My Notes During 2018 UXiD Conference

Interesting points I wrote in the two days conference, October 4–5 2018

Taken from UXiD Facebook Group Cover

Overall

The 2018 UXiD Conference is the second event held by UXiD (User Experience Indonesia Community) since 2014. This year conference’s theme is about “UX Maturity”. The organizer decides to pick this theme because the UX industry is growing so good in Indonesia in recent years. We have some startup unicorns that already achieved maturity in the design team. One of the indications is that now the design department has a place on the higher table. Design has important roles and impact on the companies.

The event is a successful one! It is really well organised. Love the conference experience! Kudos to the team!

By the way, I didn’t go to every session there because some talks or workshops were held simultaneously. So these all points are what I think important to capture.

DAY 1

Design from Within: Lessons learnt on the road to creating an in-house digital shop

From Linda Sessa’s LinkedIn

Linda Sessa — Head of Digital Transformation XL Axiata Tbk PT.

Linda’s profile

1. Digital Transformation is more about the people rather than the technology.
2. When convincing stakeholders: understand that they are also our user. Perform empathy, try to stand on their shoes. Communicate on their ‘language’. Let’s say if you trying to convince your Business Manager, talk NUMBERS. Talk Business with them. Tell them how your design decision will have a great positive impact on their division.
3. How to practice convincing the stakeholders? Talk about UX to your non-UX friends, your mother, your siblings. Surprisingly, what your mother would ask is most likely what your stakeholder will ask.
4. How to make a priority of your design tasks. To make sense and keep sane of the organisation we need to align the process ecosystem horizontally, meaning we need to align these from the customer or the user perspective, so we know which one is more critical than the others.
5. Keep your head on the ground. It’s easy to get ambitious and aim for a very huge amount of your goals. But in reality, there is a limit you can only achieve. To make sure you are reasonable and your goal is reachable, have a friend or two who can tell you what you CAN’T DO.

One slide how she prioritise which program or project comes first.

This bonus lesson is bada**

Building and Growing UX Team

Chooake Wongwattanasilpa — Managing Director, Head of User Experience & Design at DBS Bank. Chooake’s profile

1. Chooake starts from 1 person designer (himself!) to 50-ish (I kind of forgot about the details.) from 2014 to 2018.
2. Before he explains about the growing the team, he gave a tip about empathy: if you want to understand the business, read the Annual Report. Try to understand the key numbers.
3. Always start from the end. Understand the end goals from the user or customer perspectives. The same principle with Amazon.com.
4. To grow the team, we need to hire a person that have a potential to teach each other. That way, we can grow not only in the numbers but also upgrading skills the current members have.
5. Have fun together with the team. Do Team Outings, vacations, and so on.
6. Continue learning. Learn together, teach each other.
7. When hiring the first design team-mate, hire a high level designer first!
8. To attract the high level designer, share your challenges and problem for them to solve together with you.
9. To gain trust from your teammates and your stakeholders, we need to be consistence.

Be A Street Smart Design Leader

Michael Liem — Head of Product Design at Tokopedia

1. Street Smart is Michael’s own term for ‘being smart or practical in the field’ as oppose to ‘text-book smart’ where we understand the theory but overwhelmed when facing the real life (design) problems.
2. To become a good design leader, first thing we need to do is to fire yourself as a designer! Because now, as a leader, you need to focus on managing and nurture your team. Insisted to be both designer and leader will give bad impact for all parties.
3. Delegating is hard, especially when you have a high standard for your design quality. But you need to push yourself on that.
4. Be generous in time. As a former designer (since you fired yourself earlier), you should know that design process needs time. Give your team enough time to deliver their tasks.
5. Shut up and listen. Become a leader means you are now serves not only the stakeholders, but also the team. To achieve the team goal, you need more heads to solve the problem and deliver the design.

Panel Discussion: UX in Indonesian Agriculture

Farid Inawan from JALA, Walesa Danto from Limakilo, Jim Oklahoma from iGrow.asia

1. The three products they built has the similar user persona. The vendors and the Consumers. The Consumers are people who lives in a city or town, have digital or internet literacy. So they can use a smartphone and mobile apps. While their vendors; who are farmers and stock-breeders, barely know how to use a smartphone. So they shared a common speed-bumps in their path.
2. Know your local ingenuity to be able to penetrate your customers/user/clients. Especially for user who doesn’t have digital literacy.
3. When they are trying offer a deal to the farmers, Limakilo face a resistance. The farmers traumatised with the Electoral campaigns that occurred every 4–5 years. Most of them only got ‘promises’ and not gaining anything after the election. So they don’t believe when Limakilo offers a business deal. To overcome this, Limakilo give some community services to show their good will. One of the move was to install an internet connection for the villager. It wen’t well.
4. At first, Limakilo built a mobile app for both the farmers and the consumers. But it didn’t work for the farmers. They can not use smartphone. So they built a mobile site version and combine it with messaging app such as WhatsApp and the regular SMS. It works well.
5. Limakilo user has some unique behaviour that people in cities or towns might not have it. Such as: a.) The seller woman (Ibu Warung) only able to open the phone 2 hours for one day. Because their child occupy the phone almost all day long. They only able to use it when the kids a sleep. b.) They have nap time around 12–2pm, so contacting them in such hours won’t do. c.) They already asleep after 7–8pm. Contacting after that hours, also won’t do.

Advancing Space Exploration with User Experience Design

Marijke Jorritsma — Senior UX/UI Designer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Marijke talks about how she do the design process for space exploration tools using Virtual Reality technology while outside of her current job, she also creates programmed music.

Her works including: ProtoSpace one of NASA’s mixed reality projects used to visualise spacecraft models, including the rover designs for the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.

http://www.affinityvr.com/nasa-vr-space-exploration/#prettyPhoto

http://www.affinityvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Marikje-Jorritsma.jpg

DAY 2

On the second day, the conference schedule was a bit loose rather than the first day. That is because all workshops were held in this second day.

Communal Activity

For those who didn’t have a workshop in the morning, they can have a structured discussion. The method we use is called Lean Coffee. If you are interested about how we conduct the Lean Coffee Method, you can check my post here

This is just an example. I was so into the discussion I forgot to take some pics. My bad.

In this discussion, I happen to teamed up with my friends from Gramedia, Tokopedia, SweetEscape and two other more. We discussed about growing in UX; what skill should we upgrade or what mindset should we shift to in order to grow?

Interestingly, there is a statement from my friend Dicky from Tokopedia:

To grow, first we need to know our strengths. We may starts as a one-man product designer who have full-stack skills from research to prototyping, but at the end we need to focus on some areas that we are very excel at.

We also discussed some other topics such as: Design Team Management. When a designer left a company, should the team leader took over his task permanently? Or should we find the replacement fast?

UX Prototyping — Making Prototype and Defining the Successful Metrics

Anton Chandra — Interaction Designer at Go-Jek

From left to right: Anton Chandra, Agil Baka & Bahni

Anton & Bani conduct an exercise on how to improve UI of a small feature in the Amazon India mobile app.

For this exercise, Anton asked us to search a certain product and add it to the wishlist and finally improve the UI Design of that feature.

These are the steps we did:

1. Usability Review with the team and wrote interesting findings.
2. Frame the problem. From the notes, we find the pattern and decide the main problem. We decide that the position of the ‘Add to wishlist’ text link is too far from the top and the link style is almost unnoticable would be the top priority.
3. Crazy8. This the main ideation method to generate a lot of solution alternatives. If you are new to this method, please watch this video
4. Zen voting. After each member put all their sketches on the wall. All member starts to put the vote dots on the sketches they find interesting or have the best possible solution. For more info, check out this video
5. High fidelity prototype using Figma.com
6. Test with a user and measure it with a metric.

Our Crazy8 results

So this is our take on the task:

The current live design. The ‘Add to Wishlist’ is far at the bottom.

The end results

Conclusion

The conference is worth attending. I have learn so much, so much networking and super happy experience! Thank you UXiD!