Guten Tag – I am a German/Korean hybrid brand x UX designer and I can read minds.
Don’t believe me? Keep scrolling.
You’re a telepath! OMG!
Well, no, but I try really hard, speak two languages fluently, and another two and a half enough to get by and know you’re talking not-so-nice-things-not-quite-behind-my-back. The biggest challenge with my portfolio and work is: 99% of colleagues/hiring teams/companies/recruiters want to see ‘process’ and are taken back by what looks like overly polished visual design. So, to frame why my portfolio looks the way it does, you’ll need to understand my career path, current work environment, and strengths.
Again, I can’t really read minds. Most times my intuition is weirdly spot on. Sometimes, you might as well be talking to a wall in Klingon… But don’t worry, I will still try and translate that into design to get feedback on. As a former ArtCenter alumnus, I prefer a direct critique without the beating-around-the-bush-fluff. In any case, my day to day requires a bit more brainpower to stay on top of all our projects, while actively navigating a profitable startup within a massive, industry-leading, corporate environment with its own sets of diverse requirements, constraints, and stakeholders. Back to my biggest challenge: Standard best practice processes aren’t quite established – yet (we are and have been working on that…).
What the heck does that mean? Let me show you a project example.
I can see it if you can see it!
Don’t want to read so much? Rather get a quick overview of the current process vs. my ideal? Take look a the following graphs.
Finding process in the gray
Q: How do projects establish themselves?
Generally, BD is about to pitch a sale. I might get an email or a mention during stand-up. In this example for a client, it started with an email with a *missing* brand guidelines.
A hint that this particular project might be establishing itself, started as a verbal mention at the beginning of February with the request to create an infographic, followed by an email labeled ‘OBSCURECOMPANYNAME’ Brand Guide the end of that month.
My next step was to process said brand guidelines to determine how much of it was implementable, compile assets, and create quick drafts. Besides brand, client requirements could include requests such as WCAG compliancy, multi-language capabilities, third party integrations, and more. Every now and then, sales might add new product features that don’t yet exist to the contract.
An information graphic I created for this particular sales pitch outlining what our product is/does, as well as user/client and product expectations.
Not a ticket but an omen of what is to come.
Actual site screens - with a quick brand color and image overlay for BD handoff
Design Drafts
In most cases, a dedicated PM would assist with the product requirements. In my case, I wear a minor PM hat and have to rely on mind-reading skills as sales negotiations are ensuing. The assumption is the client may want the most sold product features: SSO, home page with career journeys, coaching/scheduling page, online learning resources, interview app, access to a jobs board, proprietary career ‘insights’, the resume analyzer, an assessments feature, user profile, FAQs, and a support/live chat page.
Initial designs help the sales team close deals. So, for round one, the objective is to apply client brand, and if available, brand imagery to our existing product template to elicit a reaction from various stakeholders, internal and external.
Interlude…
Work doesn’t ever stop. While I wait on feedback, end requirements, new/not mentioned requests, I spend my time with production support, research, and experimentation.
In February I spent some time on a few things. First, thinking about what polar graph ratings could look like as we started delving into the world of 360˚ assessments. If used in such an assessment, what could they look like when multiple users are answering the same question? What displays when drilling into questions?
Second, email hero images, and new client hero images.
Third, we needed a hotfix webinar feature integrated into our partner pages.
Fourth, I spent time reimagining our home page and exploring a more dashboard-style experience based on known bottlenecks, and stakeholder requests to optimize the product.
And lastly, to keep me busy for the next one and a half months a new project that evolved rather rapidly, called Alpine. (Ask me about Alpine, it was a neat exploration into game design and much too many assets and screens to fit into the interlude).
Polar graph rating exploration
Redesigning the product – dashboard exploration
Webinar feature design hot fix
Alpine executive simulation intranet design exploration
THE TICKET
After a successful sale, we’re ready to get working on the client’s requests.
More mind-reading. As you will see the ticket attached is about as detailed as things get written. One of my faves, the ‘make prettier’ request, which later was renamed to ‘make snazzier’. This ticket serves as a reminder to hold your product manager and their superior PRD writing skills dear. Because as you will see, not having a dedicated PM results in requests generated over teams on the fly.
The homepage
When the work environment isn’t necessarily design-, or user-centric, one must often show all pixel-perfect examples before a conclusion/direction can be made. Also because of lack of time and resources, using wireframing tools like Balsamiq, or building interactive prototypes in Figma, Flinto or Invision are an extraneous leisure. An interestingly new challenge I face being on such a small design team is working with stakeholders who aren’t necessarily tech or product savvy. They may not know full feature sets, technical capabilities, and/or terminology like pixel sizing, fonts. Some are not even familiar with the phrase ‘above the fold’. Often many may have strong opinions on aesthetics, and/or might not understand the balance between too much or too little content.
The homepage design was a prime example of such content creation conundrum; a great example of how homepage content needed to be laid out to visualize that more is not better.
This client had more specific home page design requests
The ticket!
Oh, hey! Remember that ‘blank-ish’ Ticket?
Here, let me remind you. It states we need designs for: Home page, profile page, assessment page, insights page, chat page… Make p-r-e-t-t-i-e-r… do we see metrics, deadlines, milestones, {insert important req here}? Not quite. So, plowing through the nebulous gray of what is required, let me turn on my mind-reading skills and preface the nest steps as they are not conventional or best practice in any form. You won’t find sticky notes or whiteboard drawings. Heck, you won’t even find a PRD, because frankly, like my blank tickets, epics and user stories, they don’t exist, and we don’t have the time, or team capacity to facilitate wires and sketches.
Ticket translation… we need quite a few more screens in various states for desktop AND mobile, not to mention assets. And what is this product?
What is the product? ‘OBSCURENAMECLIENT’ was sold existing executive leadership coaching services with a custom web experience. The big driver here is the possibility upon a successful first run to close a multi-year deal. The build includes said client’s proprietary skills and traits assessments, and hand-selected learning courses, and the opportunity to schedule executive leadership development sessions
The promise: Our technology can facilitate, our industry-leading coaches contribute to leadership growth, our product is straightforward enough for a user.The homepage needed a design overhaul to remove two key features while adhering to the tech constraint that we MUST keep the right hand, gray widget rail as is. (Even though alternatives for a better UX had been proposed as you’ll see on the right).
To address the ‘prettiness’ factor I tried to bring some white space, and a more modular layout, while sticking to existing tech and design constraints. For example, the blue ‘Journeys’ tiles, were a remnant from a ‘Discover Journeys’ design exploration that ended up being introduced into the homepage across all partners without testing, or user flow and experience expectations. Another constraint is the inclusion of not fully functional features like ‘Quick Wins’ and ‘Goals’.
Home page redesign suggestions, to eliminate the right hand feature rail, evolving them into more card like, flexible widgets.
Assessment screen, FAQ, chat/support, learning library, modals, image assets
4. A new FAQ page with some typography tweaks, an assessments page, a chat and support page with updated icons and background design, the learning landing page, the SSO prelogin page, and profile pages were quickly reskinned, images replaced according to feedback from our internal sales team, including ‘make it more snazzy’ (!!). Yes, you read that right. Now my visual and brand brain power needs activation.
5. Now I’m also required to mind read which additional assets that support this executive leadership experience are needed. In this guess after a few phone calls and emails we needed: Image placeholders for the external learning site, email image assets, error states, modals, icons, hero images, and a few more pages with specific detail changes (copy, colors, logos).
Assets, profile page, learning and assessment pages
6. The biggest challenge this particular project faced was the introduction of a scheduler from an R&D part of the ‘Journeys’ project. We’re now at the beginning of June for this particular project. And as I have no mention of a go-live date written anywhere, I can’t tell you how many days left till design freeze (as if ‘design freezes’ are a thing). But it’s pretty soon.
While a more ‘cleaner’ visual design at first glance than the original appointment scheduler, this new implementation had quite a lot of kinks that needed to be thought and talked through before build. The interaction did not reflect how I imagined this scheduler should function. Strategic conversation is a luxury that requires multiple parties to dedicate some time to. In this case, time wasn’t truly allocated to discussion until the scheduler had already been built in stage (WITHOUT FLOWS OR UX GUIDANCE)… {insert meme and expletive}.
Due to time limitations, this particular set of screens now needed some quick rethinking based on last-minute requests to make a more usable scheduler that kept the same aesthetic but was also responsive.
Scheduler, looks much simpler than it actually is, and it’s still too complicated
7. ‘OBSCURCLIENTNAME’ is also a rather inclusive and big-name company. As we currently do not employ UX copywriters or any copywriters it’s part of my duty to try and come up with correct wording for items such as image alt texts and modal prompts.
8. And finally to help with QA some write up to adjust visual and any UX/Ui issues, global sizing, fonts, max, and min-width, etc. This is generally when I phase out of spending 80% of my time this high priority project into the next big client contract while allocating time for production and other R&D requests. You might be wondering whether my QA feedback was considered? Maybe? Some of it? To be honest, dev will pick and choose, and it’s still unclear (2.5 years later) what said low-hanging fruit might be.
No copywriter means I need to alt text these assets
My writeups - I try and keep feedback directed to visual layout, since this is where frontend struggles the most
Conclusions
Every now and then I hear back from corporate on how the product actually launched, and was received. Sometimes with insight into how many people contributed to pitching, selling, launching, and maintaining the product. (I even got a acrylic award block the size of a guinea pig a while back for my work contribution on launching this particular department’s B2C product).
What you may not know: our design team is a whole two person crew, of my my very talented UX director, and myself. You might have noticed the turnaround time (here about 4 months), and some of the major process constraints I work with. PRDs, success and exit criteria, KPIs, milestones, target dates, changelogs, checklists, scope, reporting, documentation, user testing, market research and viability, even accountable stakeholders are often unclear – if available at all.
So, can I read minds? Not, really. I will try to find some sort of process in a process-less space.
I’m not a dev, and my coding skills are limited. I’m originally a graphic designer, with an entrepreneurial spirit who finds joy in organizing chaos (whether that is data, systems, or the likes) into visually stunning but also functional entities. I have good gut instincts, decently high emotional intelligence, the power of being able to strategically think while constantly thinking of brand and its application, and what it takes to get things done in a crunch.
Want to see more of what I’ve worked on at Korn Ferry Advance? Click the button below.
Some easter egg projects – lacking a lot of description – can be found here.
Always nice to get a concluding product launch email