#113 Making a difference as a designer w/Rachel Wu
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I never take a problem statement at face value. Hours of conversations with people working in the industry. So it gave me like a new perspective on the problem from the seeding the problem and then giving more meat to the bones to the problem. From there, it's a matter of, okay, piping it through that double diamond that we're already familiar with. That's kind of like the behind the scenes of this pitch. Sense of urgency, this injunction to be more strategic and then seeding ideas from product and from customers.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa and today I'm not joined by Ioana and instead we have a guest whose name is Rachel Wu. Rachel Wu is from Singapore. She's an amazing designer that I have been lucky to work with for the last, well, honestly, only half a year, but it feels like we've been working for a

long, long while now. And the reason why I wanted to invite my colleague and to talk about the new topic is because I feel like Rachel is actually very good and very efficient and making a difference as a designer in the company that she operates with. The topic of today's episode is how do we move the needle or how do we make a difference as a designer in sometimes challenging environments, no matter where we work, right?

The challenge in their environments are different all the time. The bigger the company, let's say the more people you have to manage, but the smaller the company, the faster dynamic is in the middle. You have a both worlds. So challenges are always different, but you have to stay efficient. You have to stay on top of the things you have to be a leader.

Efficient designer means inspiring designer, design that changes something, that is not only following the beaten path, but actually changes something, right? Inspires the whole company to think differently. And that's something I really would love to talk about today. But before diving into today's topic, I also want to thank Vic Studio for supporting our conversations. For those of you who's not familiar, Vic Studio is an intuitive way for designers and agencies to build exceptional websites with full stack business solutions, multi-site,

management, and AI, of course. Crafting responsive websites efficiently is obviously a challenge for us designers. While ensuring flawless user experience across devices is crucial, the process can be time-consuming because we need to adjust the design elements to desktop, tablet, mobile, and it often leads to inefficiencies and version control headaches. VIX Studio is all about layers of control. And here are the features that could support you in doing it more efficiently and save time. First feature is

scale proportionally. You can start by designing in pixels and watch elements scale by default with scale proportionally. Another feature is responsive packages. You can create more complex relationship between the elements that result in more intricate behaviors. And last but not least, my favorite feature is responsive AI. When you have more complex sections in which you want to create unique layouts per breakpoint,

you can reclaim time in a click with responsive AI that adjusts the responsive behavior for you while still giving you the freedom to tweak and adjust as needed. I encourage everyone to go ahead and check out VIX Studio. You will find the link to test it out in the show notes. And now let's go back to the topic of today's episode.

So, Rachel, hi, how are you doing? Welcome to Honest UX Talks. Hi, I'm having a great Sunday. Thanks for having me on, Nafisa. I'm equally inspired by you and I'm so glad to have met you. Oh, okay. Let's exchange some compliments. I actually wanted to start very simply. Let's talk a little bit about you. Can you maybe give us a little brief about your story as a designer and what led you here working with me at Muse in guest experiences?

When I try to talk about my story in design, I always say it's a really non-linear path into design that I've taken. My academic background is in politics and philosophy. From a young age at 18, I moved from Singapore to Paris to pursue studies in the social sciences. And I never expected to actually discover this world of product design. It really came about by accident almost.

My first foray into tech came in the humanitarian field, actually. So I did an Erasmus exchange in Austria, and I had the chance to intern with a school that was training refugees to become software developers. And I was doing all kinds of project management tasks, you know, and among them was to find internships for these passionate refugees who were training to become software developers. And that's where I spoke to my first product designer while trying to find internships for these people. And I was thinking this is

crazy this is this is such a great job you know like you can take an idea and basically see it in your hands have something working from it in a matter of weeks I thought at that moment it was kind of a turning point for me I said I want to do this I want to kind of shape the world I'm in and I think design is kind of the pathway towards that so that's kind of where my path into design started I started in the freelance world I was starting to to freelance for a lot of European startups

based in Germany, also in the UK. And then I decided to step more into a corporate design kind of organizational setting. So I joined Adyen here in the Netherlands. I also moved to a startup and then now I'm Medmuse working with Anvisa in the guest experience team. Sounds like somebody did a good job inspiring you about the design. What did they told you? How did you feel like, oh, you're changing the world as a designer? Like,

Was there some inside of a conversation that you feel like led you on into this path? That's a really good question. I remember like walking away from my first conversation with a product designer. I was thinking that product design, I was kind of already doing it without knowing what it's called.

that it's actually experience design. So to give you an example, I was doing a lot of volunteer work in the humanitarian field. Back in 2016, I would say, I was volunteering for this refugee center in Paris that kind of welcomed a lot of immigrants who wanted to get their administrative tasks done.

We had a dilemma at that time. We had big crowds who were waiting outside the gates since 5:00 AM just to get a spot. And the building was large, but somehow we had crowding issues in the corridor, also in the gateway. And one day our supervisors, they sat all of us volunteers down and said, "We need to find a solution. We need to make sure that people are not standing outside at 5:00 AM because that's kind of inhumane. And we need to find a way to be able to manage these crowds and maybe make the experience a little bit more interesting."

So taking that kind of design challenge together with those volunteers, we came up with a system where instead of waiting in line passively, actually these people who came could actually take different classes. So they would take a queue number. So we invented this queue number system and it would actually go and take like French classes while they wait for their turn.

When I was talking to this product designer and understanding what they were doing, I was thinking, I've been solving design challenges in different settings, you know, without knowing that it's actually experience design. So that allowed me to put a name to something that I was already enjoying in my previous practices. I would say it's just putting two and two together, connecting the dots. It's so funny. Fun fact.

I had pretty much not the same story, but one of my very first UX projects was also solving the lines, but it was at my university and it was not even official project that we were graded for. It was just the project as an exercise. We were doing some design thinking workshops and our tutor said, now, okay, you're in a class, go downstairs, go into the canteen, notice how people get the

food, where the lines are built in and notice what we can change around that line. Like what would be the idea that we came up? It was just like one day sort of design hackathon, service design jam, little project. But I seriously distinctively remember this because that was also the moment when I connected the dots on how we solve problems, how we observe. And then we maybe realize, okay, there's the

problem, why this problem occurs and what can be done to avoid having the same problem, but not create more problems. And now I'm looking back and thinking, okay, later, maybe like five, six years ago, I started like doing those transition design, helping journeys for other students and mentees. And I remember a lot of the mentees I had were actually working on similar projects. Like one of my mentees, she was the dancer and she was like, I'm going to do my very first project. As I'm noticing, a lot of people arrive to the dance center. There's a line, there's a queue they have to go through

wardrobe and everything, I'm going to design a better queuing system. And now I'm realizing a lot of people I've worked with actually had similar stories. Something along the lines of solving for the queues could be an interesting path that leads you to design journey. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's this instinct that you have for problem solving, you know, like, oh,

you look at this problem and you're itching to solve it and also empathy I would say so you know like kind of I guess you maybe felt that when you were like observing people in the canteen and the mentee you had in her dance class like you empathize with those people in the queue you feel their pain and you want to do something about that and I feel like that's

that also like some of the stones that pave the path towards design. Yeah, it's like a simple, very efficient, very easy to track story. Like you see the problem, you in the moment can see how it was before and how it is after. And it's very tangible story that a lot of us are experiencing, especially if it's something you love to do, right? I don't know, either going to canteen or to dance class or the thing that you did for the volunteer project. So that's amazing.

Moving away from our background and how you arrived here, I actually want to dive into the topic of today's conversation. I guess just to remind everyone, the topic is how do we move the needle as designers? How do we become efficient designers? And to give a little prehistory of why I chose this topic to

to talk about with you is because my story working with you is that when I came back after maternity leave six months ago to Muse, first thing I'm noticing, okay, we have this new designer, Rachel working in our team, great. The first thing I notice immediately is how she's like not afraid to step out

And just like, I remember the thing that happened was like, okay, in Slack, everybody's talking about Rachel's pitch, which was like some vision pitch that you were working on. And it not only like was shared across our team, but it was actually going all around in the whole company.

back then it was maybe 1,000 people. And a lot of people are discussing it, commenting, looking at your Loom video. The pitch was so well thought through. The story, the research, the fundamentals, like really like the philosophy that you thought about, like a space that you researched, you backed it up with the story, you mapped it on the reality, you mapped it on how we do the things. And then you not only showed the research, and I was like already blown away when I saw the research, but then you also went beyond that and

even like build a concept and a great concept, not just like some here's a low fidelity grayscale quick prototype. It was a really concept with a lot of details in it. And by the end of this, I don't remember, maybe like 10, 15 minutes long video, I was already blown away. And everybody was talking about that our CEO, our founder was commenting on the video. And you could notice that somebody was so strong and bold, just joined the company like a few months before.

And right away, everybody's talking about the speech. Nobody asked you to do that. You went away and just did it and started changing the culture, started changing the way we design. And it actually introduced, I guess, maybe like months before or during that same month, it was the first time I noticed that we started introducing this pitching culture in the company where whatever you believe in, the bet

that you want to put forward. You have to build this research plus the concept, pitch it, research the space and kind of make sure it's feasible as well. And you were the first one who actually led that to happen. Can you tell us a little bit of the behind the story, how this happened? Because I joined when I already saw the fruits of your work.

Wow, thank you for telling me how you saw it through your eyes. I'm really humbled to hear that. And also, to be honest, it was born from this urgency. Thinking back, I remember the sense of urgency. Before I joined the team that we're working with together in Guest Experience, I was in another team in Muse. In that moment, there was a lot of change in the company. You were talking about this pitching process being introduced. We were deep in the throes of that, figuring out how this is going to scale across the company. So remember this feeling of deep change.

And I had a conversation with my previous manager who basically gave us kind of like an injunction, you know, like an urgent one and said, we have to be more strategic. I think that was the call to action that I took away from that call. We have to kind of step away from Figma, step away from just the pixels, step away from just the visuals and think about strategy. Can you as a designer take a problem, dream up the solution and actually pitch it to stakeholders? I think that's the injunction that was behind. You have to be strategic designers.

I remember just carrying this sense of urgency and thinking, okay, I needed to come up with something. It was not born in a vacuum for sure, like this idea. I have to credit people from the product organization. I know my product manager, Ettore, if you're listening, shout out. I know you've been talking about the problem of room allocations, just to give a bit of a name to the subject without going too much into the material.

So a lot of people from the product organization were also feeding me ideas. This is based on their observation of the hospitality industry. What are the top three problems that we can solve? Definitely credit those conversations for seeding this idea, I would say. So it's not bought in a vacuum. Next part, it's research. I never take a problem statement at face value. So I had the chance to actually go and visit some hotels here.

Here in Amsterdam, we have a lot of customers and it's easy to walk in and speak to people. Hours of conversations with people working in the industry. So it gave me a new perspective on the problem. So I think that was really the second step from the seeding the problem and then

giving more meat to the bones to the problem, I would say. From there, it's a matter of, okay, piping it through that double diamond that we're already familiar with. Yeah, I would say that that's kind of like the behind the scenes of this pitch. Sense of urgency, this injunction to be more strategic, and then seeding ideas from product and from customers.

And what I'm hearing here is also a little bit of the push from the direction. So the direction played a role there, like the directors, right? The managers, but at the same time, it's okay, we would do whatever we were working on, right? We would embed it in our current work projects, delivering the next thing we are planning to do. But then it sounded like

You were given this little push. I mean, I know that in the beginning it was a bit not so little push. It was like, let's do a big thing, everyone. So it maybe felt differently, but it felt like, okay, you need to have the director who pushes you to go out of your comfort zone. But then the other thing that I feel like you excelled at, which not many people do, is actually observing and sending the signals, like receiving those signals, noticing them. And I believe we talked about it a little bit last time we synced.

I think you called it a concept of hearing the whispers, hearing what people are talking about, like hearing the pain. What's the pain that nobody's putting on paper, but you sense it, it's happening. And that's something that I've seen you doing already twice in that first project. But then I had another pitch recently, like I guess a couple of months ago. Maybe we can talk a little bit about hearing those whispers. What does it mean for you? Like, can you give us an example?

first it's it's being in the right room to pick up the signals right you know like where people are talking so it could be as simple as creating a space you know just syncing with people from product for example just a simple example like that or being in a room with customers right so these two rooms are where you will hear whispers of these problems i'm thinking back as to why i have chosen this word whisper is because you know whisper is something is nebulous

It doesn't have a body of its own. It's almost like rumors sometimes. In that sense, it's where I think designers come in. We take these whispers, whether it's from customers or from products,

And then we have to kind of verify. I think that's when we start validating these whispers and giving it a voice. So from whisper to voice, I think that's where the problem definition phase comes in. So I wouldn't take whispers at face value ever with any problem. I always like to go back to the story of if you ask people in the past what they wanted, they would say a faster horse. But the solution is actually a car, right? So whispers whisper about a faster horse, I would always say. And

And I guess like as designers, we're always looking for like the car in the scenario. First stage, creating the space to actually be able to even receive those signals. And the second one is interpreting those signals and giving a voice to the whisper, I would say. It might be interpretation right now, but it sounded also like we are designers. We often need to know people. We need to be able to discuss things with people. We would just close ourselves, like you said.

in the vacuum, we won't be able to really, well, first of all, be in the same room with them and hearing those signals. But it also means that you kind of need to be very curious to hear what people say, to be in the meetings with the people. It's still a lot of talking. It's still a lot of hearing people listening, but also being the person people want to be in the same room with, I guess.

Yeah, in a way, it's also kind of like, we all have our own inner voice, right? In this part of the process, it's important to be aware of that voice, because you make assumptions, none of us are free from assumptions. When I'm trying to be in a room and hearing these signals, or from customers or from products, I try to be aware of my own voices in my head, you know, like I have whispers of my own assumptions. They have been, of course, places where I've assumed the problem exists, where it doesn't.

or a problem takes a certain shape and it's actually a whole different form. It unfolds in a different context. I think it's also just being aware of all the voices in your own head, but at the same time also not ignoring it. Because I've also been in situations where I had an intuition that there's a problem space there, even though people were denying it. And through research, it has actually been proven to actually be validated.

You need to know when to pay attention to your own voice versus hearing others more loudly. If we want to continue with this metaphor of voices in our heads and in rooms. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because there are like a couple of topics and it's almost sounded like, well, if you look into this as a roadmap, we're kind of engineering this, in my opinion, success story.

it's not only knowing people, being in the same room with people, hearing those whispers, but also voicing what you believe, your personal intuition, but also accounting your biases, but also hearing what people say, mapping it all into some sort of big picture or big trends, and then starting from there. But if we try to move it forward,

from that point of, okay, you're in the same room, you hear those whispers, you understand some interesting ideas are running around. You understand there is like a point I can tap onto. What you did also in that pitch was going back and researching and you were not researching just the classic desk research when you go and say, how do other product do this, right? What are the market patterns? What are the layouts people are using, right? Was the interaction design ideas out there? You didn't do the market research where you compared

features, right? This product has these features, this product doesn't have these features. You did something beyond that. And I want to hear what you did there. Okay. Yeah. So if we're going more into that solutioning phase, to be honest, for this topic, I looked at analogous industries. So, okay, it's room allocations, right? So I looked at, for example, airplane seating. I looked at concert seating. I looked at

like apartment, you know, when you're bidding for to buy an apartment, how do they actually allocate? You know, you have social housing in Singapore, right? With thousands of units. How do you allocate those thousands of units to thousands of people? So I looked at analogous examples and how they kind of solve that or not, right? Or if they're struggling to solve that problem, then what can I learn from that? I always like to start from from there.

like seeing if there are similar problems in other problem spaces, how they solve that before I return back to the same space, you know, before I do the competitor research. So my mind is a bit more shaken up with new ideas and references. In this specific pitch, that was my first step. Maybe looking back, if we try to reverse engineering,

maybe that kind of led to the solution. Yeah, now I'm also seeing it in a different light, my own process. I see it as abstract thinking. We designers today love to follow the process so blindly. We are almost a slice of our design process. We have been taught on the courses. I'm also like, I contributed.

But we have been taught on the design courses, on the bootcamps, on the YouTube courses, videos, etc. That, you know, you have to follow the process. You have to talk to users. You have to ask a certain amount of questions. You have to talk to five users. You have to look at the market. You have to see analytics.

well, if you want to be smart, triangulate your data, et cetera. What you are saying is that I ignored all of those things in the beginning. I just went abstract. I thought about what are the other industries that solved the problem, maybe had the same problem and how they solved it.

If I zoom out from this particular problem space, what are the other ways that somebody else, maybe not even design, just like in general in the world, we're solving similar problem, which in that case was, I guess, space mapping or I don't know, like if you can frame it like that. You were thinking abstract and you were not following this beaten path of this is what we do as designers. Here are the steps you have to follow. Here is the templates you have to check the boxes with, which is something already new.

To be fair, I started this podcast by saying I had a non-linear path into design. And you can see how that, for better or for worse, it kind of translates into my own practice. Because I didn't go through design school or any of these. I didn't have for years someone telling me to follow a certain formula. I just kind of made it up along the way with kind of just my intuition, whatever. I felt like, okay, it was the right way. Of course, I observed some best practices. I tried to. But sometimes I just...

make it up as I go. I think for sure my background does play a bit of a part here. And of course, like, if you also think back to my academic background as well, right, like, I started in philosophy and politics. So naturally, my mind gravitates towards those examples. Like I talked about social housing in Singapore and how they attribute that. So you can see how it's kind of directly drawn from those fields. Yeah, so just wanted to call that out and say, like, it could also just be my lack of training.

in this field that contributed to this slightly different approach. I love to hear this simply because I think in today's over-saturated market, we see a lot of people just trying to be safe, following those simple safe paths so that they don't go wrong, right? They did the right thing. They did what they needed to do.

At the same time, I love to hear that you said it was never a linear path, it was never a traditional path. And I love to hear it just because a lot of the designers today are feeling... I mean, sometimes designers say, "We don't have the design education. Oh my God, it's my problem. People will not take me seriously." But at the same time, you see a lot of people transition into design from absolutely various backgrounds, legal, medicine.

And that brings this unique perspective that we always forget to account for. We always think it's our negative side that we have this other background, that we work on something different that was just not matching very well with design for some reason. But that actually gives you a new unique perspective.

that not many other people have. And I loved to hear this because now again, looking back into that, my background story was actually was studying product design, but it was very unique experience because looking back, my whole story was also transitioning to design by an accident. And it was because I was confused by the name and it was in Estonia, the program where the tutor

decided to combine people from absolutely random backgrounds in the same group and give them the design challenges to work on. And we had people with really very different backgrounds. So I was from interior designer architecture. A lot of people, they were nutritionists. They were mechanical engineers. They were linguists, anthropologists, which was amazing. A lot of people with very interesting backgrounds. We sit together in the room. Sometimes we feel like, what are we doing here? And they give us tools for design thinking.

And we all bring unique perspective. Somebody is great at analyzing things. Somebody is great with leading, facilitating. Somebody is great with like technical thinking, visibility thinking. All of us are bringing new perspectives. And what you brought is this abstract thinking, something that is not linear, something that wasn't, again, beaten path.

For me right now, it sounded great because I want to remind everyone, it's not a weakness that you don't have design background sometimes. It's actually your unique strength and value proposition that you're thinking something else. And I always like to say this to people who are right now transitioning in design. You worked with accounting. Oh my God, you probably can endure a lot of stress.

and analyze a lot of things. That's a great thing, especially if you work in the scale up in the future. Or I mentored people who were scientists before. Let's say they were sitting in a lab, they were doing experiments, they would draw the hippoides, see the results. That's a lot of the things we do also in design, right? That's a lot of interesting new perspective that you map

out A you have transferable skills, B you have a very different new perspective. Like if you were from scientific background, you probably read a lot of research papers. You're probably going to deep dive into the topic much more deeper than maybe other people with different backgrounds do. Again, that brings your unique voice and something that makes you stronger as a team player in every new team dynamic.

I love this. And I think it's definitely not your minus because obviously, like I said already, it's been a success story as for me. So having this lateral thinking is playing great. And I love to see that again, bringing people from different backgrounds with different ways of thinking brings these results.

Going back to that story with the pitch, we had the push from direction. We got the signals. You went away and thought abstract about solving this problem. You think about other industries, you arrive to certain like concept, then you started building the design. Also another thing about you, which we also talked a little bit about was that you were not just bringing this low fidelity concept to a pitch.

it was pretty high fidelity. It was interactive. You could click around. You knew that obviously the user journey story, but it was also interactive concept. Can you talk us a bit more? Why wouldn't you bring just like this hypothetical high level concept with just grayscale where people can see how you solve problem, but actually you brought in a very high fidelity prototype that people can experience and start commenting that, oh, I don't like this comment and all that, right? When you're just talking about the big problem. So what's your thinking behind that?

Just going back a little bit to the start of my career, I just do a little bit of a digression before I come back, which is related. When I was starting to freelance, I was working for a really big VC backed startup based in Germany. And I was in the situation where I had to present like a design concept to the C-suite. So like we were like a team of freelancers working on this concept and facing this high pressure situation, presenting this to the C-suite. And we went with actually low fidelity wireframes.

It was a very experimental concept and we wanted to get early buy-in and feedback. Even the product manager and the developers, we built this like black and white fidelity thing. Just so happened that like the CEO actually walked out of the meeting. They actually did not grasp that this was actually a wireframe.

they actually thought like it was kind of almost an insult to them that as a team of freelancers we were delivering this like black and white low fidelity code thing that made me think right of course on our side there was a communication we should have set the expectation right before going into the meeting explain the process a bit better so i think there was there was also that on our side and another learning thing for me was that you know sometimes

I think low fidelity wireframes works when you're talking to people who completely understand the design process. You know, that's when you get the feedback you need to kind of erase the pencil marks on the paper and give you that feedback. But sometimes for a bigger audience, for generalist audience, and when you're trying to sell something like in this pitch, I was trying to sell the strategic vision, then I had to go high fidelity.

I was thinking of this example and then I thought it was actually an obvious choice for me. I knew it had to be polished so I could also invite feedback at the right areas. You know, I wanted feedback on how I was solving the problem and not like people getting distracted by the design details, so to say.

That was the reason why I chose to go highly interactive, high fidelity, so that people could just understand and grasp that strategic vision without having to do that extra mile of imagination. And it also shows the way that you are very flexible as a designer because it means that, A, of course, you had, let's say, a bad story that led you to believe in this. Like, okay, let me be more flexible next time. Let me understand the situation better before I design for it, which I love to hear because all those fuck up stories.

I love them. We learn the best from them. I had a lot of this as well. So it always gives you a good insight into what to do and what not to do. But also it gives a good idea that designer has the growth mindset. They reflect and they understand how to adjust better and they become more universal as designers. New environment, new roles, new situation. And you said yourself with your words. It means everything.

instantly knew that it needs to be a high fidelity, right? So you already learned this lesson and you have a very strong principle. You knew how to adjust a situation, which for me also is good and important factor as for this story. Just to add, I feel like what you said is true. It's like we have to shift between different modalities. You know, it's all like reading the room and understanding which mode we can go in. So in this case, like if the pitch was flying, you know, if it's sold, then we get stakeholders in the rooms.

Then we can take out those low fidelity wireframes. You know, we can take out that pen and paper and start ideating, you know, in this like more sketchy setup because, you know, they've been sold on that vision with that high fidelity frame. Then you can get back to that. It's never that once you go high fidelity, you have to just keep polishing that up.

I think it's about being able to shift gears and moving from low to high, depending on what the goals are at the moment. It goes back to show how non-linear you are. Because in the traditional linear process, you have to first go sketches, low fidelity, high fidelity, presenting the process step one thing at a time. But you did like, this is the pitch, this is the concept, here's the high fidelity goal.

Go experience it. And then if you are sold to this vision, we will go back and we will maybe rethink the layout. Maybe we'll rethink the icons, whatever you don't like. We can go back to those fundamental principles. But here is the vision and this is how it solves the problem. And I love this that you said it's wearing those different hats when you talk to different people. You understood that your audience is a general audience.

It's a company, it's business, marketing, sales, support all the people. It needs to be general. Like the audience is somebody who needs to be sold to the concept. Of course, it comes with a disclaimer that please don't go and pitch it on public that it's not built yet. There is something that we have to keep in mind, but at the same time, it definitely sells the vision.

Looking back into that story, the last silver line is for me something we didn't touch base on yet. Onto is the whole putting things together, which is storytelling. Everybody who knows you tells Rachel is amazing at storytelling. If you need tips for doing the better storytelling, go to Rachel. Like people who worked with you, for example, recently we had another girl who came back from maternity leave and I'm saying, oh, I'm building this new pitch. And she's saying, go to Rachel, ask her about storytelling. And everybody recognizes that.

Everybody acknowledges you for being really good at telling the stories. We already discussed how you build those stories.

The problem I usually experience when building the story, very often it feels overwhelming. It feels like a fence you have to jump over. You have all those insights, you have all this research, you maybe have a concept, maybe you iterated on the details. Great, but oh my God, it's just so much piss, so overwhelming to put it into the presentation for 10 minutes because it cannot be one hour presentation, right? Nobody will be watching for one hour if you share it globally.

How do you approach telling the stories in a cohesive yet detailed enough way that people sticking through and listening to the end? I would love to go into two different instances here. So let's finish the part about the pitch that we're talking about. Our Sherrylander instance, actually just two days ago, I was struggling a lot with building a story. So let's also talk about that in this pitch. And then again, I think like my nonlinear background comes in because I always like to think of an analogy again.

Like, how can I actually tell the story, you know, maybe to a child or to someone that I meet in an elevator or the taxi driver, you know, that I have a 15 minute interaction with? I always like to think about, like, how can I just relate to people as human beings, you know, beyond their role and years of expertise?

I always start with a human approach. And then that's when analogy comes in. So for example, for this specific presentation, I use the analogy of the game Tetris, which has this quite retro vibe. Everyone has played Tetris. We know also visually it conjures this image. So it's very sensory. And I love to take these sensory references

and kind of use it to build a story around that. In this case, I was really lucky because in the industry, Tetris is already a known analogy for this specific problem space that I was solving for. So I had like a library to draw from, you know, like a library of references that I could. And it wasn't like a one-to-one match. But sometimes there isn't that one-to-one match. Sometimes it's overwhelming, especially if you've come out from a research project

You have 30 hours or more of transcripts that you sifted through. You've done the affinity mapping. You have this Miro board that's bursting at the seams and you're thinking, how can I actually condense that into something people actually want to pay attention to? I was struggling with this together with like, of course, some of my coworkers on this specific pitch because we are fresh out of a research project. We have those 30 hours. It took us a month to crack just the storyline, how to synthesize that. I don't have the formula, but I can walk you through a little bit what we've been through.

very nonlinear process. We started first by not going for perfection at the beginning. We just did like a raw recording of us speaking throughout insights. And that was like a very chaotic 45 minute recording. Thank you to the stakeholders who had the patience to actually sit through that 45 minute recording. We just decided to, okay, if we are feeling

like we cannot pare things down. Let's just do what we can. Let's record be spontaneous. Let's not go for perfection. And then we just spoke our minds like, you know, we just connected the dots instantly, you know, in the moment. And we had this kind of live debrief kind of session 45 minutes. And that already helped, right? So it came from something like this massive mirror board with like 1000s of post-its into this 45 minutes, also very messy, but at least we have this inverted pyramid, it's pared down already. So that was the first step. Second,

I cannot emphasize how much this is important is to have feedback from diverse people, you know, people who are going to disagree with you, challenge you, you know, and I'm saying, you know, the people I'm talking about, right? These people that we have in our team, they're perfect. So we got people with different perspectives to sit down, listen to that 45 minute thing and be like, OK, how can we take this messy piece of rock and actually sculpt it down into this sculpture, something that's that you can hold in your hands and pass it on to the next person. So feedback.

we needed external people to sit down, listen, be patient and nail down things with us. So again, nothing good comes in a vacuum. You know, like I always I always ask for help, ask for feedback. And then comes the now that you have the solution, you think back and you're like, wow, there were like three weeks where we were completely lost. And it's hard to trace the story of that last week's right. But it was kind of like writing a song, you know, so actually music

came up as like a guide for us. One of the mentors, Carlos, you know, here, I'm just going to call you by your name, Carlos. You're like a big mentor, big source of inspiration and feedback. And he said, your presentation should be like writing a song. Like the first note, it sets the tone for, is it going to be a sad song, happy song? You know, so in the presentation, like the business presentation, it sets that tone. Are we talking about North Star strategic? Are we talking about short-term impact, like quick win? You know, like what is the tone of, what is the opening note?

of that. Then he talks about the verse, right? So this is like, you know, in a design presentation, it's description of the research, the problem space. And then we had to build up the verses. And then that's when it got interesting, because as we were shaping it, we were looking at the song of the structure. And every time we realized that we were going away, like the verses were not connecting, you know, from the verse to the chorus, so to say, and then we would immediately reject

piece of story. We will not go in that direction. We will not use that analogy. We will not include that insight. And we would just pare it down from there, like make it sound and flow like a song. That was kind of like what was guiding us. And so we had the story without going into the material. This is what we had. We started by abstract thinking. So we use an abstract concept to talk about this. And then we went into the aspiration arc, which is what we want to build towards.

and the reality arc, which is the problem space. And then of course, as in any good story, you have a tension, right? Where the reality arc and the aspiration arc, they go in different directions, they diverge. Then you have that tension because people are not getting their needs met. And that's the pre-chorus. It's the song building up to that chorus

and then you have the solution space which is the chorus and then it flows and then you have that bridge which is also equally important which is when you know we talk about like um okay we have this vision how do we get there this bridge so honestly like i know this sounds maybe this sounds even more abstract on top of abstraction but thinking about how we write a song and constantly saying your presentation out loud it helped us oh my god it's so good to hear this

you're so good with breaking down complex topics and decoding that storytelling oh my god was it like everybody's talking about it how do you actually do the storytelling where do you even start and you just so simply went through like a very simple analogy but again abstract thinking you abstracted it into something we all understand like you said previously baby understands the topic and you clearly explain how do you write songs and how do we write pitches on the same concept on the same idea which is i know mind-blowingness for me and

Like what you were saying resonates a lot with me because like, for example, right now I'm doing this community where I'm helping designers to build their storytelling portfolios. Everything you're saying hits the nail, honestly. It hits the nail on the head. Yeah, hits the nail on the head. Exactly.

Because a lot of the times when I feel like where people are designing portfolios, it's the same problem, right? Now we're talking about pitches, but it literally maps into the same story. You're overwhelmed. You worked on this project and now you have to build this case study that people will scan in one minute without reading. How do you do this, right? And a lot of people in the community right now, I feel like they all start with what you said, raw, unfiltered, spontaneous, throw it out there, like

Just put a mess on that canvas. Like everything you're thinking about, just put it out there. As you write this down, you start sculpturing it down. You start thinking first big chunks. Then you cut away things that just don't fit together very well. And it's when those chorus things are coming, right? This starts as a sad song. It goes into like an interesting space. There is this transformational moment. And you start using those building blocks for the storytelling, this classic storytelling arc.

with like beginning, middle and end, the transformational moment in the middle and how it goes from sad song to a happy song at the end. Literally the same thing, right? But you start by outlining everything that you went through, 45 minutes of unroll things, right? Great. Then you start sculpturing the big blocks. We also have even like this workshop for storytelling where we literally try to just understand what are the big pieces that we want to sculpture together. And then you need the feedback. All right, you have created this, maybe...

not a visual design portfolio yet. It's just like a bunch of text. Let people read this, get the feedback. Does it take sense? Where people get lost, where it's confusing, where people drop their attention. And then you start realizing, okay, how do I create this song to make it engaging so people keep listening or reading or watching? And then at the end of the day, okay, you have a solid structure. Then you can finally start putting the skin on top of it, right?

For you, it probably means creating those female slides or the page that you then later records and all is over. Absolutely. Yeah. So actually, like I didn't mention this in my introduction, but I transitioned to design, of course, with the help of a bootcamp. You know, I'm a proud like a bootcamp graduate, by the way.

It's from Design Lab. So shout out to the team at Design Lab because after my program, I also had the chance to kind of stay on as a design critique facilitator. So, you know, as students, sometimes in the program, we would come together in a week and actually critique each other's work. And I had the really amazing opportunity to kind of facilitate that process. And I think coming back to the song, right, so tying my experience also

helping people shape their case studies. And this idea of a song is that tension is important. You know, like, no one listens to a flat song, you know, like, where things are smooth, then that's elevator music, what's in playing in the background, no one pays attention to that.

So tension. And I think people always forget to mention the failures, the dead ends, you know, like the mistakes or like the assumptions that didn't work out. And these are the things that I always encourage people to put in. And I always also try to do it myself, even if it's vulnerable, because you don't ever want to recap those mistakes. Right. But that's the one that builds attention. So like in the story, it's the reality arc and the aspiration arc. They don't meet. So that's what attention comes in and gives that flavor to that song.

whether you're building a portfolio for yourself you know like um telling your own personal story like your case study just include that tension you know like think of all the things that went wrong and then that's actually what makes it interesting and relatable exactly so i always emphasize

And do you also see that in like when you're mentoring? Oh, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. It's already like a common sense on the market that you when you see this, we call it like boot pumped or cookie cutter type of portfolio, right? Everything is playing the story, checkbox, the process, it's a template, you don't really pay attention to it, because it's predictable and

You don't learn anything from this. But when you're, okay, let me do the storytelling one. Okay, what I'll do, I'll kind of tell the insights. Instead of just telling the tensions and everything, I'm going to start with insights. It's already a better version of storytelling, but at the same time, it's still a lot of the times you realize that it doesn't have this conflict.

What went down? What was the opposing power that was not letting you doing this? Like what you are trying to achieve as a designer or a great user experience. And so it's true, like, okay, there are nuggets how you can tactically improve your storytelling. But then if you don't have the tension and just transformational moment, the story just feels flat. And there is like, you don't feel relieved after everything.

watching or reading this case study or you learn learn much and i really love your analogy of elevator music i just never thought about it it's true like in elevators you just okay it's a nice tune buddy whatever

I really love how you like tied it together. I have an extra thought actually. So it comes back to the whispers that we were talking about. It's about voice. Because I think another part that was so critical to this feedback process was that we were constantly reading things out loud, you know? And I think that's so important to actually hear it.

in a sensory way. You know, like when you are hearing things and you're presenting your own story to yourself and to others, then you hear it. You know, it's so different than looking at it on paper. That really makes you know like, oh, okay, actually this doesn't work. You need to cut that. Or, oh, this needs a little bit more love. Let's add to that. It's like a song. It's like you need to hear it out loud. And I think it's funny how I'm realizing like verbalizing things

things was so important to the feedback process and that comes back to like this whole things we're talking about like with voices and whispers you know don't be afraid of like just being silent in front of your screen I think always like talk to people talk out loud to yourself and you hear a very different version of the story yeah I resonate with that I had the same insight

I started teaching when I was, it was 2016 and I basically out of the internship and a bit of freelancing was jumping into being a teacher. And I was like, who am I even to speak about design? But that's not a story. Story is that when I started, you know, doing those classes in front of people who had no idea about design, I started realizing that whatever I had in my slides sometimes makes total sense. People are listening, people are engaged, and then sometimes it's just like, it

made sense when I was doing the slides on the Figma or whatever, back then it was Illustrator. But when I started talking about it, I realized there were gaps and it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't flow together. And as soon as you start speaking, it's all those sensors and you mentioned about the sensors, right? Leaving it through, you realize some things are not matching well, even though it logically made sense for you. But then you start speaking and you see there are gaps there. You have to fill them in. Absolutely. It comes with even words. I was at an AI conference, the World AI Summit last week, and

In some of the talks, you were talking about language and how some words are just AI sounding in a way like, you know, like words like revolution. I don't know, you know, things like that, like those really buzzy, hype, empty semantics. And I think before everybody was disruption. Disruption is another good one. So you know what I'm talking about, right? Once you hear yourself say those words and it rings empty, it just comes out to like... My favorite word is passionate.

Words and just hearing your voice verbalize those words. It's so important. And bringing your body back into design, even in a simple way like that. Okay, the very last thing I need to talk to you about, because I feel like at this point, everybody already realized how good you are with the words.

choosing the words. And it's not only the choice of the words, you're very articulate in how you speak. And you know, when sometimes you're listening to people, they might say great things. You're listening and...

it made sense maybe the content is really great but the way people speak is maybe i don't know very low or not enthusiastic it feels so great when you speak because it's always energetic when you speak but also the choice of the words it puts the accent so people understand better but that's not a point it's just a little compliment but i wanted to ask you more about the words because i think we in muse right now always discuss that you're so great with words and you also do the

poetry, right? Your writing. That feeds into how you're so good with the words and how you're so powerful with making those pitches. Where does this interest come from? This love for poetry and appreciation for the words? Thank you. I think you're really being too kind to me. Really humbled to hear that. Words

Firstly, always have to go back to the childhood, right? For when you're thinking about this kind of thing. I grew up in a completely bilingual environment. And then quickly, like at 12, became trilingual. Because, you know, I grew up in Singapore, we have English as first language. At my home, we only speak Mandarin. And then at 12, I began learning French. These are like three languages that I grew up with. So that's a lot of words, if you think about it. If I look at a cup, for example, my cup of

water in front of me, there are three words that flash in my head. Now I know five words for that, you know, for example. So just a lot of words always like clanging about my head all the time. And I think that's kind of where they began taking on a presence of its own. Like, I realized that words are almost like tiny objects in themselves as real as the objects that they denote as words. So without going too much again into my childhood and that space, I think that's really where like my love for words began.

because I realized that they have such a different texture and consistency depending on which language they're used in. It's something that I carry with me. You know, like it started with being born into this environment. And then, of course, like me deepening that through reading and stuff. I try to bring some of that into design work.

whether it's removing those words, which I feel are empty, that don't speak to the soul, you know, things like disruption, and, and sometimes innovation, or, you know, like revolution and stuff like that. Sometimes just removing words creates a whole different atmosphere. Imagine a presentation where there's no buzzwords and stuff like that. It's just,

human to human meaning, you know, so I think removing words is as important as putting them in a space. It's about that and choosing the right words, I would say sometimes less is more. I think I'm going off topic now. But I also feel like just choosing words just makes me think also like, it's just being kind to other people. Interesting. That's very interesting insight. Absolutely. What you just said

Would you say this to the human? It's such a great filter. Like you probably, when we were talking, right, you wouldn't say to me, I'm working on this project that would revolutionize

disrupt the way we like you never you never think about this when you're designing right just doesn't sound natural it's a great thing because when we start designing even case studies like we want to do those words we want to say mind-blowing seamless innovative all those words you want to say those words but when you read it as like as a human from the outside you don't feel well reading this like you just don't believe this person anymore so it's those little not to say red flags but like

signs that something maybe is not worth talking to.

Yeah, totally. It made me think of almost like in a theater, sometimes like when you're watching a movie, you have this suspension of belief. You need to be like, okay, I'm entering this fantasy world now. In tech, sometimes I feel that, you know, like especially with I think SEO destroyed communication in a way. Like we started putting value to these words that don't communicate anything. So I feel like in tech, sometimes like let's just drop the stage, drop those props and, you know, like just get down and let's talk as humans again. What problem are we solving? We're solving it for humans.

what is the value and what is the value for humans? And you have to communicate that with words like that, that actually means something that actually sound natural when you voice them out. Again, going back to the voice, I would say let's drop that theatrics and SEO. Let's start SEO and just communicate as human beings. Yeah, I agree. No, I love this. And I love that.

you always bring those other interesting analogies like we talked about music about theater you even like have background in politics so many things that go into those decision-making processes it's fantastic and i always say this and i will keep saying this you definitely need to speak publicly you need to speak on the stages because the way you tell ideas for me it's

Let's use the word revolutionary. No, but I mean it in a good way. I mean that it's always changing the way people think. And obviously people start talking about it, which resulted in the pitch that everybody was talking about in our company.

And so I feel like you have a talent for this and probably have to be definitely more out there. It's just my perspective. Thank you. I hope to see you more speaking publicly, honestly. Thank you. I also wanted to speak on this when you're talking about like imposter syndrome earlier on, right? Not having a background in design and kid me not, it's something I struggle with every day. I always think, okay, I did not come from that, you know, even like an agency or having that kind of formal background in

design, you know, I've never taken a typography class, for example, you know, just this little things that like little voices in my head sometimes, and it's still very present for me. Thank you for having that kind of feedback. I'm more confident now to just take what I have and everything from my past and see what it can do for my present. I think we need people who think differently. And you're just a great example of how to do this. So I really hope that whoever listened to this conversation took away something you had something to think about right now. And

while we keep talking about perfect design processes, think that maybe it's great to design in the perfect design process and how to think for whom you're designing and how to hear those voices. So a lot of things that we've unpacked today. And thank you so much, Rachel. We can, I guess,

finish our conversation at this point, but really appreciate that you took the time to jump onto this recording and speak out your mind. I think many people learned something today and I'm looking forward to see you speaking publicly. Thank you everyone for listening and we will see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.