Design Picnic Podcast Episode 3: The Importance of Storytelling

Published in

UX Planet

8 min readJun 15, 2019

Earlier in January, I was invited by Mind Apivessa and Marisa Chentakul to be a guest on their upcoming design podcast — Design Picnic. This is my first time being on a podcast, and I was very honored take part in this initiative.

Mind Apivessa and Marisa Chentakul co-host the Design Picnic podcast

Design Picnic is a podcast series on UX / Product design, featuring Thai designers across various industries from around the globe, to provide high-quality resources for the aspiring designers in Thailand.

[Thai] Design Picnic Episode 3: Vichita Jienjitlert and the Importance of Storytelling

This episode features Vi (Vichita Jienjitlert) — A UX designer who believes that storytelling and communication is an important skill in this field. She shares stories not just to practice her own story-telling skills, but also to inspire the next generation of designers.

Marisa: Hello Vi

Vi: Hi!

Mind: I heard you’re currently working at Cloudistics right?

Vi: Yes, I’m currently working as an interaction designer at a start-up called Cloudistics. Our product is a hardware stack for implementing a private cloud infrastructure and a web application that allows our users to manage resources to run virtual machines.

Marisa: What’s the important thing in designing for cloud services?

Vi: For me, the most important thing is to try our best to understand our own product — which often times comes with a very high technical complexity. How do we make our product as simple as possible? What do our users need or not need to know? How do we ensure a smooth product experience? These are the kind of work that we do.

Mind: There is so much technicality in the cloud services industry. Do you have any suggestions for those interested in working in this industry?

Vi: Coming in as a designer, you need to have a basic understanding of the technical things that drives your product. It’s also important to understand that due to the complexity, you can’t possibly understand everything in detail. However, you need to know who to ask to get answers to those questions.

If I have a question on the storage of our product, I need to know what to ask and who to talk to in order to understand the technical constraints or edge cases. We need to talk to others constantly — especially with the engineers.

Marisa: I see. If we need to design something we really need to understand it in depth.

Vi: Yes, definitely. For me it’s more of a ‘learn as you go’. During the on-boarding, I only have a high level understanding of the product. But as I work on various tickets, I started learning more and more about our product.

Marisa: Do you mean customer service tickets? The ones where users complain about issues and we figure out how we solve those problems?

Vi: Yes, that’s one way the tickets can come in. Tickets can come from the customers, from our own internal team finding bugs, or from the product vision of the c-level executives.

Mind: As a designer, do you need to prioritize tickets?

Vi: On the team we have a UX Lead who’s the first person to receive the ticket. She’s the one who would delegate tickets to others in the design team and will let us know if any tickets should be prioritized. On the team we have 3 interaction designers, 1 visual designer, and 1 UX engineer.

Mind: Can you explain the different responsibilities of the visual designer, the interaction designer, and the UX engineer?

Vi: Sure! Keep in mind that the roles can be very different for each company. At my company, interaction designers are mainly responsible for maintaining the wireframes, flows, and information architecture. The visual designer works on the UI library and maintains our design system. The UX engineer works mostly on the front-end development when we want to prototype complex interactions. For example, the visual designer and the UX engineer will work together to prototype a fluid or responsive layout and see what would work best for our product.

Mind: Do you have any tips for sending work to other designers?

Vi: As a general workflow, we send our designs directly to the engineering team through documentations on Confluence. But before we can send those designs we will iterate within our own UX team until we come to a stopping point. If there are any questions from the engineering team, we’ll work on it together to clarify, iterate, or add the needed details.

Marisa: Going slightly off topic, we found your articles on Medium about UX design and surviving a UX conference. Do you write regularly?

Vi: I usually write about side projects or projects that I did in school. At first I wanted to write about the content of the talks, but by the end of the conference I was overloaded with information and couldn’t take down all the notes. So instead, I decided to write something to help others know what a UX conference is like and what to expect out of it.

Mind: What inspired you to start blogging?

Vi: I started by reading other people’s articles, but sometimes I wanted to read about a topic that no one has written about. When I became interested in doing a Masters in UX design, I had no idea where to start. There’s a quote I really like which says “Be who you needed when you were younger.” When I graduated, I decided to share my journey so that it can be helpful for others who might be interested in doing the same thing.

Marisa: Writing blogs and articles can take so much time. With a full-time job, most people might not have the spare time. Do you have any tips for time management?

Vi: I’ve been a pretty active and busy person my whole life. It’s very important to prioritize your tasks, set up deadlines, and finish each task one at a time. If there’s a conference coming up, I’ll tell myself to finish all my pending drafts before attending otherwise I won’t be able to catch up!

Mind: Are there any tools that you use for time management?

Vi: Sometimes I would use Trello for setting up tasks and scheduling deadlines. I find the alert feature helpful.

Mind: Do you think writing blogs has helped you become a better designer?

Vi: For me, blogging allowed me to practice my storytelling and communication — which I believe are extremely important skills for UX designers. When I was in school, I had a classmate who presented projects using stories with clear reasoning and process which made me trust in her work.

My English isn’t bad, but in order to present well there has to be something more than that. I need to be able to tell stories.

Vi: When I write my case studies, I try to set the context so that my readers would understand what I’m trying to convey. This also depends on who your audience are. If you want to sell a new feature to stakeholders, you might want to focus on the return on investment. When talking to developers, they might be interested in understanding the technical limitations. This is something that I’m trying to improve on a daily basis.

Mind: This is really important. We need to think about who our audience would be. In order to gain feedback, we need to make our presentations relevant to them.

Vi: Yes, that is very true.

Marisa: Where and what did you studied for your Masters?

Vi: I studied Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at the University of Maryland, College Park . My program was under the Information School, however it could also be offered be under Design, Psychology, or a joint program between many schools. This is because UX requires knowledge from many different aspects. It makes it even more fun to work with people from different backgrounds.

Marisa: Yes, that’s the charm of UX design. People come from all kinds of departments and specialties which makes this field very diverse. Teammates with different backgrounds bring in unique perspectives to make the product even more inclusive and usable for everyone.

Mind: Before coming for your Masters in HCI, what did you do for your Bachelor’s?

Vi: I did Computer Science at Mahidol University for my undergraduate. After graduation, I joined a consultancy where I had the opportunity to do many different things — from being a Business Analyst, to designing visualizations, and implementing dashboards. That’s when I realize that I like designing and that I enjoy working with people to create something together. This is why I decided to pursue UX.

Marisa: Lastly, do you have any tips for our listeners who are interested in UX or want to work with people in this field?

Vi: I think we need to always be self-motivated and curious. There’s always something for us to learn — like new trends, new tools. Don’t be afraid to try out new things and learn one step at a time.

You don’t have to do a lot everyday but you have to do something — something everyday.

Vi: After work, I like dedicating a little bit of time for self-improvement — whether it’d be reading books, writing blogs, or doing side projects. Each week, you can accumulate like 5–6 hours to develop yourself. I believe this is going to be valuable no matter which stage you are in life.

Sometimes when I come back to read my older articles, I realized I’ve come quite a long way from when I started. My writing has gotten a bit better, a few more people have followed me —

Mind: Your blog is really good!

Marisa: Yes! I got very excited when I found a UX writer who’s Thai.

Vi: Glad to hear that. Our Thai surnames are very recognizable!

Marisa: You’re famous among the Thai UX community now.

Vi: [Laughs] No no, not yet, I still need to keep practicing! When I started I didn’t think anyone would read my blog at all, so I really appreciate the support!

Marisa: Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Vi: Thanks for having me :D