As of this writing, I have been with SMU for about a year & 2 months. Even though my superiors gave me really positive feedback and high remarks during the performance evaluation, I feel like I had disappointed them in some way.
They kept on mentioning that I was good for someone who just joined the company, or I was good for someone who had very little experience. Not that I was good, period. Since I joined the company, I have this constant feeling of not being able to live up to expectations (both mine & theirs), of being insanely under-qualified for my daily work, and of being out of place in the IT department (as a designer with no programming background, I actually am).
Here are some of the areas/projects in which I feel like I should have done better:
UX Website
(See live site)
This project is part of a bigger committee that aimed to review the UX of all IITS-related projects. One of the deliverables is a UX site that can provide knowledge to all staff before starting a project.
- Scoring. The committee had an idea to create checklists to evaluate if an interface passes the standards. The main problem is how to score this? How is one standard higher in points than the other? I suggested to measure it against the user experience hierarchy of needs. In spite of this, we still struggled to group the guidelines accordingly. In the end, I believe the checklists have not been used at all.
- Hierarchy & card sorting. To get some insight on how to group the guidelines properly, I also conducted a card sorting amongst the committee members. It went fairly well, although it felt like the insights/value gained from the exercise is not enough to justify the effort and time required. I did get a chance to do another card-sorting for another project.
- Visual design. Aside from re-writing some of the guidelines, I was also tasked to create visuals to complement it. Looking back, the visuals that I created weren’t completely bad, but I know I could do better.
- Web design. I could say the same re: the visual design of the whole site – not bad, but could be better. We also had some trouble figuring out how to navigate the pages. I initially planned for next & previous buttons, but should they be for categories only or should they include guidelines? Now it is not evident that some guidelines can be clicked to reveal more. Additionally, when clicking a guideline, there’s no clear way to go back to the parent category (example).
- Presenting in front of the whole department. No more than 3 months in and I still had the guts to speak about this project to the whole department. I won’t claim that I really had great presentation skills, but isn’t that one of the desirable traits of a designer?
- Evaluating user interfaces. Another deliverable of the committee is a review of the 1 app from each team under the IT department. I never got around to doing this, and I hope to continue with this, and finish everything before this year ends.
Lessons learned:
- Virtual card-sorting > Post-it notes and papers.
- Better to fail fast than spend time perfecting a product, only to realize that no one will use it anyway.
- It would have been more fruitful to test navigation patterns as well (side nav vs. top nav with dropdown)
- If testing with few users (0-20), do not bother to record timings & other quantitative data, as the margin of error will be very high. It is better to record observations, quotes, incidents (for example, User A hesitated to click button B), etc.
- Videos/great visuals would probably have made my presentation much more engaging.
Challenges for the UX Site 2018:
- How to continue the apps evaluation & publish it in the site?
- How to promote knowledge of user experience & how to promote the site itself (quarterly newsletters?)?
- How to integrate the new web guidelines to the UX site?
- How to encourage use of the checklists?
Alumni Mobile App
(Learn more)
The alumni mobile app isn’t exactly an app in itself. It’s integrated within the SMU mobile app, which is also not a native iOS app, but built using the kurogo platform. This posed some limitations that I was initially not aware of.
- Visual design of the home screen. After an initial project kick-off meeting, I immediately began sketching the home screen based on the things that they wanted to see. As I would come to realize throughout the year, thou shalt not take the requirements list at face value. What the users think they need are different from what they actually need.
If I had put my pencil down then, and asked a few more questions, there is a better possibility that we would get to the actual goal, but because I was eager to show off my design chops, I ended up with so many wasted studies. We then took more time than necessary focusing on little details like the colors of the icons. - Home screen redesign. In the end, we had to re-do the home screen because the main purpose of the app became clear: it is not to show ALL of the features, but to showcase the alumni benefits and the new alumni virtual card. I’m quite happy with how the new home screen turned out, although there are still a few things that could have been improved.
- Navigating inner pages. One of the limitations of the kurogo platform is that most of the features in its app are all going to be opened just their own browser. This is not good for features that require a few level of pages, because the back button will not work as expected. The alumni benefits is a good example of this. We reduced the steps required by bringing the categories upfront and adding a ‘Back to Listing’ button in the actual benefit page. Admittedly, this can also be improved, but as we were rushing towards an upcoming alumni event to launch the app, we had to make do with this solution.
- Launch. Speaking of the alumni event launch, I joined the alumni event/launch to get feedback from the first users of the app. This is how we realized one of the main challenges in adaptation: the users need to remember their SMU email & password in order to use the app. The process of resetting their password proved to be too much of a hassle that people never bothered to install the app. After all, they didn’t attend the event to install some app, they were there to network and discuss business.
- On-boarding. The alumni dept. also thought it was a good idea to add a few on-boarding screens, which means they didn’t think that the home screen was intuitive enough.
- Lessons learned:
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- What the users think they need are different from what they actually need.
- Do not be afraid to ask questions. See if there are any limitations with the technologies that will be used & what success for the business looks like, else there will be a lot of wasted work.
- What can work for graphic design, might not always work for app design. (Timestamp overlay)
- When testing, make sure that the prototype is as real as it can get (for example, we would’ve never thought to test the prototype by starting on the login screen).
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- Challenges for 2018: I don’t think we will be visiting this project again this year. Maybe if I play my cards right, finish all my goals as early as possible, I can revisit all the sites here and improve each. That would be the most satisfying thing. If I could, I would set up tracking to see how many actually redeems the benefits, and measure if any of the improvements increase the engagement/conversion.
CMP Commerce Site
(See live site)
The Centre for Management Practice site used to simply be a landing page for users to go to other sites (Perspectives, Asian Management Insights, and Asian Management Briefs). The revamp not only showed a facelift, but a transformation into an e-commerce site.
- Latest & featured articles: Since the new website will be more than just a webpage. An added functionality would the integration of all the latest articles & cases from all the sites under CMP. In theory, showing the top 5 latest articles is a good idea, except the way they publish articles is all in one go, once a month. This results to all the latest articles having the same date. If I can do it all over again, I can probably make it so that it just says “Latest Articles from March 2018” or something along these lines.
(To be continued…)
in which I write about UI/UX 
