 Hi. It's good to be here with all of you. I always like coming here to Singapore. It's always a great, great crowd. So here to talk about personality traits for effective UX and to start, this is a picture looking off a cliff in Victoria, Australia, down to the ocean. Just have a look at it for a moment. And what do you feel? What's the feeling that you get from it? To me, it kind of, there's a simplicity to it, isn't there? There's all the hustle and bustle of your day kind of just dissolves away, and all that complexity becomes simplicity. So it's a clarity, I think, if I could put a business term against it, and I think when we get hired as UX practitioners, I think businesses are actually hiring us for this. To take all the complexity of their business model, all the different types of customers out there, the different platforms and technologies, and all that in a constant state of change, and user practitioners are taking all of that in and creating clarity out of it. So that's what I wanted to start with. A bit about myself, I've just, yeah, I've kind of been in UX for quite a while, in-house, UX agencies as a contractor, in start-up incubators, start-ups, and it's been an amazing journey. So now I've ended up being like a UX consultant, so I can go in and identify the projects that I want to work on, and it's a lot of fun. During that time, there's been many people that in conferences and mentoring situations that have come to me and said, what do I need to do? What do I need to know to really get ahead in this? If I'm a junior, I'm really getting into UX, what's that thing that I need? It's a recurring question. And it's amazing, when you look at UX as a term, I'm a UX practitioner, it's this umbrella term for so many disciplines and things that you need to know that are underneath that. And so it's a complicated question, but I think if I look at how most people look at it, it's that we need to know processes. Obviously there's a UX process, and there's many processes to solving design challenges within that. We've all sort of looked at all the literature and watch videos and have learned these processes, and there's methods for doing things. You're going to do a card store, you're going to do an empathy map, you're going to be doing all these different methods to take data in and turn that into fuel for design decisions. And there's tools, but really like a tool kit. So you have your actual and your sketch and whatever tools that you use to get the job done to create artifacts and to represent design in its various states. And really importantly, tools is also like the maps and the models and the, just maybe pieces of paper with some lines through them that help you to, I don't know, get to grips with information and make decisions with. And finally, which I think is very important, particularly to junior people getting into this, is yes, you can learn all these processes and everything, but if you don't have an understanding of the commercial aspect, like how does business work? How do we make a profit? How do we drive new customers? It's a very challenging role. I think this for UX is half the equation. Half. I think the other half is soft skills. You can know all of this stuff here, but if you don't wrap that in a way where you can really connect with people and be a convincing, compelling person to sell all of that, very, very challenging. You need to build relationships. You need to be a good storyteller and be able to mediate situations, to be able to bring people together and get them to collaborate. That is a really uphill battle, if you have an ego, for example. And I'd say that if you don't spend the time to fine tune your personality traits, UX is actually an uphill battle. I think you'll lose steam, and eventually you'll plateau and it's not a rewarding career. I honestly believe that. You'll find again and again that things will start to work against you as you work your way up, and people won't respond in the way that you want them to. So it's interesting, when you look at personality traits and how that plays out, this is not an exhaustive list, but I think probably all of you are starting to realize that UX, when you look at the UX maturity model, which is kind of like a scale that says from like one to five or six, how mature does a business look at UX? The bottom is like, UX, what is this witchcraft? There's skepticism there and there's no commitment to it. All the way up to the top level, which is that UX is woven into the fabric of the business. It's the design thinking thing done properly, and the processes and the way that UX integrates into the business is very matured. When we get up to that level, UX kind of becomes a hub for decision making and for information to flow into and designs to come out of. But the issue is, as you can kind of see here, is that there's a lot of different groups here, and they're all sitting next to you in the chair beside you, right? Sea level might be in a different country. Marketing might be in a different building. The developers, they might be right beside you. That doesn't mean that you have rapport and a relationship with them. It just means they're beside you. I think we all know the guys in the cubicle beside you could be as much of an alien as the sea level sitting in a different country sometimes. So it's about building relationships and connectivity, a two-way street between all of these entities that you'll be working with every day that is so important. You have to break those visible and invisible walls down day by day as you come into a company slowly knocking them down. Think about when you're just trying to meet someone new and build a relationship with them, whatever situation that is. Tell me as a UXer, with all those people that we just looked at and all those departments, it's not the same thing. You're doing those sort of first impressions. You're trying to be someone that they can relate to and understand and you're gaining rapport, right? And that you have their best interests in your heart and what you're going to do with them and for them. But as you move on, the commercial part of this starts to kick in. It's beyond just having a relationship where you're going to the pub and having a beer with a mate. You're trying to show your competence. You have to remember at various levels of the organization, they don't necessarily know what UX is. They might not have the time or the resources to understand it. They're busy doing project management or product direction or all the things, specialty things they do. That's their focus. Don't assume that they're going to dedicate a lot of time to what you do and what your value is to bring to the table. So you have to show your competence, your knowledge, your value that you're going to bring to the business through what you do. Like UX is a cost center, not the cheapest people in the world. That's because of the repertoire of things that we have to know is very specialized. You have to be able to demonstrate that that cost center has value coming back and the level of rigor around how you do that. But ultimately, like every relationship, it's trust. Everyone in here is basing their level of a relationship with someone around trust and follow through. It's actually going to do what you've said you're going to do. And that also comes down to reliability. But trust, Jesus, it's so important. So the personality traits sort of are the foundation of building that trust. If I had to list a list of personality traits that we wouldn't want our coworkers to have, we could all come up with a pretty long list, right? I think we could think of a few. So if I said to you, hey, here's Jack. He's going to come be our new UX interaction designer. He's a bit condescending, aloof, and he's an egotistical jerk. But you're going to be working with him every day. It's interesting when you think of it that way, isn't it? So all of us can say, oh, I hate it when people are impatient or lazy. But what's that list, that golden list, that a UXer should be? What is that, you know? So I start to think about it. This is kind of what I put together. I think these are such beautiful things to have as people. But as professionals, when we're dealing with others in so many different ways every day to tackle the challenges that we have, it's an amazing list. So what I did is I put this list together, and you can see here I've tried to have similar things and slightly different, you know, their proximity of these words are similar. And I sent out a survey, got back about 75 respondents and asked them one simple question, other than the demographics and all that stuff. If you were going to hire a UX person, what are the five of these that are the most important traits? Now what would you think that would be? It's an interesting question. So the survey. Gender is about 50-50 split or so. Equals you'd want it to be. Location, a lot in Asia for just because I'm in Asia, but you can see it's a nice cross-reference of different geographies. Professions, so a lot of UX practitioners there. UX management, HR. Here's the results. It's an interesting list. There's the top five. Those are the top five that everyone said should be the top five, if that makes sense to you. And I think there's some usual suspects there. I think some of those are not a shocker, right? There they are. Empathy. There's no shortage of literature about how empathy plays into UX. So I'm not going to go over that one in great detail. Collaboration. This is people designing for people with people. So if you can't collaborate, wow, it's a tough, long career path. Whoa. Inquisitive I think is really important. You know, it's interesting when I have interviews and I'm interviewing people for UX positions and I ask them, so what questions do you have for me? You know, I've sort of gone through and I learned a bit more about you. What do you want to know? If they say, no, that's okay. No, I think everything's all right. There's no callback. It is impossible for a good UXer to not have a billion questions where I'm literally having to say, look, I think my time's up. I got to go. I got to go to the next call. You want that inquisitiveness. You want to be digging deeper. You want to know, like, okay, who am I going to work with? What kind of projects? Like, you know, what's your process? What's going on? That's being inquisitive. Adaptive. Tell me every day you don't have to be adaptive. I mean, adaptive is one of those key things that we're so good at. Right? If you just took the standard UX process and said, hey, I'm going to apply this verbatim every single time I have a design challenge. That's a boring job. And not only that, but I think that the standard UX process is a bit difficult to fit in every situation. You'll be adaptive. And then finally, understanding. Obviously, there's two ways of looking at that. Understanding being that you understand other people's predicament and position and things like that. But also understanding in, when you're working with very complex enterprise systems, you understand it. You've taken the effort and the time to fully become intimate with that system so you can make appropriate design decisions. But I don't want to be talking about those top five with you today. Actually, this presentation is about all the runner-ups. Because these were obvious. I mean, empathy, I mean, come on, that's everybody and all these presentations have been talking about empathy. Let's talk about resourceful. Having the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Tell me, we're not doing that every day. You know what, with UX, to do it properly, you're pulling in tons of different information from different departments. You're pulling in analytics for traffic. You're pulling in click reports, the marketing, the online surveys. You're doing live interviews with people, all these things. Would you not have to be resourceful to do that? Persistence. How do you get access to all that information? If you're in an enterprise environment, how many of you have come up to the problem of saying, hey, I need to interview a few customers? Can I get access to them? Or, hey, I'd like to do a contextual inquiry with about 10 people in the warehouse. Do you mind if I just sort of bug them for the next three hours on Friday? Oh, I need to get access to the BI reports so I can do some analysis. Ever run into a problem trying to get access to that stuff? And was it persistence that ultimately got you to what you needed? Articulation. My gosh. The fact that it's an eighth place. If you cannot clearly articulate very complex design decisions, the ways systems work, all these events and triggers and rules and algorithms and things that make your design work, express those clearly to a boardroom of stakeholders. Again, pretty tough. Articulation. Try to talk about a complex shopping cart system where there's a million different rules coming in over a Skype call. And you tell me that articulation is not critically important to convey the information that you need. Look at that. We're the third last now. We've jumped way down the list. How could you not be energetic when conducting a workshop? A room full of 20 people. They're there for the next two hours and you're there to have an outcome. You have a design problem and you need to come to an outcome. How do you guide those people and keep them focused and on track and on pace for two hours without energy? And to make really innovative design decisions, if you don't have energy, where does that come from? If you don't have energy. Wow. Second last, being selfless. This is kind of like the empathy and all of those types of terms where you're doing this for someone else, not because you're going to get a raise, not because you're going to get a bonus, not because your title is going to go higher, not because you're going to get an award in the industry, but because when you design that new interface for a call center in Malaysia that fulfills insurance quotes that you shave off two minutes of every call and you make it so that they're not using three screens, they're using one beautiful interface. That's being selfless. That's saying I really care that when that person goes to work each day, the interface that I designed for them makes their life a heck of a lot easier each day. This was last place. I was really floored when I saw that being affable, being a friendly person that's warm-hearted, that's approachable, last place. I'd say all of this stuff is a total nightmare to do if you're not affable. But when you're doing a usability test, you have people from the public coming in to use your product for the first time and you're not affable. Wow, think about that. How do they divulge and express their feelings, their thoughts, their emotions to you in a way that you can transcribe and make use of later to make design modifications if they don't trust you, if they feel like you're not affable? I really thought this would be top five. I don't know about you guys, but it goes a long way. And when you're asking for things in a business, tell me affable does not help you get a lot further along. So when you look at that list of all those different personality traits, it's kind of hard because you've just got this huge list. Like, how do you put that together? And I thought maybe the way that we can compartmentalize those is to say, look, a portion of those are about my personality, like who I am as an individual. How do people view me as just a person? And then how do I do things? Like, what's my way of doing things? And what level of energy and drive and determination do I have to get it done and seen through to the end? And then finally, what's my motive? What is my true intention when I'm doing the things that I do each day? So you can actually take that list from before and kind of group it like that, roughly. I mean, maybe someone's debatable, but at least that helps you to kind of break it down a little bit. What interferes with all of that the most, I think? Like, if you could come up with one of those negative ones that we looked at before, what would be one that kind of, I don't know, kind of is like a total room killer? I think it's ego. Let's look at some of the things that we looked at before. If you have a really bad ego, how could you be inquisitive? Why would you delve and deeper into something if you think you already have the answer, right? Look at adaptive. Why would you change if you're already perfect, right? Collaborative. Why would you share ideas if your one's the right one? You're not going to be collaborating. You're simply dictating. Why would you be selfless when it's all about you? Understanding. You're only interested in people to understand your perspective, not theirs. And then, finally, how can you be genuine if it's only your interests that are at heart? It's interesting to think of. We all have egos. It's just varying degrees of them, and it's good to be mindful of how much ego is influencing when I've done a design and I think this is the design that's going to solve everything and then you submit it forward. And I also think being insular. The presentation before mine about the future and all of that, when you're insular, the realities and the changes that are happening around this bubble that you formed around yourself are a very inconvenient truth. And you shield yourself from them. And when you become less insular, you're willing to accept the changes that are happening, the realities that are happening around you. So when we look at all of this, it's interesting. I think we all know life's kind of a balancing act, right? And I like to think that as you practitioners, we kind of have a detachment like an ER doctor, but the passion of a music composer. And what I mean by that is if we go and we make this design and we're fully committed to it, we put it out there in front of the stakeholders and they shoot it down. You know what that is? That's the ER room person coming in from the car wreck and you don't save them. And it's traumatic. And if you carry that baggage with you, gosh, that's a lot of baggage to carry with you. So you have to let it go. On the other side of that, that's not to say we can't be passionate, passionately driven when we're making our designs. Like a music composer. Think of all the best music you love, that you played 100 times, you literally worn out your hard drive listening to that song, guaranteed the composer was passionate about that. So there has to be that happy medium somewhere. And likewise, you know some of these things where you're being humble but you're sort of wanting to have a level of assertiveness, what is that balance of assertiveness? And basically what you're trying to do is pick your battles. Because on one end, you're a doormat. They're literally wiping your feet on you saying, well, I don't like this and well, I think we should change that. And the product manager said, we've got to change that and I don't want that. And you're thinking, well, cheese, I just spent three weeks researching and designing this. Okay, I guess I've got to do it. Your designs will never see the light of day if you're persistently like this. Here's the interesting thing. You could say, well, okay, John, then I guess what I'm going to be is a bit more assertive and strong and I'm going to say, okay, guys, I've done my research, this is what we've got to do. This is what's going to save the business. Let's do it. Not necessarily. When you tell someone what to do, they try real hard to make you know who's actually in control or who they think should be in control and they'll pit every roadblock up to defeat you so that your design doesn't make it through. So again, what is that happy medium to get your designs through? Because luckily, we're armed with facts and data, firsthand accounts and experiences and we've done a lot of research to back up what we've done. So that counters a lot of these things that all of us have come up across. Personal opinions, I like blue instead of red and all of these things. At least we have all that armed so that when we tell our story, we tell the efforts that we've expended to the conclusion that we have. We've presented the data that vets what we're doing is correct. This gets harder and harder to get away with, right? And I think when you're thinking about personality traits throughout your career, think about the different stages of your career. So if you're just learning right now, you're just getting into UX, this is one of your first conferences, consume knowledge and just build a consciousness of this. Just be mindful of how you present yourself and how you go about activities. And like I said before, when you get that first interview and you're talking with a recruiter or someone in the company, people ask, well, how do I separate myself? You do that through having a very clear differentiator which is that you have this consciousness of personality traits and you're exhibiting some of these traits that we're talking about in the call, evidence of it. But as you get into junior, you want to start experimenting and pushing yourself to actually apply these and sometimes it's a bit awkward. It's not going to be a home run every time, but you will get through it. When you're a senior, that's when you're actively implementing it while you're doing things, while you're presenting to stakeholders, while you're mediating between different parties that disagree, while you're doing a workshop, you're actively engaging it. And then when you're in management, you're bringing it back, you're getting the next generation ready to go through. Let's run through a few quick scenarios and see, okay, given typical scenarios that we're all going to kind of come up against in our UX career, what kind of traits would you use? Scoping and defining a project, how hard is it to really clearly understand why the heck we're making a product? Who's it for? What's the real benefit for us to spend the next month building this thing? To get that information, so you have a level of certainty around that and clarity, again, clarity around that, you have to pull in so much information from different people that may not actually have a full grasp of it themselves. And then it comes to us to help structure that conversation. We should be good at doing that. So we have to be inquisitive and resourceful and collaborative. If we're just expecting to be on Slack chats all day to get that kind of definition around of the information that we get in, wow, it's a lot of chatting. Get them in a room. Oh, that's right. So resourceful and inquisitive and collaboration and understanding that all of a sudden you've walked up on the scene and want a ton of information from them. Not everybody's happy about that. And that all comes back to what I was saying before. When you're trying to gain access to stuff and really ask for reports to be generated, all of these things, again, all come into play. Workshop facilitation, like I was talking before. How could you not do a workshop facilitation if you're not a confident facilitator, right? They're looking to you for guidance. And then like I said before, energetic. And if you're not articulate about how to move and progress forward in the steps of a workshop, that's pretty tough. And at the end of the day, I think you want a command of the room, but you also want to be humble. You don't want to be overbearing when these people are with you for the next couple of hours or half day. Some workshops go pretty long. Usability testing. Like I was saying before, I think all of these things go a long way to build a quick trust relationship with the person that you're testing with. So you get the maximum value from that session. Think of how hard it is to get someone off the street in front of you, testing your mobile app, spending an hour of their time with you. Don't waste it. Have these personality traits come exude from you so that you get the most value from that hour. And when you're presenting to stakeholders, you've done all of this work and now it's all coming up to an hour in a boardroom. And I tell you, the stakes go up. There are expectations of you go up when you're in that room. And if you can't articulately sell an idea to them, the patience is thin. So I want to leave you with this, is how do you develop these traits? I mean, I could put an exhaustive list of books and YouTube videos and et cetera, but I'll leave that to you because I want you to shape how that comes about. But I think we're creatures of habit and it's tough to break those habits. We've formed our own personality and for someone like myself to come up on stage and say, hey, you have to change them and now sort of craft them into this list is a pretty big demand. But you need to push yourself out of your comfort zone if you're going to achieve this. And it's not an overnight thing. Don't expect this just to be cold turkey and then you're suddenly a different person. This takes a long time. You're reprogramming yourself. And it's this. The biggest risk is not taking any risk. It is risky to assert some of these personality traits that you're not used to doing. And you need to read. There are so many amazing books about every facet of your personality, about building relationships, the old Dale Carnegie stuff, but there's many modern takes on that that you need to read. You need to watch videos and experiment and practice with these things and just be mindful of it and how you do your work each day and the motives behind your work. And finally, coming from the late Jim Rohn, which is a motivational speaker, he would always say, the things that are easy to do are easy not to do. And I think that is very applicable to applying new personality traits to yourself to develop and enhance them for the benefit of what's really an amazing career path. So, I'll leave you with that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you, John, for your time. Now we would like to show a token of appreciation from our volunteer, which is also a lecture from Republic Poly. Thank you. Thank you. Is there any questions in the ground, on the floor? Is there any questions that you want to ask John? If there's no more questions, we will move on to the next speaker.