Experience to share working in tech (to high schoolers)

1–1 session with high schooler at Google  office

Previous weeks, I attended Geek Girls meet-up for the first time where there were a group of high schools girls and 20 mentors(us) mixed around to give them advices on girls in tech field on 1–1 in every 15 minutes interval.

Woah. big responsibility. Despite not knowing what to share, I went.

We were asked to introduce in front of them. The other mentors are from strong background like Googler in YouTube ads team, product managers from PWC, top scholarship owner of some awesome place (where some gasped when she introduced)etc. Looks like I am the only “traditional” software engineer in the room.

1. Tech overall industries

Student A: Hi, are you from Google?

Me: I’m not but I’m from a really awesome IT startup.

I asked them what’s their interests in tech and what do they think people in tech industry do, mostly would say coding. Some do not have any idea if she likes it or not because “tech” sounds too vague/far from her.

Before I projected alien technical word to her, I introduced some of the recent tech trending like Robotics, Virtual Reality, Web/Mobile tech field, difference between agency and product company, and jobs besides developer in tech based on her curiosity. There are roles like UX architect, product manager, security/networking researcher, tech recruiting..etc.

2. Why I’m(still) in tech industry

I talked about the difference of working in agency company and product company, working at (1–5 people)startup, multi-national startup and corporates in hopes that they know their options as they can choose other than big brand companies in their early career phase.

My daily routine in different phase of the project and how to work with different team (locally and remotely) and the possibilities of expanding to other roles from software engineer.

3. Misconception of tech industry

Some of the girls thought they are not good enough to learn coding (as they are not as good as the boys) while I shared my experience in learning Swift online. It’s ok to write code sucks at first, gradually you will improve. A girl shared her experience of creating a project with friends and she felt amazed to create something from nothing to something with technology.

It’s not hard to transition into tech industry, you just got to get your hands dirty at producing some sample works or even attend some tech events. I shared my insecurities in attending some tech events even though I need to go back and read more about the sharing.

A refreshing experience of sharing with a group of high schoolers and expose them to a wider view on tech industry. Not really the best person to give them advice but hopefully they grasp the idea of women in tech industry.

UXSG Meetup: First self-conducted group discussion

uxsg@paypal

Backdrop: I have been joining UXSG talk from time to time to know more on UX-related issues and something really interesting insights as well. In UXSG, they applied open space discussion where by everyone can propose any topic, be it beginner question (what is UX?) or some in-depth UX dilemmas that needs more UX experts to input. After topics are suggested, the top 8 voted questions will be chosen to have 30 mins discussion. Anyone is free to join or leave any of the discussion anytime.

Everyone has 3 votes on the topics they are interested in

Chosen UX Topics of the night

Here is my topic:

How does coming from different background helps in having better UX in process?

Why I have this topic in mind:

I noticed there are a lot of people learned about UX and later transitioned into designer/researcher. Be it from finance, business analyst, or photographer..etc

As a software engineer who just finished UX from GA, I found I can do more in UX, not only in just technical help in early UX discovery phase but also apply my UX skill into development as well. However I can only find vague discussions in UX context online so I would to hear more from others.

For UX designer, I would also like to explore on:

Do share any experience you have worked with different stakeholders(from different background) and what’re the challenges or things that you wished to improve at that time?

10s of How to use …

1. Error Handling?

A safe net when something goes south. I do find this gives a better context in error handling and better readability.

What is try! and try?

Use try! when you need to ensure your app always succeed as in won’t throw an error, but when it really does, your app shouldn’t work.

try! before the expression to disable error propagation and wrap the call in a runtime assertion that no error will be thrown. If an error actually is thrown, you’ll get a runtime error.

try? to handle an error by converting it to an optional value. If an error is thrown while evaluating thetry? expression, the value of the expression is nil

from Apple

UXD General Assembly – Linder [Full Report]

LINDER

Have you ever learn any foreign language?  Have you ever learn something through video or podcasts?  You got some hands on learning a foreign language through vocabulary/phrases app and you are determine to take yourself a higher level.

You got yourself a video to learn in a fun way but you forgot what you learn as you have nothing to revise back (in case you replay the video)

You tried reading an article in that foreign language. You tried finding new word meaning via dictionary diligently but the process was getting more and more dreadful and eventually you stopped.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if an podcast app improves your language learning experience?

Here it is.

Introducing Linder, my project in  UX design program in General Assembly.

What’s Linder?

Feel free to play with the prototype here: https://invis.io/H86WYUZUE

Too long? Read Linder in keynote format here.

My name is Amy Cheong. I’m a iOS Developer in Tigerspike and I learn UX to know more about a project planning process before development.  I’m self-learning Korean and I’m really interested to find the next steps for learner who wish to continue to learn more besides vocabularies and grammar in a more context way.

UXD General Assembly Week 7

High Fidelity Prototype

What’s the difference from Low-Fi?

It’s time to remove your lorem ipsum! Putting in actual information lets user to visualize better and provides a better feedback on your prototypes. I have to browse a lot of website (dribbble, sketchappsources, google around) and get some various insights around.

Beware of following a design pattern blindly because while it might suits his use case but it might not suitable in your case. In my project, before this, I insisted of using card design pattern (just because I think it’s cool but in the end in usability testing, it proved to be one of the biggest flaws) Boo.

UXD General Assembly Week 6

WIREFRAMING

This was a technical week. It was time for us to turn our low-fi prototype(paper drawing) to medium fidelity prototype(Sketch, Axure etc). Instructor actually gave us some tips when we planned for our interfaces.

1. Show only what you need user to see. Categorize and hide secondary features. If the screen displays too much things, everything is crying for attention. Try maintain less than 7 categories for each level.
2. Keep your user focus by showing continuous flow.If you show everything all at once, users lose focus and you might risk users are not going to focus on your core features.
3. Indicate user progress from time to time. Nudge user if they complete a test or if no internet(Empty state) so that users do not confused what are they suppose to do now.

UXD General Assembly Week 5

Image source

Information Architecture & Navigation

It’s an interesting to talk about the content strategy. How the content is structured in such a way that your target audience has no problem in navigation without getting confused. There are few factors:

• Labeling – What things are to represent the features
• Taxonomy –  Classification of each label
• Information Architecture – Way to organizing and structuring content (SiteMap)
• Navigation – Design of IA that helps user to complete journeys
• Task – How things connect to each other (User Flow)

UXD General Assembly Week 4

Tool: Invision |  Sketch

PAPER PROTOTYPING

It is good to start with paper prototyping of your user flows because you will get input from users and if it doesn’t work well, you can rework again because effort in paper prototyping is small(you wasted just a few papers!). It’s ok to start again at early stage rather than discover flaws when you are developing the real product.

In class, we used Invision for the paper prototyping (It’s free!). It is simple to use and it can be downloaded on real device.  It can be shared via sms too! (love this)

 

UXD General Assembly Week 3

Topic: Grocery shopping

Persona

(Image source)

Through persona, you can relate more on how’s the persona behaves/ reacts to your product. Persona is the target group of audience that you aim to get your empathy with.

Does getting more persona means better for your project?

– More persona means your project need to target more group of audience which you have high possibility of pleasing no one in the end.

Katia conducted 3 brief interviews in front of us and we were told to write each of the observation on a sticky note during the interview. After that we grouped relevant ones together and synthesised the whole picture.

Note: Separate themes by goals, not behaviors. It’s possible that not all post-its will fall into a big grouping, and that’s okay.

Warning: A lot of Post-it notes ahead

UXD General Assembly Week 2

User Research

Before every class starts, we are given pre-work to let us have an brief idea what’s will be covered  for the week. Based on the given material,  UX has a lot  of  researches that can be used based on the project needs and stages.