Reflections on my early days
For a long time, I wanted to put my thoughts together on this topic but neither I was too busy nor was afraid of offending people. However, after chatting with my product counterpart Alvin Reyes (Product Owner of Tridion Sites), I decided to put my thoughts down and reflect on them.
It’s largely based on my personal experience so take it with a grant of salt. The first part is about the things I did wrong. The second part describes the ways I tried to tackle them.
Producing designs but not solving problems
In the early days, more often than not, I started iterating on designs…
Three things to consider before opening any prototyping tools
Without a prototype, it’s common to see confusion and misunderstandings in a discussion, leaving people to imagine how the screens behave. I notice that some designers see static mocks as “the prototypes” in my current working environment. I asked them why “interactive prototyping” is not part of their design process. The answer I got was:
I don’t feel comfortable and find it difficult to think about design interactively.
I was surprised by that answer since prototyping plays a major role in my design process, so I decided to write an article some time ago to share internally with my colleagues…
Simple principles to stick to when the design process is unclear
In the past years, I have talked to many designers and we hold the same opinion that one of the designer’s job is to make sense out of chaos and unclarity. However, at the same time, we also reveal the feeling that it’s especially difficult if the process (especially design process) is not clear in the organisation we sit in.
After working with many designers, one thing I noticed that great designers are not only good at the craft but also good at handling the process. While learning and observing how they work along the way, I synthesised 3 principles…
How to lower your ego and work better with people.
Designer is that type of vocation where individual creativity is the key ingredient and ego does help in design process. However, at a fast pace and highly collaborative software industry, having big ego does not necessarily help you work better with others. You might hear or sometimes even state:
“I love green colour”
“I come up with this new design pattern”
“I solved this navigational problem by myself”
“I run the workshop”
Once you start showing ego or acting defensive, others will not listen to whatever you want to say even if you might have a valid point. Even…
On 1, June 2019, I joined UX Camp Amsterdam together with my colleagues from SDL. It was nice to meet new people and connect with the community again. The program is a Barcamp format where community members pitched topics and the audiences decided which talks they would like to join. Since the exact format of the talk depends on the community member, it ranges from presentation, discussion to workshop. For people who are doing UX related works, I recommend you to join next time.
I decided to blog about this event because I was inspired by Alvin Reyes’s talk at…
Luke Chen
UX Designer @SDL.
