Essential ways to assess fragile workplace culture and how to empower teams to embrace creativity collectively and collaboratively.
Whether you work in a small advertising agency with a team of creative specialists or a wide range of experts in a corporate setting, the challenges are undeniably the same when we talk about culture. In the business context, it is hard to take time away from addressing business-critical needs, to building a thriving culture led by innovation. Especially, when we try to nurture creativity by encouraging the curious mindset. Not only that but leaders should have the ability to identify when and where culture needs to shift. …
Lean UX and Agile. Are the two, different types of processes? Are they the same? — How to bring them together and still push through innovation?
Let’s start by exploring the common issues of the Agile model when coupled with UX processes. Creative teams are often challenged to document less and constantly polish visuals when necessary. Additionally, and depending on the sprint length, creative teams often struggle to have enough time which results in having UX seen as the bottleneck in the process.
In most traditional organisations, who have made the transition to the agile way of a working model, UX is still unrepresented in agile teams. This is critical and leads to a wider range of problems, uncommon goals, losing sight of feasibility and desirability. What’s more harmful is the difficulties of communication, misinterpretation and increase of cross-team misunderstandings. …
An effective leadership guide to nurturing your high-performing team’s creativity and empower them to be engaged and inspired.
Almost all creative leaders are imperfect. They inevitably make mistakes and fail even when they are good leaders to this day. It’s either the failure of making the right decision, failing to inspire or scrambling to guide a team member to find the right answer. But self-reflection, regular check-in with team members and anonymous performance evaluation nudge the awareness of past sticky situations. …
A creative guide to boosting productivity while WFH in the era of COVID-19
While some of us are fortunate to have the opportunity to be employed and still have the competency to work from home, most of us struggle to adjust to this new working environment and stay productive during this critical period in human history.
Let’s face it, working remotely isn’t new in online-powered businesses in major industries or traditional businesses that have embraced the digital transformation. This digitisation shift has enabled businesses to scale globally and support their businesses no matter the location of the company’s headquarters. …
How to craft the right design challenge without a solution in mind, set the stage for creativity and equip your team with curiosity to innovation
Imagine yourself in a room with an intelligent group of specialists in various domains (e.g. product managers, business owners, developers, solution architects) discussing the next innovation that you are going to release to the public and everyone is so enthusiastic about the idea that will revolutionise the industry. (Now Pause) Sounds familiar? — Let’s take a step back.
Sometimes, we participate in large-scale discussions where 30 minutes into the meeting, we notice the focus is lost and side-conversations start to deviate from the product vision. We try to reinvent the wheel, consistently forget the main objective or get too focused on the micro experiences of user journeys. Additionally, we unconsciously jump into solution-ing mode almost immediately even before understanding the real problem statement. …
Let’s start by defining what in the world is a design system…
What is a Design System?
“Design systems provide a convenient, centralised, and evolving map of a brand’s known product territories with directional pointers to help you explore new regions.”
Chris Messina, tech evangelist and former Developer Experience Lead at Uber
Let’s go back in time:
iCar Asia owns a network of automotive portals in ASEAN’s three largest markets: Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. When these businesses were initially acquired, each portal had their own design language and non-standardised codebase as they were built by different people working for different organisations.
Efficient maintenance of all these systems became a challenge due to the major differences in each codebase and standards. This led to increased workload, waste and excessive context switching which frustrated many designers and developers. …
Background:
Back in June 2016, I joined the AngelHack 2016 in Kuala Lumpur with 337 attendees from all different backgrounds. Attendees list vary from Hardware, Software Developers to UX Designers and Entrepreneurs. All gather under the same roof in Berjaya Times Square.
My team and I wanted to solve a real-world problem through the availability of existing technology. The requirement of this hackathon is to design and build a working prototype that is related to pre-selected topics in 24 hours.
The topics were: O2O Commerce, Big Data Analytics and Smart living.
