Screenshot taken from the UXSEA Summit 2018 Website

Highlights and Learnings from Day 3 of the UXSEA Summit 2018 held in Singapore

Last November 18–20, I attended the UXSEA Summit 2018 held in the LEVEL3 co-working space in Singapore. The summit had the theme of “Experience Design in New Technologies”, with day 1 being a full day of hands-on workshops, and days 2 and 3 being a series of talks on new trends in UX design. I wrote about what happened in Day 1 here and Day 2 here.

There were a total of 8 sessions in Day 3, each being around 30 minutes to 1 hour long. Here’s a short summary of what happened in each session, and what my main takeaways were. There’s a lot of great insights here, such as how to design better onboarding, how to build more efficient design teams, and what soft skills to improve on. Let’s start with the first talk:

Irina Chiew on Design for Open Banking — Challenges Facing UX Designers

Irina is an Experience Design Lead at ThoughtWorks, a global tech consultancy firm. She talked about the relatively new concept of Open Banking, and the advantages and challenges for designers regarding this new trend. Here’s what I learned:

1. Open Banking is “the use of open APIs that enable third party developers to build applications and services around the financial institution.” APIs, for those not familiar, are application programming interfaces, which allow developers to get data from other apps more easily. Put simply, Open Banking is a movement towards providing a secure way to give trusted providers access to your financial information. This info is normally guarded up by the banks/institutions you go to. With this democratization, you own your financial data, and you can transfer these more easily to other services and apps for your benefit.
2. However, Open Banking isn’t being practiced everywhere yet. It’s mainly being pioneered in Europe and the UK, but Asian countries like Singapore are definitely being more open to it.
3. The future of Open Banking might be unclear for Asia, given the regulatory hurdles and having the big banks transition to this system, but it’s definitely quite exciting. I’ve experienced myself how I’m unable to download my financial data from my bank account here in the Philippines, and how almost no other app can access that data. Imagine how much easier it would be to apply for loans, invest money, or manage your finances if this data were more easily accessible and transferrable.

Paul Sherman on Ethical Design and Best Practices for Onboarding

The next talk was by Paul Sherman, an Assistant Professor for Kent State University’s Master of Science in User Experience Design. He’s also been a UX consultant for 21 years already. He talked to us about the best practices for onboarding users, through showing examples from different apps. However, he then transitioned to talking about “Ethical Design”, a topic I was really interested in. Here’s what I learned:

1. The average app loses 95% of its user base within a few months. So an app’s onboarding, or its experience for first-time users, is so important, because it’s what will determine whether the user would want to keep using the app or not. “The key to success is to get the users hooked during that critical first 3–7 day period.” — a quote by Ankit Jain, which was mentioned in Paul’s talk.
2. “People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.” — This was a quote mentioned by Paul, which was said by Samuel Hulick. Samuel is a user onboarding expert and the creator of UserOnboard, a popular website where he evaluates the onboarding experience of various apps and websites. I’ve seen Samuel’s teardowns before, and they’re a nice way to learn some of the concepts Paul was teaching about in his talk.
3. Paul gave a nice summary of onboarding principles and some tips when designing for onboarding. I’ve placed pictures of his slides for these below. These are from his slides in SlideShare of a similar, previous talk he gave. They’re shown after learning #5 below.
4. As designers, we need to think about how ethical our design process and designs are — we need to make sure our designs create truly positive outcomes for our user. We also need to avoid “Dark Patterns”, wherein even if we create “positive outcomes”, we shouldn’t do so in deceitful ways. Dark patterns are tricks used in websites or apps that make you buy or sign up for things you didn’t mean to. You can find some examples here.
5. There are actually codes of conduct for UX Designers given by a couple of UX organizations, such as by UXPA.org. Some of them are common sense, but maybe they’re worth reiterating to ourselves and to fellow designers, because we should be wary whenever our designs become unethical.

He showed us examples of which patterns work and what don’t, and these are the takeaways of his from those.

A nice summary of principles to remember for onboarding

Katrin Abwerzger on UX Considerations for the Property Sector

Next up was Katrin’s talk. Katrin is the head of UX & Design at PropertyGuru Group, which is Asia’s leading online property company. She talked to us about the UX of “PropTech” (Property Tech), or the new tech and design developments of online property sites. Here’s what I learned:

1. Property and PropTech is a lucrative industry to be in, as shown in the slides above.
2. The most important aspect in designing for PropTech is designing for trust. Given that these are such high-ticket items being sold, it’s important that both buyers and sellers trust each other and that no fraudulent activity happens on either end. The designs have to make each user feel that the platform is to be trustworthy too.
3. To improve the trustworthiness of the platform and help buyers, one thing PropertyGuru did was to use Machine Learning to improve their image moderation. This means that instead of having humans moderate the uploaded images by property agents and developers, they have AI do it instead, resulting in less costs, faster processing, and better image moderation.

Keith Oh on Being Smart vs. Feeling Smart (when interacting with AI)

After lunch, the next talk was by Keith Oh, head of product design at Carousell, the classified ads marketplace popular in Southeast Asia. Keith talked about some concepts related to interacting with AI and bots.

Things I Learned:

1. Keith mentioned the concept of the “Uncanny Valley”, a recurring term in the UXSEA Summit. The uncanny valley is about the unsettling feeling people feel when androids and bots closely resemble humans but are not quite realistic. It’s an interesting concept, and it shows how it might be better to make robots not resemble humans, as we might be more receptive to bots and AI that really seem like bots and not humans.
2. Keith also mentioned how he performed a “Wizard of Oz” experiment before, which was quite fascinating. The Wizard of Oz experiment is a research method in the field of UX Design wherein users interact with a platform or service that they believe is autonomous or automatic, but in truth, there are humans performing the service behind them. This is a great way to test out an “MVP” of your AI or bot. After all, if humans can’t do the service well enough for the user to be pleased, then why would we trust an AI to do it?

Paul Farla on the UX Designer of the Future

After Keith was Paul’s talk on the UX Designer of the Future. Paul is the SVP of Service Design at Siam Commercial Bank, one of the largest banks in Thailand. Here’s what I learned from his talk:

1. It’s so important for designers to assess which skills they need to improve on in order to perform the best for their current company, or for the future companies they plan on working for or on.
2. When thinking of what companies to join or work for, we need to think about the “UX Maturity” of the organization (shown in the screenshot above). Paul showed a similar graphic to the one above, showing what are the different stages of UX maturity in companies. These will help you see what are the “problems” in the organization when it comes to integrating UX, and these might affect what skills you need to learn to advance the practice of UX within the organization you are part of or you are joining.
3. Soft skills are important, especially when working in large companies, or when the company gives more power to design teams. This is because soft skills allow designers to communicate their findings better, get more buy-in from stakeholders, and persuade the company to move in a direction that benefits both businesses and users.
4. I was able to talk to Paul after his talk, and I asked him for some career advice for me. He mentioned about how it might be better for fresh grads like me to work at creative agencies first, to learn UI or UX design, as I can be exposed to more projects and get better at my craft. Then, I could try out working for startups or big corporations after, because there’s much to learn professionally in each of those settings. After the Summit, I started to see why working at an agency might be more valuable than I thought. This is partly why I accepted a remote apprenticeship to join a UX design agency in Malaysia a few weeks after the event.

Benjamin Bowes on You’re Not Listening! — Soft Skills

After Paul was Ben Bowes, who gave a workshop on the 1st day of the Summit. This time, he was giving a talk on the importance of listening. Here’s what I learned:

1. Communication is incredibly important, as we spend 70–80% of our waking hours communicating with others or being communicated to, whether it’s reading, writing, listening, or speaking. Apparently, the largest chunk on average is listening. So listening is incredibly important.
2. Ben mentioned the concept of “Active Listening”. Active listening is about a person fully concentrating, understanding, responding and remembering what is being said to him/her. It’s about making a conscious effort to understand the complete message, rather than just hearing passively. Ben also mentioned the concept of Reflective Listening, which is similar to active listening and worth reading up on.
3. Ben gave a list of bad listening habits, shown in the image below. It’s important for us to rid ourselves of some of these habits and catch ourselves whenever we do them. Ultimately, we need to be more present and thoughtful when listening.

Yoel Sumitro on Overcoming Challenges in Building an Effective Product Design Team

After Ben’s talk was Yoel’s talk, which was probably my favorite of the day. Yoel is the VP of Product Design at Bukalapak, the largest e-commerce marketplace in Indonesia. He shared to us the challenges he and Bukalapak overcame, and the best practices for how he helped lead and scale their design team. He also shared a lot of funny stories and said “Shit” too many times.

Things I Learned:

1. “If people don’t see a future at your company, they will find it somewhere else.” — This was a quote mentioned by Yoel, and it’s one reason why Bukalapak prioritized creating a “career ladder” in their company. This is something a lot of startups miss or don’t make transparent — about how the employees in them can rise the ranks and get promoted in the company. I was surprised to hear that Bukalapak has a detailed document for how designers can rise the ranks in the company.
2. It’s important to hire for diversity. Yoel mentioned how one of their designers started working for them when he was only 18 and without a college degree, and yet he’s been a good designer for Bukalapak.
3. DesignOps and ResearchOps are important for large design teams. 2018 has been a year where the term DesignOps has been thrown around a lot, and InVision defines it this way: “DesignOps is the key to scaling digital product design teams with more efficiency. As companies mature and invest in design, they need to operationalize workflow, hiring, alignment between teams, and more so designers can focus on design work while someone else takes care of the rest.” So basically, DesignOps is a team or department that handles various operations of a design team to make them more efficient. Yoel also mentioned how they have ResearchOps, which is similar to DesignOps, but they help the researchers be more efficient instead of the designers.
4. What is the culture of your company as a whole and your design team, and how would you like it to be? This was something Yoel asked us and discussed to us about. He talked about how some companies are very business-centric with their culture, such as Amazon, while others are more design-centric, like Airbnb. Pictures of his slides on this are below. Ultimately, I believe companies these days need a mix of both cultures in order to keep designers happy while being able to hit business goals.

Upasna Bhandari on Fintech and UX Research: How to Start a Research Culture in an Agile/Scrum Style Product Team

The last talk for the whole summit was by Upasna Bhandari, a Researcher from MoneySmart and one of the organizers of the UXSEA Summit. She talked about how to start a research culture in product teams, and even gave an overview of how to do it within 90 days.

Things I Learned:

1. Be patient — start by asking your co-employees about what questions they have regarding their users.
2. Find UX tenets for your whole product team to believe in. Most product teams do want to be user-centric and research-focused, and it’s more of just making sure they uphold and abide by these tenets/values.
3. Create toolkits and frameworks that best work for your team and company, for design, testing, research, and QA. This means refining the documents, design methods, and processes for each of those aspects in order to make these repeatable and successful. So that whatever the business or research problem thrown to you, you’ll know which tool (i.e. empathy maps, focus group discussions, moderated usability testing) to use, and how to best do it based on your previous experiences.
4. Get people excited about user research! Other people may find it boring, so it’s important to find ways to encourage employees to participate or find value in it. Upasna shared about how they have a hall of fame with pictures of their employees at MoneySmart, and they get a sticker every time they participated in a research activity.

All in all, I certainly learned a lot from the 3 days of UXSEA Summit. I think UX conferences are a great way to stay updated on the trends in the field and hear best practices of doing design and research from other designers and design leaders. However, conferences only give you an overview of things to do, and it’s up to you to execute these for yourself or for your team.

So from the tips and advice above, it’s up to you to list down what specific action points you want to take. For me, I took down all the resources shared during the conference, and have already started reading some of them.

I also plan on reflecting and analyzing which design and research skills of mine do I need to focus on improving, and how to best improve them. Lastly, these tips and advice above are best learned and practiced while building actual design projects, so I hope to incorporate these in my future designs and projects.

I hope you’ll figure out what action points to give for yourself too. And I encourage you to attend UX conferences and meetups near your area too. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot and have fun meeting new people.

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Brian Tan is a UI/UX designer and writer from Manila. View his portfolio at briantan.xyz and other articles he’s written at blog.briantan.xyz. Follow him on Medium to stay updated on his articles.