Alan Yeh @alanyeh - Tumblr Blog

Reflecting night

It’s been 7 months in New York. A lot has happened, I’ve made a completely new friend group. I’ve went through a toxic relationship. I’m not working in a different office on a brand new team. Tried a bunch of new restaurants. Discovered old/new hobbies. Traveled back home a couple of times. Been on a bunch of dates. It’s been a worldwind of a year so far.

I hope the rest of the year will be just as fulfilling at the last 7 months. Even with all the ups and downs, I was really maximizing my experience here as much as I can.

A lot of thoughts are swirling through my head, I feel a little anxious and stressed. I’m probably just exhausted from the weekend and I’m finally able to sit down and reflect. I’m also so tired from this date that I hope went well…My insecurities are surfacing back up and I don’t know how to cal myself down from it. I know whatever happens happens, but I can’t help but think I’m not good enough or it’s just another cycle of finding the next person, going through the same dates.

I will start writing about the positives

For the longest time, I’ve wrote in my tumblr journal late at night. When the depths of my depression and anxiety would be in full force. It was what people told me to do if I was having a hard time with life and it helped a little. But I’m going to try something different, I’m going to write about my life not in the perspective of being negative, but just write. Write like I’m writing from an observer looking at myself objectively.

This inspiration came from an article I read by Julie Zhou. Her articles on how to grow as a designer to just general work and life advice always resonated with me and motivated me to do more. This time around she trigger something in me that I wanted to start pursuing. She was talking about stop being so humble. To brag a bit about the achievements and accomplishments. The reason why this spoke to me was what I talked about earlier. I tend to focus so much on the negative aspects of my life, I forget about the positive. About where I’m at and how I get to where I am today. It’s a huge accomplishment that I don’t give myself enough credit for.

I believe a new chapter of my life is going to form. I see myself inching out of the darkness each day from this past relationship that affected me so deeply. I’m constantly teetering between different parts of myself. Do I message her and try and resolve any last feelings? Do I focus on trying to move on and tell myself this relationship has ended? Do I let myself just accept how I feel and let things run its course? My therapist tells me I know ultimately what to do? But I’m caught trying to understand my feelings and I know whatever decision I make I’m not going to regret because these decisions will ultimately be the decision I make myself.

Put Yourself First, Because Nobody Else Will

1. Stay in the present moment

2. Put yourself first, because nobody else will

3. Don’t compare yourself to others

4. You are not your thoughts

5. Never take things personally

6. Don’t make assumptions

7. All you can do, is do your best

8. Happiness is a choice

9. Focus on self-compassion over self-esteem

Product design interviews - Part 1

Before I dive into my my interview experience the past couple of months, let me just start with a couple of tibits of information that’ll help any of you going through this process - where ever you are in your design career.

Vibez

1. It’s really about the vibe between you and the people you’re interviewing with that’ll break or make you. If they vibe doesn’t feel right and you get accepted or rejected, don’t ignore it. What do I mean by vibe? Just your overall connection between the people in the company that you’re interviewing with, if it feels off in anyway sit with it and question those feelings, I repeat these feelings are not meant to be ignored.

Dealing with rejection

2. From my own experience of being rejected from 15+ companies in the past 2 months. Rejection will happen. Don’t fear it. I feel a lot of people don’t leave jobs due to a fear of rejection. Interviewing takes practice, and every interview is practice. Furthermore, don’t take it personally. A rejection doesn’t mean you’re a bad designer, it just didn’t work out between you and the company you were interviewing with. If you don’t get accepted into your dream job, most companies allow second chances at interviewing later down the line. As long as you continue to interview and put yourself out there that is already a success.

The Foundation of therapy part 1 - Boundaries

I’ve been in and out of therapy for the last 2 years and what I’ve learned recently from all these therapist is boundary setting. I think the foundation of therapy is positive internal self talk that allows for better boundary setting. What I mean by boundary setting is the ability to have the courage of speaking up when someone crosses what you’re okay with.

Personally, I’ve struggled with speaking up when it comes to what I’m okay with. For most of us we’ve been told what is “right” and what is “wrong”. Based on parental, societal, and friend influences. What I realized is that I’ve been valuing what people think of me more than how I think of myself, causing me to live a life that isn’t true to myself - ultimately causing a mild form of depresison and anxiety. I think this is one of the true reasons many of us are unhappy. We lack boundary setting and thus, live other people’s lives and not live our own lives - resulting in a unfulfilling, miserable life. To speak our minds is something that isn’t fostered in an Chinese household. I’m good at following directions and putting other people’s desires before myself. But I’ve had enough, I want to live a my own life with my own decisions. I hate it when people tell me what to do and what not to do.

I realize in America, happiness is what is taught, but deep down inside there’s a systemic issue with what we value. We value freedom and the pursuit of happiness, but most don’t know exactly how to achieve true happiness. Especially in the Bay Area, we’re taught to enter this rat race chasing money, prestige amongst our peers, and this desire for stuff to make us happy. We’re chasing this false sense of happiness dictated by consumerism to drive our economy.

Dealing with rejection

I just got rejected from a job I was looking forward to. I only got to the second phone screen and didn’t get any further. When I was the email, I was a bit taken back. A part of me was thinking I could easily get to the final round of interviews. But I was wrong, I built up this ideal fantasy where I would have gotten a job at that company.

I don’t know what I’m getting at, beside the fact that I need a bit of encouragement right now. Putting myself out there constantly without any signal of improvement besides rejection isn’t a good feeling. I went on a date today and I didn’t get rejected, we had good conversation. But I took that risk that I may in the future get rejected. More likely then not she isn’t the “one”. But who knows. The trust is, atleast I’m putting myself out there. That’s already a success. Am I just lying to myself to make my mental state feel better? Why does it matter, for as long as I feel better? Why would anyone care how I personally feel about myself, but myself. I think at this point, all I can do is be thankful for who I am. Be proud at the fact that I put myself out there and don’t dread on the rejections. Don’t build up this ideal, setting yourself up for such rejections to hurt more than it really matters. At the end of the day you’re the one who reactions to rejection and if you let it get to you, then you let the rejection win. Don’t give it that luxury.

Visual Designers vs UX Designers

I had a interesting conversation with my product designer friend. I asked her what’s harder, being a User Experience Designer, or a Visual Designer. She responded with a good answer, she said quote, “UX designers follow a set of rules while visual designers require a bit of innate sensibilities to design”. I completely agree. It’s interesting the subset, design is branching out to. Several years ago, the only roles of a designer was a graphic designer. Now in the world of designer we have roles such as user researcher, ux designer, ux copywriter, ux manager, brand designer and many more roles. It’s interesting the role of a “product designer”, which is basically a ux designer typically gets paid more then a purely visual designer / brand designer. However, visual designers in my opinion is the harder of the two careers. You can learn the foundations of a ux designer. What are best practices. However, you can’t really tell how to design a better icon when it comes to a visual designer. Funny the world we live in. At the end of the day, just because something is harder doesn’t mean that it’s more valuable.

Facebook Messenger vs iOS Messages

One of facebook’s smartest moves in the last couple of years was the decoupling of messenger from the facebook platform. Messenger’s usage has reached a huge adoption, reaching 1.3 billion users. That’s immense for a messaging platform that technically already exists within Apple’s iOS.

I’m here to explore the reasons behind why messanger pull ahead as the second most downloaded application on the App Store.

UI in Messages First lets talk about UI, When we do a side by side comparison, between iOS Messages, and Facebook’s Messenger. You can obviously tell which one is more visually appealing and personalized. The ability for messages to pull profile images made it much more customized to the the user. Pulling in facebook info such as name and image makes the UI that more pleasing.

UX in messages

The UX is more or less the same, except placement of functionality differs slightly. iOS has expanded navigation right below the input field, while facebook hides its content under a arrow. This is slight, but it cleans up information overload and allows the user to focus on the task at hand, which is typing a message. A part of me feels like apple is trying to spam us by keeping those navigation items below the input field. I’ve never once used Apple Pay and I haven’t experienced anyone pay me through messenger.

Seen vs unread messages

This has been a point of contention for a lot of people. Do people care to have messages seen? iOS messages has the ability to hide if you’ve seen a message. However, facebook doesn’t allow for such functionality. If you read a message a little image shows up. I’m sure it changes how people view messages. So often do we hide the fact that we’ve “read” a message in hopes that the person doesn’t get frustrated at the thought of not responding right away. I think this allows users to check messages without needing to worry about such issues. So who’s the winner here? I believe iOS functional makes it more welcoming for people to use it, but I don’t think it hurts Facebook Messanger as much as it’s a benefit to iOS Messages\

Conclusion

I’m sure iOS messenger still has a huge market share when sending messages in terms of communication and they introduced FaceTime to a wide audience. However, Facebook messages in my opinion has looked at the iOS platform and made it even better.

Being a design generalist

There was this interesting article by airbnb on design generalist. I consider myself a design generalist in that my design sensibilities expand the full gamut. From prototyping animations, visual design, ux design, research, and development. I’ve even had to product manage features when we didn’t have a product manager. I've had the the luxury and curse to do everything. Not only that, but I’ve worked in a wide range of companies from small start ups to agencies, and huge corporations. It has made me highly adaptable to any given environment.

The question here is what should I focus on next? Well, out of everything that I’ve worked on, I believe my current skill set lies within user experience and interaction design. I have a knack for animation and the working knowledge to work well cross functionality between managers, and developers.

Ruined by Design and purpose

I started this book by Mike Monteiro called, “Ruined by Design”. I’m not very far into it, but it’s really making me think about the impact I have on society as a whole. I agree with the overall point - Mike is trying to get across in terms of design ethics and our responsibility to make moral design decisions. We have a lot of impact in all the industries we work in to not just agree with everything we're told to do. Especially when it comes to dark patterns.

I think about the future of career and the impact I may have on society. I’ve always been the type of person who puts a lot of pressure on themselves to do the right thing. There’s enough people in the world trying to make us buy more things we don’t need. People working at companies trying to serve us more ads. I understand there’s bills to pay and money is nice. But at the end of the day, I want to look at myself say and say I contributed to society in a positive way. Hopefully, just hopefully I can make it just a little tiny bit better. I’m starting to reach a point in my career where I hopefully choose to make the world slightly better and still get paid for it. Now that is the dream.

A honest look at my design career

Being in the design field for nearly 8+ years now. From starting as a Flash designer. I’ve been through the whole spectrum of design. Visual designer, to even designing in Microsoft word. Took a several year stint as a front-end developer. Anyways, I finally feel impactful with the work I’m doing and on a trajectory that will possibly help more and more people. At the current start-up I am lucky enough to work on a product that I believe will reduce the home buy process by months. However, in terms of my design process there’s still a lot of room to grow, learn and improve.

Current thoughts

As a product designer, I’m in an extremely lucky place to have a huge amount of impact on whatever product I am working on. And living in the Silicon Valley, I have even more impact on the future of how technology shapes the world. This comes with consequences. I was recommended the book by my cousin who’s also a product designer - Mike Monteiro, “Ruined by Design”. It touched upon the ethics and responsibility we have as product designers to change things for the better and not for the worse. I won’t dive too deep into the ethics of design (I’ll save it for another blog). But it got me thinking about the whole notion of design thinking and after working in the field for this long of a time my views on design as changed. Especially in the last two years leading a whole iOS/Android, Web app. When I was a naive college student, I thought I was pretty smart, knowing a bit of web design and knowing what design thinking was. But honestly, process is great and all and grounds you, but knowing design thinking is one thing. Implementing it into the company is another thing. Being a champion for design process, user testing and data when even your boss doesn’t follow those rules let alone a whole company is a huge challenge. I was lucky enough to have a Product Manager that really pushed for user testing in a responsible and respectful way. To be resilient in times of a difficult work environment can teach you even more than if you were in a position of ease.

Design Process and Weaknesses

There’s still a lot for me to learn. I believe one of the core issues that I personally must improve on is honestly the soft skills and confidence to push back and the ability to develop multiple solutions to a single design prompt and problem. To push for testing and feedback where ever you can get. That’s where my peer Nicole really pushed for and someone I was extremely grateful to have met in my design career.

Source: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/junior-designers-vs-senior-designers-fbe483d3b51e

The above path is how a senior designer tackle problems, as outline in her article Junior vs Senior Designers. She goes on speaking about the importance of multiple solutions in a design process and gaining feedback. Those are the two pillars of a good design process. To try multiple solutions and fail until one solution may or may out solve thus problem outlined at the start.

The biggest takeaway is to continue to tackle the demons inside that prevents me from being confident to tackles the demons at the workforce and vice versa. As in to understand yourself, your weakness and strengths is probably the biggest hurdle before anything else. If you don’t understand yourself how would you have the confidence to understand and help others in the workforce.

Redesigning Registration

The log in / registration flow is something every designer needs to go through. Most every app requires a registration flow, and after doing a bit of research there’s multiple pathways you can take.

The problem I wanted to solve:

How do we improve the log in flow with the least resistance?

We’ve noticed a drop-off on the number of users in the sign-up flow when reaching clicking sign up. If thought it wasn’t a signification number of people, it was still enough to question the login we were using as way to acquire users.

A couple of ideas that i’ve implemented into the design

1. Have a low barrier entry by incorporating google sign-in 2. Show only the email bar allowing the user to focus on one task at a time 3. Make the flow sign-in and log-in one point of entry vs. two.

Questions for the future:

Should we have the registering terms of use active every single time a person signs in?

Heatmap Navigation Example

A thank you to climbing

I’ve been climbing for nearly a decade and only one person I know still climbs since I first started in 2009. I’m writing this because I want to pat myself in the back. We are constantly moving forward that we don’t spend time to tell ourselves “good job” for sticking with it for so long. Even though climbing as sort of been my escape, when I go to the gym I’m probably one of only a handful of people that have climbed as long as I have. And yet I’m still humble about my climbing abilities and honestly I’ll never want to change that. If anything I could be even more humble.

I’ll never want to be a person that isn’t open to help a beginner just because of where I originated from. Climbing has taught me so much about my potential, who I am. It has brought me the friends I associate with today. It has taught me to slow down and that life isn’t a race. To help others when they’re trying to hit a new problem. It has even helped me to public speak at work. I’ll like to give back to climbing as much as possible and I’ll stick with it as long as my two hands are attached to my body. Thank you climbing

Animation for a AVM graph

Mental Health: All-or-Nothing Thinking

As you know, I go to therapy and I’ll like to write more about this topic in order to break this stigmatism against mental health. I tell a lot of people who are curious about therapy to try it out. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going to talk about issues that may be bothering you in your day to day. If anything, going to therapy shows immense courage to admit to yourself that there’s something I’ll like to fix.

I’ve been working on with my therapist is this notion of “All or Nothing Thinking”. For example, my parents categorized my brother as two extreme, I was dumb and my brother was smart. So All-or-Nothing-thinking is the idea that it’s either or. You’re either smart or dumb. You’re either successful or a failure. This thinking, I realized fueled a-lot of my depression and anxiety. For example, in terms of friendships, I always bucketed my friendships is either best friends or not really friends. But friends aren’t like that, there’s a whole spectrum of friend ships. I’m learning to unlearn this cognitive disorder by catching these thoughts as they develop. These concepts of successful and unsuccessful or good and bad are all relative. Next time when you start thinking about a extreme, sit with it and ask yourself - Is that really true? Life isn’t so black and white as we make it out to be.

Soft skills needs as a designer

When I was going to art school, there was a strong emphasis on technical skills. For example, how to use the pen tool in illustrator to basic programming in Flash. But the one skill that was under valued was the people skills need to get your designs across. This includes conveying what is needed to developers, to pushing for your designs amongst Product Managers and Stakeholders, and lastly being able to take design feedback from your Creative Director. We must decide at product managers what is best for the product. At the end of the day our why for design. Why are we design and what fuels our soul to creative our best work? For me it was always to solve problems and make a impact in a industry with the design skills and knowledge I have. Am I putting the interest and solving the problems of the user?

At the end of the day don’t forget our own why for design.

What bothers me with developing soft skills as mid level designer is the ability to convey and push back what you truly believe is right. To be ready to talk about your design at a moments notice. This is a weak point of mine that I must improve upon and what’s one of many aspect that’s holding me back from working to my best potential.

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Alan Yeh