 Welcome and thank you for joining the first of three UX design industry night panels. Industry nights offer recent graduates and current students of the user experience design program valuable insights into industry as they start on new and exciting career paths. We also want to welcome members of the broader Emily car community who have joined us today as well. This event is hosted by Emily car continuing studies and I'm joining this event today from the unseated territories of the Musqueam Squamish and slave with tooth nations. I'm grateful to be living working and connecting with you from the territories of the Coast Salish peoples, but also through online portals. We may be connecting across many different traditional territories and lands. I encourage you to take a moment to acknowledge the land on which you live and learn and the importance of connecting back to the land in these digitally mediated times. So today's panel explores a day and a life of a UX designer from the perspective of four established professionals with responsibilities ranging from research to development and everything in between. The role of a UX designer can change depending on the organization or project, the designer scope of knowledge and expertise, or working with an internal team or external client. Joining today to share their insights are guests Sean Brower, Sean Deng, Scott you Jen and Tory show. Each panelist will introduce themselves and briefly share their journey and relationship to UX roles both past and present. We then have a series of questions prepared for the panelists that they'll have each a chance to respond to. And then we'll end the session with questions from the audience in the last 15 minutes or so. And you can add your questions directly into the chat at any time. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to our first presenter of the evening, Sean Brower. And thanks Christina for that intro and thanks everyone for joining this talk. My name is Sean Brower as Christina mentioned and I've been now graduated from university for about five years. I graduated in 2016 from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SMU actually. And kind of throughout my experience I've been able to do kind of a full gambit of different roles in kind of the work experience I did before I graduated as well as kind of once I was in the industry so kind of what I would say my typical day when I, because now my kind of job title is kind of a design designer but when I first graduated it was UX designer. And that's kind of something that I'm sure a lot of us will touch on is kind of the role itself and the name kind of changes quite a lot depending on what you're doing. But kind of from my specific perspective the typical day changed a lot depending on what role I had working with a lot of big companies as a co-op when I was still in school at university. So, I worked at actually Blackberry back when I was called Research in Motion still. I worked with SAP here in Vancouver, and then also a very small design agency that folks come branding called dossier creative which is also which is here in Vancouver in the real time. So, kind of depending on those different companies, I was able to try quite a lot of different things and when I was responsible for was quite different depending on the role. So, when I was at Research in Motion, I was actually responsible for making animations for the new OS system for Blackberry, because they were shipping out a bunch of new phones. I don't know if anyone remembers this but they actually shipped five new phones when they're trying to make kind of a push back toward Apple and Android, and they had their own OS. And there's a lot of kind of innovative features in there but they were hard to kind of understand for the users at the time so my actual job was to make animations and different things to teach the OS to people. So, my first job so the lot of kind of motion graphics focus and trying to put my head and put myself into the shoes of the user who's using this new OS for the first time. And then I moved on to working at SAP for 16 months as a co-op so two back to back co-op terms. So it was quite a long time actually. And in that case I was actually doing B2B SAS software. So this was working with huge multinational brands such as John Deere and these and Coca Cola and these kind of types of businesses who use SAP's kind of analytics dashboards to understand how their business was doing across the world. So quite a big change there and kind of as a designer in that context it was much more about working with a large team, a very large team where you would be given kind of briefs from the different product managers as to what it is that the overall business is trying to do with the what kind of need they're trying to satisfy for the different clients, whether it's John Deere or another huge kind of person who's already paid SAP a lot of money up front for the software and now you have to deliver on what they promised. So these kind of business needs come down and they filter down to you as a UX designer and you're trying to figure out how do you satisfy that business need at the same time while having a good experience for the end user in a cohesive kind of manner across the whole kind of tech stack of the software as a service. So that was kind of what I really focused on at SAP and then kind of when I graduated actually after my time at SAP and I worked at a small agency as my first job outside of school where I was a UX specialist working on kind of brands small websites here in Vancouver so I worked on the Gastown BIA's website, as well as a little work on Boom which is an art blog actually as well so these are the kind of businesses I worked on after which was a huge kind of change from the large multinational corporations that I worked at previously. But it was interesting to kind of meet people directly and have that kind of client relationship where you knew exactly, or you don't really know who their end user is but you have a client as well which makes kind of like a trifecta of people that you have to satisfy, which is kind of the clients, the users that are going to use the clients website as well as kind of your own business. So I worked there for about a year as well. And that was quite a lot of the different work where it was kind of doing competitive analysis on different websites and how they're dealing with different problems and how they're using their brand to kind of invigorate their business. So there's a lot of different kind of challenges there. So yeah I think that was again getting a lot of different things under my belt was the first thing that I would consider kind of the day to day was a lot different depending on the role. And kind of since then I have kind of moved into the startup area. I've worked at EA for a brief year as well but the last three years of my kind of professional career has been working for Copilot AI, which is a startup that started here, and I worked as designer number one. So my day to day has been anything but kind of consistent since then. So the last three years have been a whirlwind of being somewhat of a marketer somewhat of a product manager, as well as the designer that the business kind of needed. And that's really kind of what I would say is like, depending on the role that you're in. There's a lot of different things that you'll need to be kind of ready for and we can kind of get into the specifics of what I had to do it kind of each role and what that kind of look like but that's kind of the introduction to me and the typical and tame the life across the different roles that I've had before. Thanks so much Sean, lots to lots to unpack there. I was busy taking some notes for follow up later. So thank you so much. We'll move on to Sean dang next. Thank you Christina and thank you everyone for joining us today. So I'm Sean and yeah, another Sean. And I'm currently based in Vancouver and I'm a UX designer working for Microsoft SharePoint Spaces, which is a mixed reality tool for enterprise use cases. Yeah, I'm not like really experienced in UX design, I would say I graduated. So I, I'm actually one of the COVID cohort members where I graduated last year. So there was no convocation of any sort. I graduated from a school called the Center for Digital Media here in Vancouver so it's the degree that that master's degree is a co-occurred by four universities and Emily Carr is obviously one of them, and the campus sits right next to the Emily Carr campus, which is also super nice gives me the convenience to talk to to learn from and work with some Emily Carr students as well. And so yeah I because I'm also a recent grad and I didn't really have much design experience beforehand. I would say my story started as a designer really was when I came to Vancouver in 2017 in September 2017 for this master's program or I was preparing for it to say the least. And then later on I joined this program and I finished this program then I transitioned into design like my first ever full time design job was actually at SAP as well. The same team Sean was at so SAP analytics class so I was designing for that for not 12 month like 11 month until I left for Accenture or Avanade, which is the, which is a consultancy of course and after that, because of the relationship between Accenture and Microsoft business group, I moved on to Microsoft as a UX designer till now. And so, yeah, and I was a business student back then. So I'm here just to say, you don't have to worry about not having a design background of any sort. The whole design industry or the job market has been like a rat race. The reason why I'm seeing it is, it puts a lot of pressure on people who don't really have experience but for those entry jobs out there. When they ask for experience and it's still an entry level job how are you supposed to be ready for that I think they're just giving setting a lot of problems for people who are really interested in this design world and I think everyone deserves a fair chance. And that's why I'm here advocating, or at least to say, helping people from different backgrounds to to get into the industry. However, I can be of help. Yeah, I, I anything else for my background of so yeah SAP Sean was covering that as well it's be to be most of my journey actually were business related so that actually has something to do with my business background and being a consultant at Abena. I was working for TD, TD was my only client for eight month. So, that was a very interesting experience working as an as a as a vendor and not really inside their design team but also have the chance to collaborate collaborate with them, giving a different perspective of what designers can do both internally and externally, and now I'm getting back to this product design world where it's also very. I guess it's a new topic to because Microsoft just launched Microsoft mesh early this year and we're ever in the virtual world and we are having this discussion over zoom and it's all virtual. Our team is building virtual events in Microsoft teams. So it's a new concept with this metaverse kind of thing that Facebook just released. So I think a lot of opportunities are ahead of us. So it's hard to say which kinds of or which types of designers, this industry is looking for because this industry itself is ever changing. It doesn't really require different skills or experiences because I don't really have an MR design experience back in school I only did a VR project during my graduate life. But that's not, I guess to a lot of people that probably wouldn't be enough to prove that I have tons of experiences working for MR but yeah, I'm still here working for that product. I guess it's possible. I'm just here to be a positive note. I think that will be my intro during my yeah one more thing about my day today. I'm a very boring person. I guess I'm just, I will dedicate probably four hours of my day just to do has some design work because I really don't want to focus on something else like reading emails or getting back to teams messages because being in a huge organization. I've heard that you can work with different people but it's also something very consuming, especially time and after consuming where you have to take care of other things. So I urge myself to do more during the daytime, and I can take care of other things when it's not really my focus time. Every day just supporting our engineers doing all software development work and being an advocate in the design community as well trying to help more people. Yeah, that would be my intro. Again, thank you for having me here. Thank you so much Sean. We're going to move on to Scott next take it away Scott. Alright, so actually be sharing my screen really quick so just give me a big thumbs up when you can see the slide full screen. Everything good. Alright, we're still here. Alright cool. In the initial email is said that I am a product designer at Amazon care that's no longer the case actually just left and I'm now an interaction designer at Google. So hello, I'm Scott you Jan. And the reason I have a deck even though this is a casual chat is because actually just recently had to give this presentation for the team I joined at Google about my background and stuff so I figured I'll just give you guys the same spiel. So it all kind of started nine years ago when I wanted to be a painter I really wanted to be a painter that's me graduating high school, very optimistic to be a famous painter and didn't really work out. So I came to me car to study painting and that was when the logo looked like this. During that time I got a job as a woodworker and I kind of fell in love with just making stuff. And that's, you know, not long after I switched into industrial design and throughout the industrial design program. One of the things I started to notice was that no matter what I was making furniture toys, whatever. I was always very interested in how people interact with these objects. And that was when I met this professor, hey Garmin who was like yeah that's called interaction design man and I was like, what even is that I didn't know what it was at the time and so after doing research I decided to major in industrial design and interaction design. Now, that's the school stuff, getting into the career stuff I mostly started in the summer, I had the summer job at IRL creative they are a prop house in Vancouver, and they make props and design stuff for the film studios and that was a lot of fun getting to like make stuff work on it for hours and hours and days and see it in the hands of like famous people. Also worked on a few shows here and there, lots of DC superhero stuff and the process is the same you know a lot of prototyping testing, testing it with stunt actors training them how to use a prop and and seeing it in the show is pretty fun. Now during school, outside of the summer job. I did whatever work I could for the MD car research labs, I worked with health design lab living labs PMP lab did everything from marketing to lots of wearable medical devices at the time I'm not sure why there's a lot of startups doing that and one of the companies I worked with through living labs was this part time job with a and k robotics. They were a company startup working on making autonomous robots for floor cleaning it's a bit hard to explain but there I learned kind of a very important thing about this field, the thing I love most about this field and being a US designer is the fact that most of the time, you actually kind of get to work on projects you get in whatever way you want to work on them this means, you know, their skills or processes you really enjoy or want to learn or just even try. Most of the time you can and should bring those into your projects so for example, I was hired for nk robotics to be an interaction designer to work on the UI of the robot but as someone who came from an background I've always wanted to work on the product holistically I've always wanted to do the design for the hardware and software. So I just asked them hey can I do it and yes I ended up designing everything from the concept development of the device to designing for manufacturing prototyping and working with super talented mechanical engineers to actually build the first version of this robot and another example is, I also really wanted to learn motion design and animation so once again I just convinced a client hey let's bring motion and animations into the user interface and after a bunch of YouTube tutorials that's exactly what we did we brought a bunch of animations into this thing to convey different processes of the robot and yeah this was kind of the first big project that ended up landing me a job at Amazon so. Cool thing about Amazon, the same thing. I didn't expect it, but it's not just a small company so we were making this experience to let customers give delivery drivers feedback and compliments after delivery and after a few brainstorming we wanted to, you know we decided to take it in the fun direction and at the time we were going to commission illustrations and animations from external agencies but once again I just said hey, can I take your crack at it and they got me in touch with the right mentors and experts in the company and I ended up getting to create the animations that ended up in the app. And that was super fun it's quite satisfying to really like be in the place where you get to learn new skills while on the job and build fun things and launch it for you know a bunch of users. And actually see them tweet about it which was both very scary but also kind of fun. I want to mislead you guys though of course I skipped a lot of stuff in there there's obviously a lot of you know traditional UX processes, sketching paper prototyping critiques, research and testing all the regular stuff but my point is kind of like the design process is very flexible. So if you don't lose sight of the things you're trying to learn, or just the parts of the process you actually enjoy, then you will be able to most of the time get to do those things in your projects. That would be awesome. It's one of the best things about this field so anyways after working for Amazon, I joined this I mean Amazon calm, I went to this other team called Amazon care where I worked on kind of a secretive internal healthcare service for Amazon employees where I got to do some service design. I can't talk much about this project, but after a while I left and joined Google, where I'm working on other things I can't talk too much about but yeah so that's it. Thank you for listening to my spiel and thanks for having me. Thank you so much Scott. Now I'm very curious I'm sure everybody is very curious about all the things that you can't tell us about but we'll let that go for now. And then last but not least we have Tori. Hi everyone, this is Tori here. You must be curious why a software engineer joined this panel. The reason why is because I recently made a transition from UX to software engineering, especially the front end. So I'm currently working at this company called collection. And we work on web three in NFTs, especially focused on the kpop j culture and the anime manga space so pretty cool. So this is where I met, but let me tell you basically like the story how I got here. So I started from and just like a regular university engineering student. My goal was to go through civil engineering and then go to the master and then do like architecture. That was my initial goal. So here in the mobile, what is called the mobile age when it was exploded with the iPhone came out. And I figured, oh shoot this this thing's cool I need to get involved. So I got to explore like HTML CSS web development mobile app and all that and I decided this is where I want to go. And I started to do a lot of Google search like where can I like study where can I learn about mobile apps mobile designs and all that. And every car back then was the only school in BC that offers a interaction design program. And that's why I got to you know I worked really hard and got into every car because every car was not easy to get into be honest. And then yeah so I went through a four year program at the interaction design. I studied everything and I did a lot of internships and freelance projects. And I want to highlight this because it is very important. We got an awesome program set up and we've got awesome teachers and teammates but there's no way you can get real experience unless you work on real projects. So if your students leverage that a lot of opportunities are only available for students like where you're still at school. So make sure you use that. I think I did at least three internships when I was at Emily card got through like through the we have like job board back then that you can just like got connected to like start up founders and all that. I got to work with a very cool startup back then through the job board so that was awesome. So I did a lot of that and I graduated back in 2016. And I also got my first job at SAP just like the other two shots so I'm also SAP alone. But I did a working Vancouver actually got a job from their Bay Area office so I moved to the States. I worked in San Francisco Bay Area for two years. And that was awesome because I wanted to go to the capital of technology which is Silicon Valley, you get to know people from go Facebook, Airbnb Uber and all that all those cool startups, you get to work with really smart and hardworking people. Very fun learning experience, but after two years I'm like, I want to move on I want to support new stuff. And another chance can be which is the digital nomading stuff. I started to do digital nomading. I quit my job at SAP. I start to freelance again, and then do a consult work as a consultant for like startups and at that point I have like about three years of experience and I start to you know help start up to build up their UX process, how to find good UX designer how to build a good team and all that type of stuff. So I did that for a while. And then COVID happened. So that's why I came back to Vancouver. And I got a job settled down again to here and start to learn more about the local texting again. At this point, it's been four years since I left in Cuba, Vancouver changed a lot. So when I was graduating, I remember it was so hard to find your find a job. There's literally no tech companies here back then like what I was at school. And now we have Amazon, we have, we have Microsoft. And we have, I think, there's a Google team here, I don't know, like, yeah, Scott can probably answer that we got shopping fine yeah for sure and they're all like 100% remote which is awesome. So the Vancouver texting really boomed in the five years. That's why I'm trying to say so for the students, it'll be much easier for you guys to go out and really work hard to get your first job in the industry and really, you know, just like take off from there. It's much much easier than when I was at school. So you guys are really lucky. Yeah, so at this point in my career and then I was doing just being a US designer and I start to get curious on the coding side again so I was an engineer students if you remember I talked about before. I learned Java like 10 years ago or something. And I really feel like at this point I want to explore more about the programming side. I want to be more like a like a unicorn person. If you know this term is like for people for people who can both design and do programming. So I started to explore that I did a lot of self teaching, like just teach myself to call using free code free code camp.org I think that's what I used. I worked in the area for a while so I have a lot of friends who are engineers at the door Facebook they're really good engineers. They're like how to fast track this how to learn coding fast and all that so I spent a year, and then I got my current job which is at the startup. And I work. So for five days a week I spent two days on UX three days on front end so I'm doing more like a hybrid road now. But gradually I would transition to like 100% from then. But in a startup setting, everybody has to wear different hats. So you see engineers doing, I don't know product work, or you see product managers doing marketing and all that. And I'm currently doing UX and front end, and maybe sometimes a little bit of the recruiting stuff because I know a lot of people in the industry and help our team to find the best talent. And I really enjoy wearing multiple hats, working a very small team so we got connected to each other. And yeah, it's just that possibility that gives you that you can imagine how this company will grow in 10 months or like one year two years for years. That type of vision gives me a lot of excitement into my day to day job. So everyone has their own preference some people prefer like bigger teams bigger companies, I figured I'm a small company person, and I prefer working a startup, and then, especially what now when, you know, if you pay attention to all the web three NFT crypto trend, the whole internet industry is going through a new era again, just like 10 years ago when we got into mobile so I think it's a great great opportunity for kids nowadays to get involved. So I encourage you to explore and learn more about NFTs cryptos web three, go to Twitter, go to go use discord, explore all these things. And that is my intro. Thanks so much Tori and thank you everybody for your introductions. That was a lot of information. I have a few follow up questions that have come up that I might want to start with before we get into sort of the general Q&A. Something that Tori was mentioning and also Scott you mentioned it Sean you mentioned it both Sean's mentioned it everybody mentioned it is the sort of working with both startup or the smaller kind of team environment versus working for the big business kind of companies and large teams. I'd love to hear from from the others. Which is like a preference for you or is there a preference or what kind of stands out for you one versus the other, not necessarily about one being better but something that you found that you appreciated about one over another. Sean B. Do you want to, if you're if you're ready I'm just going to call on you. Oh, I'm ready for sure. And yeah, I would echo it kind of Tori mentioned as well that I found web three to be like a very interesting area and it needs a lot of UX help in the years to come. And it's really cool so I would also recommend yeah, check it out. This court has been really fun, but to answer your question. For me, I definitely have a preference and that's why I've been at the startup that I've been at for three years now. Because for me the biggest thing is just being able to see the company grow based on your own individual input. I think at the larger companies, you know, you can go ham and really like, you know, shed tears and blood and whatever over your job. And you know the most you'll get is from your manager saying like you know good job, and it's somehow like feels a little less direct response to your kind of I found then to what you see in a startup like when I joined copad AI, I was employee number 11, I think, and now we're above 50 so every kind of thing I did in that first year was like completely just immediate feedback like straight back at me. And it kind of humbled me as well as a designer a little bit too. Because, you know, you have very little capacity to work with. So you really have to make everything that you do, as good as it can be with as little like functionality, or like you know as little kind of time investment as you can. And I find that kind of constraint management and working within kind of what you have to be, you know, another activation kind of the problem. And you don't have infinite resources and everything so you're, I mean, till I kind of make some hard decisions about what needs to be there and what shouldn't be there and I think there's a quote about that and design where it's like you know, your design isn't finished until you're like crying. When you're like taking away more and more from the design. I'm not a direct quote, but definitely for me that's what I've gotten to be so satisfying and as well as just when we start hiring more and more people in different parts of the team. It's really like satisfying to see people who've like immigrated to Canada and they're able to kind of like hang their hat working at this company that I've helped kind of build so that's definitely what motivates me the most and why I think I'm going to stay kind of like in the start up area. Definitely. Unless I get too burnt out. Perhaps. Yeah, that would be what I would say. Thanks, Sean. What about you, Scott. And mute. There we go. For me. Yeah, I have to agree with everything that he just said, the impact is huge that you get to have at a startup and you know I was talking about learning things and just getting your hands on whatever you want to get your hands on that's so easy to do at a start up. If you want to do the marketing no one else is going to you do it. So it's like, literally anything you want to work on you can work on so there's definitely a big part of like the ability to just learn a bunch of skills in the start up in a very short amount of time I mean when I was in robotics you know that was just like a Ford five month thing and I got to learn you know industrial design in the way I never got to do before I got to do motion design I got to do marketing I there's a bunch of other stuff I did for them that I did even show that I never would have been able to do at a large company. In a large company there's definitely like pros as well. You don't get to wear as many hats as you might want to but you get to work with other people that you get to talk to those teams you know, being at Amazon is the first time I got to like see an actual whole branding team and see like 10 people that just works on the branding and it's super cool to get to know about you know their expertise and their areas as well and you may not get to wear those hats but it's cool that you know you get to collaborate in a very different way which is neat. Impact wise I couldn't agree more the impact you do in a big company is definitely like nothing compared to what it feels like in a start up where you're like in the trenches you're like you made this thing happen so yeah there's definitely a lot of differences here and there. The pro of the big company though is that the access to the number of users right because like when you do testing all of a sudden you can do testing with thousands of people in one week. At start ups you get that as well I guess in some cases with testing but you know it's the resources and stuff like that I think is very different but I wouldn't say I lean towards one or the other I think they both have a lot of pros and cons and it's important to know those pros and cons so when you're in those places you kind of take advantage of it. But yeah, that's all I got about that question thank you. Thanks Scott, what about you Shandy. I would say that my case is a little bit different, because to me it's, it's a perfect balance because I work for a team that works like a startup, but it's in a huge organization. I'm enjoying the culture every day, and I love the support from my teammates and I'm learning tons of things every day, and I'm also doing things that are supposed to be outside of my job, like descriptions. For example, I'm building a virtual office store for our Microsoft Vancouver office, and using our own product, which is more or less the product marketing work. And I'm just doing that because there's no dedicated product marketing specialist for our particular product because we just launched it probably three or four years ago so it's fairly new, compared to the whole Microsoft landscape. And also, being in a huge organization gives me the opportunity to learn from people. I really enjoy the work established by other great designers. And like for example when I was doing something that's going to be launched and not going to get into the details, but I was working on something that's relevant to our look that's relevant to Microsoft teams. And I did always grab a designer who worked on a particular feature or belong to that actual team to ask them, what was the logic behind their design. So it's not just with with surfacing on the website and then seeing on a daily basis but also their thought process, the whole efforts from their design team so it's basically having those conversations really teach me a lot like that that's something I didn't imagine getting from the industry or getting from my day to day job because I was, I was dreaming or I'm not dreaming I was imagining myself doing the has done design work, and someone with or for example like a design manager would just tell me like oh Sean do this or do that like finish this finish that. But in the in the in the real life it's sort of different I can drive my own design directions and I can still have my support from other folks who are more experienced, and I can do something that I love on the side so to me it's a sort of a perfect balance. I don't really have a preference but what I do notice. For me is that I care a lot about the product I'm building. So it's not that if you ask me to design something that I'm not really buying as a customer myself. Then I don't see the value inside of it. I just cannot say oh I'm a designer designing something that I personally don't like. If I have a way to change that and change it for the better then probably I'm not going to do it. So it doesn't matter whether that's big or small because big companies still have small products, or new products versus small like even startups not even like scope wise not even small or big but startups may have also impactful solutions to the world and they're saving lives and where they're doing great things and if I'm interested in that solution and I'm on board so it's more or less my passion and I care more about the product I'm designing for. So yeah I also I guess people who I work with because I care a lot about if I can get personal learnings from them. That would be great at us it's it's not just me doing the design myself it's also a bunch of other people, whether that's engineers or other designers who have more experience than I do then those are all great contacts great people to learn from and work with. Great. Thank you so much. Just thought I would throw that in there while it was fresh in everybody's mind. But I do have some questions that I sent to you earlier that I'm going to ask you now so we'll just go whoever would like to answer the question first if you want to raise your hand and let me know. So I'm going to start with thinking about your like the early stages of your UX career. Can you share an example of a project or responsibility that you were assigned that was completely unexpected. And that you had to kind of learn on the fly, or you just had to take it on and see what you could do with it. Can I actually start first. It reminds me. Yes, please. And SAP because I told you guys I or told you folks to be more inclusive. I was a business student so I didn't know anything about making animations drawing things I cannot draw. So it's embarrassing. But when I was asked to do like illustrations and also animations for SAP analytics cloud and that's the mobile app and if you guys, if you folks search on the App Store Apple App Store then you could find my profile picture on that screenshot. And that was a credit for me because I did, or I refine a lot of those onboarding animations later on and I had to deal with the timelines on after and after effects and I had to learn that from scratch. I never use that software, and I had to do that because of my work, and I'm not using it anymore, but I'm not saying it's a useless skill, but it was eye opening because I spend my time learning how to do things and, and getting the pressure from my peers to because I didn't know at the time that they did it before me, and I was just making things better and making new animations and making some illustrations and adding them back to the animation some some kind of work. So, I struggled a lot as someone who didn't use illustrator didn't draw on the digital art board. I use sketch to to to make illustrations and not sure if anyone would. I would translate that into your workflow but I use sketch to do those illustrations not in Adobe Illustrator, which was frustrating because illustrator is meant for that purpose and I just didn't know how to use it I still don't know how to use it. So, for the rest of shirt, I finished my past guy and made it work. And it's, it's, it's online it's ready now so that definitely a great experience for me to learn. And after that I asked my design lead, why she would ask me to do something that I'm completely not comfortable with or not experienced on. She always told me that, because she knew she knew that was something that would make me uncomfortable, and she just throw me under the bus just just to get me out there and try to do things that's different. That's also my comfort zone. I think that helped me a lot, because I know now I'm still experiencing some some VR things that I'm totally not sure about. And my whole mind was wired in a way that I can only think to the, like on the flat screen. And now you're asking me to design something like a game because VR is all everywhere it's it's probably some interactions happening behind you it's above you. So, I'm still struggling. Safe to say that, but I, I mentally feel less stressed, because I know with the proper learning and my team would always be there to support me so I can always ask questions if I don't feel right to do something. So, yeah, great learning experience, do something you're not sure about. And you learn the time from those things. Oh, I was just gonna say really quick. So that's awesome, Sean. We actually skipped Tori on that first question to heads up. Oh, that was only because Tori talked about it quite a bit. I'm really enjoying it moving into that startup space but sorry yes Tori if you wanted to make sure she didn't have anything. Okay, so that's good. Thanks for being on top of that. Yeah, I was like was that intentional? Sean had his hand up. I'll let Sean, Sean. Yeah, I was going to mention the thing that I had to learn kind of on the fly was after I worked at the agency I worked for I got a year contract at EA Games, and I got to work on their FIFA mobile game. It was really cool to work with such a big brand, but it was a really hard kind of like change in terms of like how I thought about design because mobile games inhibit bar. They kind of take up this space that you know they're not a very good representation of like the best that UX design and like has to offer they're like very complicated in order to feel as if you as a player are kind of going down this radical and getting better, they have to make it like increasingly complex. And I was actually responsible for kind of, not just designing screens but like designing systems that could basically expand in infinite directions like as much as the producers wanted them to do. So it became kind of this crazy thought of, you know, it, I think it definitely happens with a lot of UX designers where it's like okay we need you to make onboard and then you make like 10 screens and they're like the most manicured amazing screens and you know everything is putting correctly and then at the end you're done onboarding it was a great experience and you start whatever it is that you're working on or like whatever the app is trying to help you do. But in this case it was like how do you make elements that can be plugged in and reused and changed and updated in the art, the artist can change the background sometimes and you know just having to work within that completely kind of crazy system that needed to be scalable for the producers was definitely something that I did not really understand when I went into it and then by the end of it, I kind of had a better understanding of how kind of mobile games work and how sometimes you're asked to design just pieces that then can be used by other people if that kind of makes sense I was the biggest kind of learning I took where it was like we need these pieces and they need to act like this. So we're going to use them, but we're going to figure that out later but design it with like half that knowledge. And that was definitely like a very hard challenge but also very cool to see them just kind of run with it when we were done, and they, we actually shipped out. We had a publisher, I think 10 cent was the publisher in China and it was like all of the revenue we made in the entire world. And then like the revenue we made in China is like China made more money than like the rest of the world together, and we had to kind of use these different pieces like in order to kind of ship it out and they made all sorts of new stuff for the kind of Chinese market with these crazy systems that I had no idea how, how far these guys could actually push them. That's awesome, I guess I'll go next. Yeah, you guys learn about such cool things. Mine's going to be so boring, but it's an interesting one I guess. Yeah, I did motion design which I learned on the job which was cool but I wasn't really assigned that I wanted to do that I came up with the excuse to do it, but I guess one that I was kind of shocked by and that I learned really on the fly was Amazon's writing culture so Amazon has this really bizarre writing culture where at the start of almost every design review or meeting you go in and it's just silence for the first five to 10 minutes and it's because everyone's reading a document. The whole idea is that you know you can't package things up in a nice presentation you got to just write everything in documents and so you go into a meeting and then it's just like everyone just reads the doc for the first five to 10 minutes and then they pass it's a very efficient way of doing things but I'm a terrible writer I'm dyslexic too so I didn't enter the design field to write but that was one thing I had to kind of spend a long time to get good at and it's very like helpful though like now I have a really good habit of like writing good documentation for my designs which at big companies it's very helpful for you know everyone's knowledge sharing and just writing good documentation for design for future designers for business people to be able to see what's happening and all that so yeah it's it's a very nice and useful skill that I picked up but it took me a long time to get used to that I would go into meetings with presentations ready and they'd be like where's the doc and that was pretty painful for a long time and yeah but I really like that now though and now I actually can't go into a Google review without a doc because now it's just become a very big part of my habit it's very efficient so yeah. Tori, you have the floor. That was a mute. So, yeah, I work at a startup right now. So, I can probably talk a lot about it but I guess for more like an entry level folks like you know students decide whether to choose to join a startup, or a big company if you got an option. A quick answer will be if you're not sure join a big company because in order to work at a startup. You know everybody just mentioned like it's intense. You need to know what you're doing and you need to learn really fast. For most people like me included when I first started this career I was like, I'm clueless right like I don't know how things work. Scott just mentioned this meeting notes convention that Amazon like every company has their own way of doing that. You need to know how to write emails, you need to know how to communicate to people you need to know how to be in a meeting to actually get a result out of it like all these things you need to learn. And a lot of the times as startup there's so many, so many things you need to learn that it's very hard for you to catch up. So, I mean, if you want to learn all these things like outside of us, and they're actually very crucial for your career. You need a big company to learn it like if you're if you get awesome offer from Google or like Facebook, Amazon shop if I you get to observe from other people doing it like the senior designers or like product managers engineers, you get to learn that where at a start it's like, start up can be chaotic right and sometimes there's no process because everyone's pro everyone's good at what they're doing. There's no way for you to slow down and really take your pace and learn it. We're bigger companies that have training. They have like mentorship program that's what most big company have like SAP included SAP was awesome at training new grads. So yeah, like, I will say for a student if you want to if you just started out and you're not sure it's like, I don't know what to do in my career I just want to learn. Join a bigger company like that would be your best choice, unless you really really know what you're doing. So, yeah, I guess that will be my answer to to that question. Great, thank you everybody. So, this is a somewhat of a follow up question, but also kind of spins out a little bit from it so you've each been working in industry for a few years. But with technology and processes and strategies and job titles constantly changing. There's always more that you can learn more you can discover. So how much time do you spend upskilling or attending lectures or networking with other people or researching and like sort of figuring out where you want to be in the future of UX. I can go first. Okay, yeah, I guess I go. I personally don't. I personally don't spend a lot of time learning, I would be honest. I don't do a lot of proactive learning I kind of just learned things as they come. Honestly, I go to a lot of conferences those are super fun and engaging and you get to meet really cool designers and listen to talks by very talented designers in the field and those can help a lot honestly. So tech constantly changes. But I don't think it's anything to be afraid of I think what barely changes is people, sadly, people always say the same and we're designing for people. So if you have a good process and you get to know the people and you know how to work with them and know how to design for them then I don't think you have that much to worry about I think learning about what's coming is fun but you got it at the end of the day it's all about the people you're working with and you know always on how do you design better for people in general. That's my answer. I mean my mind is going to be similar to where if it's a not, it's if it's outside of work, there's very little that I do to kind of like go into the tech landscape and try and understand I think in general, I'm a I would call myself a bit of a I'm always kind of interested in the new tech that's coming out and what's going on and like what is how is Facebook positioning itself to be like a metaverse owner and this kind of stuff. That kind of, you know, will pop up in my feed and I'll read about it because I'm actually just kind of genuinely interested in it but in terms of, you know, reading, kind of like business books are like best in class ux books it has to be pretty top kind of well recommended for me to kind of like spend the time on it. Otherwise I'll kind of lean on again the organization I'm a part of to kind of like give me that kind of career development budget and time to work on that because you know we're all humans we all have to kind of, you know we're not our work at the end of the day we should still have hobbies that are not like oh I can't wait to look at get off my screen and then look at my screen some more, you know. I think yeah it's just wait for the things that you're genuinely interested in to pop out of you and really dive into them and I think that's kind of been my. Most of my learning has come from looking at web three and that kind of stuff as kind of what we was talking about it's just super interesting to me it's new tech it's very kind of like whoa what can we do with this like how does the ux problems that we've had in the past and is there anything new that's going to come out of this and that's kind of what really has driven my interest in like learning more in terms of new things. And I mean the same thing happened with VR as well where I got really into VR for probably like a year, and then I kind of was like okay I'm going to wait for this to kind of, you know, develop and become more of a kind of integral part of tech stack. But it was really cool to kind of see what people are doing and every time I put on a VR headset and it's improved it's kind of cool to watch that. But yeah, I think it's really cool to see interaction designers who were 2D kind of go back to Sean's point where you can only think of 2D but then all of a sudden it's like your body is the screen and like you have to use your whole body to do stuff. It's kind of interesting. And are their design kind of almost found that it was almost easier for people to pick up VR than it probably was the first desktop computer because it's just kind of like use your hands and the buttons and stuff it's just kind of interesting. But yeah, that answers yeah I don't do a whole lot other than like within work. Sean D or Tori. We're going to go first. No worries. I personally have a very unconventional way of learning because like unlike the other folks like it's very hard for me to focus so I don't really read books. You should read books for sure students listen three books. But that doesn't work for me. Unfortunately, so my main resources to like catch up with the industry trend or whatever. It's actually Twitter. It doesn't work in tech doesn't matter if product manager engineer, like designers, everybody's on Twitter, especially the folks in Bay Area like they're, they're all on Twitter. So I actually got into crypto in Web three through Twitter, and I should got my first job, like my mic sorry my current job from Twitter. I got contacted by the CTO of my current company say hey do you want to work with us blah blah blah and I got in contact and went through a process and I was hired. What I'm trying to say is if you want to know, like, most updated stuff, because sometimes there's a new framework came out there's a new design system there's a new UI trend like, you don't really know it until like you need to check for like people going to start Twitter because a lot of designers like you guys all work that Facebook Google Amazon like you're busy right like a lot of designers like great designers they don't have time to publish like blog posts or do podcasts they're just like way too busy for that. So if you want to get in touch with these people you want to know what they're working on every day. They are on Twitter. So that's why it's been very important like you can DM them like say hey like for example say hey Sean. I know you're working on this awesome design system stuff can I chat with you for 30 minutes like you can just like message people like that and reach out to them if you want to learn something. It's the best place to learn. That's basically how I learned. So if you want to read more things in depth like you can go to Udemy and grab a tutorial go to YouTube, whatever but for me always start from Twitter like hey this new thing just came up new design system from Shopify or whatever. Okay, I can reach out to the designer who would come this and just ask questions. So for me, that's the way I learned. Yeah. Thank you Tori. I was still thinking though I think for me, Tori's point of unconventional learning was kind of inspiring to me because I was thinking on my own. What are the ways that I used to to push myself outside my comfort zone. So I think through daily conversations with with folks who I work with. That would help me to to learn what they are working on and some of the parts might not be something I personally know or understand. So I would just ask a lot of questions because of those scenarios. And also, I think the mention of social media social media is actually a very powerful tool. It can be toxic, but it's also very powerful. I think Microsoft does a very great job online because the Microsoft design community is very, very popular online and designers write medium posts, writing some medium they post things regularly, and they do Instagram, random posts, even means online so they're very good at social media marketing. And I think that's where I learned a lot of new trends about our own company too. Like inside my day to day, I have every day work, I won't pay attention to oh something is launching. So days ago so there's a studio called Microsoft 365 expression studio that's the studio I really love. They made all those UX films for Microsoft 365 Windows 365 or for Microsoft as a whole company. And I really love those animations, not just disclaimer here. They're not making those things on their own they still partner with different creative agencies around the globe. But the quality of their work is just mind blowing. And they just launched a new product called Microsoft loop that looks pretty much like a notion like rebranded kind of notion. So if you folks are interested, find it online. And that's how I got to know this new product in my own company through social media I didn't, I didn't get any news from my own company. I really was just browsing on Instagram and I found this post I was like oh what is this and I finished watching the video and I was like oh this is a new thing. Then I started to realize okay a lot of folks were actually working on this new thing until this morning, the flown design system had this chair out meeting where designers were presenting this cool idea. Then I could have the chance to know who's behind those designs or products. And if I'm super interested in learning or even using their products. So just reach out that that's one of the perks being a huge work, you always have something going on, you might not know that at the point where something happened, but after all you can you can get those to the right channels. Another way is like just watching tag videos, I kind of think I don't want to read books, either. I'm just not a reader. So I watch a lot of YouTube videos on tech reviews things like that. And they just always have the latest and greatest technology. And I would just learn from that. And if I'm particularly interested in something like, I didn't know I would compare their Facebook was doing so much for their horizon work their work room product where you had this VR headset. And it captures your hand gestures to so everything is replicated in this VR world and it's so advanced. I didn't know that all I knew was a news post that oh Facebook launched this, or, or even for Microsoft like hello let's launch this and I didn't even know what that could be like, until I watched some videos or some reviews from other folks. First handed, then that's that that's how I learned how to use it I think getting those information from from second hand experience counts to and if you are a pro learning from others. I will definitely also like towards that encourage you to reach out to people who are behind those technologies and great designs. That'll be very much helpful. Thanks so much everybody. I'm just noticing the time and it's six o'clock so I'm, I want to open the chat so that if anybody has any questions that they would like to ask the panelists please do feel free to type them in there. In the meantime, if I don't see anything pop up in the next five ish seconds. I do have more questions that I've prepared. I do keep going until I see something that comes up. So, something else that I had sort of put into the series of questions to the panelists previously is like what is a workplace skill that you've developed. It should be more effective in your role or in roles that you've grown into or or transitioned into. So something in particular that really kind of helped push you forward in your career. I see a lot of thinking faces. Oh, Sean. Yes, thank you. It's kind of boring, but it's just like using your calendar effectively has made me like just so much more effective that being like okay I'm thinking about this right now I'm going to throw something in my calendar so that I remember it tomorrow. I'm just in Slack like having. I mean, I use Slack at my company but I'm sure teams has an equivalent thing or whatever chat tool you're using but being able to remind yourself of messages like looking the message and be like remind me about this tomorrow at 9am like I don't have the capacity or the mental like it's not getting in there at all so I'm going to just put it over till tomorrow and just taking that time to like actually be like oh I got to talk to this person or even if it's something just super simple as something like I want to tell them that they did a good job like I'll even put a task like that in my calendar and be like tell them that they you know did a good job if you don't want to do it like right now or whatever and especially in the remote kind of context that we've been in for you know almost two years now. And I'm very helpful just, you know, really chunk up your time and follow up with people and that kind of thing because, you know, our company works with sales stuff, and I've seen how like sales enablement kind of software and I've seen how much like following up with people at the right time can actually like make and break businesses like completely. So you should treat yourself like kind of the same way and be in front of the people when you need it when you need to be. Yeah. I also have a skill that they want to share. I also use my calendar to keep myself organized so I'm with you there Sean. Yeah, I was going to say that's probably the best one that even changes your life outside of work because like I've never had such a clean calendar and email before and I'd like started applying all the skills and network on my everyday life there. So I definitely agree with that. I was going to say, one that I learned very in depth at work is probably like storytelling, the ability to just like communicate your ideas, probably not just like, even in presentation but even how you talk about your ideas which is pretty nuts because at companies you kind of have to do it with people who are from completely different backgrounds. They're not designers. If you talk about how usable your thing is or how you know whatever they're not going to understand it just knowing how to actually pitch it and get buy-in from them. Getting people psyched, which is like very difficult but once you do like not only will they get out of your way to let you build things you want to build but they also like help push you towards whatever whatever direction you want to go really. And so that's helped a lot. I got so into storytelling. I actually started a YouTube channel where I make videos and stuff and it's just like a fun thing that I really like doing now. So yeah it's like I think another thing about it too is like especially in the field that where like things can be kind of overwhelming and intense like with a lot of like obstacles and stuff like that getting support from the people you work with your stakeholders, collaborators and all that. It's like very much needed and can just help you through your day to day. So yeah, I think that's a big part of what I love that I got out of working for these companies. I'll go next. I love what you guys are sharing and I'm going to follow up on that so communication is definitely most most important part of a US designers everyday work. And specifically I felt that using a whiteboarding tool like mural or mural or fake jam. It's very helpful to communicate with people with different background like some people have product background some people are engineers like they probably speak different languages, have different jargons with like a written document like a pure there's something like that it's usually like sometimes it doesn't work, but diagramming it's always something that will bring everybody together. And I specifically want to highlight fake jam so fake jam is something the Figma team released to you know compliment with the Figma tool itself. I highly highly recommend everybody to try out if you haven't tried it, you're probably your company or your team or your class probably already using mural or mural. They're great but they're also very conky. There's a lot of future that is just like not helpful at all and it's slow down your workflow. It's really awesome for collaborating like if you want to communicate like very complicated user flow, or if you want to, you know you have a new product and just want to align everybody on the same page on the progress or what's the goal for this quarter or something like that it's, it's very helpful, and if you go through their library there's a lot of template you can use, or you can create your own template. You can start using it for what start from when you just released like a few months ago I think it's really awesome so try out. If you feel like you're talking to one of your teammate and you feel like oh like this, this person is not understanding what I'm talking about and we're having some issues on go try out communication again it's the biggest biggest biggest part of the UX designers life. It doesn't matter maybe like now I'm an engineer I still need to talk to people every day on communicating my ideas and try to get everyone on the same page so yeah whiteboarding is your friend and that's one of the reason why in all the UX job interviews we do whiteboarding. There's a reason behind it which is this is one of the most important skills. Yeah. I'm just going to echo those points. Communication is the key. Starts holding for sure. That was the biggest thing I learned from Accenture and Avanade, being in consultancy, talking to clients every day. How do you maintain a very healthy client relationship when they sent you emails. What do you have in your morning it's it's not good and you have to like manage their expectations and everything could happen on your job. So be cool and also take care of yourself I think because of COVID time. I just want to highlight this. Yourself is the most important asset in any workplace. It's not that oh this company is so busy for me to work with or work for and this team is like working crazy hours, but at the end of the day you have to take care of yourself. Yourself control is determined by yourself. You can also learn to say no. I got tons of meetings in my calendar every day without me even noticing they just sent like emails we are on different mailing lists in the huge organization and they just sent emails to everyone. So they would reply to emails to everyone. So like getting through my emails could be one of the tasks every day I'll have to do, but I'm glad that Microsoft has its own tools to help with those things like Microsoft Viva the new employee experience platform I'm not trying to make a branding here. So those things really help people like they, those are digital tools, and they help me to understand oh, I got disrupted because of those meeting notice because of those emails that I got during my work hours during my meetings and they analyze and data visualization is key to they analyze how I work. Like I said I don't even notice myself, but down to the bottom line, I think the most I mean the biggest thing other than communication is saying no taking care of myself, like I'm not going to always be there if you have a problem and I'm not going to solve it tonight. I'm not going to let's get back to it tomorrow the first thing in the morning we can get this done but not try to like overstress herself, because I think working from home is really making everything worse. There's no like when back to back to back meeting seems to be a norm here, and everyone can just put like meeting blocks on your calendar, but in the physical office space we could still use some time to walk to literally be late. But still have a reason because we might need to walk from point one to point B point A to point B but in the in the virtual world, it happens from a click. So, say no to things you don't necessarily need to be involved in and always protect your own time. This well being is, is never going to be out of this topic because, as I mentioned that's the most important thing everyone should account for. Yeah, I, it's, it's interesting because everything that all of the panelists have said about these skills all boil down to essentially the same thing it's the way that we use our time the way that we make ourselves available. Whether to our team or to clients. It's about figuring out how to balance that out in a healthy kind of way and there's even like a friend of mine also has a hard time saying no because there's a fear that if you say no. That means that the next opportunity is going to pass you by because you you turn it down that one time. And I've actually linked in course on like, learn how to say no and I've actually sent people this link, you know, often to be like maybe you need to take this course just to kind of like learn how to do this and it is a skill right. So, I think, I think we can all sort of hear that in our own lives and and use that in our own lives no matter what industry we end up working in so thank you everybody for that really helpful insight. So the question sitting in the Q&A and I see what time it is so I just want to see if maybe anybody has an answer. We have somebody joining us from there, they're from Japan, they're currently living in Vancouver with a student visa. So the question is, do you think it would be hard to find a company that would sponsor them for visa as a UX designer, or do you have any tips for that. Or if anybody on the panel would have an answer. Oh, we've got a little bit. Um, yeah, I think big companies are usually like really easy to get visas with because they have a huge budget they don't care where you're from and stuff like that. I've seen small companies do it as well so don't rule that out but I would just say like apply everywhere, like, that would be like the way to go about it apply everywhere, and that would just kind of up your chances you know I think to be very honest I think it's a numbers game when I first came out of school. It's a numbers game with like, you know, job opportunities and stuff like that I applied to 40 places got heard back from two, and I've heard of people applying to like 200 places and hearing back from like five or something so yeah I would just do that especially if you know there are some obstacles for you with visas and stuff like that. And more companies you apply to you're going to raise your chances of having now, you know those field that will help you sign up for visa and all that and set it up for you. And I'll add to that so I was once a international student so I know what the situation is. I think I have two tips here follow up follow up on what Scott just mentioned first of all big companies are always easier in terms of vision visa issues. In terms to, like in terms of getting into big companies, a lot of times you need connections. So, if you're, if you like if you're a student from MB car we have a lot of alumni working at all these big companies. Go to LinkedIn, learn how to use LinkedIn, learn how to write a good message or notes on LinkedIn so that it gets easier to connect to people. Reach out to other alumni, you know, all these people working at Google Facebook, Amazon, whatever, reach out to them and ask them hey, can you help me to get in, get an interview, can you help me to use a referral or something. So, network is key so network network network, especially in the US field, it's very very important that you have a connection to get an interview because these days to be honest, sending in resumes online usually you just never heard back. Because there are so many people that got referrals they got ahead of you. This is just the reality so learn that. And in terms of your visa situation be very specific on how you talk to recruiters so big companies usually have recruiters to help them find new grads. So, when you communicate these people be very specific on which visa you're on, what kind of sponsorship you need, what kind of situation you're in because these recruiters sometimes they're not that familiar with all these visa issues you need to make sure they got the right message and they pass on to the right people like their their lawyer team or something so yeah just like communicate well on all these and just like pray and and just like yeah and just try yeah and good luck on that yeah. I was laughing on that front and then just one more note on that. Yeah, it's in Vancouver so always look for information that's coming from the federal government because they probably will launch different programs every year and also because of pandemic the labor shortage and everything in Canada is a real thing. I'm not sure how the immigration policy will switch to the next chapter, I heard some news early this year, and also probably every year is a different situation is a different story and every province and territory is also different in terms of immigration processes. I think the federal one is the most important thing you have to pay attention to the policy changes. Every year, and also get yourself an immigration lawyer for things like that don't get yourself into immigration fraud because that's also very hot, like one of the hot topics in the tech industry. Not every company will sponsor you so like Tori said always articulate your needs big companies so definitely help you on things like that. That's for sure. I know Microsoft does that they have a whole bunch of lawyer team, helping things like that. But speaking of some other companies they there might be restrictions in particular industries that's our, that's more related to for example like national security, some of the areas that you're not supposed to be in. If your future employers fit in that scope probably you have to talk to more specialized or a lawyer in this regard to help you solve this problem. Okay, well I want to thank all of the panelists so much for your time unfortunately we've run out of time I'm sure we could keep chatting for another hour, but I am very grateful for the time you've offered us today and all the information you shared the insights you shared. So thank you to Sean be Scott, Tori and Sean D for your time today. And thank you for everybody who joined us for this panel. I hope you join us for the next two which are on Wednesday and Thursday for some more exciting information about the UX industry. So thank you everybody and I hope you all have a wonderful evening. Thank you. Thanks.