I Have a Confession to Make I'm an Israeli guy who watched the American Survivor show. When I discovered that my favorite cast member from Season 43, Jeanine Zheng, is a product designer, I set a goal in mind: to interview her about her journey and inspire others. She told me how so many people reached out to her after the show, asking her about UX and what it's all about. I couldn't be more grateful for the fact that she said yes and agreed to be on the Writers in Tech podcast. Today, Jeanine is changing the world one step at a time as a product designer at EverBright. This new residential solar financing provider is dramatically simplifying the process with faster, more flexible, more affordable options for homeowners. It's giving installers the strength and stability they need to build their businesses while minimizing costs.
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00:00
What's really important is being able to have the design brain and the UX brain to be able to say, like, no matter what project I'm given, this is how I would handle it. This is how I would think. Through the problem. This is how I would iterate, and this is how I would end up with the design that I would end up with, which doesn't necessarily change with experience in the industry. This is Writers in Tech, a podcast where today's top contest strategists UX writers.
00:34
And content designers share their well kept industry secrets. Hello everyone and welcome to Writers in Tech, a podcast brought to you by the UX writing hub. And I want to welcome today Janine Zhang, youth designer at Levi, Trout and Toe. Jenny, how are you?
00:51
I'm great, actually. A quick update. There's an asterisk next to that because I'm actually between jobs right now, so I have left Levi's, but I'm about to start doing UX design at a solar panel installation company. So yes, a little bit of just slight caveat there.
01:10
Amazing. It's been a while since our last update.
01:14
Yes.
01:15
Are you excited about the change?
01:18
I'm very excited. I studied environmental science in undergrad, so I've been looking for an opportunity to kind of put my professional skills and UX design skill sets towards my personal passion, which is in green energy. So I'm really excited to build to merge the two in a career and job. And I feel really lucky that one, I have a job in tech right now, and two, it's something that I feel really passionately about and that I really love to do and a cause that I really care about. It's like the dream.
01:53
How did you manage to steer your career in a way that you will end up working in a company that you feel passionate about? To have many people in our audience that work in different companies and it's kind of challenging.
02:08
Again, I feel so blessed. I know that it's not the case know, all of those kind of priorities line up in a career. But yeah, I feel really lucky in that. Levi's was a great place to work. I don't have anything bad to say about that company. It was more so just me wanting to work in a more directly impacting climate solution. So I kind of just went back into the job market and was like, I feel like I have the energy and the headspace and the time to do this right now. And luckily it ended up working out at a green energy company.
02:49
That's awesome. And tell me a little bit about your background and how did you got into UX in the first place? In the UX design space, most of our audience are UX writers, people that also are curious about doing their career in general.
03:06
Yeah, I think in probably a lot of people that you've talked to, it's a very secluded route. There's not really any direct path to UX, as of now at least, it's a very new field. So for me, I actually didn't even know about UX until more than halfway through my undergrad experience. And up until that point, I thought that I had to do either something that was really qualitative or something that was really quantitative. I had been at a research lab, actually doing scientific research, because biology is another passion of mine. Again, I come from a pretty scientific oriented background. My parents are both scientists. And so I just thought that for me, it was either, oh, I can number crunch and do research, or I can do art. Those were kind of the two sides. My brain that I loved was like, the creative and the kind of more numerical logical side.
04:12
And then it wasn't until I found out about UX that I realized, oh my goodness, you can merge the two. The two can exist in one job, and the two sides complement one another in the qualitative and quantitative. And that's what I love so much about UX. And so as soon as I heard about it, I thought like, this is it. This is what I want to do. This will allow me to be artistic and creative in the output, but also informed by research and by the quantitative. So, yeah, when I heard about it, I kind of just jumped right in and I was like, I don't know anything about this field. But I had talked to a couple mentors that I had found through mutual connections and just created a portfolio that was based on all fake projects, but they were all concept projects.
05:12
I didn't have any experience at that point and got an internship at Levi's and then have been working in UX there ever since.
05:21
That is fascinating. And you know what caught my attention the most was the fact that you didn't had any real projects in your portfolio, but you managed to land a UX writing job anyway. So this is something that it's the chicken on the air kind of dilemma. How can I have real project if I don't have experience? But how could I have experience if nobody let me do real project?
05:48
Absolutely. Yeah. Like I said earlier, it is such a difficult thing right now because I think a lot of people don't know about UX, don't know it exists. I think because it's a new field, I at least still value concepts as much as real projects. Like at the beef and bulk of it all, it's just your design thinking. As long as you can demonstrate your design process and thinking in some way, what's really important is being able to have the design brain and the UX brain to be able to say, like, no matter what project I'm given, this is how I would handle it. This is how I would think through the problem. This is how I would iterate and this is how I would end up with the design that I would end up with, which doesn't necessarily change with experience in the industry.
06:46
I think that's something that is just like, you can have an inclination and a talent in a brain for and can display regardless of practice. And then of course, with practice, you get better. But being able to just have that as a base is the most important thing, and you can do that without having worked for any company.
07:09
My question to you would be, what would be your tips for people that are in this position right now? They don't have real world experience, but they still want to apply, they want to set up a case study in a portfolio. So what tips would you give to them today?
07:25
I would just say start looking, start experiencing different apps, different just websites, any kind of media you can ingest and experience and digital experiences that you can go through. That is the best way to start thinking about how you would approach design of those things. And then the more you look, the more you start to say, oh, this works, this doesn't work. This is why. And I think for those concept projects, it's really helpful to keep know of and tab of the things that don't work. And then if there's enough of a case behind it, what would you do to redesign it? And then when you kind of think about the why doesn't it work? That's when you can bullet point through the things that don't work, why they don't work, and then how you would redesign them.
08:20
Can you give me an example?
08:22
Yeah, and I'll give you an example of something I did in a concept project. And this actually didn't even come from an existing app, but it was a problem that I saw in the world that a technology could fill. And I was on campus at the time, and so there was this whole trope that people would always say, acquaintances, friends, classmates always say, oh, well, let's catch a meal. Let's catch a meal. And no one would ever follow up on it. And I get it. College students are busy, but I wanted to create an easy and seamless way for us to actually follow up on that and get a meal and connect. And so my concept was an app that would plug into an existing calendar API, maybe Gmail, GCal, whatever you use, and stake the two calendars and then be able to kind of display the free blocks and free times and allow you to, within a click of a button, schedule that meal time and actually catch a meal with that person.
09:29
And so, yeah, it was something that a problem I had noticed in the real world that I thought this would be an interesting kind of gap to fill. And how can I imagine some sort of technological solution for a problem that exists in real life between two real actors.
09:57
This is cool. It's almost like saying to someone, we should have a lunch one day, is something that you just say because it would never happen. And you found like a technical solution to actually solve it.
10:13
Well, now I'm like, well, maybe it wasn't actually a problem and people want to get a meal together, but for those who actually were intending on following up on that, yeah, I would hope that something like this would help them do that. Make it easier to do that.
10:32
First of all, when I say to people, we should grab a lunch, you really mean it.
10:36
Yeah, it does make sense.
10:39
So tell me more about the solution. And you know what's, even more than that, tell me, if you were doing this project today, what would you focus on?
10:54
That's a great question. I hadn't thought about this project. This project was honestly archive depths of my mind if I were to redo this project. So at the time it was linked through email, I think now definitely being able to link through, I think, phone number and contact your phone contact list is your most valuable place to start if you're on mobile. So would change that. I'm not sure what else I would really change about that. I think that to your question, it would necessitate either research. Like I would have to actually just go back to campus and try it out with existing students and say, how can we improve this? What would make it better? Because I'm so far out, I would no longer be. And as a designer, I should never be the point. I should never be. I mean, I am a user, but I shouldn't be testing it on myself.
12:00
So yeah, I think the things that I would prove would depend on the feedback that I would get from users.
12:08
I love this message. So basically what you're saying here, this is something we should focus on. You're saying if I would do anything differently today when building a new project, or the same project, just today, with the knowledge that I have, I would do more research, or I would start with research and I would understand exactly what are things today before jumping into the solution.
12:35
Totally.
12:35
Jeffrey is brilliant because it's still not common today for companies that research is that valuable and important. I just had a call with the client the other day, which was basically yesterday, that said, hey, so yeah, we're going to jump right in. We're going to take three or 4 hours to do research and then we will do that. And the whole project will take between twelve to 15 hours. And then she was like, listen, you don't have to do any research. We did out of the research already. You don't need to do research at all.
13:13
No, I can agree more. I am like borderline as a designer, I am borderline obsessed with research. I definitely start out every project with trying to get my hands on as much existing research as I can, but then also trying to conduct as much research throughout the project as I can. Because what else is informing your designs or telling you that you're going in the right direction towards the solution, if not real time feedback from users? And again, I think coming from a more scientific background, I really value those data points and being able to point to user feedback and research and data to be able to make design decisions. Like, design decisions should not just be aesthetic. They really need to be grounded in what works and what makes sense for the user experience.
14:14
Interesting. So what will be your best practices for user research as a designer? You said talking to people at campus because that was a project back in campus. But what would be your methodologies, your go to methodology?
14:36
I can speak to what I've been able to do industry. Again, first step, I always like to just source what exists. If there is existing research and documentation on a topic or a feature or a project, it's really important to go to that first and see what we have. And then from there, if I feel like there are still gaps in questions that I have on the problem space and I don't feel like we've yet been able to use the existing research to define the problem, then that's where I start to think about, okay, what can I do to supplement the existing research? How can I research, find the data that I need to around the things that are missing? I think it's also really important to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. So whether that's through analytics dashboards for the quantitative or more of our user testing research that we get, and direct quotes from users or CSAT is another way of looking at qualitative feedback.
15:48
I think all of that paints a picture of what I would need to know before deadling into a project and then after I start designing again is where I think the real time user feedback is really important. And just being able to have eyes on and feedback on what I'm designing to be able to ensure that it's basically just like a gut check of you're heading in the right direction or this is not working, this is not usable.
16:26
From a design point of view. We have a lot of UX writers in our audience, people that write digital interfaces, people that are in charge of the content of the app. Do you have any best practices around communicating your screens? Like the content of your screens? Oh, you worked with the writer yourself and have best practices to create better.
16:49
UX writing in your I've actually I've only worked with one UX writer in my time and I think, Rom, so we are actually expected to do a lot, if not all of the UX writing ourselves. I think one point that I really find crucial is that the UX writing and content should be complementary and complementary to the experience. It all needs to be basically a baked in content cake. There should not be any part ingredient of the content as a whole that should stick out and is kind of like, not in. That doesn't make sense as a whole with the rest of the content ingredients or what you're seeing on the screen or what you're experiencing. For me, I think less is more. I really believe that if the user experience is designed well, that it will necessitate few words. I think that the copy and the experience to complement each other in a way where you shouldn't have to explain or be verbose with words on the screen.
18:12
It should really just be baked into the experience. And of course, there will be copy and there will be writing, but just making sure that writing is every word counts.
18:22
Every word counts. I love that. And I wanted to also talk with you about small elephant in this room, which is the fact that I knew you and I didn't know about World until I watched the TV show Survivor number 43. And I've seen you over there, sona. It was actually quite a fantastic season, in my opinion.
18:53
Thank you.
18:55
And I noticed that in your title, you're a YouTube designer. And I thought to myself to be a brilliant idea to bring the podcast as a guest and to get to know you in person.
19:06
Yeah. Thank you so much for reaching out. And honestly, the response has been, I wasn't expecting it, but I've had a lot of UX designers and writers honestly reach out and say, hey, it's really cool to see you represent us on this show. I don't think there's ever been I didn't know that there has never been a UX designer before on the you know, to see people respond to positively and be excited about having someone in their same career path on the show was like, oh, okay, I guess I am representing the UX industry right now.
19:46
Definitely on TV, was like, oh, okay, so finally more people would know about this field thanks to you.
19:56
So that was pretty shit, and I think I'm lucky in that. Well, I live in definitely a tech bubble. I live in San Francisco, so I'm used to everyone knowing what I mean when I say, oh, I'm a UX designer. But I think being on the show and just being know people from all walks of life and all over the country and being able to explain to them what UX is, was really cool because a lot of them had actually never even heard of UX before.
20:27
Do you feel like being in this show had some kind of gave you some kind of insights or helped you somehow in your career path.
20:40
I think that again, going back to the I live in a bubble. I live in a place where I think a lot of people I surround myself with here have similar interests, come from similar places and backgrounds. I think the main thing from my experience on Survivor was showing me that there are people that are so different from me and they could not have more different life experiences and backgrounds and they're not that far from me either. I think that it really just goes to remind me that when I'm designing, I'm not just designing for myself or the people that are directly around me. I'm designing for users from all different backgrounds. I think it's really humbling. I think it also allows me to become and be a better designer when I understand how different people are and how different their needs might be. Not even from an accessibility standpoint, but honestly just from a person to person individual standpoint.
21:59
This is amazing. Being in this show or this kind of experience gave you more ideas about the diversity of people outside of Francisco. Yeah, I also feel like this is something you could achieve, like people that listening, you could achieve by traveling, going to places, meeting with people, understanding in different countries iguana states like understanding what people motives are.
22:34
Yeah.
22:35
And I think it's a great insight for you.
22:39
And it's also something that I've been able to do through. We're lucky in that I've been able to conduct my own user testing and see how many features that they interacted with users based on things that we screen for and filter by and have users testing across users of various backgrounds. And so in that way I feel like I have been able to interface with users, but again, that's only one direction. That's only my viewing their experience and something like Survivor or an in person interaction like you're describing in person in traveling, that's two directional, that's like reciprocal. So I think that's what I really appreciated was it's not just me observing, it's me observing, being able to interface with, ask questions, have a fluid back and forth in conversation that is more informative than just watching or just throwing questions and then taking in the questions afterwards.
23:46
That's awesome. What type of resource and content, professional or even non professional content would you recommend someone that is currently working so want to get to work in UX? Do you recommend any books or podcast or resources that you're consuming on relatively and daily, weekly, monthly basis?
24:10
Yeah, I think I can recommend a couple. One of my favorite podcasts is Time sensitive. It's more interdisciplinary. It's not like full UX design or writing, but it's all about kind of design at a whole and how our conception of time relates to that. I think in general, going off this point, my main advice or content is to think about design beyond just apps or websites and thinking about the design of everyday things. It's becoming increasingly important to understand how physical things and physical design impacts digital design as we start to bleed more into the territory where those two are merging. So I think it's just really important to think about design of anything and not just digital things.
25:10
How do you think it will where do you think it will meet us in the future? The reason I'm asking is because I saw that this Israeli company that was launching this AR laptop device that you put like, special glasses on and they give you this small keyboard. Basically, it's a projection of all of your screens. There's some feedback of people and reviews. It sounds like it's actually working really well. I was just thinking, like, what are going to be the challenges of the UX in that space? So what kind of digital, non digital challenges do you think we will have as UX people in the future?
25:48
I definitely think virtual reality is going to be a huge thing in our future. I think wearable tech can also be somewhere that we see that is rising, I think, in any sense, where we can start to make our everyday objects smarter and more usable. That's kind of where I see the merger happening. So even like appliances or home office supplies, like becoming smarter, I don't know. Just anything that we're using now that could be more technologically advanced. Doesn't have to be as crazy as your stapler spitting out a 3D projection, but maybe it's an automated stapler that, I don't know, understands. Every day at noon, Laura at Reception needs to staple 50 packets at once, whatever it is. I think the micro interactions being smarter is where I see a lot of the merger of those two things happening.
27:06
Sounds really cool, to be honest. I feel like when we will live in a world where we have a data driven stapler.
27:18
At that point, it's all over. We can stop designing. That's what we've been existing on this earth for.
27:29
Yeah. And it will be connected to AI. So it's also going to attack us at some point.
27:34
Yeah. It'll eventually contact all other staplers in universe and come for us. Honestly, that's a terrifying thought.
27:43
But staplers see the Lord, that's definitely shown horror.
27:47
Oh, God.
27:49
Jenning, it was amazing to have you in our podcast, Writers in Tech. Thank you so much for being here.
27:54
Thank you so much for having me. And again, honestly, it made my year to look in my LinkedIn inbox and see that you had reached out based on Survivor. It's like my two favorite things, UX and Survivor bringing me to more connections and more people and yeah. I'm so grateful that were able to speak today.
28:18
So in that case, we also need to thank my wife for making me survival.
28:25
Yes, we do.
28:27
All right, so thank you so much. Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Writers in Tech. My name is Ival Keshter. I'm the founder of the UX writing hub. Check our website. We have a lot of free resources for UX writers, such as the free UX Writing Course, weekly newsletter, podcast, Writers in Tech blog post, and a lot more fun stuff. Check it out. Thank you, Janine, and see you next time.
28:50
Thank you. Bye.