Eden Pua — Weaving delight into design
‘A place of pleasure.’
‘A delightful place.’
‘Paradise.’
These are just some of the definitions of the word “Eden” that you’ll find in the dictionary.
And all of the above is true indeed, where any interaction with our article’s protagonist might crack open a can of effervescent, winsome delight. But be careful; Eden’s dynamism, drive, and passion for her craft is cardinally contagious, and within her UX team where she emphatically leads, it has become motivation fodder for her and her team members to succeed.
Don’t believe me? Just ask anyone that she’s ever worked with and be regaled by stories where she had to pull the team together, deliriously putting together Figma screens right into the twilight hours of the very next day. Or at times, when she’s had to single-handedly power through presentations to stakeholders, and in the little moments that transpired, taking time out of her Tetris-blocked calendar to guide others.
To many that know her, she’s bold, eloquent, and intelligent, taking charge of big decisions and more often than not, leaving people awestruck and inspired when she has deftly left the room.
But the legend that is spoken was not always the legend that we’ve come to know. Let’s dive into Eden’s roots and love for art and design, her transition into the UX arena, and becoming a triumphant design lead.
Thriving love for art
As with all things, we begin at the start, where the garden in Eden’s mind blossomed, and so did her journey with the marvel of human imagination and expression.
In fact, you could say that in her resilient design journey thus far, she’s embraced nearly every fabric of it.
Eden was part of the animation competition in Singapore, N.E.mation, back in 2012. With a team of 3 artists, they had to perfect 1,000 hand-drawn frames while combating leaky pens to create a short film. Her team, known as ‘Hungry Monsters’, would then later go on to take the coveted crown with their sincere submission.
Snobs? She’s snubbed them too, with her perfectly imperfect morphing electrical-tape-coming-off-the-wall art installation placed halfway around the globe.
But, Eden’s experience in creating art began a long, long time ago, back when she was just a lass, but tinier.
When she had barely reached the height of a kitchen counter, Eden’s parents had signed her up for extracurricular activities that included piano, dance, and art. Though she’s no Martha Argerich or Martha Graham, her art classes completely captured her rapture and her youthful imagination.
“Once you make art and it turns out the way you want it to be, it becomes a sense of achievement. Creating art is therapeutic.”
Her passion for art burnt fiercely through the years, and when it came time for her to make a decision on where to pursue her degree next, there was no hesitation in her mind. Europe was her mecca, where she knew concepts weighed more in art than the traditional process of creating a clear, good-looking, and thorough output.
Where exactly, you might ask? The University of the Arts London, where she started on her Fine Art degree.
“Europe has a cool arts scene and is way richer than it is in Singapore,” Eden explained. “I wanted to go to London where art is more modern and conceptual.”
Travelling over 10,000 kilometres to a foreign country was a big step forward and a huge change in mindset for Eden. But with that distance travelled, she knew that she would be able to pick up the skills of art that she wanted to, instead of stopping short at exploring concepts and just raising questions.
And so she did.
“The biggest thing that took me a while to adapt to was how to create something out of nothing. At the end of the day, the motivation comes from yourself. No one’s gonna tell you what to explore. You need to find it internally. That was my biggest takeaway.”
More importantly, Eden stated that without the support from her parents, she would not be where she is today. And she’s grateful that they were there with her every step of the way.
“I was extremely lucky,” she said in response to pursuing an art degree. “I went for something that I enjoyed. Some of my friends had to give up the stuff they love, taking the more practical choices in university. I’m glad my parents were supportive.”
As Eden continued to improve her craft, she also took a keener interest in wider, experimental art.
She was inspired by her favourite artist, Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic-Danish artist who is best known for using elemental materials like light, water, and temperature in his works to enhance the viewer’s experience. Eden found the concept of using light as his main medium in his art extremely fascinating.
She also had an interest in architecture and spaces, and looked up to Korean sculptor and installation artist, Do Ho Suh, who explores the concept of space and home. She loves that his art “makes you hyper aware” of things that you had never even imagined before.
Both artists, among many others, have played a significant role in helping Eden open up her perspective on the world we live in today, pushing her to explore wider creative themes and avenues in her work.
When asked if she would have chosen it any differently, she said simply:
“If I was not doing what I’m doing today, I would want to go back to doing art.”
Art lessons in UX
For an artist like Eden, she had never originally considered entering the digital realm. But each step led her down the eventual path of being a UX designer, and thus, her UX journey began.
“When I started working, my dad asked if what I had studied was useful and applicable to my work. It wasn’t exactly a one-to-one, but yes, it was definitely useful,” she said.
Instead of gaining UX knowledge the conventional way by applying for courses, Eden threw herself into the deep end, where she took up a job in UX as an intern.
She cut her teeth at a small setup that hopped onto the UX bandwagon as many organisations at the time were still trying to make their mark as one of the early players in the industry. As such, few designers had actual experiences in UX back then, and just like everyone else, she was learning with each project and practice.
“My role had very little to do with visual design. It was mostly building wireframes. I followed senior designers to gather requirements from clients and translated them into wireframes,” she explained about her first UX role.
Equipped with her rich experiences in Fine Art, her transition to UX was not as tumultuous as first seemed. Eden’s learnings in her university helped her to stand out from a sea of designers, where she was able to apply the lessons in her studies to challenge the client’s brief.
“For me, the way I approach things is by asking ‘why not?’” Eden said, recounting a previous time where her product owners demanded the outcome to be exactly as it was briefed.
“Why can’t I do something more? That’s how other innovative companies do it, like Google and Apple. They’re not bound by restrictions. Restrictions just form a base. We need to challenge that and break beyond.”
In other words, it meant creating more ideas and providing different perspectives for her clients.
“If a client says build me a dashboard with this info, I’ll need to be resourceful enough to think that the dashboard could be more than what was requested for. Maybe it could help users understand the business better.
“I’ll research what people want to know about the business, then provide the client with 2 options. One is what you asked for. The other is a blue-sky idea,” Eden said.
In challenging their opinions and briefs, she also helped clients to think further beyond and arrive at a much better option than the requirements that they first came up with.
For Eden, it was all about having the courage to explore, push back, and ask questions. And that is perhaps, in an answer to her father’s question, the most valuable lesson that she has brought with her home from London.
Triumph as a design lead
Living out the commonly-used adage, “leaders are made, not born”, Eden’s tutelage of others started early on in her UX career, albeit not of her own volition. “After my internship of three months, I was converted to a full-time role and was forced to lead almost immediately,” she said.
Eden had to drive interactions with clients, become independent, and lead her own projects and teams — all while wiping the metaphorical sweat off her eyebrows.
“My first project was a disaster, but I was only three months in,” Eden recalled with a laugh. After a year in that role, she wanted to challenge herself and do more. Not just to build wireframes, but feed her eclectically creative side of making things visually appealing too.
Eden left her then-company in search of roles that provided the blend that she was looking for, and in the year that followed, she continued to sharpen her skills by taking on freelance jobs.
It wasn’t long before she saw an opportunity present itself and grabbed it by the arm. Coincidentally, the feeling was mutual.
“Luckily, Aleph took a chance on me,” she said, remembering the time when she first joined the organisation. Eden knew that she would be able to rub shoulders with mentors who could catapult her towards higher levels of creativity, learning, and more, all while further developing her intrinsic set of skills.
In her role at Aleph, Eden was constantly picking up various skills that were adjacent to design, fast-tracking her way from being a UX designer to now an established design lead.
And on her way there, she’s worked with every possible type of role imaginable: writers, researchers, engineers, project managers, and so many more.
“A lot of it is explaining how their work affects mine. But at the same time I’ll also need to understand where they are coming from, whether it is a difficult subject matter or if it’s a challenge in the design process,” Eden said about the process of collaboration with all of the different roles. “Once I know their challenges, I start building that connection with them to help them understand what I need. And it usually improves from there.”
In her transition to becoming a design lead, Eden also said that the perspectives of who she currently is and who she was as a UX designer is vastly different. Being a design lead is more about mentoring and reaching out to those whom she thinks need help and extending that helping hand.
“As a design lead, it’s no longer just about your own design skill sets. You start to grow into a ‘T’ shaped individual. Rather than just vertical, you grow more on the lateral space as well. It’s no longer just my own team, but outside the team, the range of influence, uplifting more people and thinking how I can empower the skills of other people and elevate their practice,” she said.
What does this all mean? It all boils down to building good relationships and bridging understanding between individuals.
“As a lead, I have to take a step back, especially when work gets hectic to preserve some mental space. I need to know that if times are tough, what’s the next step to take.
“That’s when it takes everyone in the team to understand that you’re not just slacking. That you need that space to look at the bigger picture to see what are some of the things that need to move, push, or stop, rather than just grinding through it with everyone else,” Eden said.
On where she thinks her career path is moving towards next, she said that she still wants to continue to create where she can.
“Being able to create stuff is what brought me into design in the first place,” Eden explained. “But moving forward, I also enjoy growing people and managing teams. I want to grow my own team at some point.”
Designing for the physical and virtual world
When it comes to crafting experiences, one interesting space that Eden has been wanting to explore is designing for a product’s entire ecosystem. In essence, the end-to-end experience.
She’s also fascinated by designing for both online and offline experiences, as her current field mainly tackles the digital and online design space. This includes sensor tech, like smart home equipment, to alternate reality and virtual reality. What she’s looking for is anything that exists beyond the physical realm and entwines with the digital space.
“At the end of the day, we still move around in the physical world. I want to see how it all blends together,” she said.
Eden had previously worked on products that are a single aspect in an overall customer journey, but she’s always interested in discovering more. Specifically, in servicing users and understanding the different channels of touchpoints and actions taken.
“I’d like to know the way a customer interacts with a brand. What is the experience like? Things that branch out into branding and design. Things that are tangible and related to UX design,” she said.
As UX continues to grow, Eden believes that designing for people who aren’t yet digitally-connected would be where the industry is headed next. Quoting Google’s “The Next Billion Users”, a huge part of the world’s population are only just beginning to come online.
Eden also believes accessibility is an equally important consideration in design. For instance, her grandmother is illiterate and is only able to read numbers and images, and speaks only in the Chinese dialect of Hokkien. “When you have apps with instructions in English to explain things, it means nothing to them. So it’s almost impossible to communicate,” she explained further.
“Things like Singpass (Singapore’s digital ID) for example cannot be tied to just her own identity, because she doesn’t know how to use it. Then you need a proxy. So it’s sort of designing for these sorts of people too.”
Thankfully, Eden’s family helps to ensure that these digital touchpoints don’t become foreign or difficult to use for her grandmother, but not everyone in the world is as fortunate.
“There are huge numbers of people out there who cannot read or don’t know how to get on to this digital space,” Eden said.
“When you wanna make a good product and you keep making it better and better, what happens to those who don’t even have access to that very basic type of connectivity or products that might really help their lives?”
To Eden, the nucleus of answering “Why?” should always impact and serve the lives of users. More specifically, the lives of the right users too.
Solving bigger questions on the world stage
In a world where new ideas are constantly taking shape, and as technology continues to shatter barriers, there will come a time when even the hardest of questions that still remain in the world can — and will — inevitably be solved.
For adventurers like Eden, that voyage into finding the one-size-fits-all solution can be freeing yet demanding. When asked if she had one such big question that she wanted to solve, Eden gave pause. “I don’t have one single question, I feel,” she said.
“I always want to continue to push boundaries and continue to break beyond. Today’s big question will be solved tomorrow. And then I will have another new question.”
Today, Eden is hard at work with her team, focusing and pushing together to accomplish more projects, adding another gold feather to her already rainbow-coloured cap.
As her wondrous career unfolds upwards and onwards, she continues to command a wealth of respect and a bounty of regard from her peers and those that she works with closely. Eden’s always setting her sights on what’s to come next while calibrating her craft with daily learnings and topical UX reads.
From her deep and passionate guidance to her steadfast commitment to her team and her role, there’s no leader that shines as resplendently true as Eden herself.
Special thanks to Eden Pua for sharing her story, to Evangelyn Stephen for interviewing, and to Don Ng for proofreading the feature.
