What have I learned from working in the tech industry for the past five years? (Part 1)
Having an INFJ personality and working as a Product Designer, I really value the time I spend learning from people in the field and my job. The majority of my time is spent observing, listening, and thinking. I’m fascinated by why things work a certain way and why do humans behave the way they do.
2016 — Journey as a Frontend Developer / UX Designer
In 2016, I started working at a B2B startup as a Frontend Developer. I was interviewed by the CEO and I enjoyed the time discussing about my role with him. Those were the days when he went through my university transcript and said I had good language skills. I took a Japanese language as my minor subject by the way. Regardless of the fact that my programing skills are average, I don’t just stop there. I have a different approach to learning and understanding things when it comes to programming, because I am more flexible in how I see and solve problems in comparison to my academic studies. In addition, the way the lecturer taught influencing my learning process. I feel I work best in a small group and with one professor at a time.
Studying Human-Computer Interaction is something I am very enthusiastic about. What interests me about web development is how people respond to products and feel the experience as they interact with them. In our HCI course at the time, we were assigned a final project that involved creating an interaction to guide someone with a visual impairment inside a store. The final project was created using the Alice tool. Alice is an innovative block-based programming environment that makes it easy to create animations, build interactive narratives, or program simple games in 3D.
On top of that, I wrote a Bachelor thesis about usability. My task involved learning the programming side completely from scratch using self-teaching methods. Thanks to my classmates, I was able to learn about CodeIgniter framework. The situation was challenging at the time because I had to meet a deadline and we were required to use LaTex for writing documentation. My document had to be coded in LaTex before I could export it to PDF format.
As I recall, my first day of work was spent learning and practicing Bootstrap, setting up Laravel and Laragon, and writing commands on Terminal. I also created some Javascripts for various projects. Do you know what? Javascript is a very tricky language for me but it is powerful in terms of performance. We can build interactive web pages by using frontend development frameworks. Therefore, I was very pleased with my code when it ran successfully and the interaction worked. Additionally, the enthralling work was creating masonry without Javascript and using only CSS.
Moreover, if I got stuck on code, I would ask my coworkers or look it up on StackOverflow. They were very supportive and patient. I also remembered that the Chief Financial Officer encouraged me to do my best whenever I was given a challenging task. The CEO taught me how to arrange a <div> so it wouldn’t be messed up every time I added elements. Aside from being an excellent programmer, he is also a great visionary. I never knew he was an INFJ as well. However, his ability to bring his vision to life is better than mine.
During that period, I said to my CEO I wanted to be a UI/UX Designer rather than a Frontend Developer. I could therefore fulfill my curiosity about human behavior and user experience. Surprisingly, the CEO and CTO supported my decision to become a UI/UX Designer. I started learning from Udemy and attended an event from UX community sponsored by Dribbble. As soon as I was assigned a task to create user interfaces based on user experience, I was very excited. I also conducted the first user interview.
During my time with this company, I developed many valuable skills that helped me become a designer. As a result, I am able to communicate the feasibility of a feature with engineers and put myself in their shoes. The ability to analyze problems from a broader perspective and think through design alternatives. On top of that, I am able to set more realistic approach for designing a user interface. Having this knowledge allows me to identify what can be achieved easily and what will require more effort. Another thing I learned from the CEO was the concept of Waterfall and Agile.
2017 — Journey as a Junior UI/UX Designer
Next, I joined a new firm in 2017 whose core business involves delivering innovative technology solutions to local government in order to improve transparency. In addition, this company offers an Android-based cashier machine that is effective, cost-efficient, and user-friendly. In order to provide users with easier access to bookkeeping, this product aims to bring inclusivity to Point of Sales. In the Research and Development department, I worked as a Junior UI/UX Designer. It was my duty to handle the point of sale project. My new co-workers were introduced to me. We have two teams in different cities, and the majority of our team members in my city are male engineers. I was the sole designer on the team back then. During the employee onboarding through Skype, I was introduced to other designers who live in a different city. They already worked on the design for this point of sale project. My first day at the company was spent learning about the existing systems and user flows.
At the beginning of the project, my design focus was primarily on the tablet version and sales dashboard on the desktop version. Since my company provided a Windows laptop at that time, I had to design everything in Photoshop (Yes, you read it right! 😅). My first experience designing a user interface in Photoshop was unforgettable. The file size increased as I added more component and became sluggish. In addition, I had to send the file to my co-workers so they could convert it from Photoshop to Sketch. They were fortunate to have Sketch on their MacBook. Nowadays, I utilize Figma as it is more scalable and lightweight. Personally, I do not recommend Photoshop for designing user interface as the application will be sluggish. In my case, I only use Photoshop to edit photographs. I also would recommend Illustrator if you are working with logo because it is vector-based while Photoshop is raster-based.
As soon as the company provided a MacBook, I was able to start working with Sketch. Sketch is something I learned by myself, mostly by watching tutorials on YouTube. I became familiar with the panel and Boolean operations (union, subtract, intersect, and difference). I added a plugin called Zeplin to Sketch, so my files can be synchronized and updated on the project space created by my peers. Even though Zeplin was not real-time, we were still able to collaborate, which amazed me at the time.
My team and I also worked together on the side projects. Our Lead Software Engineer presented to us his idea for a self-service application. We brainstormed the idea and I sketched on a paper. It was my responsibility to create a logo and choose a name for it. That was challenging for me since I hadn’t done much logo design before. According to my understanding, I needed to consider all aspects and philosophy of a logo that would suit the application’s mission and vision.
I thought I would need an experienced mentor in guiding me in user interface and user experience design comprehensively. Through a personal initiative, I asked Paula Borowska to be my mentor. I found her from an article that I read about user experience and user interface design. Previously, I participated in her pre-launched of Mobile Design Book. I sent her an email asking whether she would be interested in reviewing my design. She then responded to my e-mail with positive feedback 😊
I was happy and full of motivation because of her enthusiasm as well. The email advised me to first read Google’s Material Design guideline and Apple’s Human Interface guideline. Therefore, if you wish to gain a deeper understanding of the design of mobile screens, I recommend reading both of these guidelines. While I was working on my mobile application and designing the onboarding process, she recommended me reading UserOnboard. I was advised to make sure my onboarding design explains the value propositions of the application since creating the right onboarding is critical to increasing the chances of new users adopting a product.
I greatly appreciated her help in understanding the essentials of user experience and user interface design. Furthermore, I joined Uplabs with the aim of improving my user interface design skills. My Product Owner advised me to also consider the business aspect when I was designing. While he acknowledged that I had too much creativity, he encouraged me not to ignore the business aspect, since the design ought to be in line with the business. The feedback he provided was valuable because it has helped me to put design thinking into practice and improved my user interface design. During that time, I worked on a big project to create an interface design for the online hotel content management system. It was the second task after Point of Sale. Gradually, I began learning how business needs correlated with user needs.
The majority of time, I enjoyed talking about the technology (coding as well, out of curiosity!)and design with my co-workers, most of whom were engineers. They were great engineers!(Besides, a member of our Backend team won the International DotA 2 Championship in 2017). His trophy box was hung on the wall, and frankly, I admired it 😄
On one occasion, I asked him about the purpose of a Session in Tic Tac Toe. In response to my question, he explained me that we needed a Session to store data on a browser. If player A selects or clicks on a box on the game board using the web browser, the selected box will have the symbol of player A in it. Player A’s action on the web browser is handled by Javascript. Javascript performs background processing. Initially, the board is blank. If a box is selected, it contains the symbol of the player selector. Moreover, Javascript refreshes the game in order to show the opponent’s actions.
In addition, on another occasion when I explained the CRUD design to the Frontend Engineer, he told me that the user flow for a user to access the edit menu contained many steps. During our feedback session, he mentioned that it would be better if the user didn’t have to click three steps before reaching the menu. As a matter of fact, discussing my designs with engineers brings me new perspectives in which to improve my design.
As I sat next to the Senior Android Engineer, we talked about a variety of topics, including side projects, gaming, design updates, and motivational videos. There was a time when we discussed differences between Android ConstraintLayout and iOS AutoLayout. I brought up this issue when I observed him working on layout structure in Android Studio. In short, I became interested in Swift language after seeing how the iOS engineer implemented the design. It looked great on the device! Out of curiosity, I decided to learn Swift in 2019. I think it would be nice to be able to implement my design on iOS devices.
In the next instance, I saw an interactive visualization of a graph created by the Lead Software Engineer. I asked him what software he used to create the interactive graph. In response, he told me he used Elasticsearch and Kibana. Moreover, he showed me the process. The process of generating data by using Elasticsearch until it was presented in Kibana was impressive. My personal opinion is that the dashboard and the visualization are intuitively designed.
Apart from my design knowledge, it was enlightening to know about the software they used 💡
In the next part, I’ll continue writing about my experience working as a designer in the tech industry. The knowledge I have learned from the people I worked with has positively impacted my personal development, so I cannot thank them enough for what they have taught me. 🌻
Thank you for reading!
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