own with no guidance. Oftentimes you will not be able to get the feedback you want when you needed it. For example, it is impossible to gain any good design feedback if your manager is not a trained designer.

Lack of resources — Startup usually does not have a lot of spare resources to go around, so sometimes they will not be able to pay for the seminar you want to go to or spend money on usability testing, less bonuses…etc.

Lack of Job security — Unlike an establish corporation, a startup can go out of business any time if they run out of funding or fail to find product market fit.

Work gets repetitive — In a startup, you might be only working on one product or one app. This can get boring pretty quickly after 1 or 2 years.

Lack of growth — Because of the small team size, the likelihood of meeting someone smarter than you is much smaller compared to a company with a bigger team size. In the worse case scenario, you are the smartest UX in your design team, and that severely limits your ability to grow.

Corporate

A photo with a group of people holding gears

Pros

Resources — Corporate has money. They can afford to invest in their designers on luxurious items such as paying them to go to conferences (e.g. Nielson Norman Conference), setting up a design system team, creating a UX copy writing team, or even hire a team of researchers. This helps to take some of the burden off the UX designers and everyone can also learn from the experts from these areas.

Brand — A big corporate with a good brand helps people to understand who you are and what you are capable of. Working in a well respected company quickly implies your ability.

Well paid — Smart people can command high salary, and big corporate can afford to pay them that amount and that also benefits you. This also means you have a higher chance to work with smart people compared to small companies that couldn’t afford them.

You can specialize — In a small company, you might have to wear many hats, for example, UI design, copy writing, and run your own research. This may not be ideal if you prefer to focus on just doing one thing. In a big company, things are more specialized and you get to go deep on a subject.

Change jobs without leaving the company — With so many products and projects with their own budget and management team, a big company can be seen a collection of mini-companies. If you are not happy with where you are, you can apply to other teams and start fresh without the hassle of leaving the company.

Good perks — Above market norm on paid vacation days, good coverage on medical, insurance, housing allowance…etc.

Big impact of your work— As a designer’s own satisfaction, it feels good to know that your work that can be used by a lot of people.

Cons

Everything is slow— Project often involves multiple stakeholders and decision makers, and this inevitably slow things down and impact the efficiency. Project takes at least 3 months to complete compared to 3 weeks in a startup. For those that are impatient, this may feel incredibly slow.

Work on a small part — You become a small cog in a big machine, this means that sometimes you are working on a small part of the product or doing changes on existing design, instead of building brand new product for features from scratch.

Politics —This is inevitable when the place is full of people. It is common to see people fighting for attention & resource. You don’t have to be a part of it, but you must learn the rule of the game, and how to deal with it.

Difficult to get recognition — In a big company, one must work extra hard to gain noticed, otherwise you boss might never know what you do (or even that you exist). If your work is not recognized, it is very hard to get a promotion.

Illustration of 2 person connecting with each other

Conclusion

Depending on your UX journey and what you want in life right now, there are two strategies you can use in terms of finding the best industry that suits you:

Prioritize getting a UX title
Prioritize learning

Prioritize getting a UX title

If your resume doesn’t say you are a UX designer, you can basically forget about big corporate and agencies if you go through the front-door of applying online. You will never get pass HR. If you knew someone inside or you can strategically reach out to the hiring manager, that is another story.

Generally speaking, you would have better luck to work in a startup as the barrier of entry is much lower. Here is how I rank the difficulty of getting into each of these industries with zero design related background.

Startup
Agency
Corporate

Prioritize learning

If the most important thing for you right now is to grow, you should start with a big corporate with a mature UX team. Corporate has the right structure, people and resources to help you achieve that goal. Be careful though, just because you are dealing with a big company, it doesn’t mean the UX team and its process is well established. Make sure you find out about their UX team size before you apply.

However, big corporate is hard to get into as they prefer to hire people with more experience. In that cases, consider going after agencies. While it maybe stressful and demanding, you get to learn a lot of the soft skills such as presentation skills and the art of addressing stakeholders concern, which will be useful for the rest of your career.

Now if everything else fails, go for startups where the barrier of entry is lower. You still get to learn and do a lot of different things such as research, where in a big company it will be considered as someone else’s job.

Decision log

April 16, 2020 by Tim Chan

Imagine joining a UX team as the new designer wanting to learn about the product. There are two ways you can do it without taking your colleague’s time: you study the live product, or you read documentations about it. The most common form of design documentations are Wireframes. However, a wireframe only tells you part of truth, it tells you what design decisions has been made, it tells you the what, but it doesn’t tell you the why.

When we work on a project, we would have made a lot of design decisions based on user needs, stakeholder needs, research findings, time constrains, technology limitations.. the list goes on and on. If we don’t document these decisions down, we will be in a dangerous position where important project knowledge exists only in some designer’s memory. If that designer has moved on, the knowledge will be lost forever.

Without understanding the why, designers are forced to guess why things were designed that way. Every time we make a change, it is a gamble. The only solution is to systematically document project decisions, such that if future designers decides to make a change, they will have the right tools and context to help them make an informed decision. Let me introduce a tool that not only minimize design risks, but can also help you build a more mature UX organization — The Decision Log.

Benefits of a Decision Log

A decision log helps us to:

Remember things — When we write decisions down, we made sure we will have a reliable source of truth we can always refer back to it without forgetting it
Save time — By documenting what worked and what doesn’t, we made sure future designers will not waste time exploring dead-ends
Avoid going into circles — When we are exploring design options, it is easy to go back to square one and forget why we discarded it. When decisions is clearly documented, we made sure this won’t happen
Past on knowledge to others — When knowledge is written down, we are slowly building a library of knowledge where everyone can benefit and absorb it on demand

How to create a Decision Log

A decision log is a simple one pager document that sits inside the project folder. It has 3 components:

Screenshot
Decisions made
Rationale

That’s it. It really is that simple, now that every design you made is traceable and other people will no longer need to guess why you made that decision. The concept is not novel, our best friend — Developers does it all the time when they add comments to their code. Similarly, you should start writing a Decision log entry whenever a decision is made that will significantly impact the design, and you continue to do it through the project.

When in doubt, err on the side on over communication. The bad case scenario of writing something obvious is that readers ignores your sentence. The worse case scenario of not documenting a rationale is that you also forgot why you made that decision, then that information is lost forever.

Conclusion

As agile development and the introduction of Sprint has became the norm in every technology company, people seems to forget the true essence of the methodology is to learn quickly, not just do things quickly. The most efficient way to record and pass on that learning is to write it down. I hope you give this method a try and I can’t wait to hear from you the results!

How to design and implement a new process

April 4, 2020 by Tim Chan

Assume your normal output is x. If you want to increase your output, you need to produce x+1 kind of work. Here is the problem, if you have already reached you maximum capacity, how can you increase your output? The truth is, if all work comes through you and you are the bottleneck, you can’t. You will never increase your output this way.

The only solution is to improve the output from others around you. Why? Because while you are stuck on your maximum output, if you can increase the output from others, you are still producing x+1 kind of work. But how? If you look at human history, the answer is obvious, you must invent a machine and let others work on it.

As knowledge workers, a process is the equivalent to a machine in the information age, it help others to work more efficiently and not waste time on figuring out how to do things. The beauty of a process is that like a machine, once you set it up, it can continue to run itself even if you are not there.

Why we hate processes

Process nowadays gets a bad reputation especially for people working in technology companies where everyone is suppose to work in “Agile”. That is unfortunate, just because someone else’s process is bad, it doesn’t mean the concept of process is bad. It just means either they have designed a poor process, or they have set it up poorly.

Ultimately, people hate processes because most managers doesn’t know how to implement one in the first place. As a result, new processes gets ignored and is locked in the cupboard to never been seen again. In this article, I will talk about the foundation work you have to do in order to make your process work.

People falling asleep during process presentation

How to make a process work

The hardest part about designing a process is to get people to believe in it and to run it. A process will not work unless the following conditions are met:

Competence
Pain
Time
Buy-in

Competence

That is the competence of the individual who wants to make the change. Let’s assume that is you. You have to be good at what you do, or people would not respect you, and they will probably ignore you. Nobody wants to listen to “your ideas on how we can work better” if you are not good at your job.

If you have the power to force others to do things your way, you might think you are off to a good start, that is the wrong mindset. Yes you can get people to listen to you, but the process itself is a worthless piece of paper unless someone acts on it. To make a process work you must influence those that will be executing it.

You need to give people a good reason to do things your way, otherwise they will revert back to the old ways of doing things, and you will spend all day chasing them to follow your process.

Pain

Humans are creatures of habit, if they believe what they are doing is working, they will resist change. The easiest environment to apply a new process, therefore, is when people are frustrated, when they feel “someone should do something about this”.

Not everyone will feel pain the same way. Luckily for you, this pain is psychological and can be adjusted. Just like people in poor country doesn’t know they are living in poor conditions, you have to expose them to the reality and paint a picture of the wonderful life they could live if something changes. Once there is a comparison, people’s mind will start to change.

A person lying on top of a bed made of nails

Time

Don’t expect overnight success. A process is like a machine, it needs to warm up before it can fully function. You need time for people to discard old habit and get used to new way of doing things, and you also need time to refine the process itself. Implementing a process without the patience to see it through is a recipe for disaster. You need to set the right expectation to management and your team members.

Buy-in

Not only your peers might resist to change, people above you might also be the same. The human brain likes to choose the path with least resistance, once they have done something in the past successfully, when faced with similar problems, they tend to solve it in the exact same way they have solved it before.

Even if there is a “better” way, the brain tends to regard the new way as less efficient because learning the new way takes effort and there is a risk that you end up wasting time. This is why we tend to be reluctant to change.

Without buy-in from above and below, your process won’t work. The easiest way to sell to upper management is to get your team start doing things your way, then report it back to your bosses the changes you plan to make has already happened. That way, all management needs to do is to rubber stamp and make your process official. How to get buy-in from below? Let’s talk about this in the next section.

How to gain buy in from your team

When it comes to change, there will be 3 types of people:

Early adopter
Late majority
The uncooperative

Start by identifying the people that feels the pain the most and is most open to try something new. This person is the early adopter, you alone is not enough to convince other people to try the new process, you need a champion, someone that will help you to sell your process to the team. Ideally, that person has certain influence among the team. Look for someone that is senior or is well respected, if you can get that person’s buy-in, you are on a good start.

Then it comes the late majority, usually these group will start to follow once they see someone in their team has already adopted to the new process, especially if that person is someone they respect.

A person carrying a dial phone to a group of people using smart phone

You will have some uncooperative, I once had a person in my team refusing to read the new process claiming it was too wordy and confusing. I brought my laptop, sat next to that person and told her it is my job to make sure the process makes everyone’s life easier and if something is not working, I will change it right there and right in front of her.

As we walked through the document we discover some areas of improvement and wordings that are ambiguous, I made the adjustment right away and share the updated procedure with everyone. I believe my commitment and enthusiasm to make things work changed her mind, and she became one my best champions. The key here is not to see the uncooperative as the enemy, but to embrace it as an opportunity to make your process even better.

How to design a process

Document what is already there

There is always a process — although not official — a way of how people work, you want to document that. Talk to each team member individually instead of having a group chat. Two reasons: 1) to give everyone a chance to speak, 2) what people think they do and how they actually do things is sometimes different, talk to people individually will help you paint a clearer picture.

Approach this from a genuine angle, right now you are only curious to find out how they do things, respect how people work and don’t be judgmental. Once you have done this, let the person read what you have written down and confirm the steps. As you go through the document, people that have a weak or no process will find themselves a little bit uncomfortable because you have exposed them, acknowledge their feelings and keep emphasizing the fact that you are just here to document things and not judging.

Walking through people’s own process is a subtle way to help people understand they are not working very efficiently without telling them directly. They might even think “oh wait, this doesn’t really make sense, why did I do that…” to themselves. This process helps you plant the seed of changes you want to make in the future.

A person talking enthusiastically while another person take notes

Ask for suggestions

As you walk through the process with each team member, ask them where they think the process can do better, put the focus on the process and not the individual. This might take a few times as some member of your team might not be that vocal, work with the people that is most vocal first. Some will rant about things or complain about management, while you may not have the power to do much, it is important that you acknowledge the comments and write it down as this helps sending the message that you care.

Prioritize

List out the problems you found and categorize it into two groups: 1) Things that you can fix and 2) Things that someone else can fix. Start with group 1 as this will give you momentum to tackle group 2, which is often more tricky. You should also invite your team members into this prioritization exercise to make them understand you are doing this for them.

Write the new process

Keep your new process simple at first, once you have wrote it, try to turn off your brain and follow the process as it is, and see do you know exactly what to do. Send it to a each team member individually and ask for comments. Once you are ready, send it to your boss and tell him this is going to be the new way of doing things. You boss should be OK if you have followed the suggestions I made in the earlier sections. Next, send out the approved process to everyone and set up a meeting to explain how the new process works and address questions.

Observe and improve

Make sure you stay humble and tell your team this process is just an hypothesis on how we can all do things better and you are learning about it as much as they do. Set up a time to review the process with the team and refine it constantly. Be open to criticism.

A process is not about A telling B what to do, it is about how the group can figure out a better way to make their life simpler, and more importantly, happier. If one wants to make a process work, one must start with understanding the people.

2019 in Review

February 2, 2020 by Tim Chan

2019’s goal

A quick recap on the goal I set up for last year

Gain a six pack — This fails horribly. I started off the year by signing up for an F45 membership and went there regularly in the first 5 months, then my attendance rates slowly declined until I totally felt out of the gym habit. When I look for the root cause of it, I realized it has come down to my energy level being really low everyday. The reason for that is because I stay late and eat unhealthy food and the compound effects adds up. To remedy this situation, I must pay attention to my sleeping habit and what I eat. More on that in my 2020 plan.
Have at least 8 hours of sleep everyday — This didn’t go well as well. I often go to bed at around 2 and I have very low energy level when I woke up. This causes me to not be able to perform well at work and I always feel tired when I go on a date with my girl-friend. I was also really tired and don’t felt like to workout after work, and since I workout less, I am less physically fit and I felt more tired. The cycle continues
Publish 12 articles — I have only published 5 articles. Not that I have nothing to write about, in fact I created a lot of draft in my backlog but was unable to finish them. When my reminder rings I ignored it every time and just continued to do whatever I was doing (usually gaming/ browsing the internet)
Create 2 side projects —I didn’t work on any side projects. i.e. Fold origami-boar. When I think about this I have invested my energy in 2 games that I really like right now. Dota and Hollowknight. These are extremely good games and my thirst for improvement and overcoming challenge has been injected in these 2 games.
Bonus: Publish rabbit comic every week — I was actually very proud that I was able to publish a comic for my girl friend as a gift. I forced myself to work on it every day for 2 weeks and I was amazed on how much I accomplished when I was really focused.

Conclusion

2019 was a total disaster for my personal growth. When I reflected on it, I now truly see that the “Power of habit” in reverse, as in the negative habit that I built adds up until it slowly crumbles on me. All is not lost though as I also learned a lot this year in terms of what is important for me in life. As I will turn 30 this year, it is time for me to start building the positive habit to turn me into the kind of person I really want to be.

Mindset

One thing that I learned in gaming is that one must focus on the macro, the long run and not on 1 game itself. For example, if my win-rate is 60% this means that I expects I will lose 4 out of 10 games and that is okay. As long as I have above 50% win rate, I will rise to the top eventually.

To apply this mindset to life, I should constantly ask myself

Am I improving today?

Did I sleep early? Did I workout? Did I create something?

Mechanism

I am going to implement 3 mechanism that will help me. They are:

Do things NOW — This means that whenever there is something I want to do, I will sit done and set up systems that will make sure I will do it
Deadlines — Everything must have a deadline to avoid procrastination. Each deadline must then be broken down into small tasks with their own deadline. Implement checkpoints to follow through.
Focus on ONE thing at a time — Distraction is the main reason that cause me to unable to finish a task.

Goals for 2020

I believe the path to success relies in doing the small things well with consistency, this principle applies to life and work.

What I want to learn

Learn to drive —Research the best driving school that has the highest pass rate. Deadline: End of February
Learn drum — Reach out to my musician cousin and ask for recommendations. Deadline: End of February

What habits do I want to build

Go to bed at 11 everyday. I will do this by printing a big sign in front of my working desk and have a calendar to track my success by putting a cross on every day I went to bed by 11.
Workout habit. My goal is still to lose my belly, but to kick things off, I will start by doing 10 push ups everyday and use calendar to track my progress.
Writing. My goal is the same, to publish 12 articles. I will promise myself to write 10 minutes everyday and use calendar to track my progress.

Why I write

March 1, 2019 by Tim Chan

Last week my friend Costin asked me why I write. It was at that moment I realized I have never gave this question a deep thought that it deserved. So in the spirit of understanding myself a bit more, I have decided to find out why I write. I hope if you read it to the end, I would have somewhat convinced you to give writing a shot. Seriously, it is really fun!

This article serves 2 purposes:

To give me clear purpose on why I write
To remind myself why I started and motivate me even when I don’t feel like writing (which is every single day!)

Why do I write?

1. I want to contribute to the community

When I was a wanabe designer trying to break into the UX field, there were a lot of resources out there that helped me started and I eventually got into where I am today working in a profession that I am proud of. I am really grateful for those who shared their knowledge before me because if they didn’t, I might have never became a designer.

As I became a more seasoned designer, I came to realize that if no one continues to share what they learn and contribute to the community, the cycle of knowledge will die off. The responsibility now falls onto me to help those that were in the my shoes and help them succeed, such that our community will continue to thrive and our accumulated knowledge will be greater than those before our times.

2. Writing makes me think more clearly

As I experience life, I form observations and I form opinions. Sometimes I figured an explanation to something. Some ideas are insightful and I want to share them to the world. The problem is, such thoughts are disorganized in my head, it requires massaging. If I try to communicate my raw thoughts to the public, no one will understand me and I have wasted an opportunity.

If I want to communicate better, I have to organize my thoughts. Writing is a powerful tool to help me achieve that because writing demands structure and clarity. It forces me think hard on how to sell an idea to an audience where they can’t ask follow up questions. After reading my words, the reader either gets it or they don’t. I have one shot.

The act of writing my thoughts down forces me to solidify the fuzzy concept in my head, which in turn trains me to think more clearly in the long run.

3. Writing is good for my career

When I write online, I am demonstrating the following skills and attribute to my future employers:

I am a disciplined person and I am passionate about design. Publishing articles consistently takes a lot of time and commitment (1 article every month), it is not an easy task and one must therefore be very passionate and disciplined about it. My collection of design articles is the result of the standard I set for myself. I am a man for my word so you can trust me to hit deadlines.
I am knowledgeable about business & design. By sharing everything I know about business and design openly, my readers will have a clear idea on the knowledge I have in these areas. After all, one must thoroughly understand the topic before one can talk in depth and explain it in a laymen-friendly way.
I am a good communicator. Each pieces of article is my attempt to sell my thoughts to my readers. It is perfect demonstration on my ability to make arguments, explain concepts and sell ideas.

4. Writing helps me practice for interviews

Sometimes during interviews, I would get asked insightful questions that I have never thought of. That does not mean I am not smart enough, it just means I have never gave those question any thought, or I have never considered things from a different lens.

Now if I spend time to write down my answers here, it allows me to explore the answer a little bit deeper and it becomes more memorable to me. If I ever felt the need for rehearsals before an interview, I can also come back to look for things I wrote.

5. Writing makes me happy

Humans are most happy when we encounter a state of flow. As a creative person, writing puts me in the state of flow where I am so immerse of the task and have totally neglect my surroundings. I felt constantly challenged in finding different ways to express myself, while in the same-time making sure I can make my point across to my readers. It is a perfect challenge that matches my ability.

It is especially rewarding to know when someone has found my writing useful, or even reached out to me to ask for more advise. This means that I have successful achieved my goal to add value to the community, this makes me a very happy person 🙂

6. Writing offloads my memories

I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of answers to a lot of questions. If I don’t write things down, I have to come up with an answer to the same question over and over again. Keeping all my answers in the brain slowly turns them into fuzzy, messy and disorganized thought, it gets lost very easily.

The brain is not built for remembering things, it is for solving problems. When I document my thoughts down, I am putting old problems that I have solved aside such that my brain has space for new problems that comes to my way.

7. Writing is good for my personal brand

I come from Hong Kong, a place where UX is still in its infancy. Most knowledgeable UX person in Hong Kong are westerners. That is understandable because UX originates from those countries.

Almost all my knowledge about UX were acquired from leaders from the west and I look up to them, but they don’t just magically become leaders overnight. They were leaders because they share everything they learn through articles, books or talks. They slowly build up their brand one step at a time.

In order for the UX scene to grow in Hong Kong, we can’t constantly rely on oversea experts to teach us what to do, that would only carry us so far. If we truly want to grow the UX scene and has a chance to catch up with the west, we need thought leaders of our own. We need someone local. This is where I see as an opportunity for me to come in.

Once I share everything I know and have added value to the community, over time, I would be seen as an expert and have build up my personal brand. It would open more doors to opportunities, it will give new comers someone to aspire to, and we as a community would be in a better position to drive changes in the Hong Kong UX scene.

Who do I write for?

I write for 2 targeted groups in my mind.

1. Wanabe designers

They are interested into UX and have probably read some books or have taken a lesson or two about UX. For this group, I want to teach them how they can become an UX designer, but I won’t teach them the basic knowledge of UX, that is their job to figure that out.

This group of people want to know that it is possible to become an UXer and they want someone that can guide them through the process. My focus would be to teach them exactly what steps they should take that can help them land their first UX job. Some topics that will benefit this group:

how to prepare for your portfolio
how to job hunting and find the right UX jobs
how to prepare for the interview
how to networking
how to be confident even if you think you are not qualified — A mind set that would help you succeed.

2. Seasoned UX designers

The second group is seasoned UX designers. They have been working in the field for 2-3 years now and they are looking for knowledge that can help them climb the rank. This group wants to become a better designer such that they can take on more responsibility. Some topics that will benefit this group:

How to gain management support/ buy in from stakeholders
How to create and communicate your design process
How to advance to Senior UX/ Management
How to drive organization change
How to align design vision
How to create design principles
How to communicate better with programmers

Conclusion

This article is written mainly for the benefit of myself, but if you have made it this far to the article, I hope I have made you understand the benefit of writing and how it will help your career. And if this inspires you to start writing, Haleluia! Leave a comment and share with me what you wrote!

How to interview for an UX position

February 1, 2019 by Tim Chan

Insights from a designer that became an interviewer.

Last week, I interviewed someone for the first time. It was for a junior UX designer position and for all my professional careers, I have been in the interviewee’s seat. Being in the opposite end of the table has been an eye opening experience for me, and I have learned few things that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

In this article, I want to share some insights I learnt that would help you interview better for an UX position, so here it goes.

Insight #1 — Your interviewer is on your side.

Look, I might have a Senior in my title, but I am just a designer that is looking for another designer to help me with my job. As an interviewer, I am not here to test you or throw you a challenge. I am actually on your side. Why? Because…

Company hires to solve a pain.

When a company decides to hire someone, they are in pain. They are at a point where they either A) Figured out putting the designers on over time just wouldn’t produce the same kind of work Bob did before he left 3 months ago or B) Needed to do something but they don ’t have the knowledge or time to do it themselves.

Hiring people costs a lot of time and money. Especially in the time where everyone can take a weekend course and slaps a “UX designer” title on their LinkedIn profile. It takes a tremendous amount of time just to figure out whether someone actually does UX or UI, or is just simply does not have a clue there is a difference.

The interviewer’s job is not to screen out people — screening out people is just a by-product. His job to find someone to fill a role that they desperately need as soon as possible, so he can get back to do his work, the work he is paid to do and hopefully get a raise he deserved.

This is were you come in.

Insight #2 —The interviewer wants you to be THE ONE.

Any decent company gets hundreds of resume sent to their mailbox when they post something on the web. By nature of normal distribution, 80 % of them are mediocre, 10% of them are terrible. The hiring manger have to sort through the pile of resumes and hopefully find those 10% that is qualified, then persuade them to work for him.

Imagine being a hiring manager. You start screening for potential match, finding and arranging time that works for both sides, coming in at 7 a.m or staying late after work because your candidate can’t take a day off, then during the interview, the candidate does not show up. Or when they do show up, they completely blew it and have no idea what they were talking about. Maybe you found someone that was really good, but you don’t have the budget for what they asked for. In other cases, after a few rounds of interviews and an offer was given — just before you think the dust is settled — the candidate turned you down and has accepted an offer from a competitor.

Most interviews takes at least an hour, realistically you can only do 3 to 4 interviews a day. Sometimes a bad interview just completely ruins your mood and you start to question whether there are still good people out there, and you can’t focus on your work for the rest of the day.

The point is, interviewing people takes a lot of energy from the hiring manager. It is exhausting. In the end of the day, the hiring manager just wants to go to his boss and say “This is our guy, give him an offer”. This means that he is secretly hoping that this interview — the one you are having right now — would be the last one he has to give. He wants you to be the one.

Why am I going so lengthy about the hiring process? Because I want you to have empathy. Hiring managers is people too, they have their own hopes, fears and dreams. As an UX designer, you should already know what empathy is don’t you? Once you start to treat your interviewer as a person and understand their pain-points, you will start to operate in a total different level.

Now off to some tips about how to interview for an UX role.

Tip #1 — Defend your work, not yourself.

When the interviewer asks you about the design decision you made on your project, it is easy to get defensive because you see it as an act to question your ability in delivering good work. You are defending you instead of your work.

In fact, I would argue you shouldn’t even defend your work. Defend implies having your guards up and fighting off anything that is coming to your way. Once you start doing that, you put yourself in a disadvantage. You are not ready for a discussion, you are ready for a fight. You are now fighting to justify why you should be in this room instead of selling why you should be right fit.

Here is a little trick to avoid being defensive: Assume good intentions. This means assuming the interviewer is genuinely interested in understanding how you make decisions.

Think of the interview process as an usability study and the interviewer is your user. Examine questions coming out from the interviewer with a scientific lens and treat this as an opportunity to improve your presentation skills. He is confused about something you said or did. Why is he confused? What doesn’t he understand? What does he mean by saying that? Why is he asking this question? Does he have other ideas about the project that you haven’t thought of?

Tip #2— Answer the question

It is easy to get defensive when the interviewer asks you about certain choice you made. When you haven’t thought about it, it puts you off guarded. You don’t want to be seen as a designer that hasn’t thought through things, so you start going in circles and making things up, but you are not really answering the question.

This puts the interviewer in a weird spot because he will start to wonder if he ever asks you to justify your decision, will it take him 15 minutes every time to get to the bottom of things?

Its OK to not have answers to things. We have all worked for someone and we understand that in the perfect world we want to do everything “properly” such as running analytics to see whether our design performs better than the old one, or run surveys to record users satisfaction about the new design.

Of course the world is not perfect and business is full of constrains, so an answer like “No we did not measure whether the new design perform better because the problem was urgent and we needed some fixes real quick. Our new design was based on our own experience and industry best practices. We hope that we can go back to revisit it when we have the budget in the future.” is sufficient in most cases.

Tip #3— Lead the interview

When the interviewer asks you to walk through your portfolio, he is asking you to lead the presentation. He is no longer leading the interview now, you are. You own the stage, so start act like a leader and act like you know what you are doing. For the next 10 minutes, the stage is yours.

Tell them what the problem was, and the kind of research you did to uncover things you didn’t know before. Tell them the surprises, then tell them the kind of designs you tried and how you picked the final winner.

This is the part you should not screw up. I will give you the benefit of the doubt when I am the one asking you questions that is not related to your portfolio, because you might not have thought about it. But questions about your portfolio? It is your work and you should know it by heart. I assume you have practiced your presentation at home. You should know your stuff inside out, you should expect when and what the interviewer is going to ask you and be able to answer any questions with confidence.

Don’t literally walk through your slides pages by page though, you should adjust your presentation based on the audience. For example, the Head of Marketing might want to focus more in the before vs after and the results, while the UX manager might focus more on the process you went through. Adopt your pitch such that you keep your interviewer engaged.

Tip #4 — Make it hard to say NO to you.

As mentioned in Tip #2, in the end of the day, the hiring manager just wants to go to his boss and say “This is our guy”. What this means is that as an interviewee, you should do everything you can to make it hard for the interviewer to say NO to you.

How?

By removing all hesitations the interviewer might have about you. As an UX designer, apply the technique you learnt from UX and treat yourself as a product, then identify your flaws and solve them one by one. Ask yourself; “If I were in the interviewer shoes, what kind of questions will the interviewer have in his mind that I need to address as soon as he meets me? What are his biggest concerns? Which part of the interview process will he likely to drop-off (decides I am a NO-GO)?

Sometimes you don’t have to be the best designer out there to get a job, you just have to be better than everyone else that came to the interview, and this simple thought exercise might give you the extra edge.

Conclusion

While we as UX designers are good at designing user experience for digital products out there, it is easy to lose sight that we are in fact a product too. And how we position ourselves, and how much we understand about our users — determine whether the product — us, will sell or not.

If you can get an opportunity to interview someone, or just simply sit-in quietly and take notes, do it. It was a truly eye-opening experience for me and I guarantee you will learn a lot about how to become better at interviews. Until next time, may you apply empathy to everyone around you.