It has also been one of the biggest contributors to many success stories, for example — Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon, and AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business.

More so than ever, we are in need of more UI/UX designers to carry on this challenge. Undoubtedly not an easy role, UI/UX designers need to equip themselves with a certain sets of skills. Which brings to the next question— what sort of skills?

From our experiences, we could list down these skills in two categories — core skills (technical skills needed to excel as a UI/UX designer) and personal attributes (might seem secondary, but they are actually important to level yourself up to be a better UI/UX designer each day).

This week, let’s talk about core skills needed to become a UI/UX designer. Onward!

Core skills

User research

Bigger companies might have a dedicated team to perform user research, but it is important for a UI/UX designer to get herself involved in the research from the beginning. This could give her more insight into the nature of the business, get herself acquainted with the clients & their problems and how they behave — which actually could help with the direction of the design later.

Wireframing

Wireframing is the step which allows you to define the information hierarchy of your design, making it easier for you to plan the layout. It is as MVP as it can be in the design process, especially if you want to start designing and you want to confirm with the client or the team on the layout.  Once it is confirmed, it is actually faster to start designing since you already have the structure.

This beginner’s guide to wireframing is very helpful for you to start building your own guidelines.

Visual design

In order to transform the wireframes into mock ups, suffice to say you will need to have basic visual design skills. Our designers use Photoshop for this before getting the designs signed off and handed over to the development team, but best to check with the team you are working with on their preferences.

You might be thinking — “but I started with print design and I wanted to get into UI/UX, is it too late?” Absolutely not! There is an abundance of free UI/UX courses online you may find on Coursera, Hackdesign and many more. You may only need to start adapting your existing design practices to UI/UX. 

Prototyping

Prototyping can be defined as ‘a simulation or sample version of a final product, used for testing prior to launch.’ Prototypes are used to test products, fix issues and confirm requirements before sinking further into development. Prototype testing can save time and money since it can be used to identify earlier usability issues and reveal areas to be improved.

A lot of apps can be used to develop faster prototypes. Our team swears by InVision, but there are many others such as UXPin, Atomic and Sketch.

If you’d like to read more, UXPin here has a good article on a guide to prototyping.

Basic coding

We all hear of all these arguments floating about — “should designers learn how to code?”. The answer would be, “yes, but as much as possible to understand how development would work later.”

The designs done by UI/UX designers are eventually going to be translated into code, so it is helpful for UI/UX designers to know basic front end and programming knowledge. This is so that you could know what’s possible to be done before sending your design files to the developers without risking on their timelines or resources. It is vitally important, according to this discussion, that “UX folks have (at least) a theoretical understanding of “FE-related things”, including semantic page structure, optimization techniques, impact of JavaScript, graceful degradation/progressive enhancement, accessibility etc.”

Metrics and analytics

There is a possibility that user research will not be included in the scope of a project, so how do you start designing? First off, UI/UX designers do not design blindly. Your design decisions should be informed from experiential and data-driven decision.

UI/UX designers need to have some basic understanding on translating data so that we can use them to accomplish goals and achieve customer’s satisfactions. InVision has this good article on how to design with data.

Writing

In his annual Design in Tech report lead by John Maeda, he suggests that besides coding, the other one “unicorn” skill a designer should have would be writing. While many designers have noted the value of leading design with content, there are some others who are still persistent to start writing more due to many reasons. Well, we should not have.

Writing could also help immensely in articulating your design justifications to clients, or your team members. Furthermore, when you write, we empty up our mental estate in order to make way for more information to come through. We also remember better!

There is no magic to writing, and if you would like to start, here are some simple but powerful UX writing tips for designers.

Moving forward

Evidently, there is no shortcut to become a good UI/UX designer. Depends on your organisations or whether you work alone, sometimes not all of these skills are needed but it would be helpful to branch into all of these core skills as much possible.

After all, user advocation doesn’t take a day!

Next in Part 2: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer : Personal Attributes.

(Thank you WOCinTech Chat for photos!)

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My campus life

Back in September 2015, I enrolled for a post-graduate programme at a local public university. At the time, I had to apply for special leave to focus on getting married and did not want to miss classes. After that was over, I re-enrolled back a few months later (March 2016) to pursue a Masters of Science in Information Technology. Why a Masters degree so early you ask? Well, ever since the day of my degree’s convocation day, my dad had been pushing me to pursue one.

I had a rough time deciding whether to go with research or coursework for my evaluation.

Not being one to waste time, I decided to look for what I was truly passionate about, and after 2 years I had finally found it, User Experience (UX). I was looking for a course in Human-Centered Informatics (HCI) and found out that this university has a lot of specialists in the field. As a bonus, it also helped out with my financial situation as it was still in an affordable range. I had a rough time deciding whether to go with research or coursework for my evaluation. Eventually, I came to a decision with coursework because they had this HCI Track in the study plan.

Unfortunately, it came to my surprise that they did not open the HCI Track for the semester. The Head of Programme then advised me to opt for the Research Track instead, which only begins on the 4th semester. Being the determined person I am, I stayed with the coursework because there was a subject called Human-Centered Informatics (HCI) that semester and I thought that I should give a shot.

As it turns out that I still have much to learn…

And then came Stampede

Around the same time, I applied for a job at Stampede, did their trial run and several rounds of interviews before accepted into the team. I was then introduced to the world of remote working. At the beginning, I was given a lot of training to make sure by skills were on par. As of now, I have already completed all the courses and presentation of what I have learned over the past weeks (will get more courses soon). But there was one thing that I was still struggling with, and that was practical development training. As it turns out that I still have much to learn in order to keep up with the company’s standard of quality. I have never sliced a design to HTML, pixel-by-pixel, and my HTML structuring still needs much improvement. As of me writing this, I am currently on my 2nd month at Stampede and looking forward to constantly improve my skills, especially in front-end development.

They encourage you to share your experiences…

So how do I think my experience at Stampede has made me better prepared for my Master degree course? The first thing I can think of is pretty much summed in this phrase, “You are not what you think you are”. You may think you are at a certain level of skill but reality will bring your feet back down to the earth. Remote working is not easy, especially when you are so used with going to your place of work, and working shifts or fixed office hours. But the team here is very welcoming and it did not took so long for me to be comfortable with them.

They are also very structured—I can even say that it is more structured than most companies with physical offices. The team encourages you to share your experiences. Just imagine if in a day one person shares one thing, that’s 8 new things we learn everyday (we are currently a team of 8), that’s 40 new things per week, 160 per month! (Let the math sink in).

Positivity is what brings the team forward…

Everyday there will be a team scrum usually before lunch. During this session each member will be updating their tasks and given new ones, this is new for me and personally I feel that this is so much better than a 3 hours meeting because you have to absorb so much just for one meeting.

Positivity is what brings the team forward, every week there will be a session where everyone will share what have made them happy and grateful from the previous week. Also, everyone is given a chance to host something called, Happy Things. It is a team bonding activity, that makes us become closer with one another. It is excellent for a new hire like myself to improve my speaking and presentation skills. Yes, that is on top of the presentation I have to do for every course I have learned.

Putting it all into perspective

All I can say is that the months of working at Stampede is a huge paradigm shift for me. The courses assigned by Stampede to train my soft skills has been nothing but an improvement to how I view and manage things. For example, I learned about the sunk-cost effect, which is defined as a tendency for humans to continue investing in something that clearly isn’t working. This has led my decision to change my Masters mode from coursework to research. As I had mentioned previously, HCI is my focus for the semester, so with Stampede being a creative agency which practices User Experience, the HCI subject has helped a lot in teaching me the importance of designing for people. As this is still my first semester, I hope my application to do research will be accepted and my time with Stampede will continue.

Thanks all for reading!

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When was the last time you actually read a newspaper or a magazine?

It’s an obvious trend where the media is moving to, and that is from print to digital. In the last 10 years there has been a noticeable shift of designers who have moved from print to digital, not because the print industry is falling behind but rather what the Web has to offer.

Chances are the reason why you’re reading this is because you’ve thought about dabbling in the arts of web design. While the design methodology of both forms are similar, there are distinct differences that you should know before making the jump. Let’s take a look at the essential preparations needed before taking the leap.

What do you already have?

For starters, be glad that you already have the fundamentals of design. You understand object placement, spacing, colors, typography, all of which are translatable from pamphlet to webpage. Your skill and knowledge in image processing software such as Illustrator and Photoshop are still relevant because you’ll still be needing these programs to create a website’s key design template and mocks for webpages.

What you need to know

Layout

While much of the fundamentals shared between print and web are the same, the layout is for each can be very different. In print, your creative brief tells you what physical medium you’re going to be designing for. This can range from posters to giant billboards. The size of the medium is already fixed and you can begin designing a layout that harmonizes all the elements

When it comes to digital, things will be a lot more different. No longer will you be designing for fixed mediums as digital design encompasses websites, electronic newsletters, interfaces for smartphones and more. These options comes in various screen sizes because people will be viewing your design on different devices. If you’re designing a website for example, your  design may look great on a desktop (1280 pixels in width or higher) but may not be functional on a smartphone (average 360 pixels by 640 pixels, width x height).

Print vs Web Layout

Now that the differences can be seen, this is why designing for digital should to be more simplistic as it allows the design to fluidly transform itself to fit multiple mediums. You might be tempted to go crazy with design elements overlaying one another but do so at your own discretion. Elements that are positioned on its own are able to be resized or transformed easily.

Color

You might be wondering, how can the usage of color be any different from print to digital? The principles of color still stand firm between both forms, but at the same time there are differences that you might want to know in order to help you transition from paper to browser.

(Left: RGB, Right: CMYK)

As you already know, when you design anything that needs to be printed, the color mode that you’ll be using is CMYK. While we won’t be covering why it’s done so, but if you’re interested you can check this video that details the process of how printers work and why CMYK is being used for it.

The color mode that you’ll need to get used to when you start designing for digital is the RGB mode. Computer monitors give off a light known as RGB which has a larger color gamut than printing. This allows the computer to can display a million more colors than what can be achieved with printing.

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type and it is more than just making words legible. The typeface that is being used must be able to work with the layout, grid, color scheme and overall feel of the design.

When it comes to print, typography can range from being clean and structured to large and bold. Serif-type fonts are generally preferred for this medium to attract readers to the printed material. In digital however, the situation changes. While the creative use in typography is still practiced, the most important point is making sure the text is readable at all times. Due to this, sans-serif fonts are preferred due to its readability on many types of devices. Users who read text digitally via smartphones & tablets won’t be able to read cursive text properly creating great discomfort.

One thing to note overall is that different licensees are required for both print and web individually. In most cases the fonts for web-use are very much cheaper than its print counterpart.

Media

In terms of media elements, this is where we will see digital shine the most. When you’re designing for print the media elements that you can work with are images and typography. On the other hand, digital design has more leeway to work with because of the advances in technology. Video and audio media play a great part in the user’s experience on a webpage or other digital platforms.

Wireframe example of a video player on a web page.

You’ll need to understand how these rich media can be put into your design in a way that the user can interact with it and at the same time gain its benefit. Also, get used to saving these assets in its appropriate file formats such as JPG, PNG and other web-related image file formats.

User Experience

The print medium provides little to no interaction with the reader and because of this, the design must be able to capture the reader’s attention and present the information in a way that is understandable. Standing out without pushing the reader away is very important when designing for print.

Digital mediums such as websites and virtual UIs provide users with a lot of interaction. For example, websites have links to other sites and are able to play both video and music. Also with the increase of internet bandwidth worldwide, there has been an increased usage of animated images (GIF). JavaScript gives life to websites by creating smooth animations for menus to slide from the side or a content box expanding to show more information when clicked on.

You also need to understand how the user will be interacting with your design especially for touch screen devices. Are they going to tap on this button? Are they going to swipe this carousel to show more content? Changing your mindset from static to highly interactive may be a challenge but its definitely worth doing when you’re moving from print to digital.

Testing

Testing your design can be a challenging experience. To test print designs, one method is to print it out and get it examined. Seeing your design on something else other than your workstation screen can tell you many things like which element stands out, or whether the typeface is readable. Print testing is very important because once the actual design is being pushed out into public, you can’t go back and fix anything.

Always test your design.

For digital designs, testing can be even more of a challenge. For example, if you’re designing a website you’ll need to test your design on different layouts such as mobile, tablet and desktop. Unless you’re designing mocks for all these screen sizes, one method of testing the design is through blank wireframes that follow your layout. However, the best way to test your design is when it is fully developed into a working model (like a fully functional webpage). One good thing however, is that your design can be modified even at the later stages of the production process. This is digital design’s biggest advantage.

I hope that this article has helped you understand what you’ll need to know and adapt yourself for when moving from print to digital design. If you’ve experienced the same jump from print to digital, why not drop us a comment down below about your experiences and challenges doing so.

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MIT’s motto isn’t Mens et Manus (Latin for Mind and Hand) by accident.

Excellent argument on why great knowledge is not the same as great skill by Michael Schrage of the Harvard Business Review.

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That was the era of addictiveness to Internet Relay Chat for windows or better known as mIRC. I did my very first mIRC Remotes against room menace such as spammers and abusive operators. That was the start of my programming experience.

In 2006, while studying at UniKL Malaysian Institute of Information Technology (UniKL MIIT), I learned to code in C++ and Java. I also did some part-timing, working on simple image processing. It was then that I recognized the importance of web image optimizing and how many different factors affect website load time. I also did some odd jobs at editing content in Joomla. That gave me a whole load of insight as to how Joomla works with HTML and CSS.

The Stampede Time

I was having my internship with a data company in KL when I was asked to try out the position of Front-End Developer at Stampede. Being an undergraduate, seeing real web developers in action has always interests me so I jumped on the plane to meet the lead developer, Dov. With what very little knowledge in programming, I absorbed the work culture and training pretty quickly.

Throughout the learning process in April 2009, I was in Langkawi during the weekends and then hurry back to KL for my internship work during weekdays. Because of the limited time, most of my practice happened remotely.

Dov taught me a few essential front-end guidelines that are important to Stampede: paying very close attention to design details in PSD artwork, W3C validation, cross-browser testing, semantic code and proper documentation among all. Most importantly, he also encouraged me to Google things up to build my web vocabulary.

Under Dov’s guidance, I began work with my first project. It was for one of our clients in the US. I didn’t look back. Back in KL, I started to explore more about HTML/CSS. I’ve found that the only way to truly master building front-end pages is through a lot of practice. So practice and practice I did.

As a rookie, I did encounter issues that I was too green to fix myself. But then again, I have Google. During my first few months at Stampede, I relied heavily on Google and the rest are pure trial-and-error until I’m satisfied that the issues are fixed. Like most of us, I was having a hard time trying to render everything correctly on IE6 and IE7. I didn’t know that Stampede used to cater to IE 5.5 even!

How It Has Been

I think that a front-end developer holds a very unique position in a team. You have to be well-versed in both design and web programming. You need to know what the web designer wants to achieve and how to build the code efficiently for the web programmer. We’re very particular about design details (whitespace, text leading, typography etc) and it’s a very rewarding challenge for me to build webpages that are as accurate to the artwork as possible while still keeping them organized, efficient and valid. We are a company of perfectionists and working in this team has made me one too.

The Road From Here On

Despite the workload, learning new things is necessary too. You shouldn’t get too comfortable with the knowledge you have at present. Take the initiative to try something new and see how far you can go. I’m now going into some Javascripting and using frameworks like Mootools and jQuery. XHTML/CSS templating into Joomla is next on my list. Huge thanks to my Stampede team for their encouragement and guidance.

So that’s my story of how I became Stampede’s front-end developer. How about you? What’s your story?

(photo and more Lego Star Wars by Mike Stimpson)

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Consider An On-Campus Interview

You are an IT student, black circles under your eyes from that last attempt at submitting your Final Year Project in one coherent piece. You have an interview with a web company and you’ve heard all sort of cautionary tales and advise about your future career.

The university indulges you but being in IT, you can’t help but feeling marginalized over your fellow soon-to-be engineer friends. This is after all, an engineering university, where engineering future is made.

You are under-motivated, overworked and just barely made it to your 8.30 am interview. You heard you are one of six students selected from a pool of forty. You’re confident that your well-ironed shirt will leave a good impression, until you see another student arrived in a black suit with a sleek briefcase in tow, looking all polished and caffeinated. Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.

You walked into the interview room and exchanged greetings with the interviewers. They looked young and somewhat casual, probably mid-20s. They screened your resume and you started to sweat. You began to wonder if you spelled “proficient” correctly. Acting nonchalant, you flashed your biggest smile. Then one of them shot the first question,

How good are you with PHP?

I dare say the students we interviewed that Friday morning were in for a surprise.

Why We Interview?

To most companies, this is a blasphemy. “Of course you interview to hire more people in order to grow your business and generate more income.” I disagree.

Stampede’s hiring rate is one person a year, but we work hard and interview far and wide to get that one person. I believe that you do not have to hire many to achieve whatever goals you choose for your company. In most cases, you’re only adding unnecessary overhead to your otherwise agile and flexible team.

The number of employees you have is not a prerequisite to a successful business. You can be successful by staying small if staying small means keeping your people happy and giving your client work quality no bigger company can. By hiring at the rate of one person a year, Stampede is able to focus on training and introduction to our work culture, not by how quickly the person can start hacking codes. Most importantly, we are able to grow sustainably, without compromising our values.

Why Fresh Graduates?

Amazingly, this is the least-tapped pool of young talents in Malaysia. Most companies either look for candidates with significant industry experience or fresh grads with outstanding academic qualifications. Passion is often not in the equation.

Here’s what I think. People with experience tend to have one very big disadvantage: they bring with them culture from their previous work place. When they join Stampede, they tend to be highly individualized, not ready to share knowledge or responsibility. They sometimes conflict sense of teamwork with personal gain. Stampede is an office-politic-free environment. We keep communication flat so we can avoid elaborate hierarchical structure. This is not the case with other working environment where hierarchy is a way to manage and control.

In my years of interviewing and hiring, I personally find that fresh graduates should truly be the darlings of the industry. They are young and idealistic, eager to be an active part of the team. They are not (yet) affected by bad life choices. Most importantly, they bring a different level of energy to a company.

Some managers balk at the training cost. It does take more effort and patience to guide these high-octane powerhouses towards the right direction, but at the end of the day, we are in the business of nurturing talent and giving them work they are passionate about.

When you have a team of people truly invested in their work, you are doing it right.

“How Good Are You With PHP?”

Because we have a web developer vacancy, Dov did the preliminary filtering this time around. He easily trimmed a stack of resumes into six short-listed faces – a feat I never quite managed to do. A resume can be very misleading, with happy internship pictures and big company name-dropping. The most essential element we looked for was promising web programming skill. You may have interned at Intel but if you’re not good in PHP, then we’d rather not be wasting your time.

Dov as usual, was very direct about his requirements. He’s very involved with the hiring process of any new programmer and can be brutal with questions. There were times when I wished I weren’t in the student’s shoe. I am sure Shaiful and Guo Lin know this well. When he’s interested with a student’s PHP work, Dov would reach across the table, grabbed the laptop and dissected the code himself. It wasn’t a pretty sight when he ever-so-gloriously did an SQL injection vulnerability test via the login prompt. The student went pale. He only got his colors back when Dov said “That’s okay, you’re new.”

My questions, on the other hand, were centered more on the soft skills – what aspect of web development that really interests the student, what he aspires to, what an ideal workplace is like to him. These are important because we are, at the most basic, a team. We spend a great deal of time working together so the next person to join the team should be just as fun. Besides, I was due for a Stampede dinner that weekend to relay the summary of our interview to the rest of the team.

Some of the students however, were interested in other fields. One was into computer networking and the other quite a decent ASP programmer. They were honest enough to let us know the type of work they’re interested in. You could easily see that these are good students, though perhaps misguided by their seniors to simply settle for any job opportunities.

My advise in return, don’t compromise your interest. There’s only so much opportunity in life to do what you love, so start steering your way towards that now.

Was It Worth It?

For sure. The students left the interview room happier than when they came in. That alone makes it a good interview day for me.

(wonderful photography by Antontang)

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