I show genuine care for my workmates while providing honest and constructive feedback to foster growth and strengthen relationships.

I care personally

We are humans first, colleagues second. Leadership is about enabling team members to do their best work. I care personally about my coworkers and direct reports. I get to know who they are, what they value, what their career goals are.

 Everyone carries a drama. How can I effectively help, motivate and provide support for team members that I don't really know? By getting  to know them both inside and outside of work, what they value, what they struggle with, what their hopes are, I am able to help them achieve results more effectively. ​​​

I help others grow

Because design approach and experience level can vary so much, I found Principle-based approach works effectively when it comes to coaching and mentoring.

There are universal standards we all will hold ourselves accountable for.

For example, one of the standards my teams have had in the past was "We explore multiple ideas before running with any single one". When I observe a mid-level designer's prototype as nearly identical to his initial sketches I'll ask what other ideas they considered. Maybe he just got too excited and forgot. Or maybe his PM needed to start development asap, so the designer didn't have time to explore more than one idea. If that continues to happen, there's an opportunity for me to have a conversation with the PM and dev lead to try to find a way to give enough time for design estimates.​​

Other design work standards are like:

  • Experiment rather than debate

  • Sharpen the swords (E.g. Learnt a new interaction technic and share with the team)

  • I'm not the user.

  • Test with grandma

  • Every pixel on the page needs to have a reason

  • Involve stakeholders earlier rather than later​​​

Attitudes of the team

Teamwork is important to any successful team culture. I help designers identify the attitudes they prioritise as they work together.

Some of the attitudes that I used to work with:

  • Design is a team sport

  • Respectful, kind and confident

  • Share in-progress work for feedback every week.​

  • Let every speak their mind, on one will dominate the conversation

  • Constantly seek out the positive part of any reaction or negative words spoken to you

I promote a culture of creativity, excellence and resilience

When correction needs to be made, I am clear and provide details on A) What needs to happen, B) By when, and C) What the consequence will be if progress is not achieved by that date.

I also praise directly and timely in a way that resonates most with team members. (Not everyone appreciates praise in front of others). Most of all I look for opportunities to "find someone doing something right" rather than the other way around.

Introducing lean user testing into design process

My story

I once worked at a company when no discovery work was done, because the company had no experience with user research and it didn't know how.

The team began ideation but struggled to know what they should work on. Product owners tried their best to put down requirements but often would do what made sense to them rather than the user. The product team would sometimes build the features that weren't needed, wasting a lot of time and effort. User feedback would only be received after the product was launched.

In this company, I had to gradually introduce user research at the start and at the end of the design process and user testing during sprint to check we were on track.

But how do we do that with limited resources?

I called out people who just joined the organisation for less than six months with different age and genders. Surprisingly, a lot of them put hands up advocating for participation. I carried out a few rounds of moderated user testing with them.

This format of lean user testing successfully raised the awareness from top to bottom across the organisation - meaning it is not only UX team’s job to think about user experience.

Building trust in these activities took time, but contact with users was the key to building the right digital product and staying on track.

My story

Advocating for form accessibility

At a local council, over 100 online forms were used on the public website in various formats and structures. The inconsistency in visual components, language, and question logic caused confusion for local residents. Misunderstandings happened every day.

This resulted in residents using the most expensive solution for a council - phone call!

We had four content authors in the team with access to edit these forms.

How could I persuade them to draft forms consistently and in an accessibility-compliant manner?

I carried out user testing activity in the organisation to boost awareness and introduced Good Practice in Designing Forms guideline to promote awareness and best practices for creating accessible forms.

With a joint effort of the team, we redesigned and transformed them into accessibility-compliant online applications (WCAG 2.1 Level AA), driving improvement in System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 3 high traffic forms that ranged from 82 to 88.