Career development

Graduate advice for UX students

June 6, 2021 by Tim Chan

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

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

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

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

Design thinking
Design craft
Business relevance
Presentation

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

Design thinking

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

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

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

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

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

Design craft

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

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

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

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

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

Business relevance

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

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

The right way to explain your design process

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

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

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

Presentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the world of UX design.

How to plan a successful career in UX

May 2, 2021 by Tim Chan

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

How did you first enter into Expereince Design?

I wrote about that in my old post here.

Tips on First Steps/Interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me giving comments on the student’s presentation

How to plan a Successful Career in this industry

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

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

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

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

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

Experience Design & Business

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

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

Tips on handling non-designers’ challenging me?

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

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

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

Do you think you have imposer syndrome?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future Trends in Experience Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 3, 2020 by Tim Chan

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!

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.

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.

How I became a User Experience Designer

December 1, 2017 by Tim Chan

Script I wrote for a talk I did for IxDA Hong Kong

Recently I went on a panel for IxDA Hong Kong, the local chapter of the global organizer. The topic was “How I became a User Experience Designer?”. Since I already wrote a script in advance, I figured it would be a nice idea to share it here such that it might benefit a wider audience. Here it is.

Who are you?

I am Tim Chan. I am a Senior UX designer and I work for a company called GoAnimate. GoAnimate, what is it? It is a tool that lets you create videos through drag and drop. Think of it as PowerPoint, but for video creation.

We have more than 10,000 props and characters to choose from and you simply drag and drop what you want from the library, and you can add actions to the characters, do voice over and even do lip-sync for them.

What is your background before you entered the UX industry?

It goes all the way back when I was in high-school. I studied this course called Design & Technology, and I learned this word — Ergonomic. It basically means design for the human body. For example, if you are designing a chair, make sure you know how tall your target audiences are. It made so much sense to me. This planned the seed on how I perceive design should be — Designing for people.

Fast forward to 3 years ago, I was working in a telecommunication company. My title was Marketing operation officer, basically what I did was: When a marketing campaign rows out, a lot of people in the company needs to know what is going on. Company website needs to be updated, Customer service and Retention people needs to know what is changed. My job was to make sure that a) everyone gets the updated info and b) everyone can find the info.

So we had a very basic intranet at that time, basically it was just a bunch of links. I wanted to improve this, so I thought to myself, I want to meet the people that is going to use this site, so I walked into the call center, and I immediately knew that the intranet is not going to work for these people, they have customers yelling on the phone in one hand and other CS people talking over you in the other hand. It was quite a stressful environment and it became very crucial that information is organized systematically so that people can find information very quickly in this kind of situation.

This was the first time I was designing for people, trying to understand their goals and what kind of environment they will be using the product. This kind of user centered thinking set my foundation of becoming an UX designer.

How did you get into the field? And how your previous background contributes to what you do now or not?

I was lucky enough to be assigned to a mobile app project from the telecom company. My intranet project was a success and I was handed this opportunity. I put in everything I learned in building the intranet into this mobile app.

I accidentally stumble across the word UX when I was learning about Mobile UI and I realize what I had been working all along (Thinking in user’s perspective) is what a UX designer does. I know I was good at doing this kind of stuff, you know, really grilling into how people will feel and act to your product. For the company, this was only a project, but for me, I wanted to keep doing this forever, so I was surprised that someone in this world actually gets paid by continuing doing this kind of stuff, so I jump into UX right away.

What is it you actually do at your work on a daily basis?

I work in Product development for an online tool.

It is not that glamorous, 50% of my time is spent on writing functional spec, it is document that describes in detail how each features work. It describes a lot of “if this then that” scenarios and document how to handle edge cases. This is an important document because it describes decisions in details and allows you to track bugs in the future. It allows it to be shared with all kinds of people, people in CS and people in Marketing needs to know how your feature works.

20 % of my time is spend on testing the features and document usability issues found. Debating with Developers whether something is a bug or bad design…etc.

20% of my time is spent in meetings, presenting to the team, figure out what is the next features to work on, brain storming, writing patch notes..etc.

10% of my time is doing wire-frame and user flow.

You can say that 70% of my time is spent on communicating my design.

What are the opportunities you see in the industry?

As long as employees and founders respect their customers, there will be plenty of opportunities. There are a lot of start ups hiring UX designers now, but that doesn’t mean they can do good UX work. If the founder insists they are going to put and ad. on every step along when people use their app, or use design that tricks or manipulating people, then there is no UX at all.

UX is a new trend right now and its striving, so there is no shortage of jobs. Only shortage of good company that respects their customer and allow UX designers to do good UX work. So As long as companies respect their users, there will be opportunities.

What are companies looking for in designers?

That depends on the kind of company you are interviewing for, and actually, what kind of company you want to work for.

In general, a lot of company and start ups doesn’t fully get what UX is, so they might not know what they want. The responsibly lies on you to teach them what it is and how they can support you. Don’t get frustrated when they don’t “get it”, just because people didn’t know something doesn’t mean they are anything lesser than you. They are not the professional, you are, and frankly these kind of companies are better for you, as a newbie, because the barrier to entry is much lower and they are less likely to attract the experienced designers, which will out qualify you.

For other cases, company that has an established team, they will be looking for someone that totally can bring in and explain their design process, it is much harder to apply to these type of company if you didn’t have an “UX” in your title because they are looking for people that is already qaulified, not people that is just starting out.

What tips do you have for newbies?

Be realistic — What I mean is that design is a total different skill set. It doesn’t matter how senior you were in your previous company, or took a 3 months hardcore course in UX, when it comes to UX design, you are still very junior at this craft. Some people thinks that since they were a manager before, and they took an UX course, they could just magically become an UX manager or had a managerial role in UX. Well, that is not entirely impossible, but would be incredibly rare. Frankly speaking, how confidence are you in leading a design team that had more experiences than you and you had 0 practical design experience? And how much respect will you have from the team? Chances are, you had to start at the bottom. So, as a junior UX designer, are you going to be OK with that pay grade? That is the first question. Let’s say you still want in, what are the actual career path out there? Some company only has Junior → Senior and that’s it, there is nothing further, are you going to be okay with that? There aren’t really that much jobs out there that gets what UX is and can offer a good career path in the same time. Also, plan for the worse, this UX thing might not work out for you. Think about what if you don’t like UX, what are the outs? Think about how the skill you learned as an UX designer can be transited to other places.
Portfolio — Prepare for a portfolio because it is one of the most important things that will get you into the door. It proves to your potential employer that you care about this stuff (After all, you spend a good chuck of time doing this) and how much you get what UX is. The best kind of portfolio are actual works you did, they are much better than made up projects because you are dealing with real business needs and with real constrains. Business needs and Constrains, the 2 most important thing most junior designer doesn’t get. A portfolio showcasing real work can separate you from those designers. Take everything that can be related to UX and document it, take pictures or whatever. You might skipped some steps during the journey and the project might be 80% done. You might skip the user research or user testing part because your company didn’t allow you or what knot, doesn’t matter, be creative, ask your friends, family or colleagues or people from other departments. No one has to know you didn’t do things sequentially. Make sure you don’t just documented What happened, but also Why the decisions has been made. If you really can’t relate anything from your current job into UX, by all means create a fake one, just know that the portfolio would have less of an impact.
Job Hunting — You need to be very, very knowledgeable to what UX is about. The reason for that is a lot of company doesn’t know what UX is and would have a wrong expectation of what kind of people they are hiring. The worse case scenario is that people that hired you know nothing about UX at all. This might be OK if all you cared about is getting the title such that you can look for “Real UX” jobs in the future. But if you don’t want to waste time doing that, you need to get good and wielding these company out, in order to do so, you need to have a thorough understand of what an UX designer actually do and can tell from the company’s jobs ad. whether they get it or not. So, figure out what you want. Is it “A” UX job or a good UX job.
Job interview — Use this opportunity to interview the company as much as they interview you. Find out what UX means to them, find out how much support they have for the UX team (Do they even have a team?), find out whether they have any budgets allocated to user research or usability testing. Ask them how regularly do they do that and how hard is it to gain approval. Really grill them to make sure there is no BS lying around.