Web Administration devBlog

Interview with Cindy Li
Mar
25

Filed under Design, Usability

So back in December, graphic designer and UF alumna Cindy Li came by for a couple of hours for a question-and-answer session with some members of UF’s web community.

It took a while for me to transcribe it, but I finally finished it. Since the interview was so long, I picked out some of the highlights and organized them here:

On Creativity

Q: What sites do you look at for inspiration? What’s the top hit in your Google Reader, or whatever you use?
CL: Well, let’s say I needed to research flowers or something. I just kind of type things into Google, or I’ll go through pictures on Flickr, or I’ll go through my own photo stash. If I were doing a project with flowers, I would just surround myself with paper printouts or photos or create a Photoshop file and just collect them all and just take an overview.

I just put myself into the subject — let’s say it’s a gardening site. So I just research the tools that they would use or things that they would plant, and I just start collecting. Just make a very crazy collage of whatever it is you’re designing. It’s a lot easier to live and breathe it when you’re surrounding yourself with it. I have a collection folders of with pictures for each project.

I just did that for the See Jane Fly Web site. I asked her what her likes and dislikes were. I just started looking up travel photos and the feelings she was trying to convey and I just built upon that.

Q: Do you find time for a personal creative outlet away from what you do for work? Is it very similar to what you do?
CL: I like to take lots of pictures. I like to draw, but I haven’t been, so part of January is me working on this children’s book i’ve been wanting to do for a while. I try. It’s really hard because I like having money to pay rent. I’m just fortunate enough that there are enough geeky events that I can go to, like randomly the Adobe Illustrator meetup was the week before Adobe Max. I love what I do, but I do get tired.

Working with Others

Q: (In regard to your) contract offers, are they just with you or do you work in a team?
CL: Lately, it’s just been me. The contract with Yahoo! was obviously just specifically me. Before I was actually partnering with some of the guys who had an agency. I’ve gotten some projects where they needed a designer, and I was available. For the vast majority, I try to build a little mini-brand of myself that they actually ask for. I get some requests every now and then, which is nice. I pitch myself as, you know, I draw cute. So don’t ask me for a Goth character because I’m not the one to do it.

Q: How do you work with other designers? How do you [handle] the workflow … between designers?
CL: AOL and Yahoo! kind of have predefined roles: visual design and user interface design. In the current position I was in at Yahoo! [I noticed] project managers make lots of comments to designers like, “Hey, why don’t we throw this up over here?” But that doesn’t follow what I’m supposed to do for Luke’s group. Luke’s got his set of rules and I do my best to follow them. So I reference those as the documentation, and I kind of rope them back in.

I’ve been on projects where there are three or four designers and we pitch the same project, like branding, and we do more of a mood board and then business owner or whoever is in charge of the project decides.

Q: Do you pitch that as a team? Or as individuals with different concepts?
CL: As a team. So they’re not biased to which designer it is, instead they just look at the project. So whatever you have, you just put it all up in the room and then one person discusses them. That way, there’s no bias. It’s just focused on the work. Just pick the best presenter.

Q: Do you travel a lot?
CL: Well, Scrapblog was in Miami, so I went there a couple times. I live in San Francisco. Matt — my boyfriend Matt — he lives in England, so I go over there.

It’s kind of cool. There’s this thing in California called Super Happy Dev House, where a bunch of developers and designers just meet at some person who’s gracious enough to allow strangers into their house for a couple days, and they just work on their random projects. So the Brits thought it would be really funny to call it Super Evil Dev Fort, so about 12 of us rented a fort over in the British Channel Islands and we worked in a real fort. It was really cool.

Q: Canon balls and everything?
CL: Yes. So we worked on our projects and there was no Internet, so you’re wondering, “How am I going to do without Internet?” It was actually better because no one was checking Flickr, no one was checking Facebook, no one was checking anything. And we worked on our projects and the guys would go scrape data and we would just work. Work and eat, that’s pretty much it — and hanging out. So, it’s possible to work on things without the Internet.

Q: (Do you use instant messenger with coworkers?)
CL: I’ve done that. I have a couple friends where we have an understanding of what we’re doing. So [we'll say,] “Hey, I’m stuck.” They either have their own agencies or they’re just an independent designer. We’ve have these conversations like, “Hey, take a look at this is it OK?”

I have been known to use Flickr and upload my comps and set it on private and give a guest pass to my client so they can see it and comment right there.

When I was working at Yahoo!, all the designers sat together. I’ve been in situations where it’s one designer and all developers around you. So, it just depends on how the company is organized. It’s been really nice because at Yahoo! there were about 15 in the group and two developers were in the aisle by themselves. They had two remote people and one was a developer in Portland and the other was a designer in Vancouver. It was just nice. I sat next to a more user interface designer, and so when I would get stuck I would [say,] “Hey, take a look at this.”

That’s one of the things Luke has been trying to do. Luke Wroblewski just came out with a book this year about forms and it was a really good book. He worked at Ebay and he went through a sort-of a critique of all the terrible forms out there and what practices to do. It’s a really good book. I use it more as a reference for when I get stuck.

For his group, he was trying a patterns library that they’re trying to implement within Yahoo! So, [that includes] things like standard messaging when you need a confirmation. Yahoo! is so big that any chance you get to standardize something, it will actually be implemented in tons and tons of different areas. That’s one of his goals as the manager. It goes down to check boxes, search buttons; there’s a universal header that you have to use and how you’re supposed to work it into correct designs. So it’s like, the more information you can share between each other [even little bits that you learn.

At Work

Q: How do you balance a desire to be creative with deadlines?
CL: Well, my last project was for Yahoo! and it was Buzz.yahoo.com it’s Digg’s competitor. It’s Yahoo’s version of it. Their audience is completely different than Digg’s, you know, it’s conservative, middle-class America. They’re way more conservative than I ever thought they would be. The progress was do in incremental changes and we have user testing to make sure we are on the right track.

Our project was set up to have a two-week sprint. It is called agile development. We have milestones to complete in two weeks and then set up new ones in the next round. We have daily standup meetings where you say, “I’m working on this. Yesterday I did this.” It is short daily status reports, so we have the front end and the backend development in the same room. It’s much easier than all of us sending e-mails back and forth to each other, like, “Hey, I need so-and-so on this.” It’s nice to have everyone there in one place.

Q: Now, one of the things that comes up repeatedly in our UFCM Web meetings is orange and blue. We have deans and supervisors who don’t like orange and blue. So, how do you deal with a stakeholder trying to steer you off of the established branding?
CL: You remind them what of the established branding, you show them documentation of what the established branding is (as politely as possible).

I worked on a style guide project at AOL and it was big enough where we all worked on our separate little channels, like health, fitness and whatnot. And each of these individual channels had their own color scheme, but then AOL hired this outside agency it was like DNC or something in New York. They got the new AOL branding and they had this whole style guide of color palates and stuff in it. And to actually police the amount of all the different designers working on it to follow suit was not fun, so you try your best to keep them on it.

So like, I realize your personal preference may not be the orange and blue, but the university’s color palate is within this and I’m just doing my job as a designer to follow these rules. If I break them, then it opens Pandora’s Box for everyone else to do the same.

Q: A problem we run into in the university is that there’s a difference between a policy and a recommendation.
CL: Well, if you guys band together, and you create it, then no one can touch it. You never wait until the meeting. You try and pull them aside.

A tactic that I’ve tried many times before is like, “Hey, let’s go grab coffee” and you take them out of the room and you take them and just kind of have a conversation where you’re more on the same level. Because once you’re in the meeting room, it gets very confrontational. So if you try the coffee tactic, or lunch, you end up kind of being buddy-buddies and they become much more receptive to whatever you have to hear, especially when they’re not hungry.

Q: (Could you tell us about your planning process?)
CL: Oh! That’s right. I didn’t actually answer his full question.

So different projects. There was this one that we just worked on with some friends and we actually made personas for each person we thought could use the site, like we listed what their interests were, what their goals were and their age bracket — it got fairly detailed. So, you try to get the goals of the user — the users’ stories.

With the Yahoo! stuff, we got like tools that had demographics and who uses it and how many clicks we get. At Yahoo, they started this thing called Vitality, which is every time you click on a Buzz button, we know you did it. If you comment, we know. You can however opt out with the privacy setting. There was also testing involved..

We slated for 10 users to come and test out the product. Unfortunately sometimes things happen with people who sign up, sometimes they aren’t the right fit for the testing and you find that they barely know how to use a computer. Strange, I know, but it happens.

Another possibility is that people get sick, or life just gets in the way. We ended up with less than we hoped for but we used the data from about six or seven people. We did three different mockups to see what their goals were.

We tried to see if they noticed anything that changed. There are plenty of tools out there like Silverback app that Clearleft came out with. I think it’s like $30 and you can test it. It records your user on video and sees what they’re looking at and you can use the data that way.

You don’t even have to do it that complicated, I’ve done it with people where you just have four different printouts and it’s totally on the fly. You don’t even have to make them work. You can ask them very specific questions and do it for each of them and just write down and record the whole conversation and you can look back on it.

Q: What would you take from that?
CL: Just kind of average out the responses. You know, if they even notice what you’re trying to put in front of them, if it matters to them — because, you know, what matters to us and what matters to them is completely different sometimes. It’s really quite astounding because, you know, you’re in it saying, “Yeah, they’re totally going to get this one feature,” and they have no idea what you’re talking about so it doesn’t matter.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: UF Web Admin has information on user testing and how to conduct paper prototyping, including a video from the Nielsen Group).

Go Gators!

Q: Would you say UF networking pays off?
CL: The UF networking paid off as soon as I graduated. I took off the day after graduation and I asked my professor, Brian Slawson, if he know of any alumni in the Atlanta area, and he gave me a list. I showed my portfolio to every single person that let me through the door. I spoke to many agencies that didn’t have positions open but used those conversations to network myself eventually into a job. I could have given the portfolio presentation in my sleep at that point.

In the end, I got a job at NetChannel, and it was because a former UF that I had spoken to called me once they did have a position open. They weren’t looking for someone at the time I met up with them, but then a couple months later, they were. So they called me back, and that’s why I ended up getting that job. AOL bought NetChannel about six months after.