When covid happened, we struggled with meeting fatigue and the lack of human connection. On top of that, I also felt like we were losing touch with what’s going on in the design industry. That’s when I realized we took for granted all the opportunities we had while working together in the same location as a design team that we didn’t fully utilize until it was gone.

So when we entered into 2021, I initiated a bi-weekly Design Mash Session where we gather together online as a design team for an hour to an hour and a half every other week just to nerd out over anything design-related.

As a first-time design leader, I never really knew how to properly “teach” or “mentor” junior designers. For one, not every designer went through design or art school, so it was interesting hearing from their perspective how they transitioned to design. Through these design mash sessions, I realized every designer has their own understanding and view about design, and the collaborative nature of these sessions made it valuable for us to improve our design skills and knowledge.

We also opened the sessions to our colleagues from the other departments — engineering, marketing and data to join in some of the discussions which helped us understand more about how they view the working relationships between the design team and them.

While I initially planned for 10 sessions, we enjoyed it so much that I decided to run it for a full year. We skipped 4 sessions for the holiday seasons so we will be ending the year with Design Mash Session №22.

As we approach the end of the year, I’d like to share the things we did together and hopefully spark some ideas.

1. Goal Setting

We started the year by discussing what we wanted to achieve together as a design team and concluded that we would like to improve and integrate better user feedback into our design process.

We further broke that down into Short-Term (0–3 Months), Mid-Term (3–6 Months) & Long-Term (12+ Months) goals.

Here’s what we came up with:

Short-Term
Review analytics, user usage data, app store reviews and existing user insights to inform and validate our design hypothesis before and after each release.

Mid-Term
Add new ways to capture user problems and needs. This includes in-app feedback, A/B testing & funnel analysis.

Long-Term
We want to make sure users are being heard, that the design is actually solving the correct user needs or problems so that they can continue to gain value from using our product. Qualitative user feedback — from focus user groups, product contributors to ambassador programs.

We are proud to say that we have achieved both our short-term and mid-term goals and working towards the long-term with a new UX Researcher who will be heading our user research process.

2. App Design Critique

A common design interview technique we like to use is to ask the candidate to tell us about a product or service that they love using and try to evaluate what might be some of the design decisions behind it. So for this session, we tried to think about what kind of behaviour is the product trying to push for, how well they are doing this and what could be changed or improved.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer since we never know the kind of constraints a company might be working with but this exercise helped us think beyond the surface.

3. Talk About Good Design

Find and share 3 products, features or digital services that you think has been designed well and share your thoughts about them.

We referenced good design principles such as Dieter Ram’s 10 Principles of Good Design, Laws of UX as well as Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics to identify if these examples share certain traits with what the industry thinks.

4. Talk About Bad Design

Find and share 3 products, features or digital services that you think is designed badly and share your thoughts about them.

With reference to the previous session, we discussed and shared examples of what we would consider “Bad Design”. We looked at more serious examples like Dark Patterns and had a great laugh over hilariously overdesigned The Worst Volume Control UI.

5. Trending Product / App

We chose an app that was trending during this period — which happened to be Clubhouse and shared what we thought about the product, what they did well, why it was trending, what we liked and disliked about.

6. Visual Design Exercise

After a few discussion-heavy sessions, we decided to do something more hands-on and worked on the UI for a screen together during the session.

Since we only had an hour for our design session, it made us focus and prioritise on the visual elements that matter.

It reminded me of the Daily UI Challenge that I did when I first got into Product Design and was trying to improve my visual design skills. You can check out examples of the design challenges over at Collect UI.

7. Designing & Handling Different States

As a continuation to the design challenge we did in the previous session, we focused on the different types of states a user would face when interacting with a product during this session instead.

While we enjoy designing mockups for the perfect user journey, the reality is that edge cases tend to happen. We looked from the lens of a QA and imagine the types of edge cases that a user might face — designing states to handle errors, empty states, connection issues as well as extreme edge cases to test the limits of our design.

8. Work On A Side Project

This was the first design mash session where a couple of engineers joined us and we decided to work on an internal project on the side — to improve our current check-in process at the office during the covid period.

Together we designed and built an app that reminded employees to check in and record their temperature if they were in the office for the day so we could monitor and ensure that we remained within the max occupancy limit.

The design team designed the user flow as well as the high-fidelity mockups and the engineers developed the prototype within the short span of two weeks.

9. Designing a Design Task

Interviewing designers is quite a challenging task so we sat together during this session to design a design task that we would be using to evaluate potential product design candidates.

We referred to articles like How to Evaluate a Designer and Product Design Exercises to gather inspiration on what kind of design exercises were suitable, how big should the scope be, how would we evaluate their process and came up with this format:

Task Overview:

Short whiteboarding design exercise for a candidate to work on for 40–60 minutes in person.

The focus will be on the candidate’s ability to work with information architecture as well as interaction design. The task should be generic and not be directly related to the company’s product to ensure objective evaluation.

Key Points To Notes During Interview:

Ideation — How does the candidate generate their ideas?

Constraints — How does the candidate understand/work within constraints?

Define — How does the candidate narrow down the scope of the project and prioritise?

Communication — How does the candidate communicate their process with the team?

Evaluation — How does the candidate critique their design solution?

10. Figjam-ing

Around this time Figma released the Beta version of Figjam — a collaborative whiteboarding tool for teams to ideate and work together.

Being a huge fanboy of Figma myself, we made use of this week’s session to play around with Figjam — scribbling, drawing user flow charts and running design feedback sessions with it.

You can check out their tutorial file over here.

P.S If anyone from Figma is reading this, please make Figjam part of the main Figma workflow so we don’t have to constantly switch between files.

11. Design Articles

Find 1–3 design articles that you have read in the past two weeks and share your thoughts about them.

These were the articles we discussed and some key takeaways:

• It’s normal to switch when you find something else that interests you
• Try a reflection exercise to find out what suits you and what doesn’t

• “The person making decisions on what your team’s going to work on cares as much about the product as you do. But they have diplomatic decisions to make. They’re thinking about both the user needs and business needs, and sometimes these don’t match up.”

• Get users into a “flow” state (they do it by creating challenges)
• Have some “exclusive” features that users need to unlock by doing a task (leverages on Endowment Effect)
• Rewarding users upon task completion (and also showing users their progress so that it motivates them to complete the task)

12. Product Designer Career Progression

We talked about the different career tracks a product designer can take depending on if they want to focus on growing their specialization skillset (Individual Contributor) or their leadership skillset (Management) route.

For an organisation to succeed, we need both types of designers.

Resource: https://www.intercom.com/blog/product-designer-career/

13. Design Team OKRs Review

As part of our mid-year team evaluation, we sat together to review the goals we set out to meet early on in the year and review our current design process.

We identified and listed down 4 Key Objectives that the design team would like to improve our contribution towards:

Drive new user growth via product initiatives
Web Strategy / Creating Designs for Organic Growth / Conducting UX Research for Retention Mechanism)

Drive user behaviour for content creation and social engagement
Improve designs for content discovery and consumption / Simplification & quality of life improvement towards user experience

Improve Design Language Consistency across different Functions / Products
Setting up design guidelines / Design System / Running internal design workshops / Create Design<>QA Workflow

Improve Design Process to Include User Feedback / Data
Create development & handoff process to ensure the design is built to specifications / Set up user testing processes / Data reports for new features / Running more A/B Experiments

14. Upcoming Design Trends

Find and discuss upcoming Design Trends that you have identified, sharing your thoughts about them.

Here are some of the design trends that we have identified that will be getting more popular in the next few years:

Illustrations like Humaaans and Undraw make illustrations accessible to designers who need to add some visual touch to their designs. We will start to see an increase in the usage of illustrations in designs.

More personalisation with the increasing use of AI and data-driven products to tailor experience by removing frictions and making products more engaging to individual users. The features on the Instagram app that you use will be vastly different from the one that your friend use as it is tailored to your needs and interests.

Nostalgic designs like those popular in the 80s and 90s will see a revival as consumers born during those years enter their thirties and forties and designers and businesses use that as a tool to drive a powerful psychological phenomenon that creates a sense of comfort and familiarity.

15. Eastern vs Western Design Philosophy

Compare design philosophy between eastern and western countries and see how they influence the designs of digital products or services.

Resources:

https://uxdesign.cc/content-or-white-space-chinese-vs-western-design-aesthetics-2eef79e12844 https://uxdesign.cc/key-differences-between-designing-for-china-and-the-west-dad2c5132521

Technology leapfrog has allowed for Super Apps to exist in Asia Markets. For many internet users, their first experience of the internet more often than not is from mobile, hence the reason for moving design towards a mobile-first approach.

Many consumer apps follow a design philosophy that stems from their target market’s culture, traditions and consumption behaviours.

16. Universal Design

Discuss the principles of Universal Design, find examples that demonstrate them and share how they can be applied in the design process to be more inclusive.

Resources: https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/

7 Principles for Universal Design (Creds: CUD)

1. Equitable use. The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities. For example, a website that is designed to be accessible to everyone, including people who are blind and use screen reader technology, employs this principle.
2. Flexibility in Use. The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities. An example is a museum that allows visitors to choose to read or listen to the description of the contents of a display case.
3. Simple and intuitive. The use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level. Science lab equipment with clear and intuitive control buttons is an example of an application of this principle.
4. Perceptible information. The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities. An example of this principle is captioned television programming projected in a noisy sports bar.
5. Tolerance for error. The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions. An example of a product applying this principle is software applications that provide guidance when the user makes an inappropriate selection.
6. Low physical effort. The design can be used efficiently, comfortably, and with a minimum of fatigue. Doors that open automatically for people with a wide variety of physical characteristics demonstrate the application of this principle.
7. Size and space for approach and use. Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of the user’s body size, posture, or mobility. A flexible work area designed for use by employees who are left- or right-handed and have a variety of other physical characteristics and abilities is an example of applying this principle.

17. Gamification Design

During this session, we shared our thoughts on gamification as part of our product strategy and how we should design the mechanism.

Types of Gamification Mechanisms:
Badges / Achievements
Leaderboard / PVP / PVE
Levels / Progression
Virtual Currency / Rewards / Points / Digital Gifts

Gamification Goals:
Increase overall engagement by rewarding action behaviours
Increase specific user activity retention
Monetisation Model

Resources:
Gamification: Understanding The Basics
Gamification: The Importance of Failure
Gamification: Rewarding Users With Points

18. Designing Microinteractions

Micro-interactions are used to delight or inform users upon a change to make them feel more engaged with the product/service.

During this session, we found examples of micro-interactions that delight the user experience in a product or service.

Resources: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/microinteractions/

19. Designing Copy

Discuss and share how we can design copy to improve the user’s experience in a product or service.

In Design’s context, the copy is used in communicating information or instructions to the end consumers.

When executed well, the copy can help alleviate the frustrations users face when encountering errors in their user journey. It can guide users within a product by helping them to interact with it and create a stronger connection between users and the desired actions.

Examples of techniques that can be used to design copy:
Metaphors — Using everyday scenarios to explain an abstract concept
Guidance— Microcopy for different scenarios to unstuck a user
Humour — can be used to entice users to your platform
Data visualisation — Visual representation of text-heavy information
Emotional interaction — As an emotional hook

20. Design Workshop & Usability Testing

For this session, we opened it up to our other colleagues to run a design workshop for a new product feature that the design team was working on.

We recruited 5 participants from different departments and conducted a usability testing session before we brought this out to test with our own users.

21. Music Playlist

This was a fun session where we shared the type of music genres we like and just chilled out for an hour listening to our favourite beats.

22. Design Video Watch Party

For our very last design mash session for 2021, we sat together (virtually in a watch party) to watch a Design Vodcast — High Resolution, which is a series of interviews with design leaders around product design and design thinking.

The series was released in 2017, where I first watched it when I just got started in product design and it is still as relevant today.

I think designers learn best through collaboration. These regular sessions we have together certainly helped us in gaining new knowledge and being more comfortable sharing our opinions. We’ll continue to run the Design Mash Sessions in 2022, so do give this a try in the upcoming year and see how it sparks new creativity within your team.

We’re also hiring Product Designers (Remote-Friendly) so do reach out if you are looking for a new environment to grow together :)

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanselwong/
Socials: https://twitter.com/yourshansel

It has been a great year of personal growth, learning to be a first-time design leader and meeting new designers from across the world. Shoutout to my amazing design team at Lomotif, thank you all.