Roller Coaster Ride to UI/UX Role
It is a roller coaster ride into the design industry. From my initial dream of a fashion designer to becoming an UI/UX designer, it has been one big round back to the same industry, but a different design field.
This summer, I couldn’t ask for a more purposeful place than GovTech to work at. It is a golden opportunity to understand the design industry in the public sector and learn from experienced UI/UX designers. At the same time, I also hope to contribute to the government’s national strategic initiative of developing Singapore into a Smart Nation.
Still, discipline is key.
In the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins illustrates the Hedgehog Concept. The essence of Hedgehog Concept is to obtain absolute clarity about how to produce the best long term results and exercise discipline in decision making. Saying no to opportunities that fall outside these 3 circles.
What are you deeply passionate about?
What can you be the best in the world at?
What drives your economic or resource engine?
Nowadays, this concept is something I’m putting into practice to shift my focus towards design. That means strategically quitting lower priority commitments such as CCAs and other stuff outside school which I don’t feel as deeply passionate about. That means devoting more time learning on the job to better it. That means going out of my comfort zone to meet and learn from other experienced designers at Design Meetups.
So far, it has been enjoyable journey. Super thankful to everyone for the warm welcome and especially my reporting officer for her guidance. Happy to forge friendships with colleagues along the way and having an opportunity to build a virtual assistant as a side project, on top of my main scope of design work.
Sharing some of my personal takeaways below.
Serving Citizens At Heart
The public sector focuses on serving the needs of the citizens, looking after their interests and engaging stakeholders. Products and services are built to address real pain points faced by the general public. To play a part in building a product that is impactful to the entire nation means a lot to me, because it is going to value add people’s lives.
Understanding the Big Picture
Understanding the government’s masterplan through the Digital Government Blueprint gives me a bigger picture on how the country will be moving forward and how it will probably impact the public and private sectors.
Design landscape in the public sector is also moving forward, as government continues to build its design system, called blueprint, for the purpose of scaling design in the future. Design system acts as a central space for designers to share resources to provide a common UI language and user experience.
2 Parts to UX
User experience within a screen.
User experience within a feature.
Most of my work revolves around designing a screen or a flow of screens for a feature. In a project, there are Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 and followed by maintenance. When Phase 1 of the project is completed, the product is released to the public. Future features that are going to be implemented in subsequent phases has to follow a particular design style to ensure consistency.
Tough thing is learning how to design in a sustainable way that allows future product features to be added on top of existing design with minimal design changes. As new features are going to be implemented in subsequent releases, I start to think ahead about how to leverage on existing designs and plan designs for new features. Example, things such as entry points to a screen. While planning for upcoming designs, it is important to explore a wide variety of ideas before converging into a few feasible ones.
However, the challenge is when a design system has yet to be fully implemented.
“Designers don’t always use design systems because the primary goal is always to focus on creating value first”, quoted by a designer.
Be Proactive
Don’t just sit in front of the laptop.
You have to talk to people to get the information you need in order to get the work done. Make an effort to catch them, communicate humbly face to face on any doubts that you need to clarify. If you can’t catch them, then it would be wiser to shoot an email or message.
Knowledge-sharing
Designers thrive in a colourful working culture, where knowledge can be easily shared or exchanged. There are internal knowledge sharing session organised by different Chapters — Design Chapter, Dev Chapter and etc. Sometimes, I’ll get a chance to attend either Design or Dev Chapter Sharing as both fall on the same day.
Such sessions are useful in transferring knowledge and keeping up with the trends internally within the design team. Design Chapter Sharing is for all designers working on different projects to share their experience of using different design tools or learning new topics to stay up to date. Sometimes, Design Critique Session is also organised to allow designers share about the good, the bad of a prototype and get immediate feedback.
Amongst designers working on the same project, we have a weekly Design Huddle to give progress updates and explore new things that are useful to improve on design operation.
Overall, it help me learn how designers think — their thought process behind why things should be designed in a particular manner. Also, learning from other designers’ experiences provide some insights about what tools they are using in different teams, why it is used and how they communicate with other stakeholders.
