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Beyond aesthetics, a good UX designer should be able to make things nice and also easy to use
“My #1 job is to hire A+ players.” – Steve Jobs
Let’s face it, even Steve Jobs himself could not build Apple alone, without a team of super talented people. And for any manager or CEO, hiring A-players into your team is likely your most important job, because at the end of the day, your teammates are the ones who will do 90 per cent of the work, not you.
At e27, we are putting increasing focus on building good products. And recently I have the chance to build up a new Product & Engineering team in Vietnam. I think it might be useful to share my experience hand-picking the Vietnam team in the last few months. I hope it will also benefit entrepreneurs who are building their own team.
Let’s talk about hiring UX Designer role today.
What makes a good UX designer?
A good UX designer for startups can do two main things well:
- Make things nice (right-brain, artistic sense),
- Make things easy to use (left-brain, problem-solving skill, simplicity sense).
From my experience interviewing candidates, it is not easy to find that combination of skillset. A lot of so-called “UX Designers” in Vietnam can only make things nice, but not easy to use. They are more like graphical designers rather than UX designers.
So, how do you know if a person is good UX designer?
First and foremost, you need to have a decent sense of UX yourself to evaluate the candidate. You do not need to be a designer, but you need to have some senses of what is nice, and what is easy to use. If you are not sure, find some UX-oriented friends to help you.
After that, I personally find these 2 factors very effective:
1. Portfolios. Do the portfolios look nice, clean & modern? Did they design lots of apps & web (more UX), or mostly images (more graphics)?
Ask them how they come up with a specific design. Average guys will just design anything that ‘feels’ nice, or just jump to the first solution that come to mind. Good guys will think from user perspective, have a logical problem solving process, and end up with a simple solution.
2. Asking candidate to solve a real UX problem that you have struggled with. I find this the very best way to evaluate UX skill. Some guys may sell themselves very well, some others may have lots of knowledge. But it will become very clear who is the good one — when they try to solve a real UX problem that you know very well.
Then you can compare the candidate’s design with your team’s design.
If the candidate can come up with a nicer, more simple design to solve the problem, in a shorter time, he is definitely a great one!
How e27 did it
We recently built our own ticketing system to run Echelon. You can try it out in Echelon Malaysia in March. For now, here is the screenshot for Echelon Vietnam:
Building the form is quite easy. However, designing an easy-to-use form builder to customise this form is not very straightforward. For example, for the ‘Objective’ field and ‘Are you buying a ticket for yourself…’ field, different answers will trigger different sets of questions under that. How do you represent that in the form builder in an easy to use way?
We spent a few days and decide to organise things into sections, and come up with the meat and mettle. (Let me know if you can understand how to use this form builder.)
It’s definitely not easy to use. Luckily we were interviewing for UX Designer positions in Vietnam, so we ask the candidates to design for the same problem. After two days, one candidate comes back with this:
Wow, that’s much simpler! It’s the same solution using sections, but presented in a much more simple and intuitive way. Most people understand how this works at first look. Any simple solution looks obvious afterwards, but it is not easy to come up with one in the first place.
So we know this candidate is definitely the guy.
And that’s how our UX Designer Anthony Thong Do joined us. FYI, he is redesigning the whole UX of e27 sites now. Watch out for a brand new look of e27 in January 2017.
Here is a sneak peak:
Conclusion
In a new startup or a new team, any additional employee is one big part of team. So getting the right people is super important.
I hope this article has been useful to startups or any other business looking to hire a UX designer. I am still hiring and building up the Vietnam team, and will share more experiences along the way. So this article will be the first in the series.
Do ping me if you like the startup community and want to be part of the Vietnam team’s adventure to build great products. We have ambitious plans for 2017, including new disruptive online products and also Echelon conferences in nine countries! We are so optimistic for the new year.
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Featured Image Copyright: sentavio / 123RF Stock Photo
The post Building your startup dream team: Why finding a good UX designer is essential, and how e27 did it in Vietnam appeared first on e27.
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