Episode 2: Kicking Start Your UX Journey In 2021 with Ben George, Design Head, ReferralCandy
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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.

Benjamin has worked for different companies including Saucebits, Fresh Menu, which is a food tech startup where he led a small size design team to improve the online food delivery experience, which actually stretched out to the whole of India.

And today he is in Singapore with us and he hits the design team shaping the future of customer retention with referral candy and candy bar. All right. So welcome, Benjamin. I'd like to just ask you the very first question, which is like, what do you do on a day to day basis at referral candy and candy bar? Hi, Dalen. Yeah. Okay. You asked me such a difficult question right off the bat.

Oh, sorry. I should have pre-warned you. Day-to-day is very different depending on which day and which week, I think. Off late because it's the start of the quarter. Most of our day-to-days are right now planning roadmaps, figuring out what are we going to be focusing on as a product team,

What are we going to be focusing on as a design team? And I think shaping the rest of 2021 early. That's usually what I'm doing right now. Okay, that's wonderful. Let's start with your journey because that's also one of the titers of our webinar. Do you ever regret dropping out of high school?

I don't think so. Because when I was kind of learning what I enjoyed, in India, there's a common joke, which you say that if you throw a stone, it's going to usually land on a street dog or an engineer.

So India is full of like engineers and like really good engineers and mostly doctors. Those are two safe professions everybody is going into. And so when most of my friends were in engineering, I'm usually was going creating art and doing graffiti and random stuff, just exploring my creative side at the time.

Slowly I realized that I had an inkling towards art and computers. And that's what kind of led me towards graphic design initially.

And I think one of the interesting things that you mentioned in your bio as well is that you spend your time painting murals and throwing clay over the weekends, which means you do pottery. So when did this creative interest start manifesting in your life?

I think from the time I can remember, from when I was maybe five, six, I think very early on, I knew I liked doing things with my hands. I was a maker of sorts, made art, wrote poetry, various different kinds of things, whatever used to keep my brain engaged. And that was something which I found interesting.

And you said you wanted to join Pixar as a 3D artist initially, but decided to kind of like abandon that plan. Like what happened? Being a 3D artist, isn't that also sort of like a creative discipline? It is. The common analogy that I use is

Just because I like to eat food doesn't make me a chef. It was exactly like that. I loved watching animated movies. And as soon as I started learning the skill, I suddenly realized there was a little less than what I imagined. I started looking at animated movies and constantly in my mind, I used to break them down. Oh, this is the technique that they use. This was the tool that they potentially could have used.

And it lost the magic in animated movies for me. And apart from that, I also sucked at 3D. I love 3D objects, but building them and then animating them and rigging the whole structure up was a pain for me. I just lost a little bit of the magic there, I think.

I see. So what I hear you say is that when you start getting really deep into it and you started studying all there is to know about doing 3D animation, watching 3D animation films started to lose their magic. Yeah, it's just like watching a magician. If you know how the trick is performed, then you're just watching a guy doing what you are going to predict next. And you were mentioning like instead of actually enjoying the movie, you were judging them and you were kind of nitpicking what you were doing. Yeah.

In a way.

That's quite an interesting process. I guess, why graphic and web design then when you're sort of like transitioning to that? How did you know that was something of your calling? So in order to kind of expose myself, I didn't know too much at that time. Where I learned 3D, they also had a little bit of graphic design and doing posters and stuff like that. And that was where I first got a little interested in graphic and sound engineering.

So these were the two things that initially got, piqued my interest and I decided to

focused a little bit more on graphic. And there was a company that was interviewing at the time. And so as a graphic designer, I went in there, I suddenly got the role of a web designer. That's when I realized whatever the job description says, ignore it. Because what the job description says and what the company wants might be different. So you want to try and take a chance. That's wonderful. And one of the things I'm wondering is that how...

you know, did you sort of progress along the way? Because you're pretty much self-taught, you know, like how do you learn these stuff on your own, right? By being self-taught.

Hmm. I think generally I'm a very curious person. I usually like to understand how did this thing come about? Why did that handle of a teapot look like that? I think one of my earliest memories is we bought a refrigerator at home and the way the refrigerator was positioned, I could only open it in one way and it used to block the aisle.

And I kept wondering, you know, why didn't they just allow people to choose refrigerators which open the other way? And that was my earliest memory or product design thinking that I used. When I got into the job, for one year, I was just on my own. I was the first designer in the company and just learning as I go, reading blogs like Abdu Zidu and stuff like that. So just teaching myself.

and trying to figure out what trends were, what were they doing, and just learning on the job. It was at the one-year mark when the company that I was working in also hired an Apple Design Award winner called Piotr. He's from Poland.

he was brutally honest and probably one of my favorite mentors and so he taught me a lot of the things and the iPhone release at the same time and they came up with this massive human interface guidelines and

Things started surfacing, things about user experience and using psychology to make product decisions or design decisions was becoming more and more popular. And that's probably my journey. I stayed in the company for seven years because it was quite a big growth curve for me. Yeah, that's that sauce bits you were mentioning.

It sounds like you participated in building over a hundred apps according to your bio. Wow, what is it like being an early designer of Apple apps and building so many apps? What have you learned? Yeah, I started this conversation with saying that there are many, many engineers in India, some really talented ones. And so many of them were in this company as well.

We used to build apps. It was a services company and we ended up doing a bunch of apps. And so in my early days, I started, I was the sole designer or working with another designer, building the products up. Later on, I started leading teams and mostly did lesser design and more leading and managing and stuff like that.

100 apps in seven years we used to do about three to four apps in a month and back then like I think all of the designers were super packed we used to have to work I don't know 12 hours in a day 14 hours in a day to get this done I wouldn't recommend it now but it was the agency like that's pretty crazy

Wow. Yeah. And you work for some really great companies as well, such as Intel, you know, Coca-Cola, IBM, and even the US Army. Wow. That's some really interesting companies there. What would you say that you learned about sort of designing over 100 apps? You know, like, is there anything we should learn or take note of?

It's been so long. It's such a long time ago. But yeah, I think that I remember writing something about the seven sins of mobile app design somewhere on my medium a long, long time ago. You have that. You actually have an article called The Seven Sins. Yeah. So...

That's awesome. Okay, go on. Yeah, you don't have to name all seven. It's about keeping it mysterious. So you can name two or three and then like everyone else will go to your medium and read the article. Yeah, so I feel like some of the stuff that at least in mobile app design is that people struggle to keep it simple.

So while you're doing websites or maybe web apps, you have the liberty of screen estate. You can put in a little bit more, but at least when the earliest phones came in and they were relatively small, it forced everybody, everybody on the team to kind of say, is this necessary? Is this necessary here? And how would people use this product? What's core to the product?

And those questions were very important and into simplifying. Then there were other basic things like people used to ignore onboarding. So sometimes people used to come into the app, it used to be an empty state. What do I do now? And they expected customers or users to guess and figure it out on their own. Now, back then, maybe it might have worked because there were fewer apps, maybe interest.

But now I think if you don't capture them in the first few seconds, they have bounced, deleted the app.

gone. And the other thing which I used to constantly have a pet peeve against was, I think, overloading apps and making it super complex, like, you know, putting like a bunch of things into a bunch of features into an app. Some of them you didn't know, no evaluation to whether this thing actually makes sense or is actually making an impact. I think that overloading a bunch of things was a problem too.

Yeah, that sounds like quite a number of synths. So we'll definitely get your link and then we'll share it on our social media channels because that sounds very valuable in terms of sharing. And I know you also spend your time to mentor people, right? Especially designers. And I was just wondering as you're mentoring designers,

designers and you actually do open mentoring sessions you do portfolio reviews and stuff like that so if i recall correctly we had this conversation where you actually mentor over 160 you interview over 160 candidate and 50 students in the whole of last year or something like that yeah so

what got you to go like in this like mode of like just giving back? No, I think the mentoring was about maybe 60, 70 people. The 160 that you mentioned was the number of people we interviewed for an open position in the company. What got me to go crazy is lots of people basically participated, gave in their portfolios, applied to their position and

way more than I expected. And it was also around the time when everything was starting to become remote. We had opened our positions to be not just Singapore specific and we had opened it up a little bit. And so I think that got us a lot of people. Hmm.

So I understand that was sort of what happened, but what motivated you to keep doing it though? Okay, so I think very early in my career, I realized how important having that mentor in my life was because I was self-taught and I was trying to figure out everything, my own paths, make my own mistakes and lots of trial and error, very iterative process.

And along the way, the mentor that I had and how he had developed me into becoming a smarter, better thinker and a designer.

That definitely helped me. And I felt like this is one of those things which I would always like to pass it forward. I realized that I had the privilege while I was early in my career and it helped me. And so I feel like a lot of the designers right now, many of them want it. Many of them are sometimes craving for it and they just don't know which direction to go to. And there are a lot of communities right now, which I'm part of, and they're doing quite well in giving back to the community. Yeah.

That makes sense. So it's about kind of helping others because you're now in sort of that senior position and you're able to do so. I think this was one thing that we wanted to talk about tonight was I was just wondering, like, what did you learn from interviewing so many people? Like, what did you notice are some of the common mistakes that people make when they're presenting their portfolio or like coming into interviews with you?

I feel like of the number of people, let's say out of the 160 that did interview,

or did apply, maybe about 60 or 70 of them were from one or the other bootcamp. So one bootcamp or the other. And so I feel like one of these biggest problems, at least with bootcamp grads, is that it feels like most of them feel like there's a certain structure, seven things to do. And if I do all seven things, I'm going to get hired. And I feel like if you were interviewing 70 bootcamp students,

like when you start looking at the sea of the exact same format, everybody's using the same things. And many times you started seeing the same projects coming again. So what we originally assumed to be a single person's project is actually a group project. And then it comes back later on because it was a unique name or a unique identity or maybe something else in terms of their product. And so that's when I started realizing that, you know,

Maybe the common assumption is that if I've spent so much time building my portfolio out, somebody who's going to be reviewing it is going to be spending at least 15-20 minutes

Unfortunately, that's not true. Most people are spending about two to five minutes per portfolio. That's what I hear too. And so now that's a sad thing because, yeah, we know you've spent time building this portfolio, but that's what the industry, the reality we live in. People are not spending time along with a bunch of other factors about having short attention spans. You want a portfolio to stand out and grab attention. And so I feel like...

most people end up writing these novel length case studies. And Mel Sweet, another designer from Dropbox, she gave me this thing which stuck. So she was telling me like how she differentiates senior versus junior designer. And the example is of a toolbox. Now, a junior designer might take all of the tools of toolbox to fix a table, let's say.

But a senior designer would know, okay, I just need maybe the nail and the hammer and I can get the table fixed. I think that differentiation is something that maybe people can look at even in the product design realm. Figuring out, okay, certain products, your focus is on a certain side of the product and show relevant tools or approaches, right?

to the portfolio versus maybe some other product you might want to focus on maybe, I don't know, your visual design skills or maybe the research skills. There's a lot of value being said out here. I just want to take a minute to sort of like summarize a few of the things that you said. Number one, you said,

you see a lot of sameness in the bootcamp graduates in their portfolio. And the reason is they assume that UX design is a step one to step seven process, right? So you have to do step one. And that becomes really difficult to also differentiate who does what, because you're seeing the same pieces of work

in this case. So as a designer, we should look at at least telling people what is our role if we are doing a group project and also like trying to avoid that sameness. Now, the second thing you mentioned is because hiring managers have so little time reviewing their portfolio,

We should not design our portfolios to be read in 10 to 15 minutes, but actually within two to five minutes. So the important points should all be there and we should treat it like designing a product. So the last thing that you mentioned was that the difference between a junior designer and a senior designer is that

their ability to differentiate what tools to use, right? So as designers being conscious of not just treating every problem as a nail and using a hammer to nail it down, but actually understanding what the problem is and using the appropriate tool to kind of fix that problem. Right. So Omar's saying UX usually has a similar process. So does that mean we should stop showing our process and give a summary instead?

Actually, it's a good point. Showing a process for the sake of the process is never interesting. It shouldn't be done because there are only two situations. Let's say that you're an experienced designer. You will have to curate and show the key parts. Maybe it was a four to six month project. Obviously, it's not possible to show all of the stuff that you did in the six months.

But let's say figure out in that project, maybe the research part is something that you did something different and you want to highlight that area. The visual design, maybe not so much. And you don't want to highlight the process of how you arrived at that visual design. Alternatively, have two different case studies in your portfolio. One that highlights maybe research and one that highlights maybe how you arrived at the design details and the nitty gritties.

That could be another way. I feel like most people, what they end up doing is start at discovery and at visual design.

So it's a very set checklist that people are going through, figuring out, okay, what I need to put something in discovery section. I need to put something for research. I need to put something for qualitative or quantitative research and then work through the process, show the diamond and then show how you went through divergent and then convergent thinking and then came up with the final product or the final design.

Though in a real world scenario, it's never linear. It's never going from start to finish in this one linear line and you produce it. The only exception maybe is if you have a very short time and you're working for an agency setup where you're handing it off to a client and saying, I'm done. That might be a very linear process. But usually in a product system, you're kind of working on it in a very iterative way. You kind of do research. You arrived at certain maybe synthesis of research.

You are showing it with your team, figuring out what are the areas that you as a product you want to focus on? What are the areas as a design team you want to focus on? And then it's a very iterative approach to design. And that's, I think, usually lost in a portfolio or a case study. Yeah, I seem to hear this as well from some of the other hiring managers we work with, as well as some of the managers.

guest instructors we work with that storytelling or presenting that information in a very relevant way seems to be a big problem for junior designers but you know as a junior designer if I were to put myself in their shoes like I don't know anything about the industry right and I'm coming into this new industry and I'm

I'm just trying my best to copy whatever people say is the right way to do it. I'm just following the structure and the given template.

And then I unconsciously get penalized for it because I don't know any better. So is there a better way to do this than knowing that someone is really mean to this? I feel like initially everybody tends to imitate, which is okay. You don't want to stand out from a status quo. You want to imitate whatever else the other people in your bootcamp is doing or other designers in the industry are doing when you're building case studies.

But I feel like some of the strongest case studies or the strongest portfolios that I've seen are very specific about what they are trying to say. So there's two things that they do very differently, at least from the patterns that I've observed.

Everybody says, say a better story. It's a little vague. Like, how do you exactly say a better story? Like, you know, for example, what if you like action movies and you prefer that kind of maybe plot versus somebody who likes a drama and prefers a different type? So it's a very subjective thing. What I do recommend is starting from the end. So usually you want to set your audience up

with what it is that you achieved at the end. It could be in, you could be talking in numbers, you could be talking in maybe final designs, maybe prototypes, something along those lines, because that's when you have, or somebody who's viewing your portfolio case study has the maximum attention. If that's impressive, they might be more invested in trying to figure out, oh, that looks interesting, or that data point seems interesting. How did they get there? And then they navigate through the case study or the portfolio.

And hopefully this is not a novel length case study. If it's short, if it's confident, usually it maybe engages the audience in a certain way, keeping sections not expanded by default because that makes it super long. I understand there's so much of information, maybe some golden nuggets in there that you don't want to part with.

You usually maybe put it under maybe a click, maybe, you know, expand section or something like that. Maybe even you can have data on to how many people actually click that expand. Maybe you might find it interesting, but other people on your portfolio are not clicking on it, which most likely means they're not interested in it. And the other thing is, I think if you're new in the field, there's only one way to go up is to speak to people who have been there where you want to go.

So if you're trying to go to a company, a massive company in the industry, try and speak to people who are already there, who are already working there, who've gotten hired there. So obviously they have an idea of what the process was like, what kind of portfolio did they showcase to the hiring managers then. And then you can work backwards from there. Hmm.

That's good advice and I think this would be helpful for future designers to keep in mind. And I give this, share this piece of advice with my coaching clients as well, right? Beginning with an end in mind, it's super, super important.

One of the things I think we spoke about briefly as well was this idea of as a designer, you're going into design interviews. I think we have two gripes here. I mean, one is my own gripe. One is your gripe. So my gripe is like all the JDs just say, hey, you need two to three years of experience as a junior designer, which is really odd to me. Um,

That's my gripe. And then your gripe, you were mentioning is like, design managers shouldn't give people take home assignments, but rather they should give them like a whiteboard exercise or something like an app critique or something like that. So tell me a little bit more, like, what's your gripe on that?

Actually, I think I share your gripe as well in terms of companies or hiring managers having two to three years of experience for a junior role. Now, where do they expect to get this experience if they can't get any experience? So it's a problem in the industry. And constantly when I'm talking to people, other hiring managers and stuff like that, I try to talk them out of this particular decision.

And I think the concept is they want to try to be safe. If they can see maybe one or two work, they can then make a safe bet that, OK, we can hire this person without any or lowering the risk. I feel like you don't need to put experience for that. You need to put work for that. Maybe they could have done freelance or maybe they could have done something else on their personal project or something like that.

And so this definitely is a problem in the industry. And yeah, so we recently did hire a designer. She didn't need to have any previous experience and it could still be come into the company, start contributing and she's doing very well right now. But this is a problem. And my gripe is with take-home assignments. I think the only exception to take-home assignments is if you get a candidate

and they have zero portfolio, they have zero existing work and nothing to talk about. And then there's no way for somebody who's hiring to figure out, well, how do we evaluate you? What do we evaluate you? What are your skills, strengths that we can then see if you can start contributing to our team or not? I feel like that might be the only exception, but there's just a minority. Most of the people usually have one project, maybe from college or one project from a bootcamp,

at least even one project that is life. And so take-home assignments, the biggest gripe that I have against this is that they expect candidates to take time out of their probably already busy life

to spend some time on the company. And the logic they use is that, hey, if you are willing to spend 48 hours to five days spending on my problem that I'm giving you to solve, you might be worth hiring. And that's a completely flawed logic.

Imagine if you were having a carpenter come in home and you have four different chairs and you say, hey, why don't you come in and fix one chair? And if you do well, I'll give you other three chairs to fix. So nobody in skills trade works this way. And we are expecting different of our designers. And so that's my biggest problem, I think. Yeah.

I fully agree with you. And I think some companies even take it to another level where they actually pass the designer actual problems that they are solving. So in this case, the designer is doing work for free for the company or multiple design candidates are doing work for free for the candidate, which is actually kind of unethical and reminds me of being in the advertising industry where we are doing no paid spec work for clients.

which I thoroughly do not enjoy. So yeah, I think that's really the situation over there. So what's the alternative, right? As a hiring manager, what kind of alternatives have you used to determine the capability of a candidate? Oh, another very important point, which I forgot to say, take-home assignments are...

don't cater to inclusivity. If you're a single mother taking care of kids and then you have to do take home, you might be able to spend maybe, I don't know, a couple of hours versus somebody who's able to spend 40 hours on this take home.

Obviously, the results might be different. And then you start hiring a certain type of people, a certain group of people. And that's so bad for diversity and inclusion. So I think that's another thing that I miss speaking about. That's true, too. So I feel like the approach that we use is not perfect, but we try.

So the approach that we use is try to make it fair as a base. And so we say that, okay, you know what, if everybody who's interviewing at the company who goes past the first few rounds of interview, everybody gets these two things, which is a portfolio presentation and a whiteboarding exercise.

So the portfolio presentation is a good place where we can try to understand, okay, what did they do in the past? How long was the project? Who did they work with? They get an opportunity to talk to us about how was it working with engineers, with marketers or customer support. The opportunity that's missed is usually they talk about the product alone or the design alone. You're missing lots of opportunities of,

it's not working, you're not designing this in a vacuum and you're missing the conversations and maybe some time where you disagreed with engineering and you still went about maybe disagreeing, but committing and figuring out a certain solution at the end.

So the portfolio is a good place where they can talk to us about many different design decisions, product decisions. How do they contribute maybe outside of their design role as well. And this is like after how many interviews we're talking about? So like I think the first design round is a portfolio presentation. Okay, right. Okay, got it. So it's just after maybe one or two conversations. Okay, great.

Sounds good. And then you were saying there was another step to the process?

where they are given a certain design brief and then they are expected to solve the problem or at least show us the approach and the thought process to going ahead to solve that problem. Now, we know very well that one hour is nowhere close to enough time to solve a relatively vague problem.

It is also maybe not super fair for maybe if somebody is introverted and they can't think on the spot and they prefer like, you know, going under a rock and figuring out and processing all of this information and then presenting. So we have a few different systems in place to try to help a few different situations. So I feel like one of the things with the whiteboarding is that we don't repeat the problem more than once.

So the hiring manager, namely me, is the only person who knows about the design brief a day before a candidate comes. Nobody else on the design team knows about this, what the problem is going to be. So immediately it puts everybody at the fair ground.

understanding of the problem. Nobody has an expert solution ready or they have looked at five different candidates trying to solve a problem and they already have some biases in their minds. And so that's something that we try to do, intentionally make sure that everybody is given the problem at the same time. And the other one that we also do is

Usually in a whiteboarding, it's always me against everybody else in the room. I'm trying to work through a problem or try to approach it in a certain way while everybody else in the room are looking at me and judging me and evaluating me. So what we try to do is we assign another designer on the team to become their partner. So now they are both involved into coming up with the best solution. The designer along with the candidate is equally assessed.

into why did they go figure out the certain design decision or how did they decide that this is the approach that they want to do? How intentional were they? And sometimes we know that maybe somebody needs a little bit of help getting started. Maybe just if they get started, they can then come up with some interesting ideas and talk to us about the process and the approach. And so they sometimes giving hints, suggestions,

helping them manage time, telling them, oh, you know, we have 15 minutes remaining. Do you think that we have enough time for taking up five other use cases or should we just focus on one? Those kind of stuff which help the participant along the hiring process, the whiteboarding challenge as well.

I really like how inclusive this process sounds and the fact that you also are willing to invest time and resource in the candidate and not just have the candidate invest their own time and resource in the company. And I think that's very nice. But I'm also concerned, like, let's say I'm a hiring manager, I don't have a lot of time,

Is this only reserved for your top three or top five candidates where you do the whiteboard challenge with them? It's true. If you're measuring efficiency through personars,

You want to save this for candidates that look promising, maybe at least from the process that you put in place before. Things like maybe we initially have candidates fill in a questionnaire. So sometimes they tell us a little bit about their journey there. Then they talk to us about portfolio presentation and then they do the whiteboarding. So it does take some time. But my challenge to hiring managers is,

you're trying to build a better team. You're trying to build the future of your team and trying to grow your team and maybe even your metrics or your performance review depends on your team, the product that you do and the work that you do. If you can't invest in the first step, which is hiring a good candidate, that's like almost like the structural foundational level thing. And if you're saying that, oh, and what I have done

two weeks to do this, you're most likely going to get somebody with only some amount of information. And so that might sometimes work out for you in a lucky situation. And sometimes it might not. And so what we try to do is be more intentional with who we are hiring and how we go about it.

And as you're sharing this, I also reflect as a business owner as well, like in terms of how we should be more intentional in terms of our hiring and being more rigorous in that process, because really good people do make a difference in the organization and they do deliver exceptional results in this case.

We have a question from the audience. Anik, who is based in Singapore, he is asking you like how many projects would you recommend a UX designer or aspiring UX designer put in their portfolio? And then I'll ask the second question later. The short answer to this is it depends. How many good projects do you have?

I feel like if you have one good project, just showcase the one. If you have three, then showcase three. There isn't a set number, I think. Curation is as important as case study itself. Making sure that, okay, you know what, you understand. And maybe if you have a portfolio around and say, okay, you know what, you'd spent...

30 minutes talking about one project and then talk about another project for five minutes saying that, you know, I know that this is not my best work, but I still wanted to talk about a certain challenge in project B.

It shows self-awareness. It shows that, OK, you understand and you have taste and you care about doing good work. And for some reasons, maybe beyond your control or maybe within your control, you weren't able to get your best work in Project B. And I think that that is a level of awareness any organization would be happy to have.

um there are so many different types of soft skills that is not evaluated through how good you are in figma or how well you can conduct or facilitate surveys or do user research

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Anik is also asking what kind of designers actually thrive in the UX design industry since you've been in this industry for a while? I feel like UX designers generally seem to be thriving in the industry. We are in a very premium, very privileged space in the tech and we shouldn't forget that.

that we already are in the premium section of the tech. I think engineers too in the tech space are very well treated for the most part.

And I feel like the designers that thrive, it depends on the type of organization you're aspiring to be in. If you are aspiring to be in a smaller organization, startups, younger organizations, designers that are generalist usually thrive in that ecosystem. If you're in a larger organization...

specialists usually try people who are experts in certain aspects of design or certain industries those kind of characteristics are usually valued at larger organizations yeah that's a that's a good rule of thumb uh any specific um i would say attitudes or characteristics that you notice of great ux designers you work with i think that um one of the things is um curiosity or in some ways uh

Wanting to know the why behind

maybe a product decision or maybe a design decision. One of our company values is searching for the truth. And so I feel like that plays very well here because searching for the truth is characteristic that usually people are hungry, people aren't happy with superficial answers and they want to dig a little bit deeper into the root of why a decision was made or why a business chose approach A versus approach B.

And I think those are some attitudinal stuff that usually sticks with me. And whenever I'm like evaluating designers also, I'll be like, oh, that point that they made, it stuck with me. And it got me even thinking or they challenged something that I thought I knew.

but actually don't. And that's an interesting equation and a conversation to have and go back into the next, let's say one-on-one and say, you know what? The point that he brought up was pretty good. I didn't have the answer to that then, but I feel like I have a better answer now or a better decision now.

The other thing which is maybe usually very underrated is communication. Being able to communicate verbally in a written format, facilitate conversations, being able to build trust with your team and teams around you or around the design team is probably very important into getting your designs finalized and to get it into the market.

That's some really good advice, Ben. Thanks for sharing that. And also, I believe in curiosity. It's a really important trait designers should have. Now, we have a general question from Rupali. So she's asking if you're mentoring for ADP list right now.

They updated their website recently and I haven't had the chance to update my mentor profile, but I hope to be able to do this this weekend. And yeah, I am using ADPDesign.org and I have my Calendly link in my LinkedIn where anybody can go in and find this slot.

Yep, that's right. I think people are welcome to reach out to you on LinkedIn. And I see that Kellan Lee link very, very visible. It's like the first thing I see on the LinkedIn profile. So I'm sure you'll be getting quite a number of requests after this webinar as well. And, yeah, Noora asked a question, I mean, which you just answered as well. Like, is having a degree a requirement or nice to have in order to...

From my experience, I felt like most of the companies say that

degree or some of the requirements will be like degree or masters or bachelors of interaction design or human computer interaction yeah that's right design i've applied to them i've gotten through the rounds so i don't think that degree is super important but if you're maybe relocating the government places a higher weightage on degree in design for visas and whatnot as compared to maybe companies

Oh, that is actually quite an interesting point because I'm sure it was not an easy process to get you here in Singapore considering how Singapore values degree holders. Exactly. Do you want to share a little bit like how you managed to

sort of get through that process? So like, while I don't have like a degree in design or any relevant field, I do feel like I have a bachelor's in visual comm, which I done on the side part-time. So you did a part-time work. Distance, actually through distance is something that I did for the longest time. And so it was...

Why did I do that? I think it was just to stop my mom from nagging me.

I think that that was probably one of my distinct for actually going ahead and doing that. We understand. Mums know it best. So yeah, I think that's quite a valid thing. I actually did my own part-time degree on the side as well. And it's for the very same reasons because I thought when I was much younger, I thought I may want to work overseas in future. And this was going to be like something that they will look out for.

Yeah. So you're also advising Nura to just apply, even though they have a degree requirement. You're saying like apply and ask for forgiveness later. I love that attitude. I think that's kind of great. We have another question before we kind of wrap up. Rachel is asking, what are some of the most memorable portfolios you have seen and what helps them send out from the crowd? Okay. Yeah.

I think this is commonly misunderstood in terms of portfolio. What do you guys think is the objective of having an amazing portfolio, having an amazing case study?

What do you hope to achieve? Or what do you think that portfolio will achieve? Okay, great. We got our first answer. Capture the hiring manager's attention. We get a few different things about displaying aptitude, making a good impression. Okay, all fair points. One of the things that I feel a good portfolio just is like your free pass to get you through the door.

the door to the interview. Nobody ever saw an amazing portfolio that I'm going to hire this person. That never has happened in my career or I've never hired anybody in the same fashion. I feel like, yeah, okay. Something's about making a good first impression, catching attention seems roundabout there. Ticket to the interview is probably what Raymond just mentioned is probably the best way to describe it.

You want to showcase that you have a certain set of skills, things that the hiring manager is potentially looking for, and you want to go and have a meeting with them, have a more detailed discussion about the project. It's in that discussion that you have where you start talking about the soft skills,

The kind of decisions that you had to do, the kind of complex situations you have to navigate in order to get a design to go live or a product to go live or ship something to clients. So I think that that's a commonly misunderstood thing, because when you try to put all of the stuff that you plan on having a conversation with into your case study,

guess what? The case study is going to become massive. You're going to have various different types of people. Recruiters are going to be looking at your portfolio and your case study, hiring managers, other designers, designers that are peers, seniors, maybe even juniors. Everybody's looking at it. You can't have one process that fits all, that gets the hiring manager's attention. And that's like designing a product that is for everybody. The target market is everybody.

And that rarely ever happens. You need to cater your portfolios to a recruiter, to a hiring manager who you know is spending nowhere, no more than maybe 30 to 40 seconds to about five minutes. So anywhere around this, which is why I again highly recommend to start from the end.

So if you are able to show the end result, maybe even some metrics that tie with the end result, immediately a hiring manager is like, oh, if I'm in a product company, I care about metrics. This designer seems to be caring about metrics. On top of that, this design also seems to have a good output. If you're a researcher, show some of the research outputs and catering your portfolio. If you've got maybe three case studies in your portfolio, don't showcase all three. If you're applying to...

maybe a product design position, showcase something that is more heavier on the product design side. If you're in an agency, show something else which maybe an agency setup requires. That makes a lot of sense. And I have two last questions for you. One would be a continuation of Rachel's question. Who was the most memorable candidate that you interviewed that displayed great soft skills that you spoke about? I'm trying to remember.

Doesn't seem very memorable. Yeah, I know some good designers who have showcased some really good soft skills and I can't remember them right off the bat over the past month and a half maybe or maybe two months. Okay, that's fair. What was it about them that demonstrated that mastery in soft skills? Okay, so I feel like that designer, she specifically spoke about

some of the things that was complex and difficult for her to navigate way outside of the design realm. It wasn't anything to do with the technical side of design or even the research side. It ended up like, you know, there was issues with the product manager and the engineer. And she had nothing to do with it. And she was supposed to be a...

to mid-level candidate. And so she had to step in and try to facilitate this discussion because they were at loggerheads and not getting anywhere with it and stuff like that. And, you know,

It didn't have any point in terms of the project, but she still made it a point to show that, okay, there is a little bit of like people skills that she is strong in. So it demonstrated facilitation and demonstrate a bit of problem solving in that process. And the problem solving, not in the design realm, it was in the working with people. Sometimes people don't get along and you may choose to disagree, but still go ahead and push something out the door, ship something.

That's great. Well, thanks for sharing that story. I'm sure this will help give some of the audience members here some indication of what good soft skills mean. The last question I wanted to ask you, you know, if you were to give any advice to your juniors or even to your younger self, you know, what kind of advice would you give him or her?

I feel like for all those people who haven't gotten a job and just out of boot camps or like, you know, are trying to transition and trying to apply to positions that you want to. I think generally interviewing is a very nerve wracking time. It's stressful. It's filled with like lots of insecurities or moments where you are filled with anxiety.

imposter syndrome, maybe I'm not good enough, maybe this industry is not for me, and lots of self-doubt, rejection, and those kind of stuff. I feel like stay true to who you are and stay confident because it's part of the journey. Rejection is part of the journey. Getting lots of no's in order to get a yes at some point is important.

If anything, it builds grit and determination and that will make you a better, not just designer, but a person overall, I think. That's great. And with that, grit and determination, we'll end off the webinar. Thank you so much, Benjamin, for all your sharing. It got really intense in the middle. 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.