UX

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 to design for constrains

September 3, 2018 by Tim Chan

A case study on designing loading state

I like to consider design as a spectrum. On the left hand side, you have the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), the absolute bare minimum you can do to ship the product. On the other end, you have the Dream UX design, where I define it as the “If I have infinite time and resources this is what will I do” kind of design.

The challenge for every designers is to push their design towards the right hand side as much as possible while considering about the constrains. In a company, this typically means time and resources. How one can embrace this constrain and thrive in this environment is what separates novice and seasoned designers.

In today’s article, I want to walk you through how I designed loading states for Vyond, a start up I previously worked for. Where we slowly tweak our designs based on different constrains and finally coming up with something that strikes the balance between UX and available resources. Lets get right into it.

Background

When we were redesigning the Vyond product the Video Maker a year ago, we took a lot of shortcuts to hit the schedule. As a result, we didn’t create any loading states and is causing some frustrations to our users. Now that we have time, we decided to fix this.

Why is loading state important?

Loading states is a way for a system to tell users that it has received their command and is now working to make things happen for them. Without a loading state as a feedback, users won’t know what is going on and it violates one of the top 10 principles of usability design — Lost of control.

Understanding the problem — Talking to Engineers

To create good loading states, first we need to understand how things are loaded in the back-end. At this stage, you basically ask 2 questions:

Can it be done?
If yes, at what cost?

Here is an example, in the below UI, we are going to display a row of templates for the customer to use. We want items to load one by one from left to right. Can it be done? The short answer is yes. However, developer told us that there is no way to control which item to load first because items comes with different file size, and they will appear as soon as they are rendered. Which means item 3 might show up before item 1 if the file size is smaller.

← Expectation: we want items to load from Left to Right | Reality: items shows up in whatever order they want depending on its size→

The only way to load item from left to right visually is to wait for all items to finish loading, then displaying them one by one from left to right. This means users will spend more time waiting and staring at the blank state. This goes against one of the purpose of the loading state, which is to mask waiting time!

The importance of talking to Engineers

As you can see from the example above, understanding whether our ideas is feasible up front saves us time from designing something that will never see the light, and we can spend our time to focus on something that can actually work.

Another important thing from this exercise is helps us to have a better understanding roughly how long each component will load, so we can design appropriate on each scenario.

In case you are curious, for the above example, we decided to use skeleton loading in the end to help mask loading time.

Continue iteration

Let me show you another example. In the below UI, when user clicks an item from the left panel, the item will show up on the blank area on the right hand side.

Here is how the interaction works:

Click an item from the Library.
After a short loading time, the item is shown on the Stage.

Originally when you click an item, nothing happens. You will be staring at a blank canvas for 2 seconds before the item finishes loading and pop up. The delay and lack of feedback makes user feel the system is not responsive and triggers user to repeat their action. Which causes user to add multiple items unintentionally, and they have to wait even longer.

The Dream UX vs Reality

To approach this task, lets start with the dream UX, the holy-grail:

In an ideal world, when you click an item, item is shown immediately on the blank area.

This is what The Dream UX looks like, zero loading time!

Of course in the real world, items can’t appear instantly because it takes time to load them, but I don’t take “impossible” for an answer until it was proven, so I decided to ask the question:

Is it possible to render items immediately when we click on it?

The answer is yes…with a cost. Item takes time to load, if we want to have the appearance that items is shown immediately when we click on it, we have to preload the items in the backend. It is similar to when you download a big file, you decided to browse Facebook for the duration. Since you are preoccupied, you have the perception that you are not waiting for it to download, but the file is still taking its time behind the scene.

To achieve the “immediate response” effect, we need to “hide” the preload time somewhere such that users don’t feel like they are waiting for us. When user enters the Vyond app, we show them a loading screen before the app is fully loaded. Can we add this loading time to the loading screen?

Loading screen for Vyond’s Video Maker app

Yes we can! This is how we imagined the flow would look like, after the “Item loading” time has been absorbed by the “App loading” time:

The **Item loading** time is absorbed by the app loading time

Here is the catch, we have more than 20,000 items in our library. If we preload all these contents in the loading screen, this will take us more than 5 minutes. That’s quite a long time to wait, compared to the time to loading an item which only takes about 2–3 seconds.

Expectation vs Reality. Putting Item loading time into **App loading** time actually makes loading longer

Someone on our team suggested that can we preload only the items “above the fold” — items that are visible to users without them scrolling. The problem is that having instant access to those items doesn’t help us to achieve our goal of having 0 loading time, since this approach only benefit only roughly 100 items that is above the fold.

This is a time for us to pause and ask ourselves the big question —Is it worth to keep thinking about this direction?

As product designers, it is always important to keep asking yourself this question. Because you always have limited resources and a lot of problems to tackle, spending more time on this problem means you will spend less time on another problem.

In the end, we decided that we have tried our best for this 0 loading time direction and it didn’t work. Let’s find another way.

Building the gap

OK so we can’t show items instantly on the canvas, but we can try to do other tricks to mask the loading time. Below are some ideas:

Idea 1 — Real size selection box

When user selects an item, show its selection box but without the item inside it, the selection box has the same size as the item the user selected.
Display the real item when it finishes loading

What I like about this idea — It is clear that the item is loading and it helps to mask loading time

Why this idea does not work — Showing a real size selection box requires the server to load the size data of the item, this means until it can get that data, users are still staring at a blank screen and the loading time remains unchanged.

Idea 2 — Fake selection box

When user selects an asset, show a fake selection box. The fake selection does not represent the size of the Real item.
The fake box is replaced by the actual item when it finishes loading.

What I like about this idea — It gives instant feedback that the item is loading.

Why I don’t like this idea — After all, the selection box is fake and does not represent the actual size of the item being selected.

Idea 3 — Thumbnail images

When user selects an asset, show its thumbnail. Thumbnail is replaced by the real asset when it finishes loading.

What I like about this idea — It gives instant feedback and gives users a preview of the real thing as early as possible.

Why this idea was shut down — This idea seems really good on paper, however when I took this idea to the development team, I was told it would take more time to code it then we had planned. Which brings me back to the topic of this article — How to design under constrains.

Design is about trade offs. On one hand, we have and ideal solution that might deliver 90% of value to the user, but it will take 5 days to code. On the order hand, we have an Okay idea that will deliver 70% of value to the user, and takes 1 day to code.

In our case, time is limited, so we have to choose what is the best design within the constrain. Not what is the best design.

Making a choice

In the end, we went for Idea 2. We chose a box size that represents 80% of all item’s size. Which means that in 80% of the cases, the fake selection box is the perfect size and it represents the actual size of the item selected. I was actually surprised that it looked way better than I thought. Another reason why you should do prototype.

Here is what it looks like in the end:

Case 1: Item selected has the same size of the Fake selection box.

Case 2: Item selected does NOT have the same size with the selection box, the REAL size is rendered afterwards

The constrain of time forces us to focus on what really matters, it forces us to make a choice. We chose Idea Two that takes 1 day to code versus the other option that will take 5 days. It is the best design based on the given constrains because we want to solve customer’s problem tomorrow, not 5 days later. For us, delivering value to customers is the only thing that matters.

Sometimes we might think: “If only we had more time, we would have the perfect design”. The question is, perfect for whom? Perfect for the company? Perfect for the customer? Did customers really asked for perfect? Or is it for our own designer ego? In the end of the day, giving your friend a present on their birthday is way better than the “perfect” gift that is late. Embrace imperfection. Embrace constrains.

Conclusion

A dream design is just that — A Dream. The real world is a place full of constrains and a lot of things is beyond our control. We as designers, are problem solvers, not dreamers. The sooner we understand this, the better we will become. I would like to end this article from a quote from General Patton:

“ A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

The perfect design is the one that makes users pain point go away today, not tomorrow. Until next time, may your constrains helps you become a better designer 🙂

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

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.

There are no quick fixes in product design

August 22, 2017 by Tim Chan

Throughout my years in product design, I had been through numerous occasions where supposed “quick” or “small fixes” turns out to be complete scope creep, or they created problems that drains time in the future because of hasty decisions made in the past. It is a nightmare.

What is a quick fix

A quick fix is whenever one faces with a problem — without close examination — decided that the problem is a small one and thus gave it little time to work on. Sometimes one even made up a solution on the spot without consulting matter experts (aka Design by meetings).

So what is wrong with doing things quickly when you knew the problem was small? The problem is this exact “this must be a small problem” mindset.

Let’s break down why this is bad thinking.

1. You assume you understand the problem

Problem comes in many forms. Often, you need to spend some time to carefully study them in order to reveal their true nature. When you are just look at the problem from the surface and try to come up with a solution, it is like trying to finish someone’s sentence without understanding the context. You are no better than guessing.

The quick fix mindset makes you stop digging to the root cause of the problem and makes you jump right into the solution. It forces you to believe that you know it all, and prevents you from looking deeper.

2. You believe the quick answer is the right answer

Let’s just say the problem — is in fact — a small one. You want to find an elegant answer that takes the minimum effort to implement. That doesn’t mean that you would be able to find the solution quickly.

Since you already skipped ahead and decided that this will be a quick fix, you assumed that there must be a quick answer. You jump right to the first answer you came up with and assume it will work. You want it to work.

The problem here is that design is ambiguous; there might be many right answers — all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think there’s only one right answer, then you stop looking as soon as you find one. You can’t see the good ideas behind you by looking twice as hard at what’s in front of you.

3. You decided that everything is going to be okay

Now that you have picked a solution to work on, the next step is to execute it — the standard creating wire-frame and writing specification stuff. The problem now you see, is that since you already decided that you solution is the answer to the problem, it has to work for you. You became overly optimistic or even, tunnel visioned.

Should we talk to the developers to see whether our idea is feasible or not? Nah…my design is simply and shouldn’t be that hard to implement, there is no time for that. What if users do x instead of going through the desired path? Nah… I don’t think user will do that, it is an edge case.

You are likely to make bad calls with this way of thinking. You won’t see the damage you have made. Not today, not tomorrow, but when it is time to pay your debt, it will hit you hard.

4. You create design debt

The shortcuts you took and the little things you ignored will pile up. They became debts to be paid in the future. Since each components is intertwined with each other, the time it takes to solve a problem in the future is not linear, it is exponential.

Quick design almost always means there is a lack of documentation, both on describing how the feature is suppose to work, and more importantly, why the feature was designed that way. No matter how nonsense it seems now, the old logic exists for a reason. You have to be very cautious in adding new stuff while making sure you understand how the old stuff works, and if you choose to ignore the old design, you are very likely to walk into trouble.

Design debt — once accumulated — becomes a bad debt, one that is possible to pay. This is how a legacy system becomes untouchable. Touching one feature means going through the documentations of 10 other features. If you did not fully document how each these features work and why they were designed that way, chances are, the risk of changing it is too high and you are forced to stay away from them.

5. Your crappy design is permanent

If you messed up and the design doesn’t work, your crappy design is going to be permanent. Why? Because you have already worked on it. Your team, or even you would believe that you would improve it in the future. This won’t be the case.

The further away the promise, the easier it is to make. And the more painful it is to ultimately deliver. When the time comes to fulfill the promise, employees would rather be working on newer, cooler ideas rather than old promises. No one wants to put aside progress to make up for the past.

This thing has already been worked on, so it will get shuffled to the bottom of the to-do list. To your users, your crappy design is permanent.

Why do we like quick fixes

What is going on in our mind that makes us like quick fixes so much? I believe there are 3 main reasons.

We want peace of mind

When problem arises that wasn’t something we anticipated, we felt uncomfortable about it. Our first reaction is to find a quick way to make it disappear.

One way to do this is to trick yourself into believing everything is going to be okay. The logic goes “I don’t want to deal with this right now, so whatever came up is going to be a small task”. Hence, we became overly optimistic in both the severity of the problem and our ability to resolve it. It didn’t really matter how big the problem really was, as long as you can get away from it.

We want to work on something cooler

We tend to pay attention to things we care about (Don’t we all?). Small problems always comes with an unattractive batch on them. It feels small, it feels redundant. It feels like we were not going to have a fun time solving it.

More importantly, we are not going to gain much credit on fixing small issues. You might even want to hide the fact that the problem exists, because they shouldn’t exist in the first place if your designs were good. We would chose to ignore the small problems it if we were given the choice.

We are tight on schedule

This is most common reason. There is a deadline and the resources is tight, then this problem came up and it seems that you have to squeeze some time to fix it. You compromise for quality and tell yourself there won’t be next time, of course, there is always a next time.

Conclusion

There is nothing wrong with wanting to fix a problem with the minimum amount of effort if possible, that is what we should strive for. However, do not mistake you intention of using small effort to fix a problem translates to the problem being small.

Slow down. Fight the impulse of jumping to conclusion right away. Spend some time to investigate, bring in the expertise from different employees and discuss together.

If you are really in a rush, time box the time needed to investigate. It is better to spend some time to understand the problem now, than to realize a few months down the road your design doesn’t solve the real problem.

And if you really don’t have time to do all this, know that you are trading quality for speed. Your bad design will always come back to haunt you in the future. Know your debts and plan for it.

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.

UX review for League of Legend’s screensaver app

January 4, 2017 by Tim Chan

League of Legends has created a Screensaver App. I personally had a few experiences downloading artwork from games and I understand it is a very cumbersome process (Right click, save, repeat..) and an app to help people download everything at once seems like a cool idea. I am curious to find out how it works.

Part 1 — Testing the Discoverability of the app

Let’s start from the beginning, is this app discoverable? In order to use this app, first users have to find it.

To answer this question, we can look at how well it fits into the user journey. Every journey has a goal, and this is what I defined as the user’s goal, from their perspective:

I want to find cool artworks and make them my screensaver.

With a clear goal in mind, we can start with picturing the common user journey that most people have from downloading cool artworks.

I thought of 2 journeys on top of my head.

Journey #1 — Search focused:

Go on Google and type “LOL artwork”.

The first result lands me to this page. This page is a sub-page under Media, which I will talk about it in a bit.

League of Legend’s artwork page, under Media.

To my surprise, the screensaver app cannot be found here, so the discoverabilty of this app failed in this journey.

Let’s look at the second journey.

Journey #2 — Browse focused:

1. Go to the game’s website.

2. Look for a section called Media, usually there is where the artworks and game video lives.

I expect to find a section called Media because it has long been a convention for a lot of game websites, were they put all the game play videos, in-game graphics and conceptional arts under this place.

Example of how various game website put their screenshots and graphics under the “Media” section

Not so successful here, there are multiple sections on the main navigation of the website and non of them directly gets me to artworks. Here is the list of the navigation headers in the home page:

News
Game
Universe
Nexus
E-sports
Boards
University
Support
Merchandise

Where would you expect to find the artworks from the name of the headers?

Game? Nexus? Nope. None of them leads you to their artworks. The problem here is that some of the navigation names have very weak information scent (the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website) and there is no way to know what is behind the link before you click on it.

For example, what does Nexus mean? Is that related to the game’s universe?What does Boards mean? The rank ladder board? Job board or the community feedback board?

As I continue to look for a section called Media, it turns out they do have a Media section (Search “LOL media” on Google) where I honestly don’t know how to get to this page if I had started from the Homepage.

League of Legend’s Media page. Cannot be access from Home page.

As mentioned, this page does not include the screensaver app. Which I think is a huge miss-opportunity because this would be the most natural place for it to live.

Both user journey failed to discover the screensaver app.

The main reason?

The app can only be found on a separate landing page (http://screensaver.na.leagueoflegends.com/en_US), and it has no hyper link that connects to the Media section. You can find the screensaver app if you search “LOL screensaver” on Google.

Recommendations

Here is how I envision the ideal journey would look like:

1. Go to the game’s website

2. Look for a section called Media, usually there is where the artworks and game video lives.

3. If I navigate to Media > Artwork, I can see the screensaver app. It tells me I don’t have to right click and save every image one by one and can download all artworks at once, awesome!

I understand there might be some legit business reasons for the company to decided that Media is not important enough to go on the Top navigation, so as a compromise, I would recommend to put Media as a subcategory under Game or Universe to make it more discoverable.

Of course, the way we structure the contents doesn’t have to be final as we can run user tests and card sorting exercises to see whether our choice makes sense.

Furthermore, I would also recommend to put the screensaver app under the Media or Artworks section such that it shows up naturally when people needs it.

Part 2 — Testing the app experience

Since this article is about reviewing the app experience, I would just skip the download and install part because these are pretty standard stuff.

Launching the app

To set LOL’s artworks as your screensaver, you have to select the option “League of Legends” in your screensaver menu. Although I do wish after the app is installed this step is done automatically for me, there might be some technical constrains that would prevent that from happening. Otherwise, this would be a pretty streamlined process if it is achievable.

The screensaver app is launched once you select “League of Legends” as your screensaver and hit “Settings”. It replaces the OS “Settings” menu that would have pop-up normally. It looks like this:

Immediately 2 questions came to my mind:

1.Why is there a back button? The backward arrow ( ←) signals that I can go back, but there is nothing to go back because this is a pop-up menu. What further confuses me is that having a Back button implies I might have missed some steps along the way. The arrow is labelled “Exit” which makes no sense to me because this is a pop-up menu, if I want to close it, I will click the big “x” on the menu itself.

2. Why do I have to name my own playlist? I mean, assuming if I do want to spend time to create my own list at all, wouldn’t it be better to just let me get started right away, and pick the cool artworks ASAP? I never remembered the last time I have to name my screensaver list. I have been forced to stop what I am doing and make a decision. It requires me to think, which is bad.

Why is it bad?

Thinking is work and most people hate work.

To be more precious, people hate unnecessary work.

By asking me to give the list a name in this early stage, the app forces me to pay attention to the app itself instead of letting me focusing on what is more important to me, which is to setup the screensaver list.

A better flow would be first letting the user select what goes into the list, then ask them to name it after they are done. Give them the option to skip the naming part if they don’t feel like it, and if they do, give them smart names as defaults such as List 01,02..etc. Even better, don’t require them to name it at all because who the hell wants to give their screensaver a name?

Selecting artworks

Let’s move on and see how does the rest of the experience looks like. After I give my screensaver list a name, I enter this page.

I am under a tab called Champions. This tab contains the artworks of different champions and each thumbnail acts as a category. Click on the thumbnail brings us down a layer where it reveals more artwork of that champion.

Click a champion thumbnail reveals more artworks from this Champion

Two comments about the experience of selecting artworks:

After you selected the artworks inside a category, if you wish to move on or go back, you will have a tough time to exit this category. The exit button is not easy to find. You have to scroll all way way Up and click on the Downward arrow (↓) in order to exit.
There is no UI where you can have a clear overview on which artworks you have already selected, apparently, you have to click Next if you want to get an overview. To me, Next means I am ready to move on, but I am not ready to move on because I need to see have items I have selected first. Online stores have learned that naming the last step “View items and check out” is better that just calling it “Check out” because user feels more secure to have a final chance to look at their items. Applying that to here, maybe calling it “View selections” will make user feel more comfortable.

Below is the overview UI after I clicked “Next”.

Click on “Create” generates a screensaver list

The final UI shows the list I created in a list format:

Now it became apparent that the reason for requiring users to name the list as the first step of their journey is because the app allows users to create multiple screensaver list.

My question is that how many people would actually do that? Can you imaging someone creating multiple lists and switching every few weeks given that fact that screensaver is not seen very often? If people are bored at what they are seeing, won’t they just go to the existing list and adjust it? How helpful is the multiple list feature in this case?

I have reached the end of my UX review of this app, but along the journey, I felt that this app focuses too much on letting users to create and customize and multiple lists, without fully understanding whether this is in the best interest for them. Should creating a custom screensaver list be the centralized experience for the users? I am not convinced.

How can we improve this?

I think the best way to improve something is to start by questioning whether every feature has earned its place to be there, and ask questions, lots of them. For example, I would put myself into the user’s perspective and ask something like…

As a user,

Do I care which piece of artwork goes into my screensaver? (For me, I don’t really care as long as it looks cool enough. Maybe a few from my favorite champions but other champ works too).
Do I want to create my own screensaver list? (Yea, that sounds cool)
Follow from #2, do I want to spend time creating my own screensaver list? (Not really…)
Do I want to create multiple screensaver list? (I don’t really see why that would be useful for me, maybe someone else might find it useful)
Follow from #4, how often do I want to change my list? (Why would I do that, can’t I just update the already existed list?)

You can see that if I were the only user for this app, the current version would totally suck for me (I don’t want to create my own list, I just want some cool enough artworks and I don’t see the point of having multiple screensaver list).

Of course, I am not designing for myself and I shouldn’t take my own opinion as the answer. The above questions is best answered by interviewing the target users and understand their motivations, and this would give us good insights on where the design direction should go.

Think about how to delight the users

Delight is often achieved by guessing correctly what people want and provide it as defaults. To come up with these defaults we can start with what we know.

What we know

Person who download this screensaver app has a really high chance that they are a League of Legends player.
Most players are impatient.

Base on the above, we can start to brainstorm ideas that can delight users and save them time.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we can extract the game’s data and generate a screensaver list based on player’s most used champion? There is a high chance they want to see their beloved champion on the screensaver right?
What if we pre-generated a list with cool artworks for users, such that users don’t have to do it if they chose not to? What if they can open the app and click on a button that says “Randomize artwork for me”?
If users want to create their own list, would it be easier for them to edit existing ones instead of starting from scratch?

Conclusion

While it is easy to poke holes on someone else’s work, it is much harder to give concrete and actionable insights. As a designer myself, I understand the complexity of product design and I tried my best to provide possible solutions along the way such that this will not be a typical critique but no answers piece.

Overall, the visual appearance of the app looks pretty good and it resonate well with League of Legend’s brand, and I do understand sometimes, not every aspect of the company can get the resources and care as one wishes it to be. I hope in the near future, as the company continues to grow it can cater the user experience on different areas because to a user, every touch point matters.

Thank you for reading.