Perception

I took NM4210 User Experience Design last semester, and it’s really been a module that has changed the way I think about design. One of the core lessons I’ve learnt from this class is the segmentation of the broad field of user experience design into four main parts- user research, information architecture, interaction design and visual design.

My initial passion for design definitely stemmed from an interest in aesthetic interfaces, but working on projects over these last two years has enlightened me how user experience is the crux of design. It’s sometimes easy to talk about design definitively, but achieving a level of effective design is much harder to qualify, let alone do in practice. This is what makes the field so exciting, and my relentless enthusiasm is no doubt driven by my perfectionistic streak.

I used to design in a backward manner- I would think of how something looks first before moving on to how it works, but this isn’t necessarily optimal in terms of usability. Being able to understand the difference more succinctly has been refreshing, and I’ve adopted the mentality that the focus of design should be on the user experience. What is interesting is in the context of the form versus function debate, which side of the fence does user experience fall? It may well be the important bridge that connects the two, and attaining good usability will probably see compromises from both sides.

Thinking about user experience design in the contexts of user research, information architecture, interaction design and visual design has made it easier as each area highlights a critical angle to consider. As they cover the different aspects of user experience, I would make the case that they are equally important in the sense that none should be neglected. The design process should also be iterative rather than waterfall, where each of these four areas are worked on in tandem. I’ll expand on each in the context of my interest- web design.

User research is clearly the important foundation on which any design must be built as design is inherently a practice backed by psychology. Understanding the audience of your design and receiving feedback from them is thus a critical process in design. While a case can be made that users “do not know what they want”, there ultimately has to be a compromise between the designer and users where the point of convergence is an implementation that achieves both their objectives.

Information architecture describes how the content of a site is structured, not just on the front-end but a top-down view as well, where a user navigates through the information on the website. It is necessary to find the balance between how much content should be shown to the user along with what kind of information is relevant to his or her needs. Making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for is thus achieved through a regular yet intuitive site layout.

Interaction design brings the user closer and how he or she behaves and responds to the system is the core of this idea. It is increasingly difficult to design task flows that accommodate the different platforms which we use daily- either through the browser or on the mobile, while meeting the user’s expectation of a certain slickness in the experience. Modern web technologies also afford more real-time interaction on the client side, leading to faster and less disrupted flows for getting things done. This is a popular trend these days, challenging the notion of page views which often web interactions are designed upon.

Visual design is probably the most subjective segment in user experience design, and often correlates with the intended branding and message of the system. Of course, following the basic principles advocated in user interface design like contrast, balance and spacing is pretty much necessary, but beyond that it usually varies depending on the brand. Having a design that is aesthetically pleasing is usually easier than having one that suits everyone’s taste.

All in all, it’s been a fantastic class that has definitely improved my understanding of user experience design concepts. The structure of the curriculum also repeatedly enforced the segmentation of these four aspects, granting a more in-depth look at each of them.

The results for this semester was the last thing on my mind when it was released, what with the preparation of NOC and everything. I didn’t think I’d do particularly bad this time around, but at the same time I knew it wouldn’t be a fantastic semester by any means. So it really wasn’t a surprise that I did just average once again.

CS3241 Computer Graphics: B
GEK1025 Reading Visual Images: B
NM2101 Theories of Communication and Media: B
NM4210 User Experience Design: A-
NM4881A Topics in Media Studies: Social Media: B+

I wonder what it says about me that I’m generally apathetic to my grades at this point of my studies. Of course, I always hope to do well, but sometimes it seems that these grades aren’t as important to me as they used to be. I’ll be taking a year off from my normal academic routine for NOC, and maybe I’ll be able to figure this out then.

As part of my preparation for my overseas attachment with Opzi, I’ll be spending some time trying to pick up Ruby on Rails, and I’m quite looking forward to it. I remember how exciting it was when I first started with PHP over two years ago, then subsequently being able to execute some of the ideas that I had. More importantly, it’s always fun to learn something new and useful.

Rails is an MVC framework, which thankfully I’ve had some experience with CodeIgniter before, so that will surely be helpful. Ruby on Rails is also an increasingly fashionable stack, so it’s a good thing that I’ll have an opportunity to work with it. There’s a couple of other areas I’ll be exploring this December as well, namely Heroku and Git, and I hope there’ll be time for me to get a feel of those. I’ll also be trying out a couple of interesting web services that I purchased off AppSumo if I have the chance.

One of the best ways to learn something is to experiment with it in a side project, and that’s what I’ll be doing come this holidays. As always.

Since my provisional acceptance into NCSV over a year ago, the much anticipated subsequent step in the NOC application process was the company interviews, and it’s something I’d been looking forward to this semester. The wait didn’t last longer than mid-October as that was the period of time the companies were scheduled to contact the selected cohort for the interviews. Having only had two prior experiences with Skype interviews before, I definitely saw this as a chance to further hone my communication skills.

The companies were required to liaise with the students directly to schedule an appropriate time for the interviews, and it was quite exciting to receive one request after another via email. We were given instructions that we could decline interviews from companies that we weren’t interested in, although to be honest I can’t fathom why anyone would turn them down. While it may be an interview at the end of the day, it’s also really a fantastic chance to have a conversation with someone working on a startup in Silicon Valley. And beyond that, the interviewer is more often than not the co-founder or C-level executive of the company, and such opportunities rarely come by if at all.

I did my best and successfully scheduled every interview, although it was quite a nightmare of a week given how often I had to get up early or stay up late to make it for the interviews given the difference in the time zone between California and Singapore. It was tiring, with back-to-back interviews on multiple occasions, but I found it to be extremely rewarding as well. It was certainly humbling to have these people take the time out from their frenetic startup lives to tell me more about their ideas and companies, with each pitching the perks of working for them. I can’t think of any other circumstance where I’ll ever be in such a position again, so that was the most amazing part of the experience.

I got to talk about quite a number of different things during the interviews too, like my interests, the school curriculum and my role in sgBEAT. It was a proud moment to be able to share what I’ve learnt from designing the user interface of sgBEAT as well as handling and interacting with users, so the effort that I’d put in over the last year or so definitely paid off. Parts of the conversation also revolved around the lifestyle of working in Silicon Valley, which only intensified my excitement and anticipation about heading there. There were a couple of technical interviews too, some of which I didn’t do as well as I had hoped (I’m apparently not good with data structures at seven in the morning), but all in all I don’t think I fared too badly.

Doing sixteen interviews in seven days is a first for me, but I can’t deny that it was anything but an immensely enriching experience. The interesting conversations serve as a prelude to my stay in Silicon Valley next year, and the great thing is I managed to secure an internship with Opzi, a YC startup. It’s an exciting place to work at based in the heart of Palo Alto, and I’ll surely be writing more about it in the year to come. I’ve no doubt that this interview fest is the first of many memorable experiences I’ll have in NOC, and now I can’t wait for the rest.

linuxNUS started the Hack Workshop Series about a couple of months back, and I’ve been fortunate to be in touch with the core team driving this program. It’s a series of workshops covering both technical and non-technical material, and one of the aims of this program is getting people exposed to a range of skills that will hopefully help them bring their ideas to market. I got to be involved more recently with the PHP and CodeIgniter workshop, and I was pretty disappointed about the lack of follow up or disconnect after it was conducted.

My personal interest and involvement can be attributed to a few reasons. Of course, the idea of learning to learn is a great philosophy to espouse, but I think it is also important to try and find out why people aren’t interested in learning certain skills beyond the scope of academia, and how that can be changed. My passion for web design and development have driven me this far, and a positive outcome of it is that I’ve been able to build some ideas that I’ve had. I believe that ideas are worthless, and I think it’ll be great if people did have the knowledge and know-how to actually execute them.

That’s where this program comes in great, by highlighting to students that it isn’t difficult to pick up technical skills by any means, and at the same time pointing out resources that can help them. But that’s where the effects of the workshops are limited as well, in my opinion, as they don’t serve a greater function beyond a kind of exposure module, trusting it in the hands of the students to take this knowledge and do something with it. I’ve attended a couple of other workshops before, and unless I’m extremely invested or interested in a particular topic, I don’t normally follow up on what’s been taught as the context seems to have been lost.

Learning is best done when one is actually working on something one is passionate about, and this is a factor that affects whether the students take away anything from the workshop series. It’s why I think examining motivations is probably the more challenging aspect of the Hack Workshop Series. Do people desire to build the products that they envision, whether for fun or as a startup? Why do they attend the workshops, or perhaps more importantly, what do they hope to gain from it? A lot of students fall back to the comfortable lifestyle that is more easily rationalised- like participating in hall or co-curricular activities and so on. Building a project which tangible benefits currently cannot be seen is probably much less appealing.

While I think there’s a general lacking of a pervasive entrepreneurial culture in the faculty, creating a hacker culture is not something I really hope to do. I think that’s where I feel a bit deviant from some of the current objectives of the Hack Workshop Series. I’m more keen in meeting individuals who are talented and passionate, and trying to find out what’s keeping them from going out and building great products. Is it that they lack technical knowledge or perhaps a team? My own agenda would be to help these people plug these gaps in whatever way that I can.

The reason for this is a reflection of how I even got into this field in the first place- that if my brothers didn’t expose me to HTML over a decade ago, or if I never got my hands on Photoshop, my life would certainly be very different today. Some barriers extend beyond just motivation, and it’s really an interesting problem to look at and try to solve. I’m currently getting a couple of my friends started with HTML and CSS, and it’ll be exciting to see them start working on their ideas.

The NOC experience means differently to different people, and making the decision to postpone it last semester forced me to reexamine my motivations for applying for this programme. I’ve always found the startup working experience to be the most attractive feature of NOC, and being able to intern for a year at the right company would pretty much define the experience for me.

I guess there’s no formula for finding the perfect company, but the place where I really hope to work at would be a startup where I can significantly make a difference. I think a smaller company will present more opportunities for learning, and at the same time expose me to the different roles in a startup. One year is definitely enough time to put on a couple of hats, at least.

It’s also been an ambition of mine to be part of the Y Combinator (YC) experience ever since I got hooked on Hacker News two years ago. NOC will take me a step closer to my dreams by bringing me to the Valley, and it really comes down to me to see this dream all the way through. An opportunity presented itself when I learnt my brother was joining Etacts, a YC-funded startup, but after a Skype interview of sorts and a series of email exchanges, it turned out that there wasn’t a suitable role I would be able to fill as an intern.

That was definitely disappointing, for having worked with my brother on sgBEAT, it would have been cool to be able to work together in the same startup. He urged me not to give up, and suggested I apply directly to YC companies via email. I’m not a fan of cold emails, but after some persistence by him, I thought, why not? The worst that could have happened would be not getting any replies, which would put me in exactly the same circumstance as I already was in.

With that frame of mind, I set out and applied to YC startups that I am quite a fan of, like Dropbox, Mixpanel, HeyZap and Posterous amongst others. I wasn’t very hopeful, although I kind of consoled myself in that I had at least attempted. It really excited me then, when I received replies from HeyZap and Mixpanel within days. HeyZap didn’t have an opening for a front-end developer intern so that trail went cold pretty quickly, and in the meantime I managed to set up a Skype call with Mixpanel’s Tim Trefren. I told him more about the NOC programme, and explained to him my motives for emailing them directly. We talked for a bit, and I think I convinced him enough to submit a letter of intent from Mixpanel to be a part of this programme. After that was pretty much just breathless waiting.

I really had a good think while reflecting on this, and now I’m more determined than ever about really making the NOC experience for myself. It’s sort of like the realisation that the possibilities that may seem out of one’s control are in reality there just waiting to be taken. I’m definitely going to stop holding myself back next time.

It’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been more than two years into my tertiary education, and sometimes I feel that I haven’t really learnt much over these last four semesters. It’s like I’ll study really hard for something only to forget it all the moment the holidays come, and this cycle just repeats itself a semester later. I wonder how much of what I learn really stays with me at the end of the day, let alone when I graduate from this institute.

I’m taking twenty-two modular credits worth of modules this term, which is the most I’ve ever taken, and the irony is that it’s also the first time I’ve actually had a three-day school week. It’s probably because I’m only taking one Computing module this time around, and I’ll attribute the reason for this phenomenon to that. The downside to this arrangement is three New Media modules, and while each is arguably less intensive than the average Computing module, having to go through numerous readings each week is only so much fun.

I’ve also signed up for a seven-week iPhone developer course by Garag3 and 2359Media, and three lessons later and I’m already finding it immensely fun. I’ve still yet to familiarise myself with Objective-C, but it hasn’t been too difficult to keep up in class so far. While ungraded, the workload is fairly intensive as the pace of the class has been fast, and I hope it’ll be manageable when school starts picking up.

NOC is just around the corner too, and going overseas for a year somehow doesn’t seem like an easily acceptable reality. I really want to make the best of it, and I’m still worrying about which company I’ll be working for. I can only hope that this one year will be the window of opportunity I’ve been waiting for, although sometimes thinking about it can be stressful. Freshman life was definitely a lot simpler.

The July 2010 batch bound for the NUS Overseas College programme in Silicon Valley left last Saturday morning, and although I was originally destined to be on that flight, I did not. I made the decision to delay my participation in this programme by a semester a few months back, and I’ve been meaning to jot it down for quite a while, so it might as well be now.

It’s been just under a year since I applied for the programme, and between then and now, none of the perceived benefits that I have of the programme have changed. It’s definitely a valuable opportunity to have, but an important consideration in making this year-long commitment is the price of the opportunity cost. A lot of students have returned from the programme to work on their ideas which turn into startups, but I somehow have the order reversed, putting a little more at stake.

Regardless of whether sgBEAT is a side project or potential startup, it’s easily the thing I’ve poured the most heart into. Not just the emotional investment, but in terms of time and to some extent, financially too. Over the months, as the service grew as did its potential, I decided that July was going to be too soon for me to fly off. Considering that I’m the only co-founder based in Singapore, I’m felt that quite a fair bit of opportunity might have been left behind.

I applied for the deferment earlier this year, and was granted the rollover until January. There are still a number of ideas that I hope to try with sgBEAT, and I’ll have this coming semester to work on some of them. sgBEAT has been a fantastic learning journey for me, and I think the experience I’ve gained will come in useful when I’m working in a Silicon Valley startup.

The Digital Marketplace Forum was held yesterday, and it’s probably the first and only event I’ll be involved in during this internship. The two weeks prior was spent preparing for the event, and for my part I was handling mostly the administrative tasks. It was slightly similar to what I had to do for GIC’s inaugural staff conference two years back, although I probably had a more involved role this time.

I was tasked to design a flyer for the event, and after initial experiments with different ideas I was instructed to follow the corporate guidelines for IDA and the Digital Media & Entertainment department, including the colours and fonts used. This actually made it a lot easier, although perhaps slightly less satisfying to do. The final result can be found here and I think the best word to describe the result would be ‘normal’.

Preparing the information kits for the attendees was taxing to a certain extent, and manually putting together two hundred sets was menial work for more than half a day. The amount of paper that was printed for an event that ultimately had just over a hundred attendees is quite staggering, but thankfully I survived without a single paper cut. Only about three-quarters of these kits were given out though, so the rest had to be taken apart after the event.

I was also in charge of tracking the attendees list and handling the RSVP emails and phone calls, which got a bit hectic closer to the date of the event. I had to cold call quite a number of people too, and what I learnt from this is that I’m not really good at it. Over two hundred people were invited but only half managed to attend, and I must add that I’m quite pleased I didn’t screw up the attendees list in the end.

The day itself went well, with nothing going wrong except a lot of wasted, good food. I was manning the registration desk for almost the entire time and didn’t get to sit-in for any of the speeches nor the breakout sessions, so that was quite unfortunate. In any case, I think the forum was quite a success for the department, and in a larger context it was a step in the right direction for Singapore in her approach towards setting up a hub for digital media here.

The event is easily the highlight of my internship so far, and it’s definitely satisfying to see the hard work pay off. The rest of the internship will probably center around some research I’m doing on digital advertising and 3D TV trends, although I’ll leave that for a later post.

So the results were released at the start of the week, and for this semester there wasn’t really any suspense or apprehension preceding it. Having done pretty amazingly for one semester and immediately following up with a flop of results the next, I didn’t know what to expect this time round, although I did have an inkling post-examinations that I wouldn’t be doing too badly.

CS2103 Software Engineering: A+
CS3216 Software Development on Evolving Platforms: B
CS3240 Human-Computer Interaction: B+
MA1101R Linear Algebra: B
NM3215 Advertising Strategies: B+

CAP: 4.03

I think my results for the semester were only average, and in fact I would say I underperformed given that the aim I’ve set for my CAP score is 4.2. A shame is that I’m unable to exercise the S/U option for CS3216 Software Development on Evolving Platforms, because it’s not a core module and it’s pulling my CAP score down. I have two of these options left and only one General Elective module to take, so it seems like one of them will end up being wasted. That said, a positive thing I’ve taken from this semester’s result is that I managed to pass the Mathematics module, and so that’s a psychological victory of sorts. I haven’t looked ahead to what modules I’ll be taking next semester, but I know I’ll have to work harder then.