2022
FORM Swim — Augmented Reality Goggles
In the Fall of 2022, I received my first UX and product design role and it was with an emerging sport-tech company, FORM Swim. As part of their Digital Product team, my projects focused on enhancing the experience on their mobile app, Apple Watch integration, and their goggle’s digital interface.
Working on various projects enabled me to collaborate and learn from product managers, developers, data scientists, swim coaches, mechanical engineers and our end-users!
Contribution
Tools
Timeline
Total metres swam
My first ever product!
Dory goggles & mobile app 🥽📱
Throughout the 4-months, I was privileged to be part of a team of 3 senior designers who encouraged me to work alongside them on different projects, and offered guidance as I spearheaded my own design deliverables. On a macro level, I was doing user research, crafting user stories and flows, designing Hi-Fi interfaces and interactions, conducting usability testing, and collaborating with cross-functional teams of PMs, developers, and QA engineers.
The features I designed focused on improving the swimmer's ability to track their last workout, swim plan and current/upcoming achievements. I also dived into research projects on user engagement/churn and improving our Amazon purchase journey.
Note to self (and to others)
Personal reflection
The design process involves more than just the end-user.
In an academic context, my primary focus has consistently been advocating for the user while sometimes overlooking the practical development constraints. However, as I began working on collaborative projects within cross-functional teams, I started understanding the importance of factoring in engineering capacity, aligning with product strategy and roadmaps, and ensuring that my designs were grounded in analytical insights. Nonetheless, throughout the 15 weeks I actively engaged in numerous conversations and open dialogue with our users, which empowered me to become more of an empathetic and open-minded designer.
Delivering feedback and digesting input.
One of my objectives for 2022 was to enhance my listening skills. Rather than offering my divided attention where I partially focused on the speaker, while simultaneously preparing my own responses, I practiced directing my complete focus and energy toward the speaker. That quickly became a challenging endeavour, especially during feedback sessions when I had to process complex terminology and piece together information on the fly.
Over time, I did make progress in absorbing information more swiftly. Yet, the core issue was not the speed of comprehension but rather my level of engagement with the speaker. I came to the realization that feedback doesn't always require an immediate response; instead, quality feedback starts with purposeful listening and thought processing.
Practice makes Progress.
My learning experience from fellow designers and my daily use of Figma have significantly enhanced my design process, making it notably more efficient. Following my immersion and involvement in FORM's extensive design system and acquiring proficiency in effectively handling components and variants, as well as drawing inspiration from the work of others, I found that I could optimize designing interfaces and screens. This enabled me to allocate more time towards lateral ideation, user research, and the meticulous preparation of design hand-offs to our engineering teams.
