Product design is the process of creating a new product to be sold by a business to its customers. - Wikipedia

It’s clear that Product Designer’s jobs are not just making product to look visually good but also about inventing ideas, (re)defining values then translating them into a product that worth to be sold.

Inventing Ideas

Care and Empathy is a must have skill for Product Designer. Ideas come when we are aware of sorrounding aspects of the domain problem. There is no room for Ego. We should always thinking in people’s hat, to seek the missing link between what users need and the actual product offering to surface.

(Re)defining Values

Always questioning and be reasonable because Ideas-only is not enough. People might be changed and we could be wrong, so don’t let the product went dormant. We might have worked hard and shipped a feature, Yay! but the world is keep spinning and...

I’ve been digging Jobs to Be Done Framework for the past months and one thing that always gets me is the idea of circumstances.

The jobs-to-be-done framework is a tool for evaluating the circumstances that arise in customers’ lives.

Products we are using today are the result of circumstances that happen in our daily life. Circumstances may leads to interruptions which blocking our ability to progress.

Some interruptions happen regularly, like they way we get hungry. Let’s say you are in the middle of work with tight deadline, you’ve skipped breakfast and only had a cup of coffee but eventually by the lunch time, you can’t handle it anymore. Hungry is the interruption. You need to finish the work but stomach couldn’t wait. it’s blocking your progress to finish the work.

That is the case when Jobs to be done come in, you suddenly have a Job that needs to be Done in order to remove...

“Talk to your customer” — is always be a mantra of startups these days, but sometimes it could be harmful if you can’t handle the noises.

When you talk to them, everything they said all seems like a good idea and a new exciting opportunity you can’t wait to start kicking it off to your product, especially if current features are not working well. Every features you asking to them, they would say Yes. They want
everything because they don’t ever want to be lacking something.

The thing you need to find out is the facts, not opinions, 80% of customer voices are raw and it’s your job to extract them. Don’t talk to customer if you can’t handle the noises.

I currently read Refactoring: Improving The Design of Existing Code book and I’ll highlights some key points that I found Interesting to write about.

Refactoring Improves the Design of Software.

Without refactoring, the design of program will decay. As people change code—changes to realize short-term goals or changes made without a full comprehension of design of the code—the code loses its structure.

Refactor Makes Software Easier to Understand

The trouble is that when you are trying to get the program to work, you are not thinking about the future developer. It does matter if it takes a programmer a week to make a change that would have taken only an hour if she had understood your code.

Refactoring Helps You Find Bugs

Help in understanding the code also helps me spots bugs.

Refactoring Helps You Program Faster

I strongly believe that a good design is essential for rapid...

I’ve been breathing design since the beginning of my career (Apart of my engineering jobs) but for the past six months, I’ve been involved deeply into design role. This is my first full-time professional job as Product Designer and I’ve learned so much. It feels great when you can finally apply all knowledge that you’ve been known but never had a chance to really doing them. This is the real walk the talk and I want to share what exactly the fundamental/facts I’ve been facing in order to actualise this role.

Building Empathy

I’ve seen many times, people who are not a designer raised and solved interesting UX problems that even we are as designer could not. These people have the emotion to conceptualised potential user-centric problem of your design. They have Empathy.

Designer should be the one that have higher empathy than anyone else in the room. No matter new or experienced you...

There are essential things that founder usually missed to expect when assembling a new team. Especially in early stage of product development. I wrapped up the things into 3 Gets below:

Get to know

Just because you already have the flocks, doesn’t necessarily mean they are ready to work. Teamwork takes time. New friend, new stories. Fellow developers and designers will start sharing their stories about previous works. Give them the time to get the sense of how to work with others, especially new people. Some companies have their own onboarding or inauguration process to speed up this barrier.

Get the idea

Getting the team to get and understand the product idea is not easy. A founder might have had experiences on the domain he/she trying to solve. But the team weren’t. So, it’s important to give all team members specific real life examples what are the problems and how the product...

The way we do things in college is different with what actually happens in real job. When we are still in college, we doing things for ourselves. We study for our score, we work hard to impress our parents and we get smart to satisfy our professors.

When we get a job, it makes us a part of many connections in the company. Company means a system. An organised and connected system. We are now a part of that system.

Contrast to what we do in college, being an employee, we do things that are related to other people. It’s a chain of tasks and we may end up in the first chain, the middle chain or as a finisher in the last chain. If we don’t perform at our best, when we start to get lazy and are not doing things the company expected, we might break that chain. Our chain and others, it’s a bad thing.

In college, when we’re not doing well, we’ll get a bad score. We own the responsibility, no...

I told her that and adult life is built not out of eating, praying and loving but out of person, place, and thing: Who we are with, where we live, and what we do for a living. We start our lives with whichever of these we know something about.

As a curious twenties-something, it’s always excited to know and to have a resource that could explain psychology and adult perspective on how should we think, act and understand of being us.

This book explains things that we might have missed, things that we should have seen, thought, and felt. Turns out, that’s a normal thing. At our age, cited from the book, the part of our brain, called the frontal lobe that used to handle our objectivities and preparedness toward life’s problem, had not fully developed yet. Through this book, we could help our frontal lobe growth faster.

Twenties’ life is a real adventure. We have to face so many new...

I recently involved in a conversation on Twitter. It has a correlation with the book I currently read, About Face. It explains about Mental Model which have an important role on design interaction.

Let’s dive into the conversation.

Short story, there was a twitter user, X. He complaints to one of my friend, Y, which whom working for a payment processing company about “Why the landing page is not using https?”

(this is an excerpt and has been revised to make it simple)

X: @mention “Why your company landing page is not using HTTPS?”

Y: “The rest of the site is use it, I think it’s not necessary to use it on landing page, since it’s just a static html page and the use of it will reduce the loading speed.”

X is a regular user of another payment processing companies and they have been using HTTPS on landing page for years. Y, as an engineer of the company, insisted, it was a technical...