On Friday, I met with Yicheng Huang at Starbucks. She is an interaction designer at Goggle. Her team is mainly focused on improve user experience on Goggle Drive across G Suite. I started by describing TeaTalk and the reason I am doing it. And then she explained to me how UI/UX field is growing in the past few years and more and more companies realized the importance of it. She also talked about the overall design process of approaching a problem at a big company like Google and the importance of user testing. She said, “The primary factor of your success lies in the fact that you keep your user in center of your design process.” In fact, I agreed with her. Good user experience design is always part of product development process. You interact with your users to build unique combination of structure content. This process allows designer to create products that are simple, intuitive and engaging, and provide WOW experience to your users and thus differentiate with other competitors.
On the second half of meeting, She started playing with my app on mobile phone and suggests me with a couple of ideas
- In the education tab, she suggests me to subcategory teas according to tea kinds. For example, it could be divided with herbal and non-herbal tea, or full-leaf and powder tea. Another idea to create tea introduction cards in each tea.
- She liked the meetup section I created. User could search meetup by map or column which provide more options for different types of user. The only suggestion is to provide detail descriptions in each meetup.
- Lastly, Yicheng suggests me to create help/support page. The importance of creating page like that is to reduce your support workload. As a user, it’s frustrating to not be able to figure something out. Some people immediately call when they hit a roadblock, but plenty more want to fix their own problems and learn more on their own.
Overall, it was a great experience talking with her. On the last half of the semester, I will continue iterating my design and doing user testings as possible.
Yue Liu 