Why You Should Spend Time Listening
Active listening and empathy, the heartbeat behind building a UX design studio
I suppose the saying, “never say never” holds true for me. As a co-founder of 55 Minutes — a user experience (UX) design studio — I would never have thought of starting a Medium publication. Yet here I am, because the next step to expanding and sharing our mission and work, is to create a platform to write about it.
After completing my studies in digital media design, I worked as a 3D artist in an American animation company. There, I learned how a positive workplace culture is important in the way employees engage with each other. However, due to the 9/11 attacks, the company unfortunately could not carry on operations. This unexpected plot twist allowed me to embark on a different path to explore my other interest in graphic design and become a designer. I’ve always loved making beautiful things and making things beautiful. There’s been that strong desire in me that is satisfied when it comes to the aesthetics of things, and since I forayed into the design world, I’ve enjoyed every single milestone it brought me. Having spent a large part of my life working on print designs, branding, and digital designs, I grew to appreciate user experience design. I now practice a human-centered design approach at 55 Minutes, leading a team of designers and researchers while focusing on delivering delightful and effective user experiences.
About the Company
“Why is the company named 55 Minutes?”, people would ask. When my co-founder and I were setting up the company, we realized we both subscribed to the principle embodied by the renowned physicist Albert Einstein:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
That principle is what human-centered design is about — giving time to what is truly important by focusing on the people — and the essence that we wanted the company to capture. We research the real problems people face, and understand who we are solving problems for. Practicing active listening to our users leads us to developing sharp and genuine insights, enabling our solutions to meet people’s real needs.
Our Team, Our Mission, Our Vision
To deliver delightful UX, I realized early on that diversity in thought and perspectives was an important factor. Consequently, our team consists of diverse people from different backgrounds, training and nationalities. Our team includes a furniture designer with research training from South Korea, a designer with a psychology training background from Indonesia, and a designer from India who studied fashion. The diversity adds to our work because we design for a diverse profile of users. Being able to apply various disciplinary knowledge will make us creative and innovative in problem-solving. However, different as we may be, the whole team shares the same values of empathy, collaboration, and delivering joy.
We believe empathy is the key to unlocking all the unknowns that will make our designs more authentic, while collaboration with others make us better problem solvers. Lastly, we all want to bring joy to our clients and the users — the world is becoming harder to figure out with all the advancement in technology and bad news, but joy is what will continue to make us human.
We believe empathy is the key to unlocking all the unknowns that will make our designs more authentic, while collaboration with others make us better problem solvers.
Our day-to-day mission is to design products and services that improve people’s lives by understanding and solving people’s emotional, functional, and social needs while meeting business objectives.
We do this so we can work towards our bigger and grander dream of creating a human-centered world, where empathy is embedded into daily life and it drives the decisions organizations make.
Why this publication?
To achieve our goals, we need to demystify UX (the infamous acronym in the design industry) and invite both designers and non-designers to understand what human-centered design is, how to apply it, and what value it can bring to individuals and organizations.
We hope our team’s writing can help bring clarity of what value empathy brings to design, as we share more about our work process and start conversations about the approaches in problem-solving.
In the coming weeks and months, you can look out for three main categories of content:
- Team Spotlight: Get to know who’s on our team and what we do
- Our Projects: Learn about some of our client-commissioned work; we zoom into case studies to talk about our process, what we solved and how we solved it.
- Our Voices: Hear voices and perspectives from our team of many different passions and talents! We’ll discuss our interests, as well as share our learnings.
One of the projects you can expect to read about under Our Voices is on mental health, a topic the whole team has been passionately pursuing; the more we research on this, the more we realize the importance of creating platforms to increase awareness rather than shy away from what we do not know enough of. Our hope is to tap on our design skills to be part of the solution.
Good things can only get better when we grow as a community with other like-minded people, sharing resources and know-hows with one another and supporting each other. We hope our stories can reach start-ups, engineers, people with product ideas, small to medium-sized business owners, domain experts in various disciplines — just about anyone who is curious about user experience design! We are also always on a lookout for talented people who share the same values with us to join the team, so do follow us to get to know us better. We’d love to hear your comments or to explore with you possibilities of collaborations. More details of such opportunities can be found on our website, under Collaboration. If you are keen to lend your voice to talk about similar interests, please do reach out — we love to highlight important ideas and you could be our next guest writer!
A Note to Leave You With
I don’t consider myself a writer (there’s a reason why I am a designer!), but writing about my own personal experiences is something I enjoy because I value reflection and gratitude. Writing about what I have experienced, learned (and am still learning), and what I am thankful for has helped shape me into a better version of myself.
With the launch of this new platform and publication, I am grateful that my team and I have the opportunity to practice writing together as a collective group. We are excited to put our voice out there; together, we want to grow and bring positive change in the way we approach design and problem-solving. We invite you to join us on this journey of creating human-centered solutions and practicing empathy in our day to day conversations and decision making.
As the Head of 55 Minutes, Wendy is passionate about sharing the value of empathy in design with others, as well as building positive work environments and being a mentor to her team. With more than a decade of experience heading companies in the publishing, print, and digital design industry, she combines her wealth of experience in digital media, project management, and human-centered design to solve problems through creative collaborations.
