Building a Cantonese UX Community — with Tim Chan
Meet this month’s featured designer Tim Chan, who formerly was Product Design Lead at HSBC. You might know him from UXPear. He was the host of UXPear’s meet-up last month. We’re also saying goodbye as he is moving to Canada very soon 👋🏻.
Hi, I am Tim Chan. I am a former Product Design Lead at HSBC, currently taking a break to pursue a Master degree in Canada.
My favorite part of design is micro-interactions — the “invisible” designs that make software feels intuitive. They are the silent heroes!
I am also a career transitioner (My degree is in Mathematics & Statistics!) so feel free to reach out if you want to break into design as well!
What inspired you to pursue design? How did you start getting into it?
Before jumping into UX, I was working in a telecom company. The company wanted to create an app to help customers pay their bills and track their internet usage. It was a fun project and I learned a great deal about how to empathize with customers and see things from their perspectives.
After that, I learned more about UX by reading. But signing up for General Assembly’s UX course was a turning point for me. To me, it wasn’t about learning or finding cases for my own portfolio. It was a statement to myself, paying a buck-load of money and being serious about stepping into the industry. It was not possible to try for a few months, either you step into the industry or you do not.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced with design?
I think the biggest challenge I have discovered is that UI/UX design was never just about design. It’s also about elevating the status of the design discipline in the company. Say you have entered a new company, do you expect your boss to understand the value of UX suddenly one day? It will never happen, no one is going to rescue you. The company is waiting for you to promote UX. If you don’t have such kind of epiphany, and if you are not able to sell the value of design to the stakeholders, this industry may not suit you in the long term.
What does a typical day look like for you?
I’m quite free nowadays but back when I used to work. I would start my day by writing a checklist on Notion. Depending on the importance of the tasks and my mood, I would block specific times in my calendar to work on those tasks.
No matter what seniority you are at, you will need time to think. For me, I need time to think about the direction of my team and design the team. Or else, I will be drowned by meetings. Another tip I have is batch checking your emails and notifications (say 10 am and 4 pm every day), so you won’t be distracted all the time and can enter the flow for design.
What is your current workspace setup?
Not much to show in my room as I’m leaving pretty soon but my ideal workspace requires a big desk.
What are your go-to or “must-have” apps?
Pretty general like everyone else. I use Notion as a personal daily to-do list. My setup is nothing fancy. But if you can keep track and complete 2–3 meaningful tasks per day that can contribute to your personal growth, it is already a lot if you count it by years.
Is there a product that recently impressed you? Can be digital or physical.
Nothing is really impressive to me recently. One thing I can immediately recall is the experience I had with Interactive Brokers. Their mobile app has a really bad deposit experience.
What is your favorite part about Figma?
I have not been creating UI day-to-day, so I won’t consider myself a power user. At HSBC, we are still using Sketch, but I have been creating my own portfolio using Figma. It has really strong community support and templates are very accessible compared to Sketch. I also love that style properties are accessible on the right panel, being able to change multiple objects’ styles is so efficient to me.
What is your favorite afternoon snack? Or midnight snack?
My favorite snack is Pop-Pan Spring Onion Crackers by Garden.
Pop-Pan Spring Onion Crackers by Garden
What is a book you read recently? Or what is your favorite book?
I recommend “Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies”. Even though the book is about product growth, I try to apply what I learn to design a team. Treat a UX team as a product, all activities, and initiatives as features, then find metrics to track so you can know what is effective and double down.
Another book I recommend is “The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies”. It’s about creating a system to make your team self-run. For example, a script is a powerful thing paving to success. Turning the best salesman’s pitch into a script will make everyone successful. Inspired by that, I made a stakeholder kickoff meeting script for my team at work.
Both books that I recommended are non-design-related. I avoid reading design-specific books because I believe breakthroughs in your own design need to reference other disciplines’ success. For my leisure time, I enjoy reading sci-fi novels. Recently I was re-reading The Dark Forest: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. The Dark Forest theory in the novel has inspired me to coin my own UX theory. There are a few assumptions behind it. First, all teams in a company want to survive. Second, there are only limited resources within a company. Third, teams will compete against each other. Based on these assumptions, UX team in any company will need to compete with others and you will not able to avoid politics. Therefore my theory is if a UX team does not grow, it will be destroyed. It will either get absorbed or abandoned, or the worst case scenario — have no influence in the company at all.
Have you considered working on these materials further?
Currently, there are very few practical guides or playbooks accessible to design leaders, I hope to write one someday, focusing on how to grow a UX team, and how to evaluate your design maturity to progress.
What’s something in Hong Kong that inspires you? Could be a person, a place, an object, or anything in HK!
Being someone who is leaving Hong Kong very soon, Hong Kong inspires me as a place to make something happen. If there is something not present, go ahead and do it. You will have unexpected results and it’s easier than you think, like running a UX community.
Speaking of UX community, you also hosted UXPear’s community event last month.
Yes, I had a dream to elevate Hong Kong’s overall UX maturity, yet I felt powerless as I plan to leave Hong Kong for Canada. But later the powerlessness turned into motivation to organise an in-person event, that will connect more designers in Hong Kong.
In longer term, I hope the community can grow without geographical limitations. Let it be bigger than Hong Kong and connect Cantonese-speaking UX people around the world. I also hope it can connect Hong Kong people who are working in FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), making it the community where you can find out what the UX scene is like out there
Share three pieces of advice for fellow design community members.
- Learn from other disciplines. a lot of problems have already been solved by other disciplines, all you need is to learn from their success and transfer them into your field.
- Explain your design. Take coding as an example, commenting on code is common across all coding languages. You can leave comments on every line to explain your logic. Design should also have documentation to explain the reasons behind it.
- Don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. When I worked in the staff team, I wanted front-line staff to test my design on a tablet, so I just went to the branch. If I instead emailed the branch manager, I am 99% sure they will reject my request because it will “distract their work”. If you are in doubt, ask yourself “what is the worse that could happen?”, the reality is probably not as bad as you think. If you are still really concerned, my general rule of thumb is to do it anyway if I think it won’t get me fired. Worked great for me so far.
What are three topics people can chat about with you?
- Everything about science fiction
- Managing and growing a UX team from scratch
- Origami (Remember to check out Tim’s origami Instagram!)
