A Design Talk Retrospective

You may have noticed that I’ve been silent for months — I know. I was just busy with work deadlines, decluttering, organizing my talk material, and love. Yes, I did manage to find love this pandemic era. Well, if you want something, you have to make time for it. Just like how I set aside some time to jumpstart my public speaking journey.

Recently, I did a my first real public-facing talk about design online. Thanks to my friends at React Cebu, for making room for this. The event was a back-to-back talk with React Cebu’s founder, Dorell James, where he discussed how to architect your React Components, the well-designed way. As you can see, a beautifully designed application is not just about something we visually see. The underlying structure of code that runs that app is equally important, as it is what makes the app run smoothly. “Design is how it works” as Steve Jobs said.

The webinar that happened last December 5, 2020

Now, going back to my talk. Before this public event, I shared the same topic already to my officemate attendees in an internal monthly Dev Meetup organized within the company. (It’s internal, so there’s no public event history that I can share.) This happened in the last week of October 2020. Technically, I spoke twice, since the audience was split into two batches. So, I kinda have enough practice before the React Cebu event, and felt confident. So, I eagerly let Dorell knew that I’m ready to talk! But after seeing the replay of our Facebook live event, and hearing my own voice, talking no non-sense design stuff to people, with subpar delivery — my confidence shrink a bit. Yes, a bit only, so I don’t feel so small. :)

In the usual design process of creating user interfaces of complex systems, we do have what we call a “UI Review”, where the team review the current design progress, make some comments and suggestions, so the next iteration of the design gets better. This is also synonymous to a “Sprint Retrospective” at the end of a usually 2-week sprint, where the team discusses what had been done good, and which can be done better. So, here, I would like to write a little retrospective about my talk the happened not so long ago.

Simplified definition of Design

What I did well:

• Design topics simplified — I believe I composed my talk content in such a way that the different design topics are organized and presented in a more understandable manner. I added examples and visuals to make certain points easy to digest. I didn’t put too much text on the slides, so it will not look much of a textbook — that’s why its called a presentation right?
• Just doing it — My presentation and delivery might need a lot of improvement, but I was just happy I pulled things off, despite having a limited preparation time. I did pushed myself out of my comfort zones by trying to publicly speak, despite my lack of experience in this area. As a result, I was able to share something that I’m passionate about to the community.

What could be improved:

• Talk delivery — I need to improve greatly on this. I still have a long way to go. I’m not really used to talking to a large group of people, impromptu, and it gets me nervous whenever I did. I think this nervousness feeling will just slowly fade away, as I do more talks, and as I refine my material, and do more design work. I planned my talk flow, though it didn’t happen in an orderly fashion, as much as I would like to. Talking is different from writing, where I can have some space to think before I type — I can have all the time I want before I hit publish. When you talk, you only have a few minutes to share your thoughts — there’s a really tight deadline going on in there. The audience may feel relaxed, and enjoy the outburst of wisdom they’re absorbing, but the speaker feels the clock ticking, and hopes that time won’t run so fast, so he can share his thoughts nicely, and not in a hurried state.
• Talk material — We are on the era of animated content, and 3D designs. Sound got into 9D already, and my talk material is still a static “click next” type of thing. Yes, I did it on Figma, which is a one-staircase-level jump from Google Slides. Yup, I intentionally made my presentation simple, to not clutter the audience with unnecessary visuals. But I see some parts where a little animated content will make the topics easier to understand. Just like in design work, the next iteration of my talk material will be a better one, for sure.

Well, its better to start, and fail, than never start at all. A failed experience is better than no experience. So, I may need more steps towards my destination, but I’m still happy I took a few steps already — so I’m a few steps closer to where I’m going.

Design as a lever in a scale

If you are curious about my talk’s content, I mainly talked about these core basic topics:

• Design Elements
• Design Principles
• Human Psychology (Mainly about Cognitive Load, and The Habit Loop)

Here’s the link to my talk material, in case you missed the actual event.

Disclaimer:

Some information, and resources in my talk are from other people, and I did add attribution to them in my material and verbally during the talk. If I somehow misrepresented someone, or miss to add references, please let me know! It’s easy to update my talk material, and add your name on it :)

Thank you for reading my design talk retrospective. And let me know if you want me to talk again on your specific audience. I can conquer my fears now, and would be happy to share some insights based on my experience with code and design. Have a nice Tuesday, everyone!