2013 has been an amazing year. Since my main focus has been on design, here are the most important lessons I learned after 8 months of grad school, 1 month of funemployment, and 3 months of working at a startup for the first time.

CMU MHCI

I spent the majority of this year as a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University studying Human-Computer Interaction. Being in lab on Craig St. with 59 others allowed me to collaborate with highly passionate and talented individuals (hollar, Glasswing!). The HCI faculty, including Jenna Date, Steven Dow, Scott Hudson, and Jim Morris, taught me invaluable lessons about the designer’s role in organizations.

I am not the user.

User empathy is key to good product design and development. This is the main message that CMU MHCI instilled in us. As a part of team Glasswing, I saw user empathy being put into practice during our capstone project with GE Healthcare. In 8 months, we spoke with American and European radiologists to learn their needs and validate our design concepts.

In the startup world though, the step of getting user feedback is often overlooked because of tight deadlines. At Leap Motion, I discovered that recruiting fellow employees for in-person user testing saved time. The results were still very valuable. The key is still to get feedback as frequently as possible during the entire product creation process.

There is no catch-all design process.

I went to grad school with the goal of learning the golden Design Process to apply to any project. Even though I was able to consolidate a personal design process, I never truly had the opportunity to use it. The design process needs to be adapted to individual projects based on project scope. For instance, a project that must be done before an upcoming holiday must forgo certain steps in the design process.

Tomatus

After leaving Pittsburgh, I went home and had time to work on a personal design project: a food tracking app based on food groups instead of calories. My mom is the developer whom I collaborated with (woohoo women in tech!). The initial progress for Tomatus was documented here, and it’s still work in progress.

I was most productive when I was close to the developer.

Tomatus is a side project amidst post-grad school job search and full-time work. Whenever I was home, Mom and I would have spontaneous Tomatus design discussions that prompted me to create mockups. When I wasn’t home, on the other hand, it took a lot more effort for me to justify spending time on the project instead of work. Proximity is essential for teamwork.

Dogfood as much as possible.

My mom and I have been using Tomatus for months now, which gives us proof to justify adding and removing various features. For instance, we currently have 4 different charts to show food intake data, some of which will be removed because neither of us use them. Without trying out our own app, Tomatus has a high probability of having feature bloat.

Don’t get emotionally attached to my own ideas.

My initial idea for Tomatus is a real-time visual indicator of how full the user is at any given time. We prototyped, tested this, and got negative feedback. Since then, Tomatus has pivoted into a weekly report that shows recommended percentage of how much you should eat from each food group — an effective idea that came from my mom. I had to let go of my original design for the product to improve.

Leap Motion

On September 23, I joined Leap Motion as a UX designer. When the startup recently launched the Leap Motion Controller, a sensor that tracks your hands in 3D space, it received mixed reviews from consumers. As a designer, I made it my goal to increase customer loyalty via good user experiences.

Designing for the Leap is hard.

Hand / gesture interactions in 3D space is a totally new and exciting territory of design paradigm. Existing web UI has been optimized for the mouse, so introducing a new input device requires a rethinking of the traditional computer output (i.e. the UI). To tackle how to define design patterns for the Leap, I found it helpful to start with research:

• Learn about hand and gesture interactions
• Synthesize internal UX insights (e.g. from Pohung’s and Isaac’s projects)
• Prototype and test specific interactions (e.g. Daniel’s blog post on menu interactions)

Luckily, there are many of us at Leap Motion who are passionate about user experience, so I’m excited for us to continue to experiment and learn together.

Leaping Into 2014

2013 was a wonderful year of learning at every corner. As 2014 approaches, I plan to continue improving UX at Leap Motion via good design. Yay!