Stick to the plan: keep the habit of my quarterly work review. Here I am, review what achieved in Q1 2021.
Client Projects
January
The year begins with 1 design sprint for an insurance client. The client witness how fast we can achieve high quality work, turning a vague idea — several slides’ description — into an implementation-ready prototype. (Blogpost about this project is here.) So after 2 months of internal budget fight, at the end of Q1, we started a long term collaboration and kicked off 2 more projects.
February
My February project is interesting in the following 3 aspects:
- It comes from a returning client. I worked with the team 2 years ago. The feeling to collaborate again is great since the trust has been built.
- The target market is Asia. We did stakeholder interviews with people located in Singapore and Hong Kong. Though, at the beginning of interview, the stakeholder even questioned why to hire a Swiss agency to do an Asian market project. But when the interview was completed, they saw our value and turned into our alley.
- The project is to help users navigate content of a campaign inside the global corporate universe. This universe has complicated information architecture, 1) sites for different business units; 2) different country and language versions; 3) each investor types having different available content because of legal requirements. The detail page design is not the focus, because the client has a mature component library that they can quick assemble a page with low dev cost. Our main challenge is to figure out how to best locate content within this information architecture “fog”.
March
I was involved in an expert review project for a B2B business application. The current design was done by the developer team. It is quite interesting to see how an engineer-centered design could look like.
For me, the learning is mainly on how to set up expert review framework so we can effectively and efficiently review the product and structure our suggestions.
Ginetta internal work
We just launched our new website (ginetta.net). To get prepared for the launch, my main tasks this quarter are coordinating the case study creation and inputting content into the CMS process.
These tasks could rarely happen in client projects. So I was quite fascinated to learn so much new stuff through the collaboration with writer and engineer team. In the beginning, how to establish a content structure “formula”, define storyline and dig into product value for end users; in the middle, coordinate workflow starting with collecting inputs from project team, to proof of reading, editorial design; at the end, define conventions to keep consistency, learn about CMS, configure components, styles and inputting content… It is such a great learning experience for me, hands on these detail oriented behind-the-scene work.
Another ongoing project is writing offer template. It is easy to talk about process and method in a specific context. But the challenge of writing template is to think in a holistic view, for example, what we do in a concept phase in general, and what are main project types. I like this challenge. It gives me a chance to reflect, cross check among projects and generalize patterns. I look forward to the upcoming step, which is to review, discuss and align with colleagues.
Blog writing
I am learning how to write better in English on design-related topics. I even took a course in Udemy on business writing (my learning notes is here).
I wrote 2 new blogs: Notes from Dan Brown’s books and another one to publish soon. I spent more time revising 2 blogs I wrote last year with the support of my colleagues: How to plan a Card Sorting Test, and How to set up an effective remote workshop.
Writing is easy, editing is hard. Good luck to myself!
Book reading
- Communicating design and Practical Design Discovery: both books are from Dan Brown. The first one is a rich treasure including a lot of practical content for my daily project work. I keep referring to this book. It worths reading multiple times. (My notes of these two books are here)
- Writing for designers by Scott Kubie: very short and compact book.
- Design sprint by Richard Banfield, C. Todd Lombardo and Trace Wax, a very practical book listing tools and detailed steps of workshop exercises. I learned quite a few new exercises and workshop techniques from this book
- Workshopper playbook by Jonathan Courtney: another book on design sprint, I resonate so much with Jonathan’s frustration of the pointless meetings caused by office politics and team dynamics.
