 Hi everyone! How is everybody today? I think it's a great time to have a conference. You know why? December, time to be reflective, everybody is here to learn and you probably really want to be here if not you'll be in holidays or somewhere so I hope to give you something meaningful and helpful today. So when I talk about lean design, what I really mean is about being fast using the lean design process successfully and nothing motivates me then end of the year and I asked myself one question and let me do a little exercise. As you go into 2018, you're probably going to add one more year into your resume. So in your head think about how many years of experience do you have? Everyone have a number in your head already? Looking very serious like how many years is it? So that year maybe it's just a show of hands. How many years is it? Don't be shy. How many years of experience do you have? Working experience. Is it not enough hands then never mind just put it as that. A little bit sensitive right? Well I'm here to tell you that you know time is relative so this is a question I ask myself and motivate myself. So let's just imagine I have 10 years and you just substitute that years of experience over there. Do you really have 10 years of experience or five years of experience or four years of experience or do you really have one year of experience multiplied by 10? What does that mean? Well when I first started my career I was basically repeating every year over and over again. I wasn't learning much. We go through the same peer review talks with my manager expecting an increment every year but I wasn't really learning and the worst thing is that I didn't know that I wasn't learning until I stumbled into this process called Lean and specifically Lean Startup. So what happened in when I started learning this was the when I started working this was the product development process. It's very long. I won't go into details but the gist is that if you want to launch any feature it takes you at least six months and six months for a validated learning some of you will be like what how could any company deal with such cycle but some of you who are in bigger enterprise you might be thinking to yourself hey that sounds about right this is the time it takes to launch any product and in comparison Lean cycle is much simpler so easy to remember basically learn build measure and the time you need to go through the cycle is as soon as possible which itself is a problem because what is as soon as possible but this effective process if you if you compare it with a six-month cycle it means that if you are a developer or a designer working on the lean process the amount of validated learning you have in a year is much more than someone who is using waterfall for example because time it's fixed but it's porous it really depends on how much experience you can squeeze into there and then it's designed to be accelerated it's designed to help you learn much faster so this is simple enough to understand the question is why isn't more enterprise using lean and why isn't more designers effective and I feel like I realized that now we have another problem the problem is lean is very popular and everybody wants a stake in lean so you have your lean UX you have design thinking design spring a gel and what happens is each of these group are running their own cycle and if you add them together it's impossible to meet your as fast as possible time frame so when you get the agencies to do design thinking pass it on to your lean designers about a month two months if you need to call for tender for bigger companies it could take up to six months and then you have your a gel and in your scrum and finally you got to people to who does lean analytics growth hacking and so on this cycle becomes a lot longer and we're back to the same problem it's a new type of waterfall so I would urge everybody to just forget of don't be too egoistic about your own process and really go back to the roots of lean startup the rules of the games speed so ASAP again is ambiguous what I want to do here is I'm gonna share the time the time box or the time we use to do each of the steps each of the design process in SP design to let you I'm not saying that it's gonna be the right time frame but to let you compare as a designer you know how fast can you get speed is really a competition with yourself it's a change in mindset and second rule validation so getting the final or the minimum viable product to the users is crucial it means that although you can do your qualitative research you can learn as much the cycle doesn't actually end until you get to the hand of the users and you and moves a metric so if you say you're cut sorting or a B testing is a sort of quantitative analysis and it fits the lean cycle here they're not not really and I go into that later at this point I would show you illustrate the process that we use I think it's quite common in a lot of startup agencies as well and what I'm gonna do differently is I'm going to put a time frame on each of these activity so for learning it always starts with the people that you are designing for and the solutions to meet those needs but for a larger company it also includes your stakeholders so at the beginning of every design spring design ticket is very important to get alignment with the stakeholders so this is something that we do it's adapted from design spring but it is a more concise version of it because a lot of times we are not designing a new completely new product we are doing feature sprint or feature optimization so we can do with less time number one that column it's all about understanding your user sorry understanding your business understanding your product success matrix so every business would have their own business goal I would say if you want to be completely user-centered then offer everything for free but we're not a charity most companies are not charity so it's very important to get what business goals do they have this this year this three years this five years and link it back to a product success matrix because if it's not linking if your business owner is not making the connection then we're gonna have a problem in the in the future when we come out with a product and it doesn't actually generate any revenue so this part let the PO or the business owner take charge and let them explain and then we'll review current matrix next if you have a user journey map it's helpful to flesh it out and say where does this feeds in the user journey if it's increasing engagement then it's probably somewhere in the middle if it's increasing users it's probably somewhere upstream so every no everyone knows in which part of the journey these lies next sketching this is usually the fun part where we get everybody to draw the solutions say if your user story is I want to increase transaction I want to increase payment the solutions that I have in my head is going to be very different from the one that you have in your head so to reduce the risk of just drawing new designs and then going back and forth it's it's much less risky to get them to draw what they exactly mean and then we discuss from there so we have a bit of a desktop research we'll go through online Pinterest we go through our app and see which are the solutions that fit the problem then we will do a little show and tell then we come out as many ideas as possible and finally we decide which ideas you want to focus on those ideas with voted dots will go into the prototype and will be tested with our users next prototyping for hours anything more too long so you have to be really fast at this and later I'll tell you how to be much faster at prototyping so take four hours get everybody in the room together and just hash the prototype out this takes a day because the second part of the day you actually need to schedule appointment with your users and ensure that they turn up the next day so the next day interview five users this is very familiar because it is something that Google Design Spring have we adopt that and I've used that for many many cycles already it works well for me and five act value so always a friendly welcome context questions then we will do the concepts there are certain tasks for existing designs and we'll get them to do a little bit of usability testing and then debrief it's very it's in simple but a lot of the details are in the practice so the first time you are doing one-on-one research you're probably going to be a little bit uncomfortable but the more time you do it the more you master it and it's very important then you get better at it and finally one day of recommendation and design refinement from experience this part is usually the part where we lose momentum like oh yay we have all these insights let's sit on it for a while and then the next week let's look at how we refine our existing design but do it the next day so document the findings and recommendation maybe in a Word document or presentation where you should then talk it through with your stakeholders and then send it along share it and then finally the real work for designers everybody thought designers is just this part design the high fidelity design to be developed how do you learn faster it as a plethora of tools that we can use ethnographic studies contextual inquiry if you are using the lean mindset you will know that you have to not even consider ethnographic study because it doesn't fit I think the value in lean is that whatever you learn can be tested in the next week so it actually it actually validates your qualitative research as well so I think that you have to understand that the value is in the speed how do we I have a pain point where every time you want to ask the users we have to go back to our friends and then they'll be like today not free next day so it's also better to get a database of users where then when you are looking at the prototype you can just call them up and then create a good relationship with them therefore you know it's much easier to get people for to interview and every after a research you can ask if you can contact them for further research this is also the test whether your research went well research is what one-on-one interview itself is the experience if they had a great experience they will want to come back and they would also refer friends to come back for further research and finally create efficient space so I draw inspiration from other industry I was asking myself which other industry has already solved this problem where they have to learn as fast as possible in a short period of time anyone want to venture a guess what industry this or do you have answers in your head so crime crime scene crime murder investigation if you read about it there's this rule that after 48 hours if you don't have a suspect in mind it's probably an unsolved case so the investigation the investigator team will crank everyone together in the room and then you see this part here they will have like suspect photos on the walls and they will stand around and start thinking about which one have the biggest motivation it's actually very similar to researcher isn't it so my idea room would be a research or learning room would be a room like these with pictures of our users plus it all over the wall and then the PO's developers will stand together and how why did this user use our our product and they also have interrogation room which is similar to our one-on-one interview and I want to create such an environment in SP design so we are looking at inspirations to create a space for learning where the users are on the wall all the time the journey is on the wall all the time screenshots and everything it's there so when you go into the room you feel like okay this is the room where I have to find out the motivation improve the product change a matrix and we did war rooms quite frequently next designing faster and here I want to put again time box on how fast you should be because as mentioned my fast is not the same as your fast this is a concept that we did for SP so basically you want to start talking about renewables in different towns different districts and when you have renewal data when you have data on consumption and demand then you can play around with pricing so this is a concept for maybe three to five years down the road which we drew up in four hours this is property guru listing details which we created in one hour a shout-out to property guru this is launched recently so you can check it out but it doesn't take a lot of time this is another concept around payment and the concept this design is created in about 30 minutes this is another energy app where you can track your life consumption if you have solar panel installed in your home you can check how much this solar panel is contributing towards your home electricity and then this is basically a mirror of the screenshot the actual earlier where you can see the different districts and how they are using energy and it's about two hours so how fast your design is actually depends on how fast you can turn out design as individual if you are so contributor it's literally how fast you can come come out with the design but if you are working with a design team then it can get very chaotic and again I draw inspirations in another industry that have already solved these problems so the kitchen where have you have to come out with dishes that are consistent in a very time pressured environment if you are building a design team these are some of the questions and some of the steps that you have to sit together talk about and ensure that everybody follow the same thing so number one the tools that you're going to use I would lean heavily towards sketch our sponsor I mean it's a great where's the sketch okay lifetime license I mean I've used Photoshop I use sketch and sketch just prevails and it's a reason why everybody is using sketch now and someone just shared with me there was this job requirement where one of the requirements is you need to use sketch if not we're not even going to consider you so that is how powerful sketches but I feel like you know keep an open mind always be testing new tools to see whether it suits you better so tools like in vision flint oh you know make it consistent so everybody is using the same thing then the chef I was this like a simple simple thing but when we were reviewing shed files and all the features you know everybody have their own preferences but as a design lead you have to ask them to come together and stick with one for the structure so you know where everybody everything is it's like in kitchen you know this is your spoon this is the stove so it actually helps in efficiency following me in convention this is another big thing have you worked with designers where it's that messy they don't actually put things into the folder and each of the group actually have like so many layers of groups and then you have a can you clean up your files so I make them clean out the falls so that each designers know where things are and know how these are organized and this actually plays a lot of difference if you are moving things from say sketch to Zeppelin where then the file folder structure makes a lot of difference the next thing that you which is very important that you need to actually sit down and and talk about and be consistent is the grid system so there's different different grid system all of them are right there's no right or wrong answer but as a design team you need to find one that works for every products that you are doing so we have a web products we have mobile apps and we did a little shortcut here we are using the 12-column grid system and if you can see this four column is the same as the mobile system so what you need to do when doing mobile responsive a lot of time is just copy and paste and put it on the same thing much faster pattern library pattern library a lot have been said I need to repeat it's very important you can see your colors as your basic ingredients in the dish I literally name them sob and pepper and and when you have the basic ingredients you compile it into components that you review we use all the time so these are the components that we use not only in mobile web and mobile app we also use them in web and these are just examples of some of the components it's more extensive than this and what you can do and glad sketch has finally come out with this it symbols and libraries how many of you are using libraries amazing right I literally broke out the champagne and yes we have this now a lot of work needs to be done beforehand so all your components needs to be organized so for buttons you can see we have buttons we have the different buttons for primary buttons we have the different state so you can use this library in most all your design files and you just have to select our design system is called looming kid so select looming kid button blah blah and then just paste it that's why design can be so fast now design system is like your product you need to be a product owner of it and it is not healthy for the design team to be leading this you need your developers buy in you need them to actually give you feedback on how to improve it so that they feel like they own this system if not the design system will just die some more ways of designing faster so I mentioned this create a design system and then check out plugins that will help you use free resources I noticed graphic designer a bit egoistic about this I will ask my designer to a download some free stuff I think they're like I can create all this why do I need to download so this is actually an amazing set of icons that I found it's completely free the designer probably spent weeks on this and I'm like just use it and finally leaving style guide work with the developers to come up with something that is usable for all the developers in property guru we have a designed style guide that when you change the elements it changed across four sites for markets all right so that is designing fast and finally measuring fast here's the game this is a tinder profile which is better what do you think if you think the left side is a better picture put our hand no one okay if you think the right side is a better picture put our hand okay so let me give you some numbers and then you can decide further all right so the one with a kid has hundred impressions means hundred people have seen it and five matches five matches means they actually swipe swipe right swipe right and then the one without kids 230 and eight matches so at this point what do you think which is which is better if you think the one with a kid is better put our hand and if you think the one without the kid is better put our hand all right so calculation so if you calculate conversion rate the one with kids actually much higher actually double the conversion so it works better and where do I get this data again inspiration for myself so I was at property guru and developers will start talking about hey can we do a tinder for properties or not tinder for properties and I've not on I haven't been on tinder so like okay I need to find out what they're talking about so I created an account and I it uses your Facebook profile picture so it was without the kid and then I start to get messages and matches and I'm like okay this is awkward I don't know what to do with them and I want to make it very clear that I'm not available so I chose a profile with my child and nightmare I started getting more matches and more messages and what is wrong with these people some of the traits of good UX matrix you have remembered that the matrix actually changed the way you design so if I do a certain activity what does it do to this matrix and we have different matrix one is the counting matrix where you measure week after week month after month and some are experimental matrix where you say okay let's test this out and if it worked then you're not going to measure it anymore so a B testing is one of that if you are doing like version version version by version iteration and you're just measuring specific thing if it meets the matrix that you are aiming for then you don't have to measure it anymore and the good UX matrix the design matrix actually follows the customer journey so I'll give you more example who are just just a shorthand who is actually acquainted with data analytics and using data analytics for your design okay it's actually not a personality trait of designers to be very acquainted with data myself included so the easiest way is just start with one and the safest matrix are probably engagement matrix if you are designing an application that needs weekly engagement daily engagement or conversion matrix where you are doing some sort of a marketplace model you have e-commerce how much conversion you have out of each user so just start with one measure it every week and get a sense around it matrix and numbers should be something that you can actually tangible you can fill it with your hands and a good designer will tell you that okay to change this matrix I have to do something to change it and next you can put a framework around it after you are acquainted with that one matrix this is the UX hard matrix by Google I find it useful for people who are stepping into this data and analytics role but again it's not enough so this is the user experience journey for SP user we have where they start to seek utilities where they start to evaluate now you have no choice there's just as few good we have such a easy job but next year the market will be open so all of you will have other retailers to actually choose from and then on board how does the user go about creating their utility account and then the actual usage of electricity payment billing so on so I mean if you are UX designer you probably have a version of this somewhere maybe it's in a wall event but the problem with UX journey is a lot of time it's not actionable so what we try to make it actionable is number one put the business view on top so you have the user view and you also have the business view so when you talk to your business stakeholder and say hey guys we need to improve stage use and monitor they're not going to understand and they're not going to care it's not really in them to empathize with that but if you say this is actually user retention that's where they start to pay attention or payment this is your revenue share this is user growth this is where they start to understand how important it is to be empathetic towards user view the next thing we do is add the matrix at the bottom so it gives us a sense of if I want to know whether use and monitor is successful then these are the things that I can look out for so here I know it's too small we have active users sessions per user consumption for user savings per user and so on and I have all these tell it into a spreadsheet that looks like this in Google sheets it's very easy to create it takes you about 30 it takes you about maybe two days to set up everything correctly but when you are measuring you just simply have to run the report it takes you a minute and all these numbers will be tell it a few things to note about matrix you have to run your reports every week at the same time if it's a two-week spring then the first Monday at that time 10 o'clock maybe you have to sit there and run the report and get those numbers if it's a weekly then every Monday and then after that you can get a week by week comparison week one conversion per user these are all fake data by the way nothing I can't show anything so first week 6.55 conversion second week it's higher why is it higher what did I do and then it goes so why why is it lower what did I do and this gives you a lot more objectivity in your design which makes you which makes designer very powerful I love a designer who will come out to me and say hey let's try this new onboarding because I realized that our conversion our onboarding is getting lower and we need to do something and finally you know I'm looking at inspiration again stock markets stock market is an industry where you look at the design you look at the magic and that second you need to do something so we have dashboards like this in SP digital and all developers PO's designers could crowd around and say aha you know this week downloads is increasing because we did a marketing we did a new campaign engagement is increasing because of these things that we did last spring this hypothesis that we tested so it makes a team a lot more objective about your product design and that's it that is the cycle learn measure learn build and measure but if you are already using this and you are using this successfully and you're still not getting traction which is what I am right now I'm thinking in an organization where can I go beyond being it's not it's quite easy to understand and practice but if you keep doing this week after week you realize that you feel like a hamster in a will you're just running and running and running to where sometimes to nowhere so it's important to have a vision maybe three five years down the road and see whether what all the experiments that you're running now could go into that vision so here I'm going to give you an example this was the vision with it and the stakeholder was CEO of SP group we had a we had a few concepts and then we show whether it matches his vision in five years so this is something that we tested we want to show more information about how each of the districts are using their energy whether they are sustainable as well so green is more than five percent contributed from renewables and then orange is less than five percent so all fake data but it's something that we are going to start to build and then in the community so imagine you are living in Sengkang it can go into the different buildings and see whether this building is you know sustainable versus that building is sustainable it brings a little bit of gamification as well imagine you are block A and then you realize block C is very sustainable maybe you can have some activities like you know really catch up to it it contributes to a bigger purpose of sustainability and here is the family view so each of you each of the family will have their own mobile app to also measure how sustainable they are and we also looking at renewables such as solar panels which you can buy and put in your home and contributes to your electricity so your bill will be lower so we had a showcase in Singapore energy week and I'm saying design can be bigger because if you talk to stakeholders they find that you are actually very powerful without building actual things in the island you can make their concepts and their vision tangible and I feel like this is something that only designers can do not even developers and we should really embrace that and here after using after showing the concepts we showcase it in energy week and that this senior minister of state we talked to her and she is opening the doors for us she's like okay you have to talk to this you have talked to EMA and and how can we make this faster how can we actually create an ecosystem of energy awareness in Singapore so how do you sharpen the future vision each of the lean cycle actually refines and sharpen your own long term set strategy so you talk about qualitative research that are very in debt like ethnographic study but I think as you go through cycle by cycle all these data actually accumulates into something that can sharpen your vision towards the future you designers should probably spend all time learning about the business strategy so that you are empathetic towards your business as well talk to stakeholders talk to key account C level if you have access to them and mentioned help the business stakeholders bring the vision to life you are actually the only person who can do it and when they share with you and say okay can you actually come up concepts you are actually helping them and they will see the value in what you can do and that's it so in summary learn build measure put a number to it it could be two weeks if you are even faster it could be a week if you're a faster challenge yourself it could even be faster but I think according to scrum and leaned anything more than two weeks you lose the momentum so try to make it faster so some of the rules of the games the speed challenge always challenging yourself always compete with your own speed validation and vision and finally I hope that end of next year when you ask yourself what you have learned during the year you can actually put a lot more learnings into one year where you can exponentially have ten years of experience in the year I've talked to graduates who are in lean cycle who learn so much and is actually comparable to people who are in the industry for years and years and I hope after today we have the mindset to actually learn faster and gain much more in our work thank you any question time for question gill hi thank you for a very interesting talk doing things in a lean approach doing things in a very short time span so I've had any experience where you have to work with a very big project and it needs to be done in a short time so what would be the approach to getting for that kind of problem thank you so by default a lot of the SP projects are very big projects we are talking about electric vehicles which affect government policy it affects the supply of electric vehicles that we have but we always start small so we have our own fleet of electric vehicles in the SP and we have also created an app for internal use and see how they are using it first and we will answer questions like how do I actually make them charge the EV should it be in kappa multi-storey kappa should it be in residential home and these are questions that will be surfaced with these 15 users of EV vehicles another one another project that we are looking at are solar panels and we have deployed them to about a beta set of users 12 of them so we put them in our home and then we will be measuring the consumption trends and we will be validating with residents whether they would even buy solar panels FYI you can actually buy solar panels for Ikea now but it's other countries so we are actually testing that and see what is the outcome maybe it doesn't work in Singapore at all because we are living in apartments and they don't see the use of having something in their home so there are a lot of creative way to test things simply sometimes if you want to test a product value you can just launch a Facebook advertisement say solar kit for $50 a month sign up now and it goes into nowhere but then you will see whether there's an interest there and you can follow up with these users to see whether they want to actually put a solar app into their home and test it with us so there's a lot of creative ways to actually get the minimum viable product out without even building anything I've got one question so in all of your experiences like because you're from the design team how do you talk to the engineers or developers into crafting out certain features in a certain way and you know how do you make sure that there is no miscommunication and all that I think I whatever I share now will be shared with their developers so they understand the thinking behind it and they understand why we do things certain ways we also get them to feedback on the processes so you know it's a two-way thing right this is what we think we should we should work together sometimes they have other opinions so we're saying the last time we wanted to push everything to Zeppelin there were a lot of pushback as well like why are we using Zeppelin why don't you just do this and then we had a presentation from there we gathered your feedback and then we hash things out I think it is one way of building the trust this is officially unofficially I think you know connect them as people as friends go out you know have lunch with them know them as in personal level as a colleague then usually it will just make things a lot more easier and it's not only developers but also your business owners your product owners this is why we have team building team bonding retrospective but sometimes it goes a lot to just have lunch with them and know them as per person and not a developer any more questions so the research comes in the learn part the research actually comes in here snippets of it so we always start with discovery questions we will ask users say if we are looking for bill payment we will ask them when was the last time they they pay their bills and then can you walk through what is the journey it goes from the trigger how do you remember you need to build a bills and then what do you do next then next next next next next and then you have like a whole set of picture or journey for this specific person this is where we get the contacts it depends if it is a early on in the process then you get to ask questions that are much earlier on so why do you remember when you need to open a utility account and we get people who have just opened a utility account if you are someone already have a come for yes they're not going to remember so every sprint every two weeks you have little insights like these and you accumulate all that to give you a complete richer data and these data will be validated by numbers so I've also done ethnographic studies which are very very rich but the problem is it takes a long time so I think you can do both but you have to remember that lean is probably a separate track and at the same time you could have an agency to do more in-depth study so for the design team in in digital we are doing leamed but we have also engaged agencies to do more in-depth ethnographic study the thing about ethnographic study is you can do it one time if there's no disruption in the industry that behavior is not going to change so you don't have to keep doing it every month because if you are not creating a product to actually disrupt that behavior they're not going to change so it would be more of a one-time investment so linear x doesn't actually move beyond the deployment of the product so if I talk about accounting matrix this is more into the matrix that the product owner have are tracking I think this is a good diagram so linear x sits somewhere around here linear x is somewhere around here and design thinking sits quite in front so design thinking you have your ethnographic studies you have your contextual inquiry linear x you start doing the learning part that we do so you come up with the concepts you run design sprints you test those concepts with the users and then that's where the linear x actually stops and you bring those designs to the developers the problem is you don't actually get to see the product being built and the product being used by users so some of the matrix that you are using in linear x are what we call experimental matrix it could be ab testing but ab testing is not the final product so you have ab testing say you test two versions of a design and then maybe 10% of existing user for one 10% for another to be safe right because ab testing to reduce the risk you don't want to roll it out to 100% of the users and you realize that option a is working and you decided to roll out option a to the rest of the population but then you have to measure whether these option a changes an uncounting matrix so this option a that you have tested and validated should change the behavior of the users who are using the final product and this is where linked ux stops because they're not measuring the the entail so it often distrusts the whole process or sprints so it just ends up extending to another spring so I wonder in your work set and how that affects you guys, I'm sure it often turns out to be a problem and how do you deal with it for enterprise they usually connect through an account manager or sales person and I think we need to respect their relationship because a lot of time the account manager and the sales person would think that they can speak for the users and a lot of time it is often the case they know a lot about the users and I think firstly respect their relationship that account managers or sales person have with the user and talk to them and I ask them questions you know they should be one of your main stakeholders and there will be questions that they can answer there will be questions that they can't answer and from there say oh you know I still have this specific question would you mind if the next time you see the user you know ask this question or can we just sit in in your sales page can we sit in when you have a meeting I would just be an observer I'm not going to even speak to the users because these are their accounts and they are very you know they want to hold it they want to be the authority over it and I think we need to respect that and once you have that mindset it's usually simpler there will be okay you know I see that these are some of the questions to help you you know I will bring you in and I will share more with you again it's also the one-to-one relationship you have with the account and the sales person so for me I always go out with the sales head of sales you know try to connect with them learn about their problems whenever I have a new designer we get schedule stakeholder interview to ask each of these stakeholders if you are head of sales what are the problems that you're trying to solve and how can I help you if you are a business strategy how can I help you it's it's it's also user experience in that way but it's internal no questions thank you thanks everyone