Frameworks and lessons from my second year
I joined the YouTube Ads Video Creation team at Google two years ago as my first gig out of grad school. Getting into Google was a dream come true, but it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of deliberate practice and luck.
Time flies. I’m now passing the peak of “Mount Stupid” where I constantly doubted myself and climbing up the “Slope of Enlightenment” (Dunning–Kruger effect).
Now entering my third year, I’m asking myself: “What are the biggest things I’ve learned?” Here are three insights.
1. Learn what to learn
During my first three months at Google, I was so overwhelmed with the sea of…
3 UX lessons that school doesn’t teach you
Nowadays, a lot of people are making a fuss of the difficulty that individuals are facing in getting into UX Design and in finding an internship job.
Flat out, people can easily gain UX methods by enrolling through online courses. They can also gain it through Design Schools and bootcamps. As a result, every Junior Designers’ application forms have mentioned almost the same skills with one another, thus, making it hard to stand out in a pile of resumes on the office desk.
When I enrolled in my Master School studying HCI, while wearing my rose colored glasses, I clearly…
This past summer I had the once in a lifetime opportunity of working at Clinc as a Product Design intern. As the sole web designer for the AI training platform, I stretched myself to understand how AI training works. Fast forward to a few days ago my colleague told me my designs were being built. With excitement I thought back to the key takeaways from the internship:
- Design from what you already have
- Tell, don’t show
- Take the initiative to propose and execute your idea
1. Design from what you already have
The task of “building a design system“ sounded so daunting at first compared to how…
How to work with team and deal with clients
1. To have a better design work, your team need to be work efficiently and collaboratively.
We could have signed a charter at our first meeting so that everyone would understand that it is inappropriate to do their own assignments on the meeting. But we just jumped directly to our work and not everyone was so involved in the collaboration.
We could have to think hard about how to create an atmosphere that encourages constructive criticism to bounce some ideas off each other. But when someone was presenting his or her idea, no one was there to point out its rough patches and we tended to fall in love with our initial idea.
We can also…
Part 2 From Ideation to Lo-fi Prototype
Previously in several usability tests on mindfulness-based apps, I identified three main issues:
- It’s hard to keep on practicing every day.
- Novices tend to get distracted easily when practicing.
- It’s hard to break the habits and apply mindfulness in action.
IDEATION
Design Philosophy
Design is not only about solving the problems, but also assumes responsibility to challenge societal issues, norms and values. Designers can also embody different strategies in the system (not constrained to app or website) and take the associative contexts into consideration:
- Reflective Design: Design a immersive interactive game to let players experience how it feels to have mental diseases.
- Participatory…
Part 1 Redesigning the meditation experience
Since I began to practice MBCT one month ago, I have found several meditation apps designed to help users to live a mindful life. According to the research, little is known for the efficacy of the apps in developing mindfulness. Plus, the Chinese version of mindfulness-based apps are fewer. Since I am also attending the mindfulness-based program (MBCT), I am eager to take advantage of my UX knowledge to improve my daily meditation experience.
RESEARCH
Luckily, I found a review (Mani M, 2015) conducted a systematic review of mindfulness-based apps and evaluated their quality using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS)…
