By the way the application for our design apprenticeship May 2021 is ongoing. The deadline is on Sunday 18th April so don’t miss it!

In this final blog, I’ll be talking about the last 2 months of my apprenticeship which centred around my final UI assignment where I designed a digital product from scratch. I also worked with my colleagues to organise Stampede’s first-ever remote design hackathon. Working on designing my own product was one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences in my entire apprenticeship because I got the opportunity to design a product that is very personal to me while having full control of the style. Let’s dive right in!

The Final Apprenticeship UI Assignment

You may have recalled that earlier on in my apprenticeship journey, I spent 4 months working on UI assignments and client projects. Fast forward towards the end, I received the final assignment to design a product that would end up being my case study – a Final Year Project of sorts. The assignment was to design a product with the design process entirely from scratch. I had two goals: The primary objective was to further develop my UI design skills and fine-tune my aesthetic design sense. The second was to learn how to test and continuously improve the usability of my design.

Coming Up with the Product Idea

Prior to the assignment, I was playing around with a few potential ideas to choose from such as a mental health app, a home cooked food delivery app, virtual school web app for students, resume scanner etc. so that I could compare them and decide which one was both inspiring and challenging so that I could learn and grow throughout the design process. After discussing them with Shaza, the Co-founder and Principal Designer at Stampede, I ended up going with the idea of helping others be more aware of their mental health. When the pandemic hits, many countries go into lockdown, Malaysia included. The social and physical interactions we used to have in abundance pre-Covid were gone overnight. It was a hard time for many people. 

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The sudden lack of physical contact with others due to staying at home can leave people feeling they have nowhere to turn when they feel stressed or anxious. Previously, people could leave home for a change of scenery to reflect on their problems but the lockdown prevented that from happening. All the usual recreational activities like going out, music festivals, travel etc. were also taken away and it’s a huge adjustment for people. 

In order to solve this problem, I proposed a mental health app that people could use on their smartphones and tablets so it would be easy for people to access the service. The other reason was flexibility for the user; having a mental health app can enable a user to explore options and complete mental and physical activities that improve their mental health at their own pace before deciding what the next steps might be.

For the mental health app, I didn’t need to utilise the entire design process because the assignment focused on building up my skills on UI Design and Testing which were the last 2 parts of the process. Shaza provided me with a sample user persona and helped me define the problem to kick start my assignment. At this point, my design process would only have 4 steps as shown above. Usually, a complete design process would consist of empathising with the users first which is the first stage of the design process. Empathising consists of tasks such as interviewing potential personas, creating an empathy map from the information gathered from the interview. It would help the designers better appreciate and understand the problems our users faced thus designing solutions that solve problems for the users.

My mental health app, named Mindful, provides a self-paced step-by-step guide that guides users overcome their problems such as stress, depression and anxiety based on their user profile. It also has a special feature known as therapeutic photography that allows users to take photos of their favourite moments and create an album out of it so that the users can look back at their happy moments to destress themselves.

The first step of any design project is the exploration process. Sketching is a fine way to explore, but there can be other ways too. Before I started my UI design, I needed to sketch out my ideas with pen and paper because it is the fastest and most flexible way to see what the flow from one screen to another will look like or potentially work before designing them. Sketching also helps the designer check whether a button or element from one screen is connected correctly to the corresponding screen. Sketching wasn’t compulsory but it helped me to be creative and explore different versions of my ideas. I personally enjoy the process of sketching because I love the feeling of drawing on physical paper.

Components, Illustrations and Icons

After a few rounds of sketching, I moved my ideas to Figma which is a UI design tool to transform my sketches into digital components. This was the part I enjoyed the most because I got to create everything from scratch and I could also dictate the design style. I was encouraged to be adventurous and creative so I included custom illustrations called Calmly. I named it Calmly because the feeling the illustration set gave out, it calms the users looking at it with its colours. I have never done illustrations and icons set for a UI project before so this was new to me.

One of the biggest things I learnt was building a consistent illustration system. A consistent system would help me implement the illustrations easily on different screens without having to adjust the layout or position of other components. It would also help the developer to implement the illustration in production without them having to adjust the illustration sizing every time. I also learnt how to implement an iconography grid in my project which meant that the drawn icons would look consistent to users.

Besides learning about UI, I also learnt about accessibility in line spacing. In the course of designing, I learned to set my font’s line spacing between 140% – 160% because the extra space will enable better readability by giving each line more breathing room for the user to focus on the text. 

Before testing my prototype with actual users, I excluded some of the screens like the login screen from it because they were not the core features of the Mindful app like the self-paced sessions and the therapeutic photography feature which were meant to help with the user’s mental health. Non-core features would only distract the users from focusing on the actual features. I also learnt that in general the number of screens to be tested shouldn’t be more than 30 because too many screens would extend the testing session and it would exhaust both the tester and the interviewer, affecting the overall results gathered. Another reason why the screens were kept at a minimum was because it sets a good constraint for designers to focus. It helped us to ask “How can we achieve the goal with as little screens as possible?”

Learning to test and improve a product

Usability testing is a process that is done in the last stage of the design process. Testing the product with actual users allows the designers to identify usability issues because real users may run into different kinds of issues while using the prototype. These issues would help validate the designers’ assumptions so that they can improve it later.

I learnt to prepare a few things so that my testing session would go well. Those things were a test plan, testing script, Miro board, and also scheduling the time with 5 actual testers. During this period, I received help to prepare the testing session from Ayu and Mabel who’re UX Designers in Stampede and are very knowledgeable on usability testing and user interviews. They taught me how to write the test script for the usability testing session which contains a list of questions for a section of the app that we wanted to test so that the interviewer can ask these questions to the users to gather feedback. I also learnt how to be mindful about other people’s time because I need to ask for their available time slot to do the testing as early as possible so that I would not interfere with their work.

Each usability testing session usually involves 4 people who are the interviewer, the user who is testing the prototype and 2 note-takers. The picture above shows a recording of a remote usability testing session I did with Saiful, one of the Stampede designers. The reason why we have 2 note-takers is not only so there are enough people to catch all of the information the user is providing in the test, but also to have more than 1 point of view so that the notes don’t become biased because each note-taker might interpret an explanation differently based on their own perception and understanding. I alternated my role as note-taker and interviewer with Mabel so that I could train both of those skills.

After the testing sessions were completed, I used a virtual collaboration tool called Miro to consolidate the notes by combining them into one summarised and easy to understand explanation because not every piece of information provided by the user was useful for designing. There were also 2 types of notes taken. The first one was unmoderated notes which were notes about the tester’s interactions with a UI without any guidance from the interviewer. This reveals usability issues of the prototype. The moderated section focuses on going through each individual screen with the user and asking them about the screens in more detail. This part usually reveals additional ideas for improvements of the prototype and sheds light on what they may have struggled with or didn’t understand and why they did certain things.

After the testing, I had to crunch all the notes taken from the testing. Data crunching is one of the most challenging parts. I needed to analyse consolidated data from the notes and come up with a simplified version of it. The simplified notes would help identify what was working in my prototype and what wasn’t. A simplified note is a summary of multiple notes combined, not only it helps the designer to write a concise and straightforward report, it could also act as an easy reference for designers to come back and refer when they are improving the UI. To do so, I needed to identify what was negative and positive feedback. The positive feedback was written on a green sticky note and the negative feedback was written on a pink sticky note. If the data crunching is done carelessly like not going through and understanding the meaning of all the notes to come up with a summarised version it would affect the report being written later because the end result produced was not backed by solid and convincing evidence and data.

So Did I Get It Right?

The last part of the process is writing a Findings Report. The report tells the client what works and what doesn’t so they can make better informed product decisions. As this was an internal assignment, I presented my report to Shaza and my other designer colleagues. The report includes findings such as how the user used the prototype and if they found it easy to use (positive findings) or got stuck (negative findings) and also recommendations for how to improve the product where there are usability issues. 

I actually failed the first time writing this report because my recommendations were solving surface level symptoms and didn’t propose solutions that addressed the root causes. This meant that the solutions suggested were ineffective at improving Mindful’s usability. I had to redo the entire report and one piece of advice Shaza gave me was to include the goal of each of the screens in each finding. By introducing the goal I was able to write better solutions that focused on solving the root problems with the app. After I finished the report, I used the recommendations from the report I have written to iterate my prototype and test it again with another 5 users.

When I was redoing my report, I learnt to identify the root causes of the negative findings written in my report by slowing down and thinking of the bigger picture. I would re-read the notes in my Miro board and sometimes replay parts of the recorded testing session to find out what I missed. The other thing was learning to set a goal or purpose for what I was doing. Shaza’s advice on setting goals for each screen helped me scope down my recommendations and saved me a lot of time identifying them.

With the information inside the findings report I created, I revised my prototype and repeated the process from preparing testing materials and platform to writing my second findings report from the second testing session. The second testing session was way better than the first one because the prototype had a more solid purpose and goal to help users improve their mental health. The biggest takeaway from this UI assignment for me was knowing the importance of setting a goal for each of the tasks I needed to complete. Setting a goal helped me to come up with suggestions that were concise and effective to solve the problem.

Stampede Designathon

Besides focusing on the Mindful app assignment, I also assisted my fellow designer, Adiel to organise Stampede’s first ever design hackathon a.k.a. designathon. It was a surreal experience to be honest because it brought back some fond memories when I was an active hacker in the hacking community before the pandemic hit us. 

The designathon was only 1 day and the goal was to help people get to know each other better by working together, as the team had almost doubled over the past few months, some of whom had not had the opportunity to work with each other on projects. During the designathon, we had to design something that could improve our colleagues’ productivity, communication skills and mental well-being. 

We have 6 teams and each of them consists of 2 designers. We also gave each of the team names related to famous cartoon characters duos. I personally like Team Mario & Luigi even though I was not part of it because I’m a huge Nintendo fan.

I teamed up with Mabel, our UX designer who specialises in user research. Mabel has been my mentor when it comes to research during our and I was excited to do pair-designing with her. We worked hard together and actively discussed the design we wanted to do for the entire day until it was time to present our designs.

At the end of the day, each team presented their designs to all the designathon participants. Mabel and I presented our design which was a Figma template that acted as a guide to anyone about design techniques or tools used in Stampede.

We also had a virtual after party a.k.a. Stampede Mamak at Figma which I built. We were just chilling at our virtual buffet session and also took a virtual photo from it.

Graduating from my Apprenticeship

After 6 months of being a UI/UX Design Apprentice, I finally graduated as a design apprentice in early January 2021! We had a short remote graduation ceremony where everyone celebrated it by wearing a virtual mortarboard. To this day, I don’t know why Iwan decided to wear a red beret and hold a sandwich! I was also the only one who was not holding anything at all.

Takeaways from my 6 month Stampede Apprenticeship

Overall, the apprenticeship experience was very satisfying and fulfilling. I learnt more in 6 months at Stampede than I did as a solo-designer for the past 2 years. 

Quality over Speed

During the early stages of my apprenticeship, I placed a lot of emphasis on learning quickly, completing my tasks and learning as fast as possible because I always felt insecure about my own skills and not being knowledgeable enough about any topic. However, there’s a downside to speed. I completed tasks without providing a solution that will solve root problems and the so-called solution will never last because it is only solving a symptom and not the primary cause. Shaza taught me to slow down and focus on understanding the core issue before looking for possible solutions. Going deep will enable me to go far because it enables me to solve the real problem in a lasting way. As I get used to doing this over time, I will inevitably get faster. Going slowly does not mean doing things slowly but to spend a reasonable amount of time to understand the problem well and find the right tools and methods to solve the problem. 

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Hunger for knowledge has always been my good friend throughout my entire design career but I got a little too confident in the middle of my apprenticeship about the things I thought I already knew. As a result, I was advised to be open to new ideas and learning from others. It’s about understanding other people’s viewpoints such as my colleagues’ and clients’. By thinking about what points they’re making, I can strengthen my own critical thinking, ability to discuss issues and ideas with others, and work more effectively as a team. This beginner’s mindset helped me to put aside my ego and helped me learn more effectively.

You’re an apprentice, you’re also “not an apprentice”

Even though I was an apprentice in Stampede, the company gave me the equal opportunity to try things out and contribute to actual client projects just like my colleagues who are full-time designers in the company. I was treated equally as well; colleagues would ask me for my opinions if I had experience on certain topics because Stampede encourages everyone in the company to be humble and ready to learn from others.

“Communication can make or break a team” 

Overcommunication is better than assumption

In Stampede, everyone is encouraged to over-communicate their knowledge with each other because the company is remote and almost all of our communication is done through calls or messages in Slack. Assuming someone already knows something will lead to miscommunication between team members and brings unnecessary risk to projects like extra time spent to rectify the mistakes.

The Journey Continues…

My apprenticeship journey was only 6 months long but during this period, I learnt more about being a good designer, how to unlearn and relearn knowledge and most importantly, how to be humble. Those are important because they enabled me to build good relationships with my colleagues and be less stressed out and fearful when trying new things and developing new skills. 

And so that’s the end of that’s my journey as an apprentice at Stampede. Beyond the apprenticeship, Stampede offered me to come onboard as a full-time designer. I happily accepted and am now practicing my design craft everyday with my mentors and colleagues.

This is the last part of my 3 part series talking about my apprenticeship experience at Stampede. If you are curious about my previous parts of my apprenticeship experience, be sure to check out Part 1 which talks about the stampede remote working culture, my apprenticeship assignments and Part 2 which talks about collaboration with my colleagues and my hands-on experience working with clients.

If you’re interested to become our design apprentice, Stampede runs this programme annually and the next intake is May 2021 which is now. You will be part of our Beta Class, learning the ropes and learning alongside world-class designers like I did. Application deadline is Sunday 18 Apr so grab it before it’s gone. Apply here!

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Hi there! Welcome to the second part of my Stampede apprenticeship experience story. Previously, I talked about how I started my apprenticeship and what it’s like working in a fully remote company. Besides learning practical design skills from Tacticals and UI assignments like the New York Times redesign project, I also learnt a lot about how to look at design conventions which are models or standards that govern the look and feel of an interface and how to push them and myself further to produce better work. I also learnt more about design processes by shadowing my colleagues as they worked on client projects. If you have not read the first part of my Stampede apprenticeship experience, you can read it here!

For part two of my journey, I will talk about my experience collaborating with my colleagues on real projects and the work I did on a very impactful apprenticeship assignment that helped understand how my work affects others. This portion of the apprenticeship forced me to shift from a solo designer’s mindset to that of a team member’s where I had to work actively with others to achieve a goal. In the process, I learnt a big lesson about how teammates discuss ideas and compromise while supporting each other that their combined contributions make for a better working experience and even better outcome. This is one of the biggest lessons I learnt during my apprenticeship. Let’s begin!

The Lone Wolf vs Team Player

Doing things your own way without having to listen to others might sound fun and nice in the beginning because you feel like you’re in control. However, as the saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” This emphasises the importance of working in a team in order to achieve big things which is a mindset that we embrace at Stampede. Going it alone might be limiting you from learning new skills and different viewpoints from others. This is especially important considering how a fundamental part of UX design is about having empathy for others and being able to put yourself in their shoes so that you design for others and not for yourself. In Stampede, I was trained to be more humble and a better team player with my colleagues through various assignments and client projects. This ultimately taught me that engaging in teamwork makes me a better UX designer.

The Collaboration Begins!

Little did I know that 2 months into my apprenticeship, I would be assigned to 2 teamwork-heavy client projects. This is when I started doing hands-on design with other colleagues and really got a real taste of a collaborative design process. The first project was about building UI interfaces for an Oil & Gas engineering platform that will help the company to monitor and manage their resources better. The second project was about doing UX Research for a global bioscience company on their IT service platform.

For the first engineering project, we needed to come up with an interface where the users could monitor and manage their company’s resources better. Fortunately, we didn’t have to start from scratch because the previous team who worked on this project had created a design library. The library is a file that contains various UI components, such as buttons in different states or colors, that designers can use like lego building blocks to create visually consistent interfaces. This is vital because the product is only one of several digital products in a large enterprise and using a design library ensures that the look and feel is consistent across multiple products while making the designs easier to maintain in the long run. Another benefit of using the design library was that we could save a lot of time on design because we didn’t have to recreate the UI components from scratch.

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On this project, , my seniors would assign different parts of the interface to each of us to design. If we weren’t sure about something, we were encouraged to ask questions. My seniors also walked me through how the library was created so that I would understand the context and reasoning behind each component. . This meant I got to learn the thought processes and ideas behind the design library. They also taught me how to utilise certain components in the right way and at the right time.

At the end of each day, we would have a short discussion where we could share what challenges we faced or if we needed help. I learned a lot about how to explain my designs, a.k.a. provide a design rationale, by both listening to how other designers explained their work and from practising explaining my own designs. Explaining our design choices and defending them not only helps other designers or stakeholders to understand the designer’s thought process and reasoning but it also helps the designer to improve their critical thinking skills when they are solving a problem.

“Explaining our design choices and defending them not only helps other designers or stakeholders to understand the designer’s thought process and reasoning but it also helps the designer to improve their critical thinking skills when they are solving a problem”

After the first project concluded, Sarah, (my fellow apprentice!) and I worked with other designers on UX Research for another client which was a process to understand the user and their pain points so we could address them through design. This time we were part of a user interview. A user interview is a UX research method in which the researcher/interviewer asks the user about their behaviours, habits and motivations when using a certain product or service. Its main purpose is to help designers validate assumptions and empathise with the user. By understanding what’s important to them and their considerations, we can better appreciate and understand their problems and thus design an appropriate solution for them in future. Sarah and I listened to the user interviews and took down notes while listening to what the user was saying about why and how they achieved their goals using a service. It was tough because you need to write what the user is saying and it can be hard if they speak quickly! However, the main challenge was that note taking isn’t just about transcribing what the user said but noting down items that will help with the design process like knowing which parts of a current process are confusing and why. Knowing these pain points means that we as designers will know what areas we need to devise a solution for in the design phase. Note taking requires some practice to understand what point the user is trying to make and contextualising that for the product they’re referring to.

Similarly, as a note taker, you need to be careful to not only note down general information but sufficient context and l insights about why users struggle in certain parts of their experience with a service or product. For example, the pink sticky note in the picture above contains a reason but didn’t have any evidence on why the user can’t analyse information easily. On the other hand, the green sticky note contains both a reason and context on why the user can’t easily analyse information. Over time, though, and with practice, we managed to write down good notes that helped inform the design.

Here are some of the main takeaways from working with other designers:

• Design work is more cohesive. You will notice the connection between one element of the task to the other even though each element was contributed to by different people. This is because everyone has a shared understanding of how the product and various components work so that they can effectively connect different parts of the product to make it a united whole.
• Collaboration trains the team members to respect each other even if they don’t agree and encourages team members to use different points of view and ideas to have a richer understanding of a product and how it may work. Conflict and disagreements happen in teams all the time and it’s normal. The important thing is to know how to compromise and learn from each other so that the final outcome can solve different problems and cater for different viewpoints that a solo designer may otherwise have missed.
• Pillars of support. It is sometimes hard to carry the pressure of a project on your own. If the project is divided into different and smaller parts, the pressure will also be divided as well and you can rely on others to help you. But most importantly, you will have people to bounce ideas with and exchange knowledge.

Great Designer Experience

After working on client projects and also some UI assignments, Sarah and I worked together on “The Great Designer Experience.” The goal of this assignment was to teach us the importance and impact of delivering a positive working experience among colleagues and our clients.

“How do you deliver a great experience to other people who are working with you?”

This assignment required us to come up with 3 different journey maps that represented the processes of 3 personas. We then came up with pain points for each of them in each stage of the design process from teaching clients about UX to shipping the product to the end users. The 3 personas were designer, developer and the client. Using the personas we identified, we constructed a journey map. A journey map is a visualisation of a process a person goes through to reach a goal. The journey map shown above is not a typical journey map because it contains the overlapping journeys of 3 personas. Nevertheless, all 3 shared the same goal of having a positive experience working with us, the apprentices.

Shaza, who is the Co-founder and UX Principal of Stampede advised us to be creative and flexible with the map and not to be afraid of adding more steps in between. Doing so would help us understand the design process better.

After we built the journey map, we needed to identify pain points at each step of the process. We didn’t want to assume that we knew all the problems because we weren’t the users themselves. If we were to provide solutions for them, they wouldn’t be accurate as we have our own biases and can’t help but think about our own point of view, even when we’re supposed to be thinking from theirs! So the best way to learn about our colleagues’ pain points was to ask them about it. Sarah and I scheduled short calls with some of our colleagues to find out their difficulties when working on designs.

“When identifying pain points, focus on the pain points users have that are caused or impacted by the designers”

We didn’t do a full fledged UX research interview with our colleagues but had simple calls to listen to their point of view. This helped us empathise with them and place ourselves in their shoes. We also applied what we learned from note-taking in this assignment.

Instead of jumping straight into solving the pain points, we would need to reframe the pain points into a How Might We question which rephrases it into an opportunity. This helped us shift our mindset from a problem space to a potential solution and also helped us think about the true value the user would get if we solved their problem as opposed to looking at a superficial solution that only addressed a symptom rather than a root cause.

This assignment made a strong impact on us because it taught us to be aware of the impact a task has on others like the developers, clients and my designer colleagues. For example, when you design a UI without providing any information or instructions on how the interaction works before passing it to a developer, the reasons and what exactly is required will be unclear to them and they will need to ask you to clarify. To this day, the lesson from this particular assignment means that I am mindful when I am handing over my design work and how it impacts others.

Takeaways

The path from lone wolf to a team player was not easy. I have to let go of a lot of my bad habits and attitudes like ego, knowledge-bias and not compromising to learn from others. These habits were mostly subconscious which was why they’re hard to spot and I needed my colleagues to point that out constantly. I appreciate their effort to remind me and help me to be a better team player.

The great designer experience was also never only about the designer who creates the design. It talks about the whole design experience of people within product teams. The whole design experience also includes tension and disagreement in discussions. These are important in teamwork because identifying where differences lie and understanding how to compromise and work together to address them is what leads to better product outcomes. If everyone thought the same, we wouldn’t create products that embrace different points of view or address blind spots.

In my next and final blog post, I’ll be introducing the last part of my apprenticeship journey which was an assignment to design a digital product entirely from scratch utilising the design process. This was the toughest, longest and most exciting assignment among all those that I had completed. It taught me about the importance of quality over quantity, and also the benefits of working with a goal in mind. So stay tuned for the post next week!

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Before becoming an apprentice at Stampede, I was already a User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX) Designer with 2 years of experience. However, it always felt like something was missing because I was always looking for a company with designers I could learn from and bounce ideas with. UI/UX has always fascinated me because it utilises the knowledge of design and technology both of which are my interest and UI/UX also covers nearly every field in any industry. It was through my search that I came across the Stampede Design Apprenticeship.

This blog post is the first of a three part series with me releasing 1 post once a week. In this first post, I’ll tell you about my experience in my apprenticeship from getting into the apprenticeship program to what I did and experienced in my first 2 months.

How I got into the Apprenticeship Program

I had applied to multiple mid-level startups and large corporations but hadn’t managed to get a job, then I saw a post about Stampede’s apprenticeship program on Twitter that Stampede was opening 2 slots for a 6 months apprenticeship. I immediately applied and hoped for the best for myself.

After 2 weeks I got an email from Stampede stating that I had been accepted to their 2 Day Design Bootcamp for Apprentices. This bootcamp was to introduce candidates to how Stampede solves problems and at the end of the bootcamp, 2 candidates would be invited to become design apprentices.

The bootcamp was led by Shaza, Emily, Mai Sarah and Ayu who are Stampede UX designers. I learnt the basics of how a design sprint can help product development to come up with features and products and test them in a short period of time. I thought that it was a great experience because even if I didn’t get in, I would’veI learnt a lot about design. The bootcamp became the first time I could work with so many designers at the same time to solve problems. The bootcamp was split into 2 days each day on a Sunday across 2 weeks so that the participants have enough time to warm up in order to work better together. On the first day, we were split into 2 groups and assigned into 2 breakout rooms in Zoom to work on creating a user journey map and come up with opportunities on the given persona with 2 Stampede UX designers in each room. After the first day, we were given a group homework assignment to work on for a week. A week after that, we will share our homework with the rest of the team to discuss.

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In this short bootcamp, I learnt about listening to everyone’s opinions and also communicating my own ideas to other designers as well. Collaboration and respect were key in the bootcamp no matter how much experience you had previously. This was also the time where I got to collaborate with Sarah Lim who was later accepted into the apprenticeship program as well.

After the bootcamp had ended, I received a message from Shaza, Stampede’s UX Principal and Co-founder, that I had been accepted into the apprenticeship program. The announcement was given on the day of my birthday as well which was very special! I was searching for a design position for almost a year and now I finally got it!

I also found out that Sarah Lim who was one of the candidates at the bootcamp was also accepted into the apprenticeship program. Over the next 6 months, we’d work together a lot as Stampede’s apprentices.

Getting Started

The first 2 months were about getting to know how to work remotely (Stampede has been remote since 2006!), how to learn by observing how my colleagues worked, completing UI/UX assignments and learning from sharing sessions conducted by colleagues so that I could have a basic understanding of what it’s like to work in a UX design agency. 

Processes and Culture

It was my first time working in a remote company, so there was a lot for me to learn about working at Stampede. In my first few days, Sarah and I were onboarded by Shaza about the design process like the reasoning behind each activity. For example, she explained that we do a user experience workshop with the client’s team before diving into any solutioning because the workshop will help us understand the user’s journey, strengthen the proto-personas for us to interview. Something cool that Stampede also has is an internal website called Stampede Wiki which is a digital version of an employees handbook for Stampede employees to refer to if they have any questions about the company’s operations. Some elements that exist in Stampede Wiki are how to apply for leave, submitting claims, guides and benefits for remote working. It has been a very useful site throughout the entire apprenticeship. For example, if I want to know the method and website to time track my work, I can do so before asking the team. Inside Stampede Wiki, there is also a part where it shows ways of working for Stampede employees so I can learn how to work better with my colleagues. When I was working remotely, I felt that I had more time and energy to complete more tasks without worrying about external factors like being stuck in the traffic or rushing to get onto the next bus and train. I also managed to plan my time to run easily!

Shadowing Other Designers

One thing Sarah and I did a lot of in the early stages of our apprenticeship was shadowing other designers in Stampede. This meant that we’d see how others designers worked on tasks through observation. The shadowing is particularly important because it allows you to see how designers work and the processes they go through before you dive into doing actual work with the rest of the team. 

I shadowed designers working on a PETRONAS design project at that time and watched how they wrote findings for usability testing, prepared user flows and presented them to clients. This gave me insight into how to understand what is important to learn from testing about design and how to communicate this to clients. Another good thing I realised when I was shadowing is that my colleagues really engaged with us and would consistently ask us whether we understood what they were working on and how they were doing it so that they could teach us. This was helpful because I could learn faster and in the correct way when my seniors were teaching us patiently.

A few weeks into my apprenticeship, a new activity was introduced. They’re called Tacticals. The idea of Tacticals is to encourage Stampede employees to share knowledge on what they’ve learnt or discovered while working on projects.

Tacticals

Tacticals are sessions where a colleague shares what they know and have experienced about a certain design skill or topic with the team. A shorter format, called Mini Tacticals, were later introduced for bitesized sharing sessions that focused on a specific skill. The sessions in my first month were UI 101 Class conducted by Saiful, UX 101 Class conducted by Zo-Ee and HTML5/CSS3 Class conducted by Iwan, all of which gave me a better idea of how UI, UX and code work independently and together in the design process. The sessions are really helpful, not only to the apprentices but also for the other team members who were listening. Even the presenter benefits because they can practise their teaching skills. These tacticals became my formal way to learn about design and they also acted as a guide for all of us at Stampede to refer to when we are working on projects. I also got a chance to give a tactical on how people can learn from attending community events.

Apprenticeship Assignments

The key elements in the apprenticeship were assignments. Their main purpose is to strengthen our UI design skills through learning by doing. I received my first assignment after a week of shadowing and learning about Stampede’s culture. 

The first UI assignment was to redesign the New York Times website which involved a master design, the homepage, and child design, the article page. Redesigning the New York Times website was not easy at all because it is famous for being well designed and it required me to go through their design again and again to understand what could be improved. This also enabled me to think hard about how intention will need to be translated into design. I had to look at elements like the grid the webpage used, the cards format and content, the footer etc.

There were some blips along the way, like me focusing on doing user research and questionnaires because I thought I needed to know what users wanted to see in a newspaper website. However, Shaza pointed out that this was not necessary because the focus is to redesign the UI. After that, I got back on track and focused on redesigning the UI. The way I dissected it was quite literal because I divided the page into different sections just like the image shown above which I could focus to improve the like.

Looking back at the design right now, what I could have done better was to be more ambitious when I was designing the NYT homepage. I only moved things around structurally because I was fixated to the fact that the design was already good and it did not need that much change in terms of visuals. The final outcome was not bad and I also received good feedback based on my explanation towards the UI components I changed. I just thought I could have been more ambitious with my approach.

This assignment taught me that good design is invisible and usually very hard to spot but bad design is easier because usually you would complain about the bad experience of using something. NYT homepage was almost invisible because everything was clear and placed in the right place. I learnt to improve it by introducing some interactivity to the NYT homepage to make it more modern.

The first 2 months were to get myself used to the new working environment and culture of the team. The experience was so new and worthwhile where I got to participate in design discussions and most importantly practise my technical skills like UI designing. 

In my next blog post, I will take you on my journey of collaborating with other designers and working on a group assignment during my third and fourth months as an apprentice. Stay tuned for the post next week!

The post My Stampede UI/UX Design Apprenticeship Experience – Part 1 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.