These pictures were taken by me 10 years ago. They are the stunning views of Hong Kong, a city I feel very attached to. I grew up heavily influenced by its culture, and later I was lucky enough to live there for 15 years. What I love about the city is not just the amazing cityscape, but also the many great designs through my designer eyes.
Continue readingCategory: Design in General
What Do Designers Really Do?
Design is a vaguely defined term, and people tend to have misconceptions about what designers do. When you tell people you’re a designer, especially those outside of tech, chances are they will think that your job is to sit in front of a monitor, pushing pixels and make things look beautiful.
Continue readingMy Top 3 Apps During Social Distancing
When practicing social distancing, we are more likely to feel bored or stressed. I’ve been working from home for almost 2 months, and I found the following 3 apps really useful in helping me stay grounded and healthy. As a designer, from a product design point of view, I think they all have successfully achieved their value propositions.
Continue readingIs It Working? — A Simple Question to Keep in Mind when Critiquing a Design during Interviews
Recently, I was participating in a few designer interviews. After the first round, candidates would be given a design exercise which they would need to complete and present to us remotely in the second round. We would then look at the design, ask them questions and provide feedback during their presentations.
From interviewers’ perspective, understanding a candidate’s design could be challenging. Candidates usually need to go through many screens in a short period of time. Maybe the candidate is not so good at explaining the rationale behind his or her design. Sometimes there could be problems with the connection which lead to poor audio or video. In these circumstances, how can we critique a design effectively and provide the candidate with valuable feedback?
5 Lessons On Reducing Design Frustrations: What I learned in the Past Year as a UX Designer
I am a user experience designer. A lot of my knowledge in UX comes from the human-computer interaction program I did in graduate school. Getting an degree in HCI, of course, cannot teach me everything about how UX design is practiced in the real world. Below are 5 lessons on reducing design frustrations I’d like to share which I learned while working as a designer on the agency side in the past year.