Can Lah Attitude

I remember when I was a Mobile Software Engineer at British Telecoms (11-12 years ago), we’re working on a project for Transport for London, to help people exploring London using the Tube (it’s similar to CityMapper or GoogleMaps now). There’s no Android at that time, only J2ME. Limited resources to learn from, unlike today where it’s (relatively) easy to find articles/tutorials/source code about (almost) anything you want to develop. There’s no mature UI library (I happened to lead the UI), so we needed to create our own components. The same for the logic part, a lot of things that we needed to create by ourselves. What I miss the most was the Can Lah Attitude of the team members. (Lah is a Singlish word, you can learn about it later).

Can Lah Attitude is about not pushing back just because we don’t know how to do it (yet!). It’s about not pushing back just because it’s hard. It’s about pushing our limit, knowing that we’re a lot more capable than we thought we are. It’s about delivering the best experience, even though we needed to work until 4–5 am. And it’s about myself. I felt embarrassed to say ‘Can not’ for things that can be done. Of course time is something that we need to consider. But more often than not, time is used as an excuse to not do something better. As I move to the other part of the team, as designer, I have a mixed feeling about the “Can not-type” of engineers. Feel sorry that they look down on themselves. Feel annoyed because they don’t want to develop a better product, that not only satisfies the basic needs of the users, but also delights the users. A lot of delightful things need extra effort and thinking, unfortunately. One example, micro-interaction that uses arc path, instead of a straight line. I was annoyed to hear that some engineer mentioned that it’s hard to implement, complicated because it needs some algorithm to make it happen. Of course it needs some algorithm, it’s not easy, that’s why it’s delightful. Anyway, some things are out of our control. The best I can do, as a designer, is to design the best experience for the users that also helps business to achieve the goals. If I were lucky, I might meet some awesome engineers (and I have met some of them) who can make it happen. If not, then it’s ok, I might learn a thing or two about different things, like being more patient or how to improve my negotiation/persuasion skill. Or probably learning that some things just can’t be changed, and you just need to keep going.