Becoming a better designer
The 7-year journey of my design career thus far
4 months into my new job at Amazon as a UX designer, I somehow feel a bit lost and uncertain. Part of it is because I’m still adjusting to large corporate settings after working in the startup space for most of my career. So I decided to take some time to reflect on my journey thus far to collect my thoughts and clear my mind. Here are some of the struggles I once faced or am currently facing. I’ll try to describe some of the ways that I’ve been working through them to become a better designer, and I hope others can find some insight from my experience.
1. How to execute the concepts in my head effectively
Everything is hard when you are a beginner. This couldn’t have been more true than when I was trying to transition from a marketing job to UI design. I was not completely green since I spent 3 years in tech on the marketing side, and I was good friends with one of the designers back then and learned Photoshop and Illustrator from her. But I had never designed an icon before, let alone a full page UI. I struggled a lot when I was preparing my first portfolio to apply for a design college. I had high hopes for myself to complete 3 projects including a cupcake shop website, an iOS app, and a fashion eCommerce site. I also made a common rookie mistake — I couldn’t wait to start doing the visual design with elaborate and stunning UI’s. But the reality was that I wasn’t ready. I had ideas that I could imagine and feel, but the ability to translate those things from my imagination onto the screen eluded me. I remembered I spent a whole night trying to translate a paper sketch to a full-page UI in Photoshop, but it was still a half-finished page after 3 hours and I was caught up on tweaking the minor spacing and font sizes back and forth. Another time I was trying to flesh out the product details page UI for the fashion eCommerce site even though I didn’t even have the content figured out yet. My design friend eventually helped out with my first portfolio.
How I gradually became better at UI design
Looking back, I realize that I’d lacked important knowledge such as interaction patterns and basic graphic design fundamentals. I also had no idea what visual hierarchy was. I just wanted that same slick style I found on Behance or Dribble on my design. I also didn’t think of designs in terms of systems back then, so oftentimes, there were flashy elements here and there on one page, everything had the same level of intensity and was about the same size and had the same level of impact.
I experienced the same struggle when I was in my web design course. Here are some of the old designs I had(as seen below). In addition to all the issues I mentioned above, I somehow wanted to chase “originality” badly and wanted to have some kind of distinct illustrations for almost all of my projects, as I thought that would make my portfolio stand out. Oh, I also didn’t know about web accessibility at all.
I was extraordinarily grateful for my teachers’ help and patience with me. I gradually began to recognize the hierarchy of the information in other people’s designs and how I could learn from it and stopped trying to cram every trendy visual style into my UI design. I felt proud of what my independent project ended up with(as seen below).
It took me another 2 years of learning on the job and reading as much as I could on classic design books to get to the point where I wouldn’t feel panicked or anxious when I was responsible for all of the UI work of a project. To learn more about how to train yourself to have an eye for aesthetics, check out this article.
What beauty brings to function is the hierarchy, what's related to each other, and how things are related.
On a related note, although it is important to show your thought process and planning skills in your case studies as a designer, it would be insufficient to focus solely on these aspects during the interview process. The final design should never be ignored. In fact, it’s essential to review the final product in order to see how effectively the broader concepts translated and/or contributed to the resulting execution.
2. How to get out of my head and start expressing myself
One of the most invaluable things I learned from my first full-time design job was to be willing to express myself and be as clear as possible in front of a group of people.
In the beginning, I was often overly quiet at work, overthinking everything and coming out with irrational anxiety, either at work events or in meetings. I especially struggled a lot when I was expected to participate and give feedback during team product reviews in my first job. We had weekly Friday product reviews where designers presented their work-in-process projects and asked for feedback, other teams in the company were also welcomed to join such as the product team, strategy team. Sometimes the CEO joined us too. This used to be the one meeting that I always dreaded. During the few times that I talked, my heart was pounding, my face was red, thousands of things running through my head — inner conflicts, fear of being judged, etc, even when I was just asking a simple question about someone else’s presentation. And after I finished talking, I just wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear.
How I gradually overcame my speaking anxiety in meetings and presentations
Everyone knows that designers must be good communicators, but it was something I really struggled with. I started to look for help and asked my manager for advice and told him during our 1 on 1 that my personal goal was to overcome my fear of speaking and become a better communicator. He told me to not feel pressured to have the perfect answer. In presentation or meeting situations, proper preparation would get me started on the right foot. I also realized that social situations are another beast. But again, perfection is the enemy of good here. I just needed to start somewhere and keep the flow going. Trying to be witty or smart with every remark I say makes it exhausting and unnatural. So I started small with daily standups and listed down important information in bullet points before meetings. Gradually I got comfortable with expressing my thoughts in words at design reviews, presentations, and negotiating with clients.
Later on, I joined another startup where there were only 4 designers. 3 of us were embedded in different product teams working closely with cross-functional partners. Meanwhile, I also initiated an effort to consolidate our design system. This to me meant that I had to talk to people and get buy-in from them much more often than I did at my first job. This also means I had to further advance my communication skills so I could be more concise and on point. It’s definitely no easy task for me and I’m still improving it 3 years later. The key I think it’s to develop a sense of what is and isn’t important to say. Better to have a solid focus and have people ask me questions than to bog people down with details that may or may not be useful. My goal is that through conversational practice and trial and error, I will continue to find better combinations of words through which to express myself.
I also pick up some tricks along the way. For example, I like to observe how experienced people talk. It’s useful to listen to how other people phrase questions or how good storytellers unfold their stories. I’ve also learned to take some time to formulate my thoughts before talking.
Just keep practicing on talking. If you said something stupid or fumbled, make it right and/or do better next time.
In this Zoom call era, I noticed I’m subconsciously paying attention to my own video instead of what I’m doing which wouldn’t happen in a normal meeting. This is extra work on my brain and can be exhausting. So I always try to hide my self-view. My meetings have been much better since I stopped looking at myself all the time.
As time goes on, these things that are really hard now are just going to become second nature.
3. How to thrive in my transition from startup to big corporate
When I quit my last job and joined Amazon, I didn’t quite know how to navigate a complex organizational structure that requires political and communication savvy. For starters, part of my onboarding plan was to talk to 18 teammates (18 video calls) within the first month or two to get to know their roles and responsibilities and where I fit into them, including designers, researchers, product managers, program managers, and engineers. In comparison, there were only 11 people in total when I joined the first start-up I ever worked at. In all my previous jobs, whenever I encountered a problem or had a question about some legacy products, I could easily find the right person or the right team to talk to and figure it out, but it’s definitely not the case in Amazon, especially when I’m still new here. One time, I had to ask 3 different people to find out who should I reach out to about an obvious typo in the header.
How I gradually find small ways to see results
The pace of my organization at Amazon goes much slower and I have a hard time adjusting to it. Especially at the beginning, I was looking forward to proving myself by taking on projects shortly after I joined, just like I did in all my previous jobs. I was in a big client meeting the first day when I joined the design agency 5 years ago.
Having not much to do at work for an extended period of time can drive me nuts. A few things have kept me going. One of them is to turn off my desire to prove myself to others and focus on learning and adding values in small ways. For example, sharing my ideas and feedback during team design reviews, or weighing in on decisions in meetings, or simply talking to people and seeing if there is anything I could help with. And of course, I made sure that any tasks or projects your manager requests from you are high-quality and on-time, even it was a logo design for another team or conducting a heuristic review for another project before its initial release. I do miss the days when I was heavily focused on actually designing. However, the saying “have fun while it lasts” does seem wise. So I tell myself every morning just to “start from what I have on my plate every day”.
Just because there isn’t a lot of work doesn’t mean that you should wait to be activated.
Tiffany Eaton, How to Have Impact When You’re a Junior at a Big Company
I’ve also used some downtime to continue improving my communication skills. Every new hire is paired with an onboarding buddy who will check in weekly for about one month. I felt that it was actually a great way to connect outside of meetings, so I extended my check-ins with my “buddy” for another 2 months. And then I proposed to have a biweekly meeting that includes the other designer on the team, to check how each other’s doing. I found it’s valuable especially when everyone is remote.
No matter how small a project is, try to be involved and included in the higher level processes of defining project requirements and planning next steps.
People say that you are just a cog in the machine when you are working in a huge organization. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to demonstrate my impact in it. It’s much harder to do so when I’m a smaller fish in a much larger pond. What I’m doing currently is to be proactive and try to identify opportunities for us to either learn more about our users or initiatives that align with our long-term product vision. To be honest, I have no idea whether or not those ideas will come to fruition or even if they are good ideas when I talked to my manager. I just thought to put myself out there and develop relationships. It never hurts to get feedback on ideas.
I also challenge myself to become a better facilitator as most of my recent work involves consulting multiple teams or organizations. Sometimes questions come up that no single person or team can confidently answer. For example, when trying to improve a filter panel, we were looking at a less-used filter category and wondering do we need it? That depends on the team who initially added it on the website. What options should go into that filter category? Well, that involves another team. These kinds of decisions rarely move forward (at least not in the right direction) until the right people put their little pieces of the map together to find the way. Someone needs to facilitate that discussion. As designers, it’s natural for us to facilitate conversations using some visual aids, that’s why I decide to own those discussions and use simple sketches and diagrams to help people think through ideas.
I think I’m still early in the process, and I’m still learning where I fit in such a large company. It may sound cliche but I do trust and often remind myself what the great Greek philosopher Aristotle’s said:
Everything happening to you today has a purpose because it turns you into the person you are becoming.
