In 2018, I sat in a classroom with a General Assembly representative. I was considering a UX Bootcamp, and I asked her what time of students the program attracts. …

In my experience, just because you are running agile does not mean you cannot be thoughtful about what gets built, it does not mean you cannot be intentional about quality and resist cutting corners, it does not mean you cannot invest in design systems, it does not mean you cannot…

One of the more challenging aspects of creating your first practice / academic user experience (UX) design project is coming up with a topic yourself. In the real world, if you are a product designer, unless you are building a tech startup yourself, you’d rarely need to come up with…

Around four months in as a product designer, I wrote this post to chronicle my guiding principles working as the only designer in a startup. Two and a half years have gone by, and as I’ve built up a bit more experience, I’d like to keep up the effort in…

Here’s one important reason. — Growing up, I’ve always subconsciously avoided competitions. I’ve received “awards” here and there throughout school, but they were usually prizes that I didn’t even know I’d entered. Such as — “the most awkward penguin in the high school class of 2005.” Why is that? Because I hate doing fake projects…

What I learned in my “first 90 days” — My “first 90-days” at Empowerly, an early-stage startup, was spent speed-fixing an utterly broken web app so that our users can successfully access our basic revenue-generating service features to complete their tasks. Now that the product is patched up, we saw our user engagement up by four-fold — and can…

A letter to disillusioned architects trying to take the leap — Dear disillusioned architect, When I signed up to study architecture for my undergrad degree a dozen years ago, it was far from being an informed decision. I was 18 and had no clue what I wanted to do in life. …

A case study on overcoming the imposter syndrome and becoming in control — Ok, this is embarrassing. I’m going to announce to the world that: In the past decade I’ve failed close to eight driving road tests in total (and passed two). That is five times (to get my Hong Kong license), and three times (to get my Californian permit). When I first…