A deep dive guide on teaching yourself UI/UX design from zero knowledge to a full-time role — September 2020 was when I got hired as a UI/UX designer, even without any experience. Despite being a newbie, I still managed to get a 25% pay raise after three months. Yet, just based on my words alone, it seemed that the journey was smooth-sailing: it was only so because…

I recently chanced upon Brian Lovin’s podcast episode on Senior++ Designer Expectations on “non-obvious paths to level up at work”. While the gap between a junior and a senior product designer is vague and huge at times (depending on where you’re applying to be a senior), it got me to…

Niche construction in Product Design and a thought about ethical design — Beavers are really interesting creatures. We know them as furry animals that build dams (they also build lodges!) and float on their backs in the river. What’s more interesting is that beavers are actually very much like product designers. Unfortunately, product designers aren’t wood-eating rodents that slap the water's surface…

A reflection: how I went from writing news scripts at a radio station to designing the subscriptions experience in foodpanda — In a Nutshell… My entire design journey was a lot of self-discovery. This is a quick snippet of my journey separated by years, starting from 2015: 2015: I began my journey as a media professional-in-training, studying a Diploma in Mass Communications at Temasek Polytechnic.

Great product designers don’t come by chance — Stepping into the product design field in late-2020, I had the opportunity to work with brilliant founders and product people. I also crossed paths with aspirant designers to veterans who’ve seen the transformation of the web from Flash to today’s Web3.0. Throughout my product design journey, I had the chance…

A deep dive into driving design velocity at any organisation at any scale — The entire design process can be condensed into a day’s worth of work, or it could be stretched out as we can see in waterfall-type organisations. In any case, design velocity is one of the key metrics that determine whether the design team is efficient or not, assuming that the…

An opinionated piece on why it is a feature that can destroy any sense of asynchronous culture. — When the world plunged deeper into a remote working culture, many companies faced the issue of transition: from being able to call out your colleague over the cubicle wall to having to sending a message that they may not even reply, it was a drastic change for people who never…

An honest chronicle of my current problems as a designer-turned-PM and how I’m struggling to overcome them — About a year and a little more ago, I was hired as a UI/UX designer without experience. I was a completely self-taught UI/UX designer and this March, I created a definitive guide to self-teaching UI/UX design in 2021. In July, I joined Polymerize, a deeptech startup in materials science-based in…

I took these 5 steps to negotiate for more. — Three months ago, I was hired as a UI/UX Designer for a travel startup despite having no experience or formal training. Within a few weeks, I ran a design exercise to ideate with the team for a full feature. I was fortunate enough to be hired during this period, but…