What I learn from TIA PDC 2019 as UX-er

https://pdc.techinasia.com/

That is my 4th time, I went to Jakarta. Many reasons that make people arrive in this city. For me, the main reason is to learn. So, on the 3–4 July with my sleepy eyes, I met this city again to join Tech In Asia — Product Development Conference (I think the biggest one in Indonesia).

That my first time joining such a big conference like this. I can’t wait to learn from great speakers there. If you too, I have a suggestion for you. Usually, a big conference comes with many tracks of topics.

The tracks of TIA PDC 2019.

Choose the tracks that you want to learn but don’t too much. I think 2 is nice and make sure the tracks that you choose is related. The example is Product Design and User Experience. Why? Because the track’s session that not very related usually doing at the same time.

The example of 2 sessions (the track isn’t very related) doing at the same time.

For example, is like the schedule above. After you choose the tracks, It’s time to check the schedule. Bookmark the sessions that you want to join. Don’t forget to check the time. My suggestion is 4-5 sessions/day is enough. Don’t be late, seats are very limited. Don’t forget to spare time to rest and chit-chat with the crowd. This is the perfect place to relation with an investor, community member, and other great people.

Is there any question don’t be hesitate to text me. I love to discuss UX. If you will attend the TIA Conference 2019 in October ( https://conference.techinasia.com/), I’ll be there maybe we can meet ;)

Back to the title of this story. I love UX and of course, I follow the Product Design and User Experience track. So, from now until the end, I’ll share you what I’ve learned from each session that I follow. There are 9 sessions that I share to you. You can read it from top to bottom or bottom to top or read only the interest to you. Your choices. Hope you enjoy it :)

1. Using Design Language System to Improve Product Design Efficiency

1st day on 10:30–11:15 at Kapuas Stage

The very first session that I go. I arrive at the stage at 10:30 and no seats left. Cool! The last choice is standing. The speakers are Tri Kurniawan (Senior UI/UX Designer) and Gelar Pradipta Utama (Head of Product). They both from Kata.ai.

Belong to them, there are 5 aspects of Design Language System (DLS) that is artifacts, team model & workflow, structure, building process, and tools.

Artifacts

It’s consist of principles, guidelines, design library (UI kit), and component library (React component). For the first time, I think this is the place you learn more. After you understand, this is the library to find all you need.

Team Model & Workflow

There are many team model that you can choose:

1. Solitary: Only one person handle it.
2. Centralized: There is one team handle.
3. Federated: Person from multiple teams decide to handle it together.
4. Cyclical: The centralized + The federated model.

Each model has plus and minus. Choose the best to fit with your company.

We know that in the team there are many roles. The different role has different responsibilities. So does DLS, each role has the task that written in the distribution model.

1. Research team: Conduct testing to users and gather insight from it.
2. Development team: Define markup and style name. Create react component.
3. Writer team: Create writing guidelines, voice, and tone.
4. Individual: Offer feedback and propose update.

How about the workflow?

1. Demand: Propose request.
2. Discussion: Open discussion by DLS team.
3. Decision: Select and put the discussion result in DLS backlog.
4. Design: Iteration of design the request.
5. Deliver: Deliver it and update the guidelines.

Structure

Finally, in this aspect, we can touch the DLS. The structure consist of 3 sections:

1. Foundations: Design principles like basic/visual elements (color, typography, etc), communications (Voice & tone, writing style, etc), accessibility, and motion/animation.
2. Guidelines: Brand guidelines (personality, logo, etc), product guidelines (component, pattern), and marketing guidelines (newsletter, social media post, etc).
3. Resources: Design library (UI kit), and component library (React component).

Not all things built at the same thing. You can give the prioritize to them. What to do first and later.

Building Process

In this aspect, we talk about how to build DLS. If you are familiar with design thinking, this process is similar.

1. Understand: Try to understand about vision & mission, objective & goal, and purpose & value of the product and company.
2. Define: In this stage, we produce design principles. It is a form of basis direction for any design and product. If it touches with the user persona, produce writing principles.
3. Explore: Doing design and UI audit. Communicate with front-end engineer about the possibility to become components. Then, better break it into the atomic design.
4. Design: Design all components.
5. Testing: Test all components, gather insight and implement the iterations (back to explore).
6. Deliver: Hand-over into libraries that can be used by designer and engineer. Don’t forget to update the guidelines.

Tools

What tools they use?

1. Google Drive
2. Google Docs
3. Figma
4. React
5. Storybook
6. Github

Then, they introduce DLS that Kata.ai build.

https://aksara.kata.ai/

It contains principles, elements, component standards, and other guidelines that systematically improve quality, timeliness, and consistency to their product.

In the end, they talk about the impact after they implement the DLS to their product.

From the design side:

• 3x faster on designing a new product.
• No need to start with a lo-fi prototype.
• Reduce friction between designer.
• Increase the velocity of the onboarding designers to align with product context.

From the development side:

• Faster time to deliver design to the developer.
• Template ready and design consistency.

From the business side:

• Improve the user experience of clients and partners.
• Consistency Improve product identity.

They hope DLS can be single of truth across the team, rapid design and prototyping tool, and modular system that continue to evolve & support Kata.ai.

2. User Research for Product-Market Fit: The Science of Human Behaviour

1st day on 11:15–12:00 at Kapuas Stage

Still at the same stage as before. No one left their warm seats. Standing again. In this session, the speaker is Sakti Nuzan (Product Research Lead) from GOJEK. He was studied product design and anthropology before joining GOJEK.

As a start, he tells us about GOJEK’s product research. There are many approaches (interaction design, statistic, etc) and many goals (business, marketing, etc) on it, but there is only one anchor that are users. Then, he told us about the evolution of GOJEK’s research. From UX research, then experience research, and finally product research. GOJEK need to constantly check whether the expanding of their product solve the market demand (product-market fit). So, GOJEK’ research evolves to product research to achieve it.

The main iterations that he tells are:

1. Identify demands.
2. Strategize solutions.
3. Measure results.
4. Gather feedback. Iterate.

In the next 30 minutes, we dive deeper into User Research for Product-Market Fit. He split the topics into 3 sections:

What user research in tech product needs to focus on Empathy, but also Evidence

We need a nimble research function with a hybrid tool to quickly and iteratively help decision making. To achieve it, need to hold 2 main principles that are empathy and evidence.

Empathy is an intellectual capability to know what other people are likely to think and do. It’s very related to sensibility.

Evidence is information collated and presented to be weighted for decision making. It’s very related to measurements.

If we combine them, we ensure competitive and innovative advantages of our product. Because empathy without tight measurements can’t move the business. And evidence without sensibility can be cold and reinforces data paralysis.

Building a systematic empathy & evidence-based product research practice in the pursuit of product-market fit

We need to measure the impact of the research that we conducting to make sure it impacts the right things.

It’s easy to use service map based on qualitative data and measuring importance from quantitative data. The result is quantifiable insights.

But, GOJEK is a massive product that evolves in a short time. They need more strategies than it.

1. Focusing the research in the right section, not in all of the product development cycle. Deciding to put more effort into different states of product the team faces.
2. Building a knowledge repository of users outside projects.
3. Scaling up product testing capabilities for rapid feedback.

Learning from implementing and spreading the cult of user research in GOJEK

Principles of research activities in GOJEK.

1. Making sure empathy works by meeting in the middle.
   The achieve it, sometimes, GOJEK invites drivers to chit-chat with them.
2. Getting creatives in showcasing research.
   Make sure the research result was understood across the team.
3. Campaigning for sensible, qualitative metrics.
   Prioritize users-favored to the product metrics.

3. Driving Customer Experience Growth by Metrics Insight

1st day on 13:30–14:15 at Kapuas Stage

Learn from the previous session, after lunch, I come 30 minutes earlier to get a seat. In this session, the speaker is Bisma Satria Wardhana (Product Manager Customer Experience) from Bukalapak.

The main goal of this session is to update from “reduce users complain” to “make users can solve their problems before they complain” with customer experience approach.

If we look at the age of the customers today, they tend to highly connect and influence each other. If someone uses our product, he tends to spread his experience (good or bad) to the others. We need to hear them to improves. So, customer experience presented to connect us with our users' voice.

What actually is the customer experience? CX is larget than UX. CX is insuring good experience at every touchpoint of brand. While UX is just insuring good experience on an app. So, UX is a part of CX.

The impact of CX is massive. One of them is quoted from Harvard Business Review “Customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.”. From that quoted too, we can break down that the impact is repeat purchases, customer loyalty, and services efficiency.

So, there are many metrics to measure CX. He tells us the top 4.

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

NPS is a survey system to measure customer satisfaction & loyalty.

NPS consist of several scores usually 0–10. The scores are usually categorized into 3 that is detractors (0–6), neutral (7–8), and promoter (9–10). NPS is calculated by [% promoters] - [% detractors].

When does our NPS survey send?

1. When users already have a certain experience with our service/product in a period of time.
2. After subscribe.

There are tips to improve NPS:

1. Don’t set too many scores. It confusing the users.
2. Ask about past behavior, not in the future.

Example question: “In the last 6 weeks, did you recommend us to a friend or family member?” (Y/N).

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

CSAT is a survey system that’s designed to measure Performance Customer Service on handling the complaint.

Example question: “How was your complaint process experience?” (Not satisfied/satisfied enough/satisfied).

CES (Customer Effort Score)

A CES survey asks the customer “How much effort did you have to expend to handle your request?”.

Example question: “How easy was it for you to sign up for our trial?” (Easy/medium/hard).

Multichannel Complaint Listener

We set listener from many channels like live chat, help form, call center, etc and then save it to the database. From the database, we categorizing the problems & finding the top trend. Then, Follow up to the team.

4. Transforming Corporate UX Team & Process with Growth Mindset

1st day on 14:15–15:00 at Kapuas Stage

Stay in my warn seat and enjoy the next session. The speaker of this session is Arnold Saputra (Senior Manager UX) from GOJEK.

Before in GOJEK, he was in Gramedia. This session is full talk about what the approach and how he does it to make “better” while he was there.

The conditions when he arrived in Gramedia:

1. Designer working based on PM and C level order.
2. There’s no UX research.
3. Straight to high fidelity.
4. No standardization in UX.
5. No behavioral data (just sales).

Now, how he makes it “better”? Better means:

1. Design faster.
2. More consistent.
3. Create a real impact on user & business.
4. The impact of design can be measured.
5. Design can make people life easier.

The strategies are split into 3 sections:

Purpose

It’s important to know about the personal and team working purpose.

The questions to ask about personal purpose:

• “What is your purpose working here?”
• “What is your motivation to wake up every day to the office?”
• “What is your purpose in 5 years?”
• “What can I help as your leader?”

For the team, we can democratize the goals and team OKR’s. “What will we do for (…)?”

People

It’s important to know better about the member of your team. To achieve it there are 3 ways:

1. Get to know your team. Where are they from and anything.
2. Care as a person, not as one of leader job. Team bonding like eating out together is important.
3. Invest in learning. Gave your team a chance, time, and resource to learning.

Process

It’s important to define the process as a single source of truth to work across the team’s member. You can do design thinking here.

There are tips for a leader too.

1. Be a role model. You must be disciplined with yourself before, implement it to others.
2. Empathize with your teammates.
3. Let your team shine. Give space to them. Don’t take all the space alone.
4. Don’t panic when a crisis happens.
5. Be patient with the process. Not all result can show immediately.

And finally, after he applies his approach.

1. Designer working based data & research.
2. There’s a team of UX research.
3. Validate before designing.
4. Brand guideline, design system & tokens.
5. There are some behavioral data.

You can learn more about the “before-after” here https://www.slideshare.net/mucuwiguik/transform-by-arnold-saputra

5. UX Writing: Building Experience with Words

2nd day on 10:30–11:15 at Mahakam Stage

New day, a new spirit and the most important is I get a seat. In this session, the speaker is Edwin Mohammad (UX Copywriting Lead) from Blibli.com.

He starts to introduce the age without UX Copywriting exist. There are only managers and programmers. Businessman and technical man less understand about their users. They trying the best to provide writing to their users. They know that they must transform computer language to the language that human can understand.

Undefined Error
W5001.11161521:FailedUpload
Error Code: 1013

Transform to:

Failed to Upload
The system found an unknown error when uploading your document.

They know the below is better and that is the perfect one for their users. But let us ask their users. How were they feel when seeing that writing?

• Suppose I uploaded a few documents, which one did it fail to upload?
• So what if there’s an unknown error, should I be worried? Was it my fault?
• And why did it fail? Should I ask Customer Service for help?

Look, maybe the writing is Human Language but that is not enough. It’s time to UX Copywriting.

UX Copywriting supposed to be clear, comforting, problem-solving, and natural. Imagine it like when you talk with your close friend, personal assistant, doctor, or therapist. We guide the users from start to finish including when users face an error or failure.

In the UX Copywriting, there are 2 aspects that must be known that is crafting and writing. Let’s start with writing.

Writing is the activity to only think the next word we want to write. There are not exploration and lack of empathy. For example, how would you feel when you read this.

Account Blocked
Cannot proceed due to some unidentified problems with your account.

Naturally, anyone will panic when knowing their account is blocked, isn’t it? With that writing, can we calm down the users? I think not yet, we need to put clarity and empathy on it.

Your account is blocked, but don’t worry
It’s only temporary. Call CS now and help us unblock your account.

How about that? I think the users will calmer with that writing because that is clear about what happens and what the users must do to tackle it.

From the latest example, we know not only writing in it, but there is another big thing. That is crafting, almost 90% in it.

To crafting, we need to find our voice, watch our tone, and follow the basic principles.

Voice

Voice is the character of the brand, the personality. Voice should be an honest reflection of the people behind your company and be appropriate to your industry. Make sure you use the same language as your users to describe your brand. For example, if your users are children you can use a childish voice. The speaker tells us that we can use card sorting to define our company voice.

Tone

The tone is an expression of the brand character. It changes based on the situation. The situations can be when we face an error, when we success doing something, etc. Each situation has its own tone. For example, don’t use cheerful tone when your users face an error. It’ll be hurt. To find the right tone in the right situation you must:

• Understand the content type you’re writing.
• Learn the reader’s emotional state for each type of content.
• Find the appropriate tone that a person (with your brand character) would use.

The speakers tell us that we can use content mapping to find the right tone.

Voice and tone combined are the ingredients to humanize our writing.

Follow the basic principles

Writing is almost always about clarity. Make it scannable.

1. Make it simple. Use a simple word that more general and familiar.
2. Make it concise. Users don’t have much time to read all the word.
3. Make it consistent. Don’t make the users confused with the different.
4. Make it truthful. If it writes “the process will take 5 minutes” so make the process take 5 minutes.

6. Building Data-Driven User Experience

2nd day on 10:30–11:15 at Mahakam Stage

Not move an inch from my current position. Let’s enjoy the next session. The speaker is Naning Utoyo (Senior Experience Researcher) from SP Group.

SP Group is an energy utility company based in Singapore. This company creates digital energy products for residential customers, commercial & industrial customers, and for the nation. They have many products like electric vehicle charging, home cooling, etc.

This company realizes the importance of to start with the people they are designing for, end with solutions that suit their need. To achieve this, they hold 2 main principles that are consumer-centred and data-driven. Consumer-centred means finding the right users’ problems to solve. The question may be “Who are the users?”, “What is the problem?”, and “How will this product solve it?”. Data-driven means make a measured decision. The question may be “Which metric are we trying to change?”, “By doing X, what will happen to this metric?”.

How about the process? This company adopts the Lean Process. Its core components are to learn, build, and measure.

It's beginning with understanding the problem that needs to solve and then developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). To understand the problem we need to conduct a 5-act interview with the users. The 5-act interview consists of 5 steps that are:

• Welcome: Build rapport and gain the user’s trust.
• Discovery: Understand users and their existing behaviour.
• Usability: See if users understand and able to use features.
• Sacrificial concepts: Get a sense of which concepts is important.
• Debrief: Customizable interfaces and purposes.

After we conduct the interview and get the result, it’s time to analyze the insight. Find the right insight then recommend to the team. Let the team build it and then launch it.

After the launch, there are research process need to conduct data analytics, user interview, and monitor the community. We conduct it to measure what we launch is to solve the problems. Because if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

7. A Story Behind GOJEK Driver App Redesign: How Turning Hate to Love

2nd day on 13:30–14:15 at Barito Stage

Because the queue to the lift is so long, I late 5 minutes and miss the introduction. I’m sorry but I hope you enjoy the rest. Of course, there is no seat left. Standing again. Back to the session, the speaker is Bahni Mahariasha (Product Manager) from GOJEK.

This session is full of story, less technical things here. The story focuses on driver app that uses by the driver of GOJEK. When I arrive at the stage, the speaker tells about the conversation between GOJEK and their drivers.

Me: “Pak, kalo boleh tau, sehari itu biasanya bapak bisa dapet pendapatan bersih berapa sih pak?”

D: “Ya berapa ya? Sehari saya dapet berapa ya? Ya segini deh nih yang ada di kantong lol”

Another conversation:

D: “Aplikasi teh suka enggak jelas. Saya enggak ngapa-ngapain, tau-tau dibilang ‘terjadi kesalahan’, saya teh salah apa?!”

Then, the conversation floor to the team so all the team member can know what actually the drivers’ problem. This is important to empathy with the drivers and can find the right problems to solve. After discussion to discussion, they found that the architecture of their app was poor.

This is bad for the drivers. Imagine the drivers use the app while driving. The app is hard to use because of poor architecture. So, the drivers spend a long time to use the app. They are too focus on it and forget they are still driving. Do you know? Something danger can happen.

GOJEK realize that they need to redesign the app with Ulysses approach. That means to put simplicity and thoughtfulness to the app. So, the app can ensure the drivers feel valued and provide safety of life and livelihood.

The interesting for me is the app ever remind the drivers to take a break. The speakers tell us this is important because they know the drivers work too hard. This is impacting the drivers' health. This interests me because for me the great app is the app that can ensure safety when using it.

Does it stop here? Of course, no. Design is an iterative process. Dig deeper, provides more values, and iterate continuously.

8. Towards A Total Design

2nd day on 14:15–15:00 at Main Stage

Finally, I am in the main stage. So a huge stage with much seats but no one left. Amazing crowd, isn’t it? This session is special because the previous speakers are from Indonesia, but not this time. The speaker is Randy J. Hunt (Head of Design) from Grab.

Before in Grab, he used to be a designer in an e-commerce company. He used to be in Artsy and Etsy. He tells us the culture of e-commerce design is ingrained to him. So, move to Grab that provide taxi online service is a challenge to him.

In this session, he shares to us about a framework that he discovers himself named Total Design. Total Design is a full experience of design that can happen because all the components work together harmoniously. For example, is a cafe with forest concept. To make it total design, you must move a full experience of the forest to the cafe. You put many plants, use the wood table, serve forest food, and maybe the waiter use Tarzan uniform.

So, how can we build a Total Design? He tells us that 5 aspects must follow to achieve it.

1. Is Coherent. All the components have a similar feel.
2. Has Focus. All the components work together to achieve one goal.
3. Is Distinct. Unique experience.
4. Related to times. What popular now? That can be a reference.
5. Is emotional. Can make people happy/sad/angry (your choices).

9. Building Effective UX Team

2nd day on 16:15–17:00 at Main Stage

Still in the main stage, looking someone left his seat. Luckily I get a one. Sweet present to enjoy my last session. The speaker is Yoel Sumitro (VP of Product Design) from Bukalapak.

He starts with the fact that 51% of employees looking for new opportunities due to poor leadership or management. That because if people don’t see a future at the company, they will find it somewhere else. Do you know the top 5 reasons people left their last job?

1. Poor leadership or management.
2. Lack of career ladder/opportunity.
3. Lack of meaning/purpose.
4. Stopped learning.
5. Better opportunity outside.

To tackle this challenge he uses the Design Thinking approach. Yes, start with empathy, ideate, testing, and iterate.

Empathy

To build empathy, he asks his team’ member about background, skillset, fun fact, what are they working on, are there any problems, etc. After collecting the data, he analyzes it then break it into several topics that need to solve.

Ideate and Testing

The organizational structure is important to know. There are 3 structures that can be chosen based on company culture.

1. Studio Culture like Airbnb, Apple.
2. Embedded Model like Amazon, Booking.
3. A hybrid like Uber, Instagram

How about the structure in Bukalapak Design? It split into 2 team that is core and functional team. The core team is be distinguished based on the company goals like innovation, design ops, research ops, scalable research, design system, and engineer liaison. While the functional team is be distinguished based on the roles like UX Designer, UX Researcher, UX Writers, UX Engineers, Motion Designers, and Illustrator.

Every company wants to grow its team by recruiting a new employee. Bukalapak realizes that if you want high performance than you must build a team with high diversity member. That is why Bukalapak Design invites all kind of people to join the team. Now in Bukalapak Design there are 148 people spread in many teams.

Bukapalak realizes that companies with career ladders had higher employee engagement, lower attrition, and a higher representation of people in design leadership roles. So, they make their career ladders path clear. For example when you start from Designer, after that you become, Sr. Designer, Principle Designer, and Sr. Principle Designer. What makes you up is also must clear.

Iterate

Bukalapak Design team build several programs continues to improve the effectivity of their team. In the beginning, they build Bukalapak Design Roundup. A design conference as sharing session of the team. Joining the conference worldwide. Hire the design Mentor to mentor their designer. Mentoring the mentor. And then maybe you will be a part that feels the next iteration.