This, for now, will not be a case study. Rather, I will be describing what I do as the at a custom wear startup Tailors Mark.
Tailors Mark is a proof of concept for scanning, printing, and body measurement research and hardware built by the sibling company Tec.Fit. We are committed to making the best fit through custom wear by providing tools for every step of the journey.
I design apps that are used by people from a variety of roles. It could be for managing orders, or customers, or hardware. It could be a web app accessed on a laptop or phone, or it could be an app built on the scanner to instruct a customer how to get scanned.
I design for:
Staff who manage orders
Tailors or style consultants who manage customers
Vendors who manufacture the suits
Clients who license our software
Most of the time I am designing internal tools. New features are used by my colleagues as soon as they are live. We are a very small team, and I wear a second hat: product management. I design for bug fixes, I design for management and production workflows, but I also ruthlessly prioritize and make daily decisions based on time and cost.
This is a good summary of our tailoring process
Challenges
Tailoring and hardware are new and unfamiliar territories for me — which makes designing my current projects extremely exciting. I love learning about new industries, and it feels very rewarding when I feel like I am on the road to nailing my colleague’s pain points.
There are busy seasons where it can be extremely hard to get immediate feedback from my teammates. Our tailor, for example, could be fully booked with clients on some days
There are challenges in every company:
Our dev team is entirely remote, and there are some gaps in their skill sets that I have to compromise with
There are some legacy decisions I have to work around, so some of our processes sound a bit convoluted
I need to manage my time wisely because my day is split doing design work, management, and meetings
A number of projects are running in parallel, and there is only one me
Despite the challenges, work is rewarding. The good news is, there’s a TON of improvements to be made, an endless list of pain points to be addressed. I have never designed tools for tailoring before. Sometimes I need a few days to really understand how something works.
My Process
Prototype
Clarify
Collaborate
I prototype designs on Invision as much as I can. It’s easier to share and explain, plus during busy times my teammates can provide feedback even when they’re unable to join a meeting. It’s also excellent for design hand-overs remotely done with developers.
I ask and clarify. I would approach our head tailor, for example, if I want to understand what his needs are when garments need to be altered.
I also involve the team in workshops whenever I can. Some of them may have more experience with the different user roles that I am designing for, and so I get invaluable insights from collaborations.
Success
I consider a project successful when:
my colleagues are able to do their work faster and more efficiently.
our customers have a better experience, from fitting to delivery, because the tools we use make the customer experience and production process smoother.
For more stories about what I do or what I’m working on, drop me a note and I’m happy to make time for a chat.
Before 2019, customers who booked a hotel through Qantas could only access the details about their booking through their email confirmation. In 2019, our team released the portal in which customers can finally view and access all their current and past bookings.
I was the product designer, and I was responsible for user research, design discovery, and the final visual/ui designs. I tested user flows through prototypes. Our primary goal was to provide customers the information they need exactly when the needed it, and to give customers a way to manage bookings through self-help.
The Problem
How might we give our customers more control over their bookings?
The company was aware that it was falling a little behind our customers’ expectations. While all our competitors already had tools that allow their customers to manage their lodgings online, Qantas customers could only view details about the hotel they’ve booked by combing through their inbox and looking for their confirmation email.
Customers could already cancel bookings through a special link in their confirmation email. In this project, our goal was to extend that functionality and give our customers the ability to change or manage their bookings. The benefits to the company was two-fold: customers can make changes quickly (which would make them happy), and our call center won’t be bogged down by small tasks. If customers can resolve some booking issues through self-help, our customer service team can focus on resolving bigger tickets that require more of their time and knowledge.
Discovery
The team had to first decide which key functionalities, apart from viewing bookings, that we have to build for our customers. We were able to get data from the Customer Service team, who managed the calls the company receives from customers. Cancellations was the top reason for customer support calls (and this feature was already available, we only needed to integrate it into the customer’s account section). This is followed by changing booking details (such as guest name, email, and phone number). Other sources of customer information included surveys and customer call recordings. I had access to the types of questions customers typically asked when they call customer support, and saw an opportunity to address these topics through the customer’s account portal.
An ideation workshop with different stakeholders, developers, and the customer service team based in Manila.
I facilitated a number of workshops to generate ideas from the team and other stakeholders. We involved the Customer Support team, which was based overseas, since they deal with our customers directly. Discovery and design workshops uncovered needs not just of our customers but also of our customer service representatives.
Some workshops I facilitated:
listening to a few customer support calls with the product team to build empathy and share ideas to solve customer pain points
prioritization with the customer service team to understand which features they think our customers would need the most
sketch sessions with different teams and stakeholders to involve everyone in the early design process, as well as listen to their insights
a gamification of the customer journey
A card game I created to simulate the unexpected problems that arise during travel.The team developers roleplaying to simulate the experience of a customer with issues in the middle of travel.
Design
The MVP for the customer’s account section included:
the new navigation for customers to access their account
the ability for a customer to view their bookings
the ability for a customer to cancel a booking
I went through a process of adding and subtracting elements when refining the designs for each screen. I created prototypes via Sketch, Axure, and Framer (depending on what I want to test) to demonstrate interactions and test various flows in different platforms. It was important that the site worked excellently on mobile, since travelers would use it as their primary device to manage bookings on the go.
Dot voting during an ideation sessionSome early designs that was too cluttered.I refined the screens and removed unnecessary information. I reused design patterns that the team was using on other products to keep the design consistent, whether the customer is searching for a hotel or managing their bookings.
I also went through a few design rounds to make elements scalable. We had a number of features we were planning to build next and I had to think ahead to accommodate these in the future. A menu with 2 links on launch may have 4 in the next year or so.
After launching the MVP, we put up a poll on the Account section to ask customers what they would want to see on this page. This gave the team direction in terms of what to build next.
One of the top requests by customers was the ability to change the guest name themselves. Unfortunately, this was just one of the few things they had to resolve through a call because of identity verification steps. There were other top requests such as rebooking (instead of cancellation). Since we would need more time to implement features that would resolve these hot pain points, we thought about adding an FAQ at the bottom of the page with the top questions/requests.
To measure the effectiveness of this feature (and the relevance of each question), a small yes/no question appears at the bottom of each FAQ question.
Other small and quick-wins for the team were useful features that were easy to add. While we were working on features that would take time to be delivered, we wanted to provide a little convenience for customers where we can.
An “Add to calendar” link makes it convenient to copy booking dates to any calendarThe ‘Book again’ links appear in a few screens, useful especially for our business travelers
Learnings
The workshops and customer call recordings highlighted very early on just how much we could “empower” our customers. With a product that was primarily online, there were limitations on what we can do for our customers. A traveler stuck in the middle of a town without internet, or lost in a city whose language they cannot read or understand, are already common pain points that our product cannot address. We had to move away from some of these in order to focus on problems we had the ability to solve.
We were tracking engagement and regularly had polls on the site to provide the team with a constant feedback loop with our customers. I left Qantas shortly after our launch and was unable to keep track of the usefulness of some of the features.
We needed more time to measure the impact of the product on the number of customer calls our customer service team was receiving, although our customers had quickly shifted to managing and checking their booking through their account once the feature went live. There was a consistent upward trend of user adoption, so we knew that managing their bookings was a much-awaited feature.
One of the challenges for me as a designer was this constant mental debate about consistency in design patterns. Should I stick to a pattern used by a different team on a different product, since it is ‘familiar’ to our customers, or should I introduce a better pattern that fits for the context I am designing for? (I went back and forth through different designs because of this issue!)
I tried to find a balance in between and at the end of the day usability won. If an interface or design pattern had some similarities (for example, same color for links), if it is easy to use and understand then the customer won’t have any trouble adapting to some slight differences between the products under the Qantas umbrella.
I also discovered just how much I enjoyed facilitating workshops with my team, even as far as doing an ideation workshop with a remote team where we were able to share designs with each other. Gamification of the customer’s journey was so enjoyable, we were planning to apply it to other projects. It wasn’t often that I had so much time for design discovery, and I learned so much about collaboration by facilitating different types of workshops.
This project has affected how I work, not just with pixels but also with people, in the best way possible.
What’s the future of email? Chat apps are now the primary tool for everyday communication with friends and colleagues and email has shifted its purpose. People use it as a todo-list, or part of a security workflow that people need to validate their accounts (think: logging onto Slack). Email seem to have changed into something that validates our identity, or gives you purposeful information: meeting agendas, upcoming lunches, or a bill waiting to be paid.
The team at Huge designed proposal of an experience that helps people do more by helping people think less.
My Role
As UX designer, I was involved in user research through one-on-one interviews, competitive analysis, and designing user flows and wireframes, and user testing. I worked with an art director and visual designer who set the brand guidelines, which I applied onto the rest of the screens for the app. I designed the interactions using Framer.
Process
The team engaged the client through a workshop to understand their brand and the goals of their team internally. User interviews and competitive analysis was done prior to the design phase. We interviewed a small group of professionals and narrowed down common use cases for email:
Communication
Planning and Organization
Relationships and Networks
Identity
Email has gone beyond being a ‘communication tool’. Looking at it from a different perspective, people have been using it to form new habits or accomplish personal and professional goals. Although traditional email as we knew it was changing, it was not necessarily dead. APIs have made the email experience faster and convenient for people.
The team proposed an experience that can push people towards accomplishing tasks rather than digging for information in their Inbox.
Design
Emphasis was put on bottom navigation and gesture-based browsing. Swiping through emails makes it easier to go through important agendas quickly. The screen estate was optimized to show the most relevant information where additional info can be pulled from the top.
Evaluation
The team had user testing sessions to evaluate the proposed experience. We implemented some design and content changes following the tests to improve on the usability and clarity of the experience. Icons that were too vague were redesigned to conform to imagery that people were more familiar with.
The proposal was received well by the client. We had a month for research, design, and prototyping and I was happy with what our team was able to accomplish in a short timeframe. Building the prototype using Framer helped the team bring the experience to the client’s devices especially when we had to present the product remotely.
If I were to do the project again, I would like to accomplish a few things:
Integrate more services into the experience to show email as part of an ecosystem.
Demonstrate the impact of personalization and NLP when managing tasks.
The team worked on a pitch for a media consumption experience that focused on learning for kids.
My Role
I was part of a team of two other UX designers and an art director. The user flows were divided among the team and I designed the onboarding and search experiences. I did visual design that followed some design guidelines set by the art director.
I used Principle to prototype interactions for some of the screens.
Process
One of the members of the team conducted user interviews (children aged 3-10). We also conducted a survey among parents from different parts of Asia, UK, and US to understand what their concerns are regarding media content apps (TV shows, e-books) and their kids’ interactions with these products.
Following our findings, we designed an experience where media consumption for kids doesn’t have to be boxed within their favorite characters. We explored showing videos and books under learning buckets such as maths, music, outdoors, geography, or careers like doctors and dentistry. We also integrated short quizzes to put emphasis on topics and terms that children may learn from.
Design
The app was designed for kids. I’ve taken a more visual approach to the experience: more space for thumbnails and images, bigger and readable text, and wide tappable areas. Children should be able to navigate through content without reading.
I started with wireframes and went through iterations to polish the copy and content.
Early wireframes of the onboarding experience.
Onboarding with visual design
Search flow designs
Interactions were done using Principle to demonstrate animations for some screens.
We wanted to highlight different ways of discovering content by bucketing videos and ebooks under content themes such as ‘Play Outdoors’, or exploring space.
