Most popular

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!

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

January 7, 2021 by Tim Chan

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

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

00:00/

Interview with Anindita Saha — Senior Service Design Lead

(中文版訪談請按此, 翻譯: Siwen)

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

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

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

Discovering UX

How did you get into UX?

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

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

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

What was the job market like at the time?

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

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

What made you decide to learn more about UX?

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

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

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

How did you know UX is right for you?

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

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

…

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

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

Why did you take a UX course?

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

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

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

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

Facing self-doubt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On job search

What was your job search strategy at that time?

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

Tip: DO NOT discard your previous experience

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

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

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

How did you get your first UX job?

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

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

What was your mindset for interviewing?

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

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

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

Startup vs Corporate — What should UX newbies choose?

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

How do you embrace the unknown and commit to UX?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

What’s next?

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

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

How to design your own UX process

August 7, 2020 by Tim Chan

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

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

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

Lets deep dive into this.

What problems are we solving?

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

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

Decorative image on: Consider what are you trying to solve

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

1. Why are you using blue?

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

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

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

Output

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

Why this project exists
What are the requirements

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

What is the scope?

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

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

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

Output: MVP documentations, Out of scope documentation

Has anyone solved this problem before?

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

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

Output: Case-study, Lesson-learned

How does the existing stuff work?

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

Decorative image on: Two guys discussing on a document

What is our solution?

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

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

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

How do we know our solution works?

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

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

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

Internal people — Stakeholders
External people — Customers/Users

Has our internal people agreed to this?

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

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

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

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

Output: Review session, approval log

Do customers understand our design?

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

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

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

Output: Usability testing

What do people downstream need?

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

Decorative image on: People discussing around a document

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

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

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

Output: Final UX & UI specifications.

How do you know the design is properly implemented?

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

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

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

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

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

How to 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.

A beginner’s guide to Microinteraction

June 26, 2017 by Tim Chan

If you are working in digital products, chances are you’ve heard about the term Microinteraction, but what is it and why is it important to us? If you are new to microinteraction or want to have a better idea of what it is about, read on.

What is a Microinteraction?

Microinteractions are “invisible” designs that helps users to complete their task seamlessly. The word “Invisible” is in quotes to convey they are not really invisible. Most of the time microinteractions has minimal UI, and when it was done right, users should rarely notice it existed because they will be so focused on their task. You will recognize a microinteraction when you see it, famous examples includes: Autocomplete, Autocorrect and Drag & drop.

Why is Microinteraction important to us?

As Charles Eames once said:

The details are not details. They make the product.

Microinteractions are, despite their small size and near-invisibility, incredibly important. The difference between a product you love and a product you tolerate is often the microinteractions you have with it. They can make our lifes easier, more fun, and just more interesting if done well.

In this article, I am going to walk you through — step by step — on how I designed microinteractions for GoAnimate. Let’s get right into it!

Case study : Designing interactions to resize objects in GoAnimate

Suppose you are working on a graphical software, something like Photoshop. You want to make this circle just a little bit bigger, how do you do it?

Most people would say “Easy! click on the circle and drag its corners”. Lets break this down, there are actually 2 steps involved in here.

1.First, you knew that if you click on the circle, you would probability see something that looks like this:

Click on the circle review some boxes and lines

2.Then, you knew that dragging the boxes on the corner will make the circle bigger or smaller.

Drag on the boxes on the corner will resize the object

Wait, how do you know all these stuff? How did you know how to control this circle without reading a menu on how it is suppose to work?

You knew what to do because you have seen or done something similar before. Within a split-second, your brain quickly recognizes the pattern and tells you what to do, it becomes “intuitive” to you.

Why is it important to understand this?

There is no such thing as “intuitive”

The truth is, there is no such thing as “intuitive” in digital design. For something to be intuitive — by definition — it has to be something that you knew what to do instinctively without being taught.

Nobody knew how to use a mouse when they first saw it because the thing that makes it useful (the cursor) only exists in a digital screen, there is no cursor in the real world. Once you are trained, controlling a mouse becomes natural and intuitive to you.

Let me introduce our first principle for designing microinteractions:

Principle # 1 — Don’t start from zero

Always start with what users already know. This is important because it saves you time from reinventing the wheel, helps you to reduce the design complexity and also lowers the learning curve for the user.

Designing the interaction

Let’s go back to the resizing circle example I gave earlier. We can break down what most people would expect on how to resize the circle in the following steps:

Click on the shape to display it’s control points.
To resize the shape, drag any control points.

These are the basic rules from the user’s perspective. For us, that is all we want the user to know. Anything beyond that is too complicated to the user. However, on our side, we have a lot of details to think through. Lets zoom-in to point 2 together:

To resize the circle, drag any control points.

How does this work exactly?

Decision #1 — Resize in realtime or not?

Do you resize the circle while you drag or do we resize the circle after you finished dragging (Continue to show the original size of the circle before you mouse up)?

For GoAnimate, we considered 2 things: a) Since we are not a graphical design tool, we see little value of showing the original size of the object. b) resizing in real time feels more responsive. So, this is what we went for in the end.

We now have our updated rules:

Click on the shape to display it’s control points.
To resize the shape, drag any control points.
Shape is resized in real time.

Decision #2 — Should the object be resized proportionally?

In most applications, user can hold the Shift key while they resize to retain proportion of the object. Otherwise, the object can be resized freely and can be distorted. This kind of interaction has became a convention.

If we go with that, the rule becomes:

Click on the shape to display it’s control points.
To resize the shape, drag any control points.
Shape is resized in real time.
To retain proportion, hold Shift while you drag.

Most of the time we will err on the side to follow conventions. However in our case, since GoAnimate provides a library of pre-made contents to our users (such as Characters), those contents looks pretty bad when they are distorted. There is also no strong use case to support the claim that a distorted content will be useful in helping our users to tell stories. So, we broke the convention on holding Shift to scale proportionally, instead we did the opposite: By default, all objects resizes proportionally, hold Shift to resize freely.

Here is the updated rules:

Click on the shape to display it’s control points.
To resize the shape, drag any control points.
Shape is resized in real time.
The shape resizes proportionally unless you holds Shift while you drag.

We have considered that holding Shift to distort an object may be hard to discover. However, we are okay with it because our primary goal is to help user resize proportionally. This is one of the choices we got to make in order to make the interaction customize to our primary use case.

Decision #3 — How does the drag interaction works?

Our goal here is to figure out what kind of interactions feels the most comfortable and natural to the user. Here is what I immediately came up:

Since the control point exists in the corners, drag in 45 degrees to resize.

To make it easier to drag, lets make the drag-able area be 20px, meaning as long as your cursor is within that area, we count that as a dragging action. Now we have something like this:

Needless to say, this is going to cause some serious usability problem because the limited draggable zone is going to cause a hard time to most motor functioned. Users will probably be expected to do something like this when they want to enlarge the circle:

This makes more sense. Can we do better?

Let’s try the following:

To resize the circle, drag any corner outwards enlarges it, dragging it inwards shrinks it.

All we need to do now is to define where is in and where is out. It should behave something like this:

The idea is that whenever user drags the corner, we are going to draw an invisible line perpendicular with the corner. If the cursor is then moved “outside” of this line, the shape enlarges, when it is moved “inside”, the shape shrinks.

If we add all these up, our final rules becomes:

Click on the shape to display it’s control points.
To resize the shape, drag any control points.
An invisible line is drawn perpendicular to the control points, if the cursor is in the outer area of the line, enlarge the shape. If it is in the inner area, shrink the shape.
Shape is resized in real time.
The shape resizes proportionally unless you holds Shift while you drag.

As you can see, resizing a shape might just be simply “Dragging the corners” to the user, but behind the scene, there are 5 rules working closely together to make this happen. Which brings us to our next principle:

Principle # 2 — Absorb complexity

Remember 2 things, a) people didn’t come here to use your product, they came here to get something done. Learning how your tool works was not part of that goal, and b) user cannot read the rules of the microinteraction you designed. The only way they can understand the rule is to take an action, see what happens through the feedback, and adjust their mental model accordingly.

In the case study I provided, you can see that although there are a lot of logic going on behind the scene, all the users needs to know to resize an object is boiled down to 2 rules:

Click on the shape to display it’s control points.
Drag any control points to resize.

As designers, it is our job to absorb the complexity of our product and enable users to do the things they need to do without having to think about how to do them. The more we can absorb, the more the users can focus on their goal.

Conclusion

Well this has been a long article to talk about the basics of microinteraction. Making something intuitive takes hard work, but in the end, it is the little things that separates an okay product and a great product.

If you are interested in learning more about microineraction, I strongly recommend you check out the book by Dan Saffer, the title — unsurprisingly — is Microinterations. Even if you don’t see yourself designing mircointeractions anytime soon, this books will give you a fresh view on how to approach design problems and I guarantee you will learn something from it.

Until next time, may your microinteractions be intuitive.

P.S. Feel free to leave comments, click the ❤ button below or share this article if you find it useful 🙂

Disclaimer: I am no longer a GoAnimate employee and I’m not posting on behalf of GoAnimate.