Disclaimer: This article is purely my personal view, based on my own experience, and it doesn’t represent any company or organization’s view or policies, or generalize to the whole industry.

Recently I’ve been in many interview loops (~3/wk). And in my last role, I had been in more than 60 loops for Senior Designer interviews and trainings, which gave me a lot of insights on what interviewers are looking for in a more seasoned designer, so I’d like to share my 0.02 here. Might not be any “easy wins” but I do like to go a little meta on those points. (Fyi these observations and tips might not apply to Junior — Mid level designers since I don’t have too much experience interviewing them.)

Be bold but know your benchmark

1. Know how good your work is. Build some self awareness by benchmarking with others in the same market, similar industry, role and job title, etc, seek feedback among your peers and mgr and outside of your organization. This information is crucial for you to know where you are at, and then you can be very confident about what you can bring to the table. I’ve had people who has 3yr experience asking me “Should I apply for this senior role?”. To me, this is less about yoe but how you see/know yourself. If you don’t know or feel you have to ask this question, then you’re probably not at the senior level. In addition, do some due diligence to the company/role you’re applying for to see if your work is on par with that company’s product.
2. Understand your lever and use it. A lot of people find higher level designers don’t have a full portfolio, some(e.g from FAANG) just a link to the launched product , and some no portfolio at all, and people start to mimic that trend. My personal opinion is, you should not just mimic the surface level stuff, because you don’t know the back stories. Maybe those people have very strong network and they’ve proven them in the industry, have won awards, or did talks at international conferences, in LT positions etc. Think about what levers do you have? What’s something only you can do? If you don’t have any of those, set out a plan to grow there and be humble. Once I had a candidate with only Saas projects on their folio, and I mentioned they might not be a good fit for our biz since we were looking for people have tons of consumer product experiences. The candidate said “I know my projects are all 2b, but I want to switch to 2c in my next role”. Similarly, another said “I know my folio looks very dashboardy, but I guarantee you I have very visual eyes”. Let’s not debate if 2b designers can do 2c etc, my point here is that, how can you convince people you can do something without any evidence? You can’t just say “I have good aesthetics” while your folio site looks barebone and not visually pleasing.
3. Change your mindset from “am I qualified for this job?” to “how can I stand out among all competitors?” This one is a pretty common issue among a lot of the candidates. While it is generally true if you could do the job, you get hired. In the post-covid world employers are more selective purely because they can. A lot of them will compare candidates and choose the best fit for the role. So this goes back to benchmarking yourself and know what lever you have for this role, and sell yourself from that angle. Last meta point, you’re in control of how much you wanna sweat for a certain job. I did a mentor session once with a job seeker — after they showcased a hypothetical case study (not launched), my feedback was: maybe you could add in some personal ties there, why you wanted to do this project, why it mattered to you, so it doesn’t feel like just a task assigned to you. The mentee pushed back: “is this a requirement for all of the projects I showcase? Do I have to add it?” — No no no, of course you don’t have to add anything. And this is definitely not a formula for success either. Just like this post, take or leave it. You should decide how much effort to put into your folios and how polished they should be. But as an interviewer, with equal capabilities, I definitely would prefer the ones with a lot of passion in design v.s treating it as another job.

Own your branding and story

1. People love stories. This is also true in interviews. We’re always looking for the stories about you. It’s not just what you did in this particular project, what you’ve launched, it’s also your personality, demeanor, aspirations, all reflected in your presentation (and 1–1s). At a more senior level, you should’ve developed more leadership skills and strategies than just the craftsmanship. Do you have a good understanding of the business? What moves the needle and what is a blocker? Who are your competitors? Can you talk numbers off top of your head? Why are you working on this particular project? A typical answer I heard is “Our PM/LTs gave us this requirement that we need to develop xx features/products”. And you know this answer won’t satisfy me as an interviewer. What I really want to hear is — did you influence the product roadmap, how did you help elevating the thinking around the product, the experience, etc.
2. Tell us who you are. What’s your super power? What’s your design philosophy and tenets? How have you grown as a designer? And your case studies and 1–1 are just proof of these qualities you embody. Try practice your preso beforehand with friends/peers/mentors and then ask people what impression you left with them. And reflect on if that’s what you want the interviewers to feel. This can help you refine your personal branding. The best interviews I had made me feel not only impressed by the candidate’s fundamentals, but “to work with this person I feel so fun/ privileged/ chill/ supportive, etc”. And the worst interviews left me feeling no presence of the candidate. Think about characters you like from movies and shows and ask yourself, how did they leave you such a strong impression?
3. Stories have arcs. This one is obviously cliche, however people tend to overlook it. Many candidates talk about the project in the same sequence as how they actually did it. But interviewers don’t care about your winding stories, they care about the moral from the stories. The Three Little Pigs story isn’t about how pigs built houses and defeated wolves, but “hard work pays off”. So when selecting case studies and which part to highlight from your end to end project, try to put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes and think about what this project says about you. And then build your narrative with some context, foreshadowing, leading up to the climax of the story, and the ending. Never do the cookie cutter process: “Here’s the user research we did… these are initial design drafts… and here are some iterations… and this is the final design…”. With fairly established UX discipline, the processes should be no brainer to all Product Designers, so you shouldn’t overemphasize on the processes and frameworks. At the senior level, it’s less about “I followed the correct design process”, but more of “I know the framework, but by balancing business and customer needs and tech constraints, I made an intentional decision to follow/not follow these steps and here’s why”. I think curiosity here is key. Why do you do what you do? For example, why do you do user research for this particular project? Is it because it’s the “right process” to follow? Or is it a deliberate decision? I’ve encountered situations where I proposed to not do robust user research upfront. Why? From our historic data, competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation and product hunch, I already knew enough what I needed to iterate on, and with the small scope of the project the extra research seems unnecessary. Nowadays everything is “data driven”, but maybe sometimes, we should be a little more “emotion driven” or “instinct driven”? Like Tony Fadell points out, the reason some people allude to data for all decision making is because they lack the vision. They try to rely too much on “facts”, so that if the product fails, they can say “hey it’s not my fault, the data told us to go there”. But are you brave enough to say, my instinct tells me we should go this direction, when data is not available?
4. Once you have crafted your narrative, own your story and be not apologetic. There was one time I was interviewing a candidate, in the end we had a few minutes for them to ask questions. The candidate asked: “can I bring my pets to the office?” At the very moment, I was pretty surprised to be honest, among all of the questions they could ask, they asked about their pets. I told them I wasn’t sure about the policy since I was not a recruiter and suggested them asking the recruiter to clarify. And they really did reach out immediately to the recruiter for the question. Later I learnt their pet has some special needs so they would want to keep them close at work. Again, not to suggest what you should be asking during your interview, I gave the example to show that the question is important to the candidate so they asked. The story they’re telling me — I prioritize my pet’s needs, and I need a work environment that can accommodate that. As long as you are intentional, own your story and your decision making, then don’t feel apologetic about it.

Don’t ever say “I don’t have anything to say about…”.

Anyone who’s interviewed at Amazon probably knows the famous/infamous Leadership Principles. We have scripts that outline all of the LPs and potential questions to ask for each one. It always starts with “Tell me about a time you did xyz…”. Many complained about the behavior questions round and told me “I don’t have any examples to showcase this LP…”. Regardless of LPs, sometimes I ask candidates in portfolio reviews “Did you encounter any challenges during this project? And how did you solve it?”, I can tell their face sunk and got stuck quite a bit. This isn’t me being tricky and trying to seize the “gotcha” moment, but I think it’s important to have curiosity and take time to reflect in a given project. Before I started doing martial arts, I’ve never noticed my breathing patterns. And before I hurt my lower back, I never noticed my lower back affects so many daily activities I do. You get the idea. We don’t always notice things when living it. Reflections should happen often during your project, so you can pause and zoom out and see things you’ve not noticed before. You can write down those sparkles, new realizations, pivotal moments, etc, and they become the ingredients for your story later. On the other hand, if you really don’t have these experiences, be honest but thoughtful. For example, once asked “Did you iterate on your design? Or your first design is already good enough and you just launched it”, I have the candidate stuck “ugh… we didn’t really explore other ideas or iterate on it.” I appreciate the honesty but would have hoped to hear “I didn’t iterate for xyz reasons, but I know the design could evolve more from the MVP phase, and I was thinking we could do xyz post launch…”.

Bonus: Titles don’t matter that much nowadays

As the saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words”, in an era where everyone is a Lead Designer, Principal Designer, Design Lead, Head of Design, it’s harder and harder to evaluate someone’s expertise solely from the Resume or job title. You might argue that FAANG companies’ titles still have a lot of weight, but I’ve also seen extremely talented candidates from small startups and agencies, and others from FAANG that provided the answer “We did this project because it’s a LT ask”, etc. Not to mention FAANG is not every designer’s aspiration. Maybe titles could potentially get you a screening call, but once I see the work and hear your story, a much more clear picture is formed. Ultimately, you’re not calibrated based on your title but your performance during the interviews.

To sum it up, benchmark yourself, know your value, and then package it in a good story, build your personal brand and the impression you want others to feel, and own it. Be confident — “Yep, this is me. And this is what I can bring to the table. And these things are important to me.” And reflect often for learnings and opportunities to grow. The good stuff will come. Remember, hard work pays off.

My company started the biggest layoff in its history this week, with said 10k jobs eliminated. Many designers, PMs, and Engs from my Linkedin timeline are impacted. For more context, read this NYT article, or Linkedin search “Amazon layoff”.

It’s a stressful time, with the overall climate for tech layoffs (think of Twitter & Meta lately, and Uber & Lyft from a year ago), and I’ve been seeing almost identical timeline posts from tremendous former co-workers. I think the situation is especially worse for early-career folks with several years of work experience, or directly hired after graduation. I wanna share my own experience and my reflections on dealing with layoffs since I’ve been impacted twice, once before COVID, and once during COVID. And this might offer a different perspective for those in need. (You never know, maybe this can be my respawn booster if I get laid off next year).

My first layoff

I was working as an Art Director at a magazine company. The company is a startup and I reported to the CEO directly. This is my first job in the U.S after graduating from the master's program. The pay is low (talking about minimum wage), but they sponsor H1b, which is the most important criterion at the time to me. I realized the company was not doing well when my boss can’t pay my salary on time. He started delaying it for a week, two weeks, and sometimes a month. I started asking him about it and got very ambiguous answers, and he always talked about some big opportunities for the business to come.

I gradually started looking for new jobs. I spent almost a year applying for jobs. Sent out 400+ cold applications. It’s extremely hard for a foreigner who has only several years of experience but needs visa sponsorship. I got fewer than 10 interviews, and 1 offer at last.

The offer came right around the time the CEO was to shut down the magazine company. But after the new company learned I needed visa sponsorship, they rescinded the offer. Not many companies in the midwest (Chicago for instance) understand H1b visa sponsorship, nor do they want to go the extra mile for the trouble. Then the CEO of the magazine company announced the company's gone broke and dismissed all employees. At the time, I was owed 6 months of salary.

That was a long winter. I couldn’t afford to pay tax returns. I had $1000 in my bank account. I had 2 months before I would be deported from the U.S. I was a graphic designer, and I couldn’t find any jobs.

A month passed, and suddenly I got a call from the company that rescinded my offer. It was from the design director who interviewed me, not HR. He told me he was fighting to get me into the company, and finally, after several months, the leadership agreed to sponsor me with a work visa. Thanks to him, I didn’t get deported from this country.

My second layoff

After my first layoff, I realized although paper media is my passion, I have to build more versatile skillsets in digital design. I started learning about user experience design (or web/digital design at the time). After a few years, I transitioned into a full-time UX design role at a marketing agency, leading a UX team of two.

I was hired by the VP of digital business at the company, who was leading all UX projects and the tech department. Unfortunately, soon after I was hired, he left the company to start his own business. And the company hired a new guy from traditional marketing to lead the creatives.

The new VP didn’t know anything about UX or digital products, so he focused on investing in mostly graphic design stuff. I was at one point doing packaging design for H&R Block. Another time making posters for BOA’s campaign, and some data visualizations. I told him many times in our 1–1 that I wanted to do digital product design, but we just don’t have that many projects coming in.

In early 2020 when the pandemic hit, the marketing agency furloughed 1/3 of its employees and laid off another 1/3. I was on the layoff list. Got a zoom call with the VP and HR for only 5 mins to inform me I was laid off. Hung up the call, and found I lost access to Slack, emails, internal servers, etc immediately. I wasn’t even able to say goodbye to my co-workers. No severance, and no grace period. Lost health benefits immediately. I was back in the same situation as the first time, facing deportation in 60 days. Not quite I guess, this time I have a shoulder to cry on.

I was extremely lucky again.

I saw a layoff list on Linkedin which I can add my resume and contact info to. So I did. After a few days, a hiring manager reached out to me, and then I went through the interview process and the rest of the story you already know. I submitted my work visa application by the last day of my visa grace period, and thus I remained in this country again. Below is the post I wrote after going through the 2nd layoff.

My takeaways

Kendo has concepts such as Zanshin (as explained above), and also Heijōshin (平常心), which refers to the “everyday mind”. The definition is to keep one’s mind in a normal state, unaffected by things around you. Of course, it’s much easier said than done, but if we zoom out of the particular situation, and measure the impact against a lifelong time, it might be trivial, as we’re not just defined by work. I’m not trying to negate or undermine the layoff, but it could’ve been worse. Most people are given 60 days to find jobs internally, and there is severance pay. In my opinion, the priority is to get out of the defeating mindset as quickly as possible and reset for something better to come.

What has helped me to deal with the situation and my reflections(not an exhaustive list, just based on my own experience):

1. Acknowledge the layoff is not your fault. You are as capable as the people who remained on the job. Stop questioning about “why me” or speculating why others get to keep their jobs because it’s hard to know what was discussed at the leadership level. Layoff sometimes happens to the best of us. All you can do is control your moves. After my 2nd layoff, I applied to 40+ companies in a short month. I was desperate so I applied to any companies I saw hiring. I still remember there was one super small local company that replied to me (not by bots) “We looked at your resume and portfolio and felt you’re not experienced enough for this job”. It was devastating, but I was running out of time, so I moved on, and I guess Amazon thought I was good enough.
2. Prep for H1b situation. Usually, I heard from a visa standpoint, it starts to count towards the grace period from the last paycheck day. So you might get a little more time depending on when you get your last paycheck. (Still need to talk to your lawyer to confirm). For smaller companies, you might be able to negotiate with them to keep you on the payroll for a longer time (e.g take vacation times, instead of cashing it out). And when looking for new jobs, try not to let them know ahead of time that you need sponsorship (unless they mentioned explicitly in the JD they don’t sponsor or you need to tell them in advance). I had a personal experience where once I told HR I needed sponsorship they stopped the interview process. But if I went through the process and got the offer, there was usually more wiggle room.
3. Save your contacts’ info when you’re still at your job. Don’t wait till the last minute like my 2nd layoff, and I lost the opportunity to say goodbye to my work friends. The same goes for saving your design work and docs you wrote periodically to your personal computer. Have a habit of documenting activities you led across different teams (e.g design sprint, workshops, etc). And any research data, and metrics that can help you quantify your “user problem” or “outcome” for your case studies in the works.
4. Keep your resume and portfolio up to date in volatile times, especially if you’re on a work visa. When I was laid off the 2nd time, I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t update my folio or resume for 3 years, and I didn’t document any projects I’ve done at the company. It took me two weeks, 14hrs a day to rebuild my portfolio. It was painful.
5. Understand your benefits after the layoff. If you’re on Cobra after your health benefits expire, know how much you need to pay, your eligibility for unemployment benefits (not recommended for visa holders), etc. Don’t forget about your RSUs, 401K, health savings account, reimbursements, etc.
6. Try not to make one-way-door decisions. When making important decisions (e.g buy a house and pay the mortgage, start a family, global relocation, investment, etc), make sure you take into account the worst scenario of what could happen financially, and be okay with it. I’ve had some friends coming to Seattle from Mexico for a contractor job at Amazon. They brought all of their stuff and their families over, along with their pets. Now they had to leave the country only after several months of relocation.
7. Don’t just focus internally. It’s very tempting to only stay connected internally at Amazon when the design community is so large, and we can find mentors, seminars, and training just within the company. Some former colleagues have only worked at Amazon, and once they started looking for other jobs or joining other companies, they were struck by the huge differences or culture shock from other companies. Some also asked me how to prepare for interviews now that they don’t have the Leadership Principles as guidelines. Learning about other functions, companies, and industries, getting a mentor from outside of your company, and building a support network as early as possible can help you understand the broader spectrum of things you can do outside of Amazon and know what to expect when you do. And most importantly, it helps you get referrals when you need them. I’ve been mentoring on adplist.com and have benefitted from consulting mentors from other companies there too.

To anyone that’s been laid off recently or is still in uncertainties, I just wanna let you know you’re not alone. Just remember, you’re as capable and valuable as others. We’re all in this together.

If we’ve worked together before in any capacity, I’m happy to write you an endorsement or recommendation letter, and provide support however I can.

Pt.1 Responsible & Inclusive Design

Pt.2 Design for Emotion and Storytelling

Pt.3 Speculative & Design Innovation (upcoming)

Pt.4 XR and Ethics in Metaverse (upcoming)

😊 Pt.2 Design for Emotions and Storytelling

With more dimensions of interactions made possible with XR (five dimensions of IxDA: words, visual representations, physical objects/space, time, behavior), experiential storytelling experiences will be a big part of content creation and requires us to understand and design for human emotions.

Notre-Dame: Bringing Heritage to New Audiences

In the “Notre-Dame: Bringing Heritage to New Audiences” case study, Ubisoft’s SVP Deborah Papiernik and World Design Director Maxime Durand shared the story of how they recreated Notre-Dame in digital space for a broader audience, after the big fire in 2019.

Ubisoft has seen an unprecedented emotions arisen among gamers and non-gamers after the fire — people start to share photos and memories they have with the Notre-Dame, and even try to recreate it in the gaming space. While the landmark already lives in the game Assassin’s Creed Unity by Ubisoft, they see an opportunity to expand it beyond just video games but to a wider audience of all ages, with more immersive experiences, to respond to the general public’s emotions and memories of the masterpiece.

The team adapted the 3d models of Notre-Dame into VR with more than 5000 hrs of graphic work, confirming details with historians and experts, and also using creativity when data is not available, to tell an engaging story. Later, the one hour tour was expanded to CAVE experiences so that the audience can have a bird’s eye view of the facade of the building, and now a location based VR escape room game in 2022. To create the escape game in VR where the players play the role of firefighters to save Notre-Dame, the team were constantly testing out their prototypes with firefighters that were first responders from the real fire. They tried to simulate the vocabularies and body languages those firefighters use, and restore the fire scene with smoke, water, etc to the greatest extent, making the experience more “real” for the audience as if they were there.

Origin Story: The making of a hybrid experience

Another great example for engaging storytelling can be seen from the Lost Origin Story experience. It is a hybrid experience that incorporates live performance, theatre experience with mixed reality. Originally, the team at Factory 42 was commissioned to create two separated experience: one with robot for the Science Museum, and one for Dinosaurs for the Natural History Museum. But as Covid hit, they had to reimagine the experience, e.g from museum experience into mobile AR to a warehouse, from two separate experience into a cohesive one.

The process

1. The space

Due to COVID, the team can’t use museums as the location as planned, so they found a warehouse as the stage, and came up with multiple floor plan designs by imagining different journeys the audience will go through, and tested and iterated. Lots of thoughts went into audience onboarding experience with Magic Leap and the offboarding experience, all of which have to be immersive and seamless to fit into the story, otherwise people will feel out of place.

2. The creation

The task of merging the robot and dinosaur experiences into one is not an easy job. The team brought learnings from early shopping mall experience, and created an engaging story / quest — the audience’s mission: break into the headquarter of Origin, a warehouse in Hoxton, and try to find the lost dinosaur bones sold in a dark marketplace. The team extracted assets from the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, worked with experts such as dinosaur paleontologists to bring in detailed educational information with theatrical gameplay context, and worked with Magic Leap to bring the experience into XR.

3. The journey

When the journey starts, the audience will first navigate in the physical space, interact with some “fake” AI, time based laser lights, simulated body scans, and even with actors playing on the background. Once they found the dinosaur bones, that’s where the mixed reality starts — they will see dinosaurs projected into the physical space, discover new species, and finally decide what ending they want to pursue, out of as many as 25 different endings.

The three secret ingredients to make the experience happen: the audience, the narrative and technology. They audience are a major part of the story, and the narrative evokes their emotions of curiosity and magic, and technology makes the experience fully interactive and immersive in every moment of the storytelling.

The language of emotion: designing for engagement (in XR)

Understanding and leveraging the language of emotion will help content creators to produce meaningful content in XR space, like the ones above. In the panel discussion “The language of emotion: designing for engagement”, four panelists that came across design, tech, science and art shared their views on designing for emotions and ethics.

Author and educator Caitlin Krause brought the concept of “human centric VR” — VR experience that brings out emotions from people, not imposing emotions on them.

Neuroscientist Sofia Batchelor shared from a neuroscience’s perspective that emotions are provoked, not created. They’re highly tied to memories, and that’s why people learn better in XR environment. Utilizing XR for experiments can be extremely helpful to establishing the foundation for emotion research.

XR innovator Nicole Lazzaro shared the 4 Keys to creating fun in game design — easy fun, hard fun, people fun, and serious fun.

Game producer and developer Jude Dai told us how they co-created the engaging Lantern Ensemble experience with 700+ audiences. They made prototypes with calligraphy brushing experiences and invited audience to try it out while observing how they use it. Every audience was asked one question in the end of their session: “describe your emotion when you were creating the lantern”. Jude then analyzed the pattern that emerged from the word cloud, and iterated to get rid of unwanted emotions, and made intentional decisions to make the emotion meditative and not social.

To design for emotion, creators need to consider the journey the audience goes through — What’s the onboarding and offboarding experience? How might we make certain emotions last longer? (e.g Wonder) How might we design emotions that are beneficial to people, instead of manipulating or harming them? Especially with metaverse experiences, we’re closer than ever with strangers, and there are new emotions emerging with social emotions. These are still questions we need to answer, not just as creators, but also designers, developers, platforms and companies that empower creators and users.

Resources & Speakers

Lost Origin at Hoxton Docks | Behind the Scenes

Lost Origin at Hoxton Docks | Behind the Scenes

LOST ORIGIN | factory42

Book: Designing Wonder by Caitlin Krause

Engagement in wonderland: The 4 keys to fun in XR

Caitlin Krause

Sofia Batchelor

Nicole Lazzaro

Jude Dai

A designer’s takeaways from SXSW 2022 Pt.2 was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m dividing the takeaways into 4 parts, with one topic per each part, so you can pick the ones you’re interested in from below. All topics are things I learnt from the sessions I attended, and it doesn’t represent the whole SXSW experience. In the end of each topic, you will also find resources and the speakers info.

Pt.1 Responsible & Inclusive Design

Pt.2 Design for Emotion and Storytelling

Pt.3 Speculative & Design Innovation (upcoming)

Pt.4 XR and Ethics in Metaverse (upcoming)

🌍 Pt.1 Responsible & Inclusive Design

The topic is nothing new. As designers, we are all about problem solving, about “human-centered design”, about “making the world a better place”. But how many of us really think about pushing the design beyond checking the accessibility box (color contrast, sizes)? How many really think about the intention and possible impact on individual people, the community, and society? As the Director of Design Impact for AIGA Minnesota, Andy Vitale puts it: “Did we learn anything from all past mistakes we made? Of course not!”

Intention matters

Alan Cooper said: “The individuals who create some of the most oppressive digital systems are mostly good people.” Yes, most of us are good people. We do good work. We have good intentions. We don’t design things to screw people up. But somehow, the products we create can turn against us, without fully understanding the consequences.

According to an article published by Spotify design about ethical design, there are three types of harms:

1. Physical harm. E.g Parallax scrolling can harm people who have vertigo.
2. Emotional harm. E.g When Facebook chose a small subset of people to show them negative news without their consent, just to see how it affects people’s emotions. Another example, when people try to deactivate their Facebook account, Facebook show a page with their connections and how “They’re gonna miss you”, to make them guilty, and thus manipulate users.
3. Societal harm. E.g Political polarization from algorithm biases, which we’ve seen too much from the last election.

As designers, we have to understand and predict the potential consequences of our designs. And we need governance to build responsible products, just like we need design systems. We need to be intentional about what to build, what not to build. E.g Slack rolled out a feature about enabling DM to anyone on Slack, not just someone in your workspace or someone you know. And Slack users had to plea to roll back the feature because of the potential spams of messages they receive. However, that feature still exists today.

Be intentional with language use as well. Airbnb User Researcher Nanako Era shared a story when they were recruiting participants for inclusive research they were conducting, they changed the wording from “xx min walk” to “xx min drive”, but the word “drive” is still not inclusive enough since it indicates a human ability. So the ending of the story is they changed the wording again, only this time they dropped any word might suggest an ability but with more objective distance. The lesson? Say what you mean. Don’t leave room for interpretation because it leads to exclusion. Work with your legal team on how to collect data, since it is usually sensitive with people that have disabilities.

Design Ethics / Universal Design / Inclusive Design

Design ethics definition: Design ethics guide how designers work with clients, colleagues, and the end users or products, how they conduct the design process, how they determine the features of products, and how they assess the ethical significance or moral worth of the products that result from the activity of designing.

When we’re designing for the products today, we need to zoom out from today, and think about designing the products for our future self — what if we are a bit older, what if we lost some capabilities, like vision, hearing, etc. We need to future proof whatever we do to produce a sustainable design.

Universal design definition: The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

Andy Vitale gave some good universal design examples:

1. Sidewalk curb ramp — for people in wheelchair, people with luggages, strollers, joggers, etc.

2. Automatic doors to prevent “pull” “push” confusion.

Of course there are also many bad examples:

1. Soap dispenser that can’t distinguish dark skin tone

2. Google photos algorithms, Microsoft and Xbox Connect had the same issue

3. This one actually comes from my friend not the speaker: One of my friend’s last name was marked “Invalid Last Name” in a form field from a major app, because her last name only has two letters (that’s a common case with Chinese last names).

To grow awareness and uncover experience gaps, you can ask questions like:

1. Who is doing more work (with this product)? What are competing products?
2. What assumptions does this product make about people?
3. Where do you fit into this product space? Who are you similar to?
4. What questions can we ask to close knowledge gaps?

Design With, not Design For

Embrace participatory design to make our design process more collaborative and inclusive. As responsible designers, we should avoid excuses as “I didn’t know” “I didn’t mean to”. It is our obligation to minimize unintended consequences from happening, so we need to know how the product is intended to be used, v.s how is it actually used by people.

Where to start inclusive design and research? Well, start small, start now. Ask questions. Reach out to experts. Have a growth mindset. Be inclusive when recruiting participants. Make sure they have a diverse background. Be intentional about who’s included in your panel. Get consent for participation, and provide accommodation as much as possible. E.g use phone call instead of video call to accommodate low internet bandwidth.

Think about what’s the worst that can happen to people that use your product, think about people who are the opposite of you, how they might be experiencing your product. Think about different levels of abilities and tolerance, and then use your design superpower to really design to accommodate those different needs.

Resources & Speakers

Designing for Tomorrow: A Discussion on Ethical Design

Sustainable goals from UN

A Practical Guide to Inclusive Research

Equity-Centered Community Design (ECCD)

Book: Cross-cultural Design

Book: Mismatch

Andy Vitale, @andyvitale

Molly Bloom, Erica Ellis, Nanako Era, Liza Meckler

A designer’s takeaways from SXSW 2022 Pt.1 was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are many great leadership/management books, articles and tips to help people develop leadership skills, and yet this article is something different — I am not giving tips on how you can become great leaders, but rather an observation when leadership fails in my own experience. If you could learn one thing or two, I hope to help you see red flags in your company’s leadership or a potential company you want to work for, but let’s hope you will never encounter what I had encountered. In addition, this is not an exhaustive list of bad leadership out there, since I’ve only experienced a handful in my 10 years’ design career. However, I think some of them might be common enough that anyone can tap into. And when you do, I hope my experience can be a lesson to you to get out of these situations with some damage control.

(Note: all stories are in chronological order. If you want a TL;DR ver, just jump to The Lesson in each story.)

Story 1: No leadership, lack of communication and chaotic management

I got a job offer as an Art & Production Director right after my grad school in Chicago. The company is a magazine startup, and had 3 designers in house at the time. I met the founder, passed interviews, and got the offer in email. Everything went well, until my first day at work:

I arrived at the office early before the scheduled company meeting. I first met some designers on the team. One designer introduced herself to me as the “Art Director” on the team, and told me my job responsibility was to “find images and photoshop them”. I was confused as I was supposed to be the art director and manage the team. I didn’t confront her, as I thought this must’ve been some confusion and misunderstanding. I’ll wait for the company meeting to clarify things.

And then the company meeting started. The three designers showed up. The administrative assistant showed up (who gave me the offer btw). The founder and CEO showed up, with a couple other operational staff. He announced me as the “Art & Production Director” of the design team. Immediately, the design team flipped. They argued they had never heard of any new hirings of art directors, and the designer who talked to me earlier said she was the real art director, and other designers said the team didn’t need another designer, it was a waste of money — Yes, this really happened in my welcome meeting. The administrative assistant pointed out that the other designer was not an “Art Director” since she claimed so by herself, and then there’s just more finger pointing and people arguing. Finally, all designers stormed out, and threatened to quit, left me in shock… The founder & CEO guy apologized for their “rudeness” and then told me that’s the team I had to manage.

And the following story should be no surprise — the design team held a grudge against me for everything I did, even I tried to communicate how I understood their feelings — didn’t work. And one after another, they quit the job.

The lesson: How the company communicates changes internally can reflect how chaotic and non-transparent they are. Some obvious red flags: 1 designers didn’t know the company was hiring; 2 designers didn’t weigh in on any interviews, and didn’t feel respected; 3 there was a confusion on job titles and job responsibilities; 4 there’s no support system for new managers or onboarding training to deal with situations like this. My suggestion: try talk to the team if you can before accepting any offer, so you know what the real culture is like.

Story 2: The patronizing boss that belittles others

This is probably the worst working experience I had in my entire career. I got this trial offer to work for a marketing agency for a month, and if they see me as a good fit they’ll hire me as a full-time employee. The job title is the same as last one — art director, and same structure of a startup, with me reporting to the CEO directly.

The CEO was nice to me at first, and I was referred by a friend, so I loosened my guard. One of the first projects I got was to refresh a logo for a client. I worked hard on it, starting from some basic sketches, and then tried around 50 different font, layout, color combinations, and then sent to the team to review internally. After sending my pdf through, the assistant sent it directly to the client without asking me first. And the client thought these were final design and got upset and called the CEO.

Of course I didn’t know any of this until I got a call from the mad CEO. The first thing the CEO said to me was: “Do not ship anything that you’re not proud of!” And then she went on attacking me personally “How can you be an art director for so long and didn’t know these basic protocols?” I didn’t feel I did anything wrong, but it was just a misunderstanding, so I said well maybe we should focus on how to solve this with the client asap, instead of blaming each other. And the CEO got more upset, with me not backing down, and screamed: “Why are you so tough? Do you never apologize to people?” Ultimately we clarified to the client that the pdf we sent was for internal first draft and not final design, and I was pushed to create at least three concepts in a week to present to the client as a remedy.

After this incident, whenever the CEO talked to me in meetings, she’d always belittle me in front of others. She once said in a meeting “I think this design intern’s work is better than Jany’s. Yeah maybe we should switch them…” If I didn’t need the work visa, I probably could’ve quit onsite, but I had to endure all the humiliations for a whole month. By the end of the month, I felt so free like I can finally breathe again.

The lesson: You should never work for someone that belittles you or makes you feel you worth nothing. A boss never listens to your side of story and just blames you when something goes wrong is the worst. Plus all the personal attacks? Respect should be the bottom line.

Story 3: When the boss doesn’t have any domain knowledge of what you do and has to manage you

In 2017, I was in a special task force as the solo Sr. designer on the team, reporting to an editorial director and the VP of creative. The ask is to redesign the whole website of the flagship brand I was responsible for. The VP of creative was from a marketing and editorial background, and not a designer. He asked me to wrap up the design assets in 3 months so I can send to developers for production. I knew it was not gonna work, so I had 1–1s with him on what a good UX process should be, and why we should stick to a good UX process, and presented design thinking to the whole creative department, and finally persuaded him to make the project a year-long project starting with some solid user research.

The lesson: It’s hard when the boss doesn’t know anything about your domain. They set unrealistic timelines for you and expect wrong things from you. It could be harmful to the project and also to your morale. And like I did, you can seek alignment from: Advocating for a good process from your domain; Educating the boss on what he doesn’t know; Showing ROI and metrics to convince him (if he’s into data); Asking crucial questions to help him see the gaps; Aligning others on the team to advocate for you. And most importantly, don’t be arrogant and think “I’m better than you” — this won’t get you anywhere. If the boss is smart enough, he will know he doesn’t have to know everything, and especially things outside of his domain. And that’s when he will rely on your expertise to solve the problem. But if he’s not, then you deserve a better boss.

Story 4: A boss that can’t embrace authenticity & vulnerability

In the same company, I was reporting to another editorial director lady at one time. At the time the editorial department was understaffed so she had to jump in for some IC work. She was on the brand I was responsible for, and did editorial work while I did the design. It was right before thanksgiving (one of our busiest time), and she had several days scheduled for vacation. Before she left, I had a chat with her to make sure we were on track for shipping our mags to production, so the prints can come out and get delivered to our clients on time. She reassured me all her editorial edits were done, and just needed some final oversight and then I can send for print. And she pointed another editor to work with me in her absence.

When the new editor went through the mag with me, she found at least half of the stories (300+ pages for the mag) were not edited — meaning they were still just drafts without any fact check. I was concerned and reported to the VP of creative (a different guy from story 3) right away. To my surprise, the VP told me to “not let anyone on the team know our project can’t make the deadline”, and we probably have to postpone the print schedule secretively. This is ridiculous logic to me as I think we should focus on getting all the help to make it happen, instead of covering it up from other teams. And the temporary editor was under tremendous pressure to “finish as much as she can”. So I made a bold decision — I called other editors on different teams, explained the situation, and asked them for help. People were very empathetic and jumped in right away, even this was outside of their responsibilities. Ultimately we finished all edits in time and I sent the mag to production.

Well, the story is not really about how I saved the print schedule, but what happened next. I saw this gap of communication and misaligned expectation, which needs to be addressed. So after the editorial director came back from her vacation, I gathered her, the VP, the temp editor and some other folks on the project team to have a post mortem meeting. I wanted the meeting to be constructive and not finger pointing, so I started with what happened and how we solved it and what we could’ve done differently. Before I can finish my points, the editorial director got very defensive and said “Why are we talking about this, since the mag is already sent to production? Can we just drop it?” and after I pointed out why reflection was important and so we can prevent it from happening again, she got emotional: “Can I beg your forgiveness, because I was overworked, I worked till midnight everyday, and I just couldn’t get all things done!” And the VP helped: “Yeah I don’t think there’s anything to discuss, if it’s just a shortage of resources”. I disagreed and shared my point of view: 1 we are not accusing the director for not getting all stuff done, if she’s overwhelmed, but we weren’t informed; 2 we acknowledge we’re understaffed, but still, there are things we could do to help prevent this from happening, like a better communication. The director should be empowered to share with her subordinate and boss that she’s overworked. And she should not have lied about how much progress she had made in the edits. And the VP should’ve not asked us to “cover up”, as we are a team, and we’re in this together.

The lesson: Some people believe being in a leadership position means they are the authority, they are the know-it-all, and they should appear “on top of everything”, otherwise they might be seen as incompetent. The truth is, everyone is only human, and everyone can feel overwhelmed or off track at times, and there’s no shame to admit that to your manager or peers or subordinate. To hide it or cover up will only cause more negative impact and jeopardize trust.

Story 5: A dictator boss

After I was hired, my original hiring manager resigned in my first week, and another manager took over the design team until he left too. So the VP of creative was trying to find someone to backfill the position. Just a little context: we had four designers at the time — two senior designers(including me) and two mid-level designers. There was one week I saw the VP had frequent 1–1s with one of the mid-level designers, and had other directors in the meetings too, and the next week I found the VP offered the mid-level designer a “Lead Designer” role. This came as a shock to me and the other senior designer as the promotion was skip-level and there was no communication to us whatsoever. The mid-level designer must’ve felt the same way that she rejected the offer.

The next thing I heard, after a few weeks, is that the VP has found the new design director for the team. He announced to the design team his start date, and told us about his experience, and his portfolio site. Everyone was caught off guard as we’ve never heard of this guy before, and he just suddenly parachuted. Now I really felt how designers in story 1 felt. After the announcement, the designers went to that new director’s portfolio site, and… let’s just say none of us thought he would be a good fit. Some got even upset, so we went back to the VP and explained why we don’t think he would be ideal for this job, and we should have a more transparent process, e.g to involve designers in the loop, and know the hiring criteria, etc. Of course the VP didn’t listen to our reasonings or feelings and insisted on his “executive decision”. I comforted myself to just give him the benefit of the doubt since I’ve never met him, and maybe seeing him in person would change everything. And fast forward to the ending of the story: designers left one after another (including me), the design director was fired for some misconduct, and the VP was laid off later too.

The lesson: Avoid a dictator boss that only does things his way. I’m not saying that all decisions should be a team vote. If we do so, we will never get stuff done. The boss should still be the decision maker, but it’s important to have a hiring process in place, transparent to others, and all decisions should be made against those criteria, not by the boss’ personal preference. That should be the same for UX design too. When there’s a conflict in design decisions, we should always hone in on the customer needs, and assess if the design helps users reach their goals, instead of yielding to whoever speaks the loudest in the room.

Story 6: A boss that doesn’t care about you

In one of the companies I worked for, we had a flexible work schedule and people can work from home a few days a week (that was way before COVID). Soon after a new boss came, he took multiple measures to make sure “we are productive” — he didn’t allow us to work from home on Monday & Friday, stating that “then people would combine the weekend with one of those days and not work”; he made us report to him everyday on what we did and show proof; and lastly he made us report time off at least 2 weeks in advance otherwise he won’t approve it. I remember the team fought him on some of his measures, and he explained “your salary is the best reward for your work, and you shouldn’t ask for more, just be grateful…”.

In another company, I was put on projects that didn’t fit my job description, and I had no interest in doing, most of the time. I tried to talk to my boss in our 1–1s, elaborated on what my career goal was, how I felt not growing and being stuck, and what I got was “it is what it is, but you should hang in there in case things change — of course things never changed.

The lesson: There are many signs when the boss doesn’t care about individual employees and just treat them as “replaceable resources”. And you will definitely know when that happens. When encountering those moments, try to acknowledge your feelings, emotions and needs, instead of feeling guilty of what you are asking for. Try to negotiate with the boss/company and if they really value you, they will figure out a way to accommodate your needs. And if not, it’s time to move on. It should be a no brainer: before you join a company, ask about all the benefits (e.g healthcare, dental, vision, 401k, hsa/fsa, free meals, career development funds, phone bill expenses, transportation stipend, pto days, paternal leave, daycare assistance, work from home policy, etc), but also ask how many people got promoted in the past x years to get a sense of the promotion rate, what is the churn rate, etc.

Of course to “care” about an employee doesn’t just mean all the benefits at a company level. It also means the boss cares about you on a personal level, acknowledges your needs, advocates for you when appropriate, motivates you when you’re stuck, and supports you so you can be the best self you strive to be. And that’s when you can finally substitute the word “boss” to “leader”.

On the final thoughts, I just wanna share some good leader traits I found from all the stories above:

A good leader:

1. communicates and over-communicates to make sure everyone’s aligned
2. always listens, and listens to different sides of the story
3. doesn’t make you feel you are worthless
4. is empathetic and respectful
5. shows their authentic and vulnerable self
6. supports you when you need help
7. challenges and motivates you to achieve more
8. never orders people to do things their way, but leads by example
9. admits that they don’t know everything and asks for help/feedback when needed
10. makes informed decisions, and not by personal preference
11. is transparent about the business, their job, and how decisions are made

Let me know if you have encountered other types of leadership failure and I would be interested to know as well. 🙂

The failure of leadership, and how to get better from here was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NPS overall:

NPS is to measure the overall perception of your brand/company. It captures the longer-term relationship of customers with the company (e.g Quarterly, since it is not going to fluctuate much from time to time). In that case, it is best suited for being in a survey and sent to users via email.

NPS analysis:

Use the NPS results to compare to other companies, different sectors, industries to benchmark data.

Who should see the NPS survey or the on-site survey?

The more users the better. NPS can be sent to the overall population of your audience, or get representative samples to project the whole population. And if the NPS survey is situated on the website, it might as well be on the homepage and pops up right away when the users land on the page. It is not ideal to put the survey on an individual specific product/feature page, because you only get a particular segment of your audience to answer, and thus the answers might be biased. For a specific page survey, you can decide by page views of that page in a week/month cadence. Depending on your survey goal, you can select first-time users or users who come to this page with very high frequency, etc.

Registered users v.s unregistered users: onsite survey should be sent to unregistered users as well because you don’t have those users’ emails to send them surveys via emails. For registered users, you can send them both from emails or on-site. And you can segment unregistered users and registered users and compare the results.

NPS on a specific page:

If you want to test out users’ perception of a specific page, it is not NPS, but rather a different type of survey questions. Some use cases for page/feature-specific surveys on site are: whenever there’s a launch and something is noticeably different. You want the users to compare the new feature from the old pages.

What types of survey questions can you ask for on-site surveys?

One biggest consideration here is not to bombard the users with lots of survey questions. While in an email survey you can have a longer list of questions (usually because you send out at a lower frequency), for on-site questions each time you should only pop up one question (and potentially with a follow-up question). Some types of questions are: “Happy or not” question: a 3 point satisfaction scale (happy, mutual, negative) or smiley face, sad face, etc. When analyzing those survey question results, you can still use the NPS analysis methodology, e.g: People who choose “satisfied” are promoters. Don’t get a specific feature in the survey to ask the users. Remember, the more granular the question is, the more cognitive load will be added to the users.

How to decide to send out survey questions in email v.s on-site?

NPS is best suited to send out in email because you strip away unnecessary elements from the page to distract the users and force them to think in an abstract fashion about your brand/product in general. For other types of questions, if the users need some context and background to be able to answer, then it’s appropriate to put them on the website since it’s contextualized. Email survey is not good for testing out features because users are not interacting with it at the moment, but rather after the fact.

When should the on-site survey pop up?

To put it simply, it depends. Some features don’t need the users to do complex interaction or the effect is instant, so the survey can pop up sooner or instantly (e.g a change of button text, color, etc). On the other hand, some features require a lot of understanding upfront, for example, a new widget on the page. And for these pages, the pop-up should give users enough time to digest and interact before it pops up. Regarding #minutes/second, depending on the content, might need to test out and iterate to find the best timing.

Where should the on-site survey pop up?

Persistent footer, anchored to the bottom. This way it is not popping up to the center of the screen to disrupt the users’ workflow and still retain some visibility. The other advantage is, usually users tend to close pop-ups right up if it shows up in the center of the screen, so having it sticky to the bottom minimizes the real estate it uses.

What if I want to collect more data from the on-site survey?

As mentioned above, it is not ideal to add cognitive load to the users by asking them multiple questions at a time. But there are several ways to work around it if you indeed need to collect more data. Usually, after submitting a 3 point scale question (e.g “how satisfied are you with our product — “satisfied”, “neutral”, “not satisfied”), you can prompt a follow-up question: can you provide additional feedback? Comments or suggestions? Can you tell us more about why you made the selection? etc. The follow-up question should be optional though. The other way is to redirect the users to Qualtrics (or a third-party survey tool of your choice) and ask them to fill the survey there. The first question data will be sent to Qualtrics as well (might need some js scripts though).

Dismiss of survey on-site:

We should always keep the users on top of our minds. And thus we shouldn’t bother them too much/frequently ask for feedback. The on-site survey should always have a close button for the users to dismiss it easily. (instead of having questions centered and mandatory to answer to proceed) And once they dismiss it, the survey should not come back in a short amount of time (e.g in several hours, or days). Try to minimize the distraction of the survey on the customers from getting their jobs done (what they come to the website to do).

Should you modify the NPS score from 0–10?

You should not. Use 0–10 because it’s standard across industries so it will help you compare and benchmark the data with other companies/industries.

Yes, the title sounds very much like a clickbait, however, these are real words people have used to describe me, 10 years apart. This is a story of my journey of becoming and growing as a designer. While it’s as much of a self-reflection, I hope it could be encouraging for people who are considering entering the design/UX field or feel discouraged to continue at the moment.

An Outsider to Design

I have learned painting and drawing for quite some time when I was a kid, but I had to face a choice of either art or academic path in high school. In China, many kids who are determined to pursue an artist path will quit high school classes and focus on finessing their art skills to get into the few top art schools. However, I had not bad grades in high school, and my parents were worried about not being able to make money as an artist, so they convinced me to quit learning art but focusing on my academic study. (how stereotypical!) And thus, I went to a comprehensive university in Shanghai, majoring in English. Ironically, the university was famous for its architecture and design, and the design school was just by the foreign language school. Everyday I went to class, I saw other design kids carrying sketch boards, paints, 3d models, I was jealous, and always wondered: what if that were me!

In my junior year, I had a chance to go to Belgium to study for half a year. It was not until then I realized I had no passion for English or the French language, but I was obsessed with all the art museums and galleries in Europe. After I came back from the study trip, I told my mom I wanted to pursue an art/design future and wanted to get into an art graduate school. I somehow found the chairman’s contact from the design school in my university, and went with some of my paintings and showed him. “Well, to enter design graduate program you have to learn way more than just painting”, after seeing my work he said, “you need to know the history of design, basic disciplines, the trends, the tools to do design, etc”. Ok, that sounded like a lot to learn, and I didn’t know where to start. (This was 2009, and we had a lot fewer resources online)

At this time, my mom told me one of her colleagues’ daughter was a graphic designer, so maybe she can give me some suggestions. I was super excited to meet her, but later realized it was such a scam my parents had set up. The designer lady told me not to become a designer at all: “it’s low pay and a lot of work, and even now you like design and art, once it’s become your profession you will hate it…” Maybe she was speaking the truth to her with a good intention, but I have to disagree after being a designer for 10 years — I still love design & art, if not more than 10 years ago.

Learning design on my own

Determined to become a design student, I started with learning design history from The Arts & Crafts Movement to Bauhaus, from color theory to typography, and started doodling with Adobe — all in my spare time during college. There was one night, I put up a lot of my hand-drawn posters on the wall of the English classroom, so it didn’t look so empty. I did this without telling anyone, and the next day everyone was amazed by the new posters.

And then I graduated with my English bachelor's degree, and again, because of my not bad grades, the university granted me a special free ride to post-graduate study in Language education. I was reluctant to go, but one more time, my parents were strongly against my pursuing art and pressured me into my first grad school — Chinese language teaching to English speakers. I did it for three years and never forgot to keep practicing design on the side. I started skipping my language classes and learning design almost took all my day time. In my 2nd year in grad school, I finally found an internship as a designer.

My first design gig

I applied to many places, but no company wanted to hire me even as an intern, because of my background. And this magazine company that offered me the internship turned out to be, they thought I applied for an English translation internship. After translating architect’s interviews (that’s an architecture & urban planning mag) for a month, I had to talk to the editor-in-chief that I would want to do design instead of translation and that was when she realized I had applied for a design internship. And during that time the company happened to fire the only designer they had, so my boss said ok you can give it a try, and later they hired a new creative director to lead the design.

Of course, I never did real design (industry level) before, so most of the time I had no idea what I was doing until the new creative director came. I still remember the first thing he asked me: “Do you know what RGB stands for? What CMYK stands for? What’s the difference between RGB and CMYK?” I was ashamed. I didn’t know. After working with me for a week, he told me: “You are the worst designer I have ever worked with. You don’t know anything about designing a magazine, you don’t even know some basic knowledge of design.” Feeling extremely devastated, I asked him: “I am willing to learn. Can you teach me?” And that’s how I started my fast learning path with my first design mentor. Sometimes I would design a feature story for 6 hours, and he would scan for less than 1 minute and say “Nope. Try again.” Sometimes I worked till 3 am on press day, and still got “No”. Yes, he was super harsh on me, and sometimes felt he was just a jerk, but he told me, any designers he had trained got good careers because of the real good foundation he had laid out for them. And whenever I worked late, he would work late with me, never once left office earlier than me.

After working in the magazine company for almost two years (while doing my grad school), I felt I got all knowledge from this job and decided to get some formal training in design.

Study at SAIC

I got another opportunity to teach Chinese in San Diego, CA in my last year of grad school. I utilized it not because I wanted to become a teacher in the future but to check out famous art schools in the US and prepare for applications. In my teaching internship, I had taken TOFEL twice, GMAT once, prepped my portfolio, and applied many art schools such as SAIC, MICA, SVA, Pratt, Calarts, etc, while juggling through my grad thesis on language education.

I didn’t tell my parents until I applied to multiple schools, and as my parents were still on the fence about me pursuing art, they saw how persistent I was, and my mom finally said: “If you can get in any of the top 10 art schools in the US, I’ll let you go.”

That’s where the miracle happened— I was admitted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, top 2 in the US at the time. (top 1 is Yale in case you are wondering). And my parents kept their promise, so I started my 8years life in Chicago.

Study at SAIC was intense but probably my happiest time. I felt so free to express myself: I made installations, videos, letterpress, sculptures, even papers from tree branches. I finally became the cool art kid I always wanted to be. One side note, SAIC is an amazing school where grad students are given absolute freedom to learn whatever they want. I even earned more credits than needed to graduate, because I was just so interested in all courses (to the extent my family refused to pay extra classes for me and asked me to pay by myself and I did with my trivial savings :))

Good times always pass fast. In May 2015, after the thesis exhibition, everyone was facing a dilemma: to become an artist or to find a job. Some classmates got leads from galleries right away, and signed contracts to become an artist; some were still producing art, hoping to get noticed by art critics or galleries. As for me, my family supported my undergrad and both grad schools, and I didn’t want to be a burden to them after graduation, and thus left me one path to go: find a job.

Early Career

Man, I wish somebody had told me how hard it was to find a job in the US. As ignorant as I was, I thought top art schools and a graduate degree almost promised me a good job (well, it’s the case in China). I spent months trying to land an internship in design, not to mention I had previous working experiences. But all the art stuff I did in school just can’t get me any leads. I had to build my portfolio with all the magazine work I did back in China. Ultimately, I got a job as an art director in a startup, managing 4 junior designers. Unfortunately, the startup ran out of business in over a year’s time, and I lost my job.

As a foreigner, losing a job is devastating as we only have 60 days to get the next job otherwise we will be deported. I applied to more than 400 companies, and got less than 5 interviews, and eventually 1 offer. But after the company learned I needed visa sponsorship, they retracted the offer. I was disappointed but never lost hope. I convinced the company that retracted the offer to finally agreed on getting me the work visa. And thus I was able to stay in the US.

This company was also a media/magazine company, and I got the job as a Sr. editorial designer. We had 7 designers working for different magazine brands, and as the only senior, I was responsible for their flagship brand. I worked hard but didn’t feel fulfilled, since I was too familiar with magazine design. I was exposed to design thinking methodology accidentally (my roommate majored in design methodology, design thinking back in 2014 and that picked my interest) and started exploring a broader design field that I might be interested in.

Same method as when I first started learning design— in my day time I did editorial design, after work I was learning design methodology and digital design or web design (UED was not widely used at the time). Finally, an opportunity came that changed my career path.

Becoming a user experience designer

In late 2017, the magazine company wanted to start digital transformation — building a better online platform for editorial content beyond print magazines. They wanted to start with the flagship brand to gain the most impact, which is the brand I was responsible for. And among all designers at the time, I was the only one that knew some knowledge of web/digital design, so I was assigned to be the sole designer on this year-long project.

Due to I was the only one that knew UX design in the company, I had a lot of challenges from peers, stakeholders and leadership. I still remember when I first started, the VP of creative requested: “we need to wrap up this project in three months, and you need to get all design assets ready for developers”. “But that’s not the right process,” I argued, “We should start from the customers and learn what their pain points and needs are, and then start thinking about the solution.” I ultimately convinced the VP we need to follow a good UX process, but he was still very skeptical: “ I understand the process you shared, but I am not sure how we can do it. E.g how can we do user research? what does it look like? …” Well, I was not confident enough to carry out a clear roadmap, but fortunately I found this book: Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research. I used a lot of lean methodologies from the book to make sure we get enough user data to validate some assumptions we had, but still move quickly. And I also ran my first design sprint with all stakeholders, although we had to customize it from 5 days to 5 hours. The new platform was a success, and we have seen a 44% increase in page views. Besides all the traffic increase, I was very happy that everyone enjoyed the process. When one colleague — a customer support manager left the company, she thanked me: “All of the activities we did for this project make me feel my work is worth something”.

The digital platform development project got my foot into the door of UX, and I wanted a full-time job in UX in a more mature org, so I switched my job again, after working for almost two years in-house. Lucky enough, I got a UX designer job in a marketing agency, leading a team of two UX designers. I worked with PMs, clients, strategy team, and dev team on every project. When I first heard strategy team, I was very curious. I did not have any background in strategy whatsoever, but I believe a good product needs a good product strategy. So I knocked on the VP of strategy’s door and asked him what his department was about. Gradually, I started 1–1 with him every month, and he looped me in several projects where I worked with strategists (as a designer). Thanks to him and his team, I learnt more analytical skills in business opportunity analysis, market research, hosted innovation workshops with clients, and learned UX was not everything, but just one pillar among other functions that make a product successful.

Everything couldn’t go better until COVID hit us badly in 2020.

Laid off during pandemic

On the last day of March 2020, I got a call from the VP of Creative, that I was laid off. Later I learned, my direct manager was also laid off, and the company furloughed 1/3 employees. The sudden bad news really hit me as I wasn’t ready for finding a new job, and my portfolio was from three years ago. Apart from losing income, again I was facing deportation in 60 days.

Maybe I was just rebellious, I couldn’t accept the reality easily. After one week’s depression, I started looking for a new job. I spent 2 weeks making a new portfolio— I lost access to Adobe, so I borrowed my friend’s account, and I didn’t have time to make a brand new website, so I built a new site using XD, just faking it. In two weeks’ time, I applied for 40 jobs, spent 14hrs every day working on my portfolio, but never heard back from my applications.

One day someone on LinkedIn reached out to me and wanted to have an informal chat. I was thrilled although I had no idea about the company. Soon I learned the company was a subsidiary of Amazon. Excited and anxious, I chatted with the hiring manager (later my boss) and then went through a phone interview and a 7hr onsite interview, including a whiteboard design challenge.

In the meantime, another big global agency contacted me. I applied to the agency three times in the past, and never got an interview opportunity. So I went through the interviews with the agency this time and got the offer from both Amazon and the agency.

In one month’s time, my emotion went through a roller coaster ride, but I had to make a decision. The agency job was in Chicago, and offered me a more senior title, while Amazon needed me to move to Seattle, which meant I had to leave all of my friends and go to a place where I know no one. Well, when I came to the US I also didn’t know anyone, isn’t it?

Working at Amazon

I finally accepted the offer from Amazon, and I have to admit, it was challenging to onboard virtually, and move from Chicago to Seattle during the pandemic. It was my cat’s first flight experience as well, and he puked and pooped on the plane, poor kitty. But once got through all the initial chaos, I was excited about all new projects, new team setup, and all the smart people surrounded me.

After working for almost one year there, I think I can say, I made the right decision. When exposed to smart people, I learn how they approach things, solve design challenges, and persuade others with data, and apply them in my own work and design philosophy. And I am lucky enough to have a lot of support outside of my org (as I am the solo designer on the team). In this year’s performance review, I got exceeds, and the Sr. PM on the team told me “Hiring you is the best decision our org has made (this year)”.

Looking back at my journey, from an English major to a UX designer, it is certainly a winding one, and I’m sure there are a lot of people who changed their career path got there much faster and more successfully than I did. However, I never regretted the path I took and am proud that I never quit becoming a designer. There is still a lot to learn, and Amazon might not be my final destination either, but to work as a designer, to think as a designer, to solve problems as a designer is the best thing that ever happens to me. :)

01 What is UX Strategy

Misinterpretation 1: UX strategy is about identifying a “North Star”.

Due to the nature of digital products and fast-moving market environment, ux strategy should be a goal or point to work towards but steer every time you pivot.

Misinterpretation 2: UX strategy is a “strategic way” to perform UX design.

A product strategist thinks about all possibilities for the products and defines it after researching the potential customers and existing competitors. She comes up with a game plan while the product designer actually fabricates the thing.

Misinterpretation 3: UX strategy is just product strategy.

UX strategy goes beyond just one digital product or online experience. (e.g: digital products, services, platforms, a whole ecosystem). It accounts for the entire user journey down the funnel.

Misinterpretation 4: UX strategy is closely tied to brand strategy.

Poor UX will decrease the value of a brand, but even a brand is good enough, it can not overcome poor UX of a product. And solid UX design no longer differentiates brands. A product needs a good UX no matter what.

“Marketing can increase awareness for the product, but if the product sucks, that’s what the buzz will be.”

02 The Four Tenets of UX Strategy

The discovery phase is where UX strategy begins. UX strategy is based on four tenets: business strategy, value innovation, validated user research, and killer UX design.

Tenet 1: Business Strategy

A business must continually identify and utilize a competitive advantage. A competitive advantage is essential to the company’s long-term existence.

There are two common ways to achieve a competitive advantage: cost leadership and differentiation.

Cost leadership: offering the lowest price for products in a particular industry. (Think about Walmart and Target.) Disadvantage: when the prices hit rock bottom, the battle needs to be about what makes the products better.

Differentiation: is based on a new or unique product or a unique aspect of the product for which customers will pay a premium because of its perceived value. (Think about people pay for $5 for a latte, they are paying for the experience.)

Today, a UX differentiation is the digital-product game changer. Traditionally, the purpose of a competitive advantage was to make a product that was self-sufficient through a revenue stream. But UX differentiation does not necessarily mean big bucks when the product hits the market. Instead, the goal is mass adoption. (Thnk about Facebook). Still, a good business model doesn’t just define the revenue stream of a product. Nor does it just rely on a ridiculous number of users adopting it. Product founders should adopt a flexible business model that requires all of the key components to be validated using empirical, customer-facing discovery methods.

Tool: Business Model Canvas

Nine essential elements: Customer segments, Value propositions, Channels, Customer relationships, Revenue streams, Key resources, Key activities, Key partnerships, Cost structure.

Building a business strategy is not about formulating and executing a perfect plan. It’s about being able to research what’s out there, analyze the opportunities, run structured experiments, fail, learn, and iterate until we devise something of value that people truly want.

Tenet 2: Value Innovation

Traditional value chain (for physical products):

Research → Design → Source → Manufacture → Market → Sell → Service

Value innovation occurs when companies align newness with utility and price to create a leap in value for both buyers and the company.

Value innovation = (simultaneous pursuit of ) Differentiation + Low cost

Sustaining Innovation v.s Disruptive Innovation:

Sustaining innovation is any innovation that enables industry leaders to do something better for their existing customers.

Disruptive innovation is a product that a company’s best customer potentially can’t use and therefore has substantially lower profit margins than the business might be willing to support. However, disruptive innovation usually is “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.” (e.g Airbnb) True value innovation occurs when the UX and business model intersect. ( that separates Airbnb and Craigslist)

Tenet 3: Validated User Research

Validation is the secret sauce of the Lean Startup business approach. Validation is the process of confirming a specific customer segment finds value in your product. Without validation, you are simply assuming that customers will find use for your product. Validated user research goes beyond just observing and establishing empathy for potential users. It is a process based on a reality-check that focuses on direct feedback from interaction with users. It helps your team to determine if the vision of your product is a dream or a potential nightmare.

The MVP approach: learning if potential customers want your product by building just the core features of your value proposition. This is far different from traditional product development in which building a prototype was often a simulation to show potential investors the future product. By getting customer buy-in on your value proposition early, you are de-risking your product. And if users don’t like what they see, we need to either “pivot” to a different customer segment or pivot to a different problem that our value proposition can address. Feature validation process: build — measure — learn. (lean startup feedback loop)

Validated user research is a collaborative process that should involve as many members of the product team as possible. The collaboration will actually help organically build consensus on the value proposition and any pivots that follow.

What if I work in an agency model environment, and the product requirements are already locked in stone during a requirement-gathering phase that I’m not involved in?

That’s the exact moment that you need to be intrapreneurial. Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. You need to decide to take the fate of the product into your own hands through assertive risk-taking and innovation. Stand up and ask for the extra week or two to conduct validated user research. If you get a “no” or are too afraid to ask, it’s time to start working off-hours. The worst thing that can happen is that you will discover something about yourself and/or start looking for ways to improve your own work process. The bottom line is that confronting your target customer is non-negotiable. In the end, though, this approach is more cost-effective and efficient.

Tenet 4: Killer UX Design

The traditional ux design is associated with deliverables for development and design execution — site maps, wireframes, process/task flows, and functional specifications. Recruiters identify UX design with job title: interaction designer, information architect, UX designers. The “traditional” system is often more focused on the issues of user engagement and design rather than customer development and business model generation.

Difference between a novice UX designer and a killer UX designer: killer UX designer knows how to guide the value innovation of a product in the following ways:

• They work collaboratively with stakeholders at the idea’s inception. Then UX designer is involved in designing structured experiments for validation. Using measurable results, they make design decisions based on real evidence.
• They help determine key moments and features that are critical to the product.
• They learn about the existing market space to identify UX opportunities that can be exploited.
• They talk directly to potential users or existing power users of the product to discover and validate its primary utility with respect to the problem that must be solved.
• They weave UX through all touch points-online and offline- enabling an experience that’s frictionless. (e.g Airbnb: transaction happens online, fulfilled offline, and then loops back online to write reviews)

03 Validating the Value Proposition (tenet 1,3: business strategy and validated user research)

Five steps to create value proposition:

Step 1: Define your primary customer segment

Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s (biggest) problem

Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions

Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition

Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned

Step 1: Define your primary customer segment

Examples of successful digital products when they first launched: FB was exclusive to Harvard University students; Airbnb tested on the 2008 Democratic national convention; Tinder piloted with college students at USC.

The customer is a group or segment of people with a common need or pain. Your primary customer’s pain point must be severe because there is a lot of risks involved in trying to change how people do something in a familiar way to an unfamiliar one in an uncontested market space.

Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s (biggest) problem

The problem should be a specific one that a specific customer segmentation is having. It’s ok to make assumptions in the very beginning about user’s needs and how to solve them, but you need to be honest about them.

Don’t build your product’s UX around a value proposition unless you have tangible evidence that people will want the product. Don’t believe in your own hype. Instead, approach every new product or project like an experiment.

Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions

Personas can be a helpful tool in giving stakeholders and the product team an empathetic sense of what the end user’s needs, goals and motivations are. When you don’t have the budget or time or resources to do months of qualitative “ethnographic” research, you can use provisional personas (a Lean UX technique) as a communication tool to depict your hypothesized customer and align your team. It also gives everyone a starting point for the validation process.

Provisional persona layout and breakdown( four parts):

• Name and snapshot/sketch: name, gender, demographic, photo, etc
• Description: motivations, a composite archetype that’s relevant to the product idea.
• Behaviors: How the customer is solving the problem now; is the customer tech-savvy? The person’s personality that affects the behavior. Are they trusting or skeptical?
• Needs and goals: What’s missing from current solutions? What goals are not satisfied by current behaviors? What are the deal breakers the customer is facing? What are the compromising points?

Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition

Customer discovery: Customer discovery is a process used to discover, test and validate whether a specific product solves a known problem for an identifiable group of users; it is essentially conducting user research. Do not just observe them in a lab setting, really go out to the field and talk to users.

The problem interview: The goal of the customer discovery interview is to talk to real people (that fit into your provisional personas). The research should be meaningful, effective and swift. Get into the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop asap. Phase 1 is for screener questions. Phase 2 is the real interview.

Two sided markets: sometimes the business need two distinct user types for your product to have value. E.g: Uber drivers and riders, Airbnb hosts and guests. Then you need customer journey for both entities.

Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned! (and continue to iterate until you have product/market fit.)

After gathering the feedback, share with the team. Make decisions based on:

• You didn’t validate your customer segment hypothesis. Go back to step 1.
• You didn’t validate your customer’s pain points. Go back to step 2 to pivot on the problems.
• You validated both your customer and your problem hypothesis and feel good about your solution’s value proposition. Go to chapter 4.

04 Conducting Competitive Research (Tenet 1, business strategy)

Before you start a new business, learn about how it works.

Investigate your competition. What are they doing right? what are they doing wrong? What type of customer segment uses their products. Why should customers come to you? (instead of your competitor)

If you can’t figure out how to make it work, it’s okay to fail. Move on or pivot.

Understanding the Meaning of Competition

A competitor is a person, team, or company that shares your goals and is fighting for the same thing that your product team wants.

Direct competitor: companies that offer the same, or very similar, value propositions to your current or future customers.

Indirect competitor: offers a similar value proposition to a different customer segment, or they target your exact customer base without offering the exact same value proposition.

Find competitors and fill out the matrix with data

Ways to find competitors:

• users mention products they currently use
• stakeholders interview about their competitors or some products they have heard of
• search on the internet using keywords

Matrix elements include(not limited to):

• Competitors (separate direct competitor and indirect competitor)
• URL of website or App store location (separate mobile and desktop experience if they are very different)
• Username & Pswd (try register using a global username & pswd to share with your team)
• Purpose of site (look at “About” page, or “company overview” or description part in app store)
• Year founded (to see what products are new to the market, which are out there for a while)
• Rounds of funding (find on Crunchbase, funding would be a competitive advantage)
• Revenue stream (it could be: transaction fee, advertising, monthly subscription fee, SaaS fee, or sell user data and trends to 3rd party, like FB)
• Monthly traffic (You can get free data on traffic on the website by typing in the url of the website here: Compete.com, Quantcast, Alexa.)
• Listings (Optional, to track how many items are available to the product so you can compare.)
• Primary categories (understand how things are categorized and what are the main categories, e.g: main menu items)
• Social networks (What other social platforms does it utilize? Twitter, FB, Instagram? etc)
• Content types (think text, photo, video, etc and how it is presented. How detailed is the information? How much information about one product? How easy to read?)
• Personalization (personalization features include: favoriting, watch lists, user profiles, wish lists, custom content, things listed under “my account” section.) (Jany: I tend to think these are more customization instead of personalization, and personalization should be automation like on Amazon: “you might like this”)
• Community/UGC features (User generated content, or crowd-sourced content v.s editorial content or curated content. Think about how they bring value to the product’s other customers.)
• Competitive advantage (Figure out top three differentiators of each product. Ask yourself: which features were successful because the product was first-to-market? Can those features be easily replicated? Which attributes are specific to online experience?)
• Heuristic evaluation (Easy for users to accomplish tasks? Easy to navigate? Is system feedback satisfactory? e.g live help, chatbot, etc) (Jany: the author didn’t go in depth in heuristic evaluation, but only gave out some samples.)
• General notes
• Questions/notes to team
• Analysis (see the next chapter)

05 Conducting Competitive Analysis

to be continued…