Episode 5: Design Maturity in APAC with Varun Thota, Product Design Lead at SEEK
48:31 Share

Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core.

Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year. Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design.

Hi, very good evening to everyone. I'm Dalen over here speaking. And tonight we are in Singapore, where I'm from, and Varun is in Hong Kong. So let me introduce our guest for tonight, Varun. We're glad to have him join us. Varun is the product design lead at SIEC. And in some countries, SIEC is best known for their product, Jobstreet. And in some countries, they're known for their product, JobsDB.

but he has been working at SEEK for several years and he's been trained as a product designer, a self-taught product designer in fact, and we will be actually asking him about that journey tonight as well as exploring this idea of the design maturity in Asia Pacific and what exactly that means and how does it exactly impact all of us in the industry itself.

So let's welcome Varun. So Varun, let's start by asking the first question, which is what do you do on a daily basis? Hi, Dylan. Thanks for having me.

So as you kind of said, I'm a product designer, also known as a UX designer, depending on what kind of organization you're in. I currently work for Seek. So Seek is a job marketplace. They're based out of Australia, and they bought JobsDB and Jobstreet. They acquired JobsDB and Jobstreet a couple of years ago, more than 10 years ago now, I think. And that's when I kind of came on board. So I joined JobsDB in 2014.

And I've been working at JobsDB for the past, actually about seven years. So for the past seven years, I've been working as a product designer in a pretty large product company.

And so we are, you know, it's a dual marketplace type of platform. So we help candidates find jobs. We're pretty well known in Southeast Asia, especially the JobStreet brand. JobSV is a smaller one in Hong Kong and Thailand predominantly. Then there's the other side of the marketplace where we help hirers also find the right candidates. So for the past few years, we've kind of been working through a bunch of different products that we've launched recently. And then also just a whole lot of organizational change as well.

Thanks for sharing the context and sharing about what you do on a daily basis. So as I understand, we're going to talk a little bit about your journey as a product designer. And I understand you're self-taught. Can you share a little bit like how did you manage to get into the industry? You know, how did you self-taught yourself as a UX designer? Yeah, that's a really good question. I've been actually thinking about how I got into it and it kind of starts with

So I graduated as a business major from business school in Portland State, Oregon. I did my degree in information systems and while I was there, so this was 2005 to 2010,

I had the opportunity to intern with a friend of mine. He actually started his own company. It was a website called Magasha, music gathering, sharing. And it was before podcasts. It was before SoundCloud, Mixcloud, all these web players were out. And what this product did essentially was

We were very much into electronic dance music. We used to go to all the festivals. And these music sets are pretty long. So like, you know, two, three hours long, some of them eight hours long. And we took that and broke it down into individual tracks. And then you can listen to each track and share it with friends. So interning there kind of got me into this whole product landscape, product thinking, design and development.

And even though I was interning, you know, it was, I learned a lot about marketing, about social media, and then more importantly about UX and kind of UI design. That was around, what, 2008, 2009? That's when actually the first iPhone came out. And then I got my first iPhone in 2008, so the 3G iPhone. And then that's what kind of

I developed this passion that I have now about design and apps and product thinking. And it was just this thing that you could do on your phone. And as soon as I bought the phone, I was, you know, I was just early adopter. So I was trying out different apps. I was playing around with tons of different kind of, you know, email apps, Twitter apps. And I was just reading a whole lot back then as well about, you know, app reviews.

Try to understand how people make these apps, why they go and design it this way. What are some outstanding kind of interaction patterns? And that's when I started training my eyes. So my passion for UX kind of grew from there. Once I graduated from uni, I joined a design firm and I wasn't a designer. So I joined the design firm actually on the tech side of things. I was in the IT team and I was kind of building the infrastructure out inside this hundred person design firm.

And that's where I heard about UX design. It's a design agency, basically. And they had a massive UX team. They were developing new products and they asked me to be one of their beta testers. And so I was kind of interviewed, asked to try something out. I was like, OK, this is pretty interesting. What they're doing is UX design. I didn't really fully understand it, but it kind of grew my curiosity.

And then I lost my job and it was really bad kind of downturn in the US in 2010. And I moved back to Macau. So I'm from India originally, but I grew up in Macau. I lived there for more than 20 years. And when I moved back to Macau, I decided, hey, you know, I think I need to, there wasn't a lot of stuff going on. I didn't want to go work for a casino, but I knew I wanted to do something web design and development. So I started teaching myself web design.

you know, I was reading Smashing Magazine. I was reading all these different UX blogs. I was trying to understand web development, hosting your own servers, hosting your own websites. And I was lucky enough to have a university to be my first client. And I kind of designed an events website for them. They were hosting an event in Macau, I think at that time. And then from there, I just kind of got clients through family and friends. So the next one was a restaurant. Then there was a

person that wanted to sell heat lamps. So it was all about marketing that kind of heated lamp thing, outdoor heated lamp. And so I was building all these things, these designs to get people to use, to come to the websites, come to the restaurants that I was working for. And then

It kind of transitioned to, okay, I can't really do freelance a whole lot for too long. And I joined a casino, but I wasn't doing anything gaming. I joined the technical team or the technology team at a casino. And so I was doing internal applications. I was building out these business-facing apps for the internal team. Two things that kind of got me into thinking about the experience of these products was first,

digitizing their limo booking system. So it was an offline written on paper books. They had a massive limo suite of limos that in this casino, but they were doing it all manually. And so one project that we were tasked with from this technology team was to digitize that. And so

I learned about front end development frameworks that we use bootstrap. I worked with the development team and we basically, you know, it got me into interviewing the main customers. So the back office taking down all these schedules and then trying to get that onto a digitized platform where they could log in, log all the limos. And it was an interface basically on the website. So that got me, you know, into all this UX stuff. And I realized at that time that, you know, I need to learn more. I need to understand this whole industry more.

And the one thing about Macau was back then, it wasn't really a creative industry. It was very much about gaming. I needed to find an outlet. So this led me to hearing about this Instagram meetup in Hong Kong. And it's very easy to commute between Macau and Hong Kong. It's just an hour ferry. I joined one of the Instagram meetups. That's kind of where I met my current wife as well. This was like eight years ago. And through that, you know,

Since I started coming to Hong Kong quite often to see her, I was trying to find things to do. And so there were events always happening in Hong Kong. And so one thing I found out recently while I was commuting to Hong Kong back then was, oh, there's an annual event called UXHK. And so in 2014, I was like, I think this is something I need to go. I need to broaden my experience. I need to understand this whole landscape. I need to talk to people. And so I signed up for the three-day event.

3-day workshop, it was back then, USHK. Funded it myself and then came over to Hong Kong for the weekend and went to UX Hong Kong conference where I met tons of cool people and fortunately met the head of design at that time at JobsDB. So this was in 2014, they were scaling up the design team and I pitched myself and I guess the rest is history. So a couple of months later, I moved to Hong Kong because of JobsDB and I joined as a UX designer.

And this was way back in 2004. Yeah, so like seven years ago now. And since then, I've been kind of working my way up through being an individual contributor, working with different product teams, understanding agile methodology in such a big kind of product company. And I'm working my way into like design leadership and now leading a team of about four or five people across three countries.

So it's never a straight path. It's always kind of like, you know, it's all over the place. But all these different things kind of got me into UX design. I'm still super passionate about the thinking when it comes to really good experiences, how we use psychology to get people to do things, not always the best things. And obviously, very, very passionate about mobile. And so I currently lead the mobile apps team and the notifications team at Seek. ♪

Well, thanks for sharing Varun and I think that's an amazing story where you hustled your way into the industry and it goes to show that curiosity and hustle pays off. That curiosity of actually learning more from industry experts like some of you here today who may not be in the industry but also at the same time that spirit of actually going out there and finding out more and getting to know people and pitching yourself, right? That's what I got from it. Like,

You have to be prepared in order to actually pitch yourself and get a job. So I think that's something quite admirable. I think that we have quite an enthusiastic audience here and we've got several questions in our chat. And Leon is asking, you know, what are some of the apps that you look up to both past and present? Good question. Hi, Leon. I work with Leon. He's in Australia right now. So this is way past his bedtime, but that's a really good question, right? Over the past few years,

There've been so many apps that have kind of come and gone. But the first few apps I remember when I first got the iPhone were email apps. I was super into email apps for some reason. So there were things like Sparrow. I didn't really use the native iPhone app for email back then.

There was Sparrow, then there was these different news apps like Feedly. I forgot the other one, Feeder. There was another one. And then the first Twitter app that I kind of fell in love with was Tweety from Lauren Bircher. So he was the one that actually designed the pull-to-refresh, if I'm not mistaken. And then Twitter bought Tweety back then and then got integrated into the current Twitter app that you see now. It kind of evolved over time. More recently, Clubhouse has blown my mind just because of what they've done and what they've enabled.

in the community and just the simplicity of it.

Some of my other favorite apps that I go to now, the Google News app, for some reason, I love it. Medium, one of my favorite apps. Spotify for the longest time was one of my go-to music apps. And I've switched over to kind of Apple Music, which feels like a step backward. So there's, yeah, it just comes and goes. I just try different things and I keep trying and seeing what I can learn from them, why they did it and see if there's any blog posts out there as well. Yeah, thanks for sharing. And I think someone commented that

you know, passion, curiosity and courage and hard work is always a good formula for success. And I fully agree with that.

And someone did ask, you know, if you were back to your 25 year old self, you know, what would you say to yourself? Oh, good question. If you were back a 25 year old, what would you say to yourself? I don't know. I think I would just constantly tell myself never give up, just constantly persevere and get stuff done. So I'm not trying to give a sob story, but I've had to work pretty hard for everything that I do. I don't know why. Maybe it's just the life that I have. But

It's never been like just easy kind of given to me on a platter after work for everything. After I lost my job in the US and moving back to Macau and having to figure things out, it kind of taught me a lot about just persevering through it all and never giving up. So, and even now there's, you know, there's a lot of challenges we're going through with COVID and plans always being kind of not going according to plan. I would say, you know, just constantly look at that, learn from that and keep growing, keep moving forward. Hopefully that answered the question. Yeah, it did.

I think in terms of your story, what really stood out for me is also how you met your wife from an Instagram meetup. And I think it really talks about the power of actually networking and getting to know people. Now it's COVID, right? What kind of advice would you give to young designers who are trying to get into the industry but are now limited because there are no longer meetups like UX Hong Kong or like

actual physical events? Yeah, what can they do? Yeah, I mean it's tough right? You can't go to actual spaces anymore and meet people face to face and

get to know them. So if you've kind of seen the industry, if you kind of see what happened with COVID and how things have moved online, right? A lot of companies are moving to online platforms for learning, for having events, even with kind of COVID locking down a bunch of countries, a lot of stuff moved to kind of stuff like this, right? Zoom webinars. I was actually supposed to be in Singapore earlier this year, sorry, early in 2020 for a workshop and that got canceled.

And the person who was hosting this workshop, and this was all about human psychology, human behavior, communication, right? This is something that it's probably better to do it face-to-face so he can gauge our kind of feedback and how we're thinking about stuff. He moved it online and he was doing stuff between drawing on an iPad and showing slides to just having like face-to-face conversation with 20, 30 other people on Zoom saying, hey, I know this is tough, but I'd love to see your face. I'd love to kind of talk to you.

ask questions right and so he was trying something new and this was the first time for him so i feel like there's a lot of opportunity still online you can still join stuff like this clubhouse more recently without trying to sell it again is it's just it's awesome what they've done it's pretty unobtrusive so it's like just audio you can listen to it anytime you want and as you kind of grow your your confidence to put your hand up and ask a question then you can start

benefiting from that conversation as well. For example, Dale and we met over a Clubhouse session, which was about design in Asia, and Jay was hosting it, I think, from Designly from Grab. Yeah. And so it does help you get connections. So Jay hosted a job fair as well on Clubhouse. And from what I've heard, someone got a job through that from a previous session that he had. So explore these other different

You don't have to get into it and kind of raise your hand like I was saying in Clubhouse, but you can listen and if you feel like you want to participate, you can. Awesome. I'd like to ask a little bit, and this is a question from the audience, what about the iPhone that was inspiring to you that wasn't found in other products or platform that really just triggered and made you

start your journey as a UX designer? Other platforms, I mean there wasn't really anything out there back then that even came close to what the iPhone was trying to do, right? So a little bit of a story. I built my own computer. I used to build my own computer and I used to be a big Windows fan and then I heard about Macs and Macintosh and I was a poor college student so I couldn't afford one so I built my own. And

When the iPhone came out, I could see that there was this resemblance that they were trying to do between a desktop version of Mac and then what you could do on your phone. I think the thing that kind of blew my mind about the iPhone was you could just do so much on it. Even back then, it was a browser. It was all these different things. It was music. And I came from the days of Nokia and Apple.

I'm sure you know this too, but Nokia 8810s and 3810s with the snake and on game and music. And there was just this one device that you can do everything and you can browse websites and you can play games, but all on a small device, right? Everything was just in your pocket. And then they,

improved that, they improved the camera over time, they improved, they added stuff like FaceTime and all of this was still from the same device that you had in your pocket. And now it's even more powerful than most desktops, right? So even myself, even though I have a computer from work, I don't actually use a desktop. I am predominantly mobile when it comes to even photo editing for the last about six years.

Even my photo process from capturing photos to editing it to storing it, I do it all through mobile, like my iPhone and more recently an iPad. And it's just that flexibility of having that with you all the time. Even more recently, this experience has improved so much that you can do so much through it as well. And of course, you have the most powerful camera in the world in your pocket, right? So it's just having that flexibility.

how easy it is to kind of use that and have it there with you all the time that I love about just, I guess, phones in general or smartphones in general. Yeah. And I think this is an excellent segue to talk about mobile first, which is something we wanted to discuss about. I understand that you're leading the mobile first efforts in Seek right now. So can you just share with us this idea of mobile first? So maybe some of us are not too familiar. What is mobile first and maybe why it's important and

Yeah, it's a very important subject in Asia, I feel. So in a nutshell, mobile first is basically design has always been for the longest time has been on bigger screens, has been on desktops and on laptops. And the amount of real estate you have is a lot more. You can do a lot more things and show a lot more content. With the iPhone, with the launch of the iPhone and with phones and Android coming up as well, mobile devices have kind of blown up around.

around the world. So I pulled a couple of stats just to kind of prep for this, right? A couple of years ago, I learned about We Are Social, which is the agency, I think, out of Singapore. And every year they do a digital report, right? So like 2018 was when I first heard about it. And they do this digital report on how is digital kind of evolving around the world, like globally, and then more specifically in Asia. And then you can kind of dive down to like Singapore or Malaysia.

The 2020 numbers that I found that they had was basically that mobile phone connections. So that has gone up 3.5%. So that's 151 million mobile connections, right? That's a whole lot. Internet users has increased 9.2% since 2019. So that's plus 204 million. And when you think about

how many of the stuff is actually mobile phone and internet coming together, 92% of the world's internet users now connect via mobile devices. So it's so much easier to get on a mobile device, to get a plan, to get 3G SIM cards and get on the internet. Because that's, especially in Southeast Asia and South Asia, that is the fastest way to get online. And more recently, that is the only way that people get online as well. So countries like Indonesia, Philippines,

Vietnam, that is, I remember reading a study quite a long time ago when Facebook was launching their internet basically all over the world, did research in Indonesia to ask people, what is internet to you, right? What do you define as internet? And a lot of the people said, oh, it's Facebook. Facebook is internet. I use my device to get on Facebook, to chat to my friends, to look at news more recently, you know, to pay bills, to buy stuff, to watch videos, listen to music.

the time spent on mobile has just kind of quadrupled over the past few years. And so when you think about what that means for design, right, experiences, you actually have to rethink how you design for these smaller screens, right? So a couple more stats, because I'm a lover of stats.

In general, in Asia, 80% of traffic is Android and then 20% on iOS. And that's definitely just because of how easy it is to get an Android phone. And Android devices are pretty kind of diverse as well. There's many different screen sizes. And so when you're thinking about designing for the screen sizes, it's almost like you're to rethink, okay, what do people want to see on a small device? How do I make it really legible, right? What is the content that I want to show that is prioritized with their kind of

Either it's viewing on the go, which used to be kind of the main thing about mobile. It's all about viewing on the go. But now more recently, it's actually, that's a myth, right? People's only access to the internet is their device. The only device they have is the mobile phone because it's way more expensive to buy desktops and iPads, tablets. And so now you have to rethink how you design that content, design interfaces for them, interactions,

And then when you think about just the gamut of all the devices, you can't have fancy animation and tons of loading and tons of content being loaded at one time. You have to think about slower networks, especially in Asia. How do you serve this content to them in a manner that they kind of just don't jump to another site because it takes too long?

So it's multiple things when you think about mobile-first thinking. It's how do you design for all these different screen sizes? How do you design for slower networks? How do you design for just the breadth of Android devices? Because there's so many different screen sizes and OSs to deal with.

And then there's the technical side of things, right? Like how do you make sure that your apps work on slower devices? Well, not everyone has the most powerful iPhone, the most powerful Samsung or Android device. So how do you make your apps as easily accessible to them? Then there are things like, obviously you're designing for people not with peripherals. By that I mean mice, mouse, mice.

where they use a pointer and can accurately go click on a small button, you're designing for thumbs and fingers and people who are using the devices with one hand. Swiping, gestures, being able to be

in reach of your thumb, not everybody has big hands. So there's a lot to think about when you think mobile first and kind of summarizing it, the design aspect of mobile first, there's a technical aspect of mobile first, and it's obviously like product strategy of mobile first and having a really good strategy because that's where the most users are these days as well. So, you know, it's growing. People are getting online even more and their first device is a mobile device. ♪

I think that's an excellent summary in general of why we should care about mobile first and what it is. And I was just wondering when you're talking about mobile first, let's kind of solidify it with an example, right? So I understand that JobsDB, Jobstreet built for desktop first, right? So now you're trying to help the products become mobile first. What are some of the challenges in doing so?

What are some of the things that we can expect if we are transitioning products from desktop to mobile instead of building it with a clean slate, which is much easier, I heard. I actually wouldn't think of it as transitioning desktop to mobile. So I think one of the first principles of responsive design is you start with a small screen and then you kind of grow your design for bigger screens and then have your layouts with different screen sizes. And again, it comes back to content, designing for fingers and thumbs and index fingers and stuff.

The big challenge now is to really, you actually have to have a mind shift. You actually have to start with a small device first. And then when starting with a small device, you first need to understand who your customers are and how they use their mobile devices, right? How are they using the mobile device in everyday usage? When do they use it? Do they use it on the go frequently? Do they use it at home? So once you get into that, into understanding who your customers are, and for us, it's about tailoring that content for the small sizes now.

and then also being able to complete tasks on a mobile device, right? So what used to be a very specific example, you could only upload documents on a desktop device back in the day. And I think after iOS, I don't know when, 10 maybe, you were able to upload documents from cloud.

from your device from anywhere and just use the application to do it right a mobile app to do it and so that enabled people to not you have to rethink that task right it used to be oh i don't i can't do this stuff on mobile devices or there's no ability for me to do it so i have to go find another way to go about this task go about uploading a document document go about updating my profile we need to change that to actually hey how can we enable this on a mobile device right

people only have one device. It might be the only device. So how do we help them and how do we enable them to kind of complete their task? And in our case, it's basically looking for a job, updating your profile to make it as relevant as possible, uploading a document if you have it stored either on your device or on a cloud somewhere, and then kind of going about, again, researching and doing all those things on a mobile device. And so it's a very different way of thinking of it. It's actually starting with that and then saying, okay, well now if they transition back to a desktop, which is usually

I would say just looking at our traffic previously as well, it's only about 30% of people visit us to desktop. Then you go about thinking, okay, now that you've done this on a mobile device, if they transition to a desktop, if they transition to a tablet, how much more room do we have to play with and how much more content can we show them? And then obviously you're designing slightly different. So that challenge actually is that mind shift change. Start with a small device first. Rethink your content for a smaller device first. This is the reason why it's called

mobile first, right? First being the emphasis in this term. And it's a good segue to what we wanted to speak about, which is the maturity in Asia Pacific as you're observing this, right? Let's talk about mobile first, right? How many companies do you think it's a common practice for people to think mobile first as you're observing apps in Asia Pacific? What are your thoughts and how is it linked to the maturity of UX design?

So there's two questions in there, right? So other companies who are doing really well or thinking about mobile first in Asia and then how that impacts design maturity? Yeah, you could say so. Okay. So the first question, right? Mobile first. I think there've been a couple of companies who understand the importance of mobile. They understand the mobile landscape and they are doing insane stuff. So companies like Grab, companies like Gojek, WeChat, who are

building, you know, one thing that they all have in common is they're all building super apps. One app that can do a multitude of things. You can surf the internet, you can pay your bills. In China, WeChat's also tied to your citizen score. I mean, there's so much stuff

that they're already building on mobile devices because these companies know that that's actually where the audience is, that's where the market is, and that's where the audience is going to continue growing. So I don't know if you heard about the first billion users that Google has this initiative for Asia, that actually racks up to, again, I love stats. I'm going to pull out some stats that I was reading about.

In Southeast Asia, that unconnected audience is about 229 million. And in South Asia, it's 1 billion, right? These are people coming online for the first time and their first device is mobile. So there are companies who already know this and they're targeting...

mobile, they have a mobile strategy. They've got really good responsive sites, but they've also got progressive websites because they understand that not everyone's going to have a fancy phone with 128 gigabytes of space. Apps usually are between 100 to 200 megabytes. So that's a lot of space. So how do we get more people to use our platform? And that's building really good websites as well. And I'm not sure if you noticed,

PWA, which is a framework from Google, they actually have standards and kind of guidelines to make sure that their mobile site and the app is as close as possible when it comes to the experience. And there's so much that you can do with the PWA now as well. So a really good example of that is Stadia that Google came up with.

They had to circumvent the app store and say they built the entire gaming platform on PWA and they launched it on iOS. So the power's there. You just have to think about how to go and use these platforms effectively.

So when it comes to kind of how design maturity fits into it, I'm not sure if I can connect it directly to mobile-first thinking. Yeah, maybe before you answer the second question, I just wanted to give a little bit of context for those of you who are wondering the term PWA. I think it means progressive web apps and it's Google's initiative to ensure that

mobile experience on the web is as accessible as possible for everyone, including the kind of speeds and experiences that we get to enjoy by using native apps where we install them on our Android and iPhone devices. So I think that's a really good point. I do know of some teams who are kind of experimenting and pushing the boundaries on that. Yeah. So on to the second question, which is about design maturity, you know,

Do you think, like, is it a prerequisite for companies to think mobile first in order to be mature as a design organization? For companies to think mobile first to have a design, a mature design team, basically? I don't think so. It really depends on what your product is in your organization, obviously, and whether your market's actually a mobile-driven market or a website that people kind of visit. I don't think they're kind of tied together in terms of design maturity, but

In general, you have to think about, especially in Asia, I think it's still growing. There's a lot that needs to be understood about what UX and design does for businesses.

In the West, there have already been tons of studies and there's been a lot of research. And even I think Intercom came out with this report about how design impacts business and why it's not just about the way it looks and it feels, but understanding the customer problems, being able to go and research and synthesizing all that information and then coming up with a really good strategy to drive business performance and business profits.

If you understand your customers, you can eventually have the outcome of that is really good business. Right. And so design maturity in Asia, I think it's still, yeah, I think there's a lot to grow there. We were actually supposed to give a talk in 2020 about what we were seeing in Hong Kong. So I have some numbers, again, data that I pulled out. So this is from our JobsDB platform in Hong Kong. And

We were looking at basically what is, if you go look for jobs in Hong Kong for UX, UI, product design, how has that changed since say 2017, 2018, right? What we saw that was between 2017 and 19, there was like a 4% uplift, sorry, 4% more UX related jobs in Hong Kong. Now, when you dive in a bit deeper,

When you look at what UI/UX is and what product design was, so UI/UX kind of relates to technology, telecommunications, insurance, fintech, but that's the thing in Hong Kong.

Product design, however, which is, I think, a relatively new term that was kind of connecting to trading and distribution, manufacturing, toys. So there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what product design is. And I think someone asked, like, what is the difference between a product designer and U.S. designer? And I think people are still, like, organizations are still trying to understand that.

That part, like just the terminology. And then there are obviously organizations that need to understand or still trying to understand the value that design brings to an organization. Everything from having kind of visual designs and product designs, but also really strong research teams, being able to go and talk to customers, being able to come up with strategies that say, hey, you know, we're looking at these business metrics. These are some of the biggest customer problems. And this is how we think this ladders up to a specific customer.

profit or a business metric that we want to drive. And there are organizations, at least in Hong Kong, I think Curious Core is going down the path of educating people as well. Like in Hong Kong, we had the General Assembly course. I think they've gone out of business, at least in Hong Kong, so it's all online. SCAD had a course in UX design and we were trying to link up with them and have some sort of partnership with them. But then in 2020, they also left Hong Kong. So a lot of stuff, you know,

Also, sorry, more recently there's also Accelerator that is now doing courses in UX. So there is appetite for it. There are people who want to get into it. Businesses have a lot more to understand about how this impacts their kind of business profits. And we're still kind of behind when you compare it to like the West, right? So, yeah. What I find interesting in what you shared so far is like the amount of data

that you share and also like you talking about strategy and also for the benefit of the audience here, maybe we should differentiate a little bit what does product design mean? I've heard about those posts where you are a traditional product designer. So you do a physical product, but what we're talking over here is a digital product designer. What do you think is the difference between a digital product designer and a typical UX or UI designer?

Age-old question, right? So my kind of perspective on this is that you've got UX, UI designers who basically think about the experience of a digital experience, basically like a digital platform, how it looks, how it feels, how we get people to complete tasks, what the flows look like, how do we get people from point A to point B with as less friction as possible, and how do we get people to complete tasks?

And then everything else on the UX design with being able to go and do research, being able to talk to customers, being able to come back and synthesize that and have a deck ready. Or from an agency, and I haven't worked in an agency for too long, but agency perspective is these websites and getting people to go and either buy something and go do something on a website. For me, a product designer, though, falls in the category of, well,

All of the stuff you do, especially if you're working in in-house companies, in-house product teams or really big organizations, enterprises essentially, is that all these things would be laddering up to a business outcome, like a business metric, right? So everything from these are some of the business metrics that we want to go, that the business has, we have to think about. This is how we want to drive more people to our platform. This is how we want to think about getting them

through, say, an e-commerce website, through looking at something, paying for it, buying it, and then bringing them back to a platform because we rely on these key business metrics like daily active users, monthly active users, engagement and retention, all these different product metrics. You have to think about how you design that is up to that. And so a product designer needs to think that through a bit more. It's not just about how it looks and feels. You actually have to think, okay, well, in the bigger scheme of things, this flow, this experience,

how exactly is the business going to benefit from it, right? What problem are we solving for the customer that they continue to come back to our product and then that equals business profit, right? You're always thinking about how this...

improve the business number. Also with product design, you can easily go down the unethical route and have a whole lot of unethical design and dark patterns and get people to spend a lot more money. And I think that just goes back to your values. And so I'm very much against having dark patterns on websites. I know how that feels. I've seen certain companies do it where they drive as much traffic to their site. So product design has to think a lot more about how

Small things, even from how people interact with icons, will ladder up to a business outcome. It depends, again, on the organization. But that's a slight nuance between UX and product design. Yeah, I agree with the definition. I think that's also my, as per my understanding, that product designers actually consider business strategy and are more business-focused as well. And I think there's a question from the audience asking, how do you elevate business?

the UX maturity in an organization, right? Did you have to do that while you're at Seek? Yeah, it's constantly evolving. We're trying to do a whole lot of things. So previously, so Seek has kind of acquired DropsDB and Dropstreet about 10 years ago, but only recently we started working in a bigger, bigger kind of organization, an APAC organization. Our design team, when we joined, was about 12 to 14 people, one head of design, a visual designer, a researcher here, and a couple of product designers.

As we grew to an APAC team, that jumped to like 40 people, right? So now we have design ops. We've got a massive research team. We've got senior design leads and then kind of design leads where I sit.

And then our head of design sits at the table with the business, right? So at the same level as kind of the directors of products and the head of products. So kind of growing that maturity is depending on your organization and depending on how the organization sees the value of design, there's kind of different ways you have to go about it. So I can probably speak to like, you know, what we did in our Seek Asia event.

team a couple of years ago, right? So as we grew the SeekAsia team, it was about, especially in our organization, it was very much product driven. So that meaning product managers were making decisions on what's the best way to go about what problems we want to solve, right? And this is why we need to do it. And this is why it's good for the business.

So for us, they were saying, actually, this is why we have a design team. Designers are not just about how it looks and feels. We want to be in those conversations up front. So we muscled our way in, and that was done through many different ways. We had design leads advocating for growing their design voice, understanding the business, understanding metrics.

And then kind of muscling our way into the conversation with product managers and the product team and saying, actually, we're going to go do a bunch of research and we're going to go understand the customer and the customer problem. And then we're going to see how this ladders up to specific OKRs that we have, why it's important that we solve these problems versus other problems. And so, like, I don't think there's like a clean cut way of doing it. It really just depends on the organization that you're in. One is obviously understanding customers.

what you can do as a design team, what do you have the capability to do, where you need to upscale. So whether it's upscaling research, whether it's upscaling and kind of data or using evidence to drive decisions, kind of don't know where to start. There's so much to do, but it's basically about growing that design voice, right? You have to grow your design voice in the organization by showing what the value of design does for the business.

Yeah, I think that's a fair point of view and it's also a nice tie up on the question on design maturity and how do we elevate it in general. When we think about that topic at hand, we talk about trust, right? And having a design voice and gaining trust with the entire organization as a design team.

What are your views on that? I'm sure it's not been easy trying to, because you used the term wrestle your way in. So how do you gain trust with the rest of the organization, especially if people are still thinking like designers are just about, yeah, making things look fancy? Yeah, I think it's going to be, it's always going to be a challenge in any organization, no matter how mature that, well, maybe if it's a really, you know, design-led organization, things could change. Kind of one thing for me was that

I had the opportunity to do at Seek actually was

become product manager for close to eight months. I was leading the design on the apps. We didn't have a product manager. We had a tech team across Hong Kong, Penang, and KL. And I put my hand up and basically said, you know, I would like to try out for this role. So I will be the product designer and the product manager. Luckily, I had like a really strong visual designer with me so I could, you know, have partner with a visual designer, a content, like a copywriter. And so I had them to kind of help me out as well.

And so that role was basically a masterclass in product management, right? Product strategy, product thinking, prioritizing your backlog, right? Understanding what metrics you need to drive.

So if you want to grow your design voice in an organization, you kind of have to step out of your role of just thinking through how something looks and how something feels and thinking through flows. You actually have to be in the conversation with product managers and say, hey, what are we trying to solve? What is the context that I need to think about from a business perspective that's going to help me elevate this design and at the end of the day, improve our OKRs that we have?

growing a sense or building your ability to understand data as well. So, again, with Seek, we are fortunate enough to have a really big analytical team as well. And so I was able to partner with an analyst to come up with dashboards to understand all our product metrics, what the funnels look like, what are the key metrics that we use as the product health metrics, and then think about, okay, we're trying to solve this.

Where in the design do we need to go solve it? Where is the problem space that's causing metrics to drop? And then you have to change how you talk about how your designs impact those metrics. You actually have to understand that actually people are thinking about the product teams are going to be thinking about key metrics, key funnels, and obviously OKRs. If you have OKRs in your company or KPIs that they need to drive. And so you need to start talking their language. And so product management, that eight-month kind of masterclass taught me about, OK,

Here is a flow. Here is which part of the funnel I'm designing it for. This is how much traffic I think this design is going to get people into our product. This is how seamless that flow is. And this is why we're going to have, say, 20% conversions on X metrics. And if you can connect those things to your design and you're able to speak the language of the business,

That's how you start showing your, you grow your confidence and they start to understand that design is not just the way it looks and it interacts and final output. You're actually being in those conversations about product managers and strategy people. That's excellent advice. I think using data, speaking the language of the business are definite things as we grow as designers or as we grow as UX designers, we should all learn.

And you speak very passionately about gaining trust and respect as a design team. Do you see any other areas where design teams can actually, you know, gain more trust and respect within an organization? Yeah, that's a tough question, right? I think depending on the size of your organization, and actually, like, it really needs to start at the top, right? It really needs to start at

whether it's a startup, so the founder, whether it's a big organization, the CEO or CP or whatever, they need to see the value of design, right? And if they've gone out and they've kind of understood and say, hey, we need to go build a design team now and just start employing designers and stuff and they build this design team, they probably understand it. Now,

Part of it needs to come from the top. The top needs to say, hey, this is why we have design in the company, and this is why we need to rely on them to go talk to the customer. Part of it is us saying, bottom-up approach, saying, hey, this is what the customer problems are, right? We have to go and talk to the customers. I know it's wrong to say that UXers or product designers are predominantly the voice of the customer. Everyone should be the voice of the customer, really. But

depending again on your organization it falls in the UXers or the product designers to be that voice of the customer to bring it to every conversation to say hey this is the customer problems not some some hypothesis that hasn't been vetted yet or you know we don't really understand the problems that we're trying to solve like we need to constantly talk about the customer and bring it to every conversation and then say start building that trust with product and say you know if we do this

this is what's going to happen again, and then launch it, see what happens. And if you get more wins on the board through that, that's how you start building your trust with the company. They start to see the value of design. But it really depends from organization to organization, I think. I'm sure. I think we've been speaking in rather generic terms. And what I hear you say is this partnership between the business and design. It requires leaders to, of course,

support the team and action often speaks louder than words in this case and of course for the design teams to be effective in demonstrating results and bringing back the necessary insights as well as delivering where the organization needs in very very critical areas so i think that definitely will help the team gain more trust and respect and i think one question

if you were to start all over again, now let's say you're in your 20s again, and then, and you're going to UX design, right? Would you choose to do it on your own, self-taught? Or would you choose to actually enroll in the program? I'll be honest, I didn't have the best time in uni, right? I hated going to classes. I hated learning from books. I didn't feel that was a way for me to learn. So I feel like it's,

It really depends on how you want to learn, right? What's the best way for you to learn, whether it's going to classes and learning from books and learning from like a structured method or kind of the way I did it, which was reading a whole lot of articles, learning from, you know, going to conferences, talking to people and just learning on the job. And so for me, I found that more valuable kind of doing it. So I wouldn't go down the path of probably getting a design, going down the path of a

being a design major or, you know, signing up for design school. But that's just my kind of way of learning. Even now, as I kind of transitioned to a design lead and learning about leadership and management, there are key things that I want to go learn from a more structured method. So, you know, I signed up for a communications course to understand how to deliver better, communicate better and communicate for impact, which is what the course was.

But when it comes to leadership, becoming a better lead, I am just learning from books. I'm learning from articles on Medium that have a Medium account. I'm learning from other people on Clubhouse more recently as well and just talking to people. So that's my method of learning. So I probably wouldn't go back and kind of sign up for a course. But other people, to each their own, if you feel like you should sign up for a course, definitely go about and go do that because I think you can learn a lot there.

in a lot more structured manner as well. Yeah, I 100% agree. As an educator myself, I think one thing I'm very conscious of is the different types of learners, like whether they're more visual, whether they're more kinesthetic. And I myself am a more auditory and kinesthetic learner, which is why I didn't do great in school. I'm not an A student, I'm more like a B student. So I think to learn by doing is actually what I would prefer very much as well. And I think

That's definitely a consideration when choosing a program, whether it's more theory lectures or is it more practical lessons? Is it actually very close to what's being done? Because one thing I learned from your story is that even though you were not a UX designer in the casino,

You were building products, you were actually very close to the technical team and you were trying your best to learn from whichever position you came from in order to build that familiarity with building digital products. So I think that is really wonderful. Do you have any parting advice for young designers or designers in general given on the topic today? Parting advice? Where do you start?

If you're just getting into UX, right? If you're just getting into the industry, you're signing up to classes like on Curious Core or taking masterclass sessions or whatever. Apart from the hot skills, obviously, that you gain from going through these courses, right? Understanding interactive patterns, IA, UX research, UX design, UI, all this kind of stuff.

Apart from that, I think one thing that, and again, depending on which path you take, whether it's in-house and working for an enterprise or working for an agency, really try to hone in on your soft skills as well. So in my earlier years at Seek, I was terrible

I still feel I'm kind of terrible at speaking, but I was terrible at speaking. I was super shy. But how you craft your story is how you start to influence stuff as well. And when it comes to design, one thing that you don't learn at design school is basically how you

work with other people and how you work under constraints because that's what design essentially is. It's a massive trade-off. Like design is trade-off. You're always trading off to get something out to market and then iterating, right? So you learn those things on the job, but a lot of that is also being able to communicate really efficiently with your teammates, being able to influence them as well if you want to go down a certain path and sell your design, right?

You should be able to have debates with people as well, be able to ask really good questions, have strong opinions about something, but don't have strong opinions and get really annoyed by someone saying, oh, yeah, but you're super opinionated. I don't believe in you. We're just going to go down the path. I feel like designers are opinionated anyway. It's super subjective industry anyway, right? Yeah.

So they're super opinionated, but come with evidence, right? Design is all about coming to the table with evidence as well. I'm very much evidence led, whether it's kind of quant data through dashboards that we have at work or research or insights, have evidence to back up your opinion and then have a debate with your team. I think designers coming out of school, one thing to look out for is to grow that soft skill, communicate and

asking really good questions. And even with that, asking really good questions is not easy. But if you don't ask, you're kind of not growing, right? You're not really, you're not putting yourself out there, you're not putting your hand up. And I feel like that's also how you grow as a designer. It's like you ask questions, you learn how to ask really good questions as well. Yeah, that's great advice. And certainly I hope it helps all of you here who are looking to transition into the industry. For those of you who are already practitioners, I hope this evening and this session

has been useful for you in terms of growing and helping your organizations push for better design maturity. We learned about trust, we learned about being a designer and how to hustle our way to be a designer. We learned about other life lessons as well. So I would like to thank Varun for spending time with us for tonight and I wish all of you well. Well Varun, thank you for your time and we'll catch up in a short bit. Cool, thanks for having me.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you. Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.