I was born in Ho Chi Minh City and have been lived here forever. It’s one of the biggest cities in Vietnam and you can consider it as the equivalent of New York City to the United States, or Toronto to Canada.
My full name is Hưng Trần Quang. But I tend to go for Jake, for my international fellows and friends. This image captures perfectly the essence of what Ho Chi Minh City is really about. It’s always busy, jam-packed with people on their motorbikes (our go-to everyday vehicles), and weaved by layers of influence and culture from both the East and the West.
I joined three boot camps from Memorisely. I joined UX UI Design Bootcamp to learn how Design Thinking works in the product design process and how that solves problems.
For Design System Bootcamp, I took it because I would like to learn how to build a design system from scratch.
Recently, I took Accessibility Design Bootcamp because I would like to learn how to remove biases and learn to be more inclusive in every day’s design.
Brian Chesky and Airbnb. If there was one thing that I was really moved by Airbnb back then (and probably still now), it is how they design not just beautiful products but also products that solve fundamental human problems, given how troublesome the Airbnb business is. Chesky and Airbnb also prove that design-led can make great impacts.
S U P E R F A S T ⚡️ Whatever energy you guys see from Zander’s Instagram stories, you guys can expect the same in Memorisely’s virtual classroom, taught by Zander. On the other hand, Lilith gives this super-warm vibe to the class that is equally irresistible as well. I was doubtful to choose Lilith at first but I’m really glad I was wrong.
If you are active enough, you could make friends in the Bootcamp as well and it doesn’t matter where are you from. And that’s what's great about participating in a global remote BootCamp. You get to see people from all over the globe join this one virtual classroom.
That there is this cascading, spectrum of personas when it comes to design for accessibility. This also gives me an entirely new perspective when it comes to design for accessibility. You don’t have to literally look for a permanently disabled person to do user research and that is a big relief. Furthermore, to be able to achieve great accessibility design, it’s very embedded in the design process.
Keeping up with the course. At times the material can be slightly fast for my pace and I do need time to digest the material. Perhaps, English is a second language that might be a bottleneck for me to digest?
Wake up → Go to class. That is literally what my day is like as a student. Because of the difference in time zone, the class already starts at 7 am in the morning for me. And that’s basically how I start my day before my work.
Because I’m a founding product designer, at work, I pretty much do almost everything, the entire end-to-end process from talking to users to doing wireframes and doing high fidelity mockups, and handing them off to developers. Working in a start-up is crazy in a way that decisions change really fast. Also, being a founding designer means you need to establish a lot of things from the ground up. And that is scary and exciting at the same time.
Ho Chi Minh City is also known for being full of hidden cafes and gems that are located in the corners of old buildings. It is also one of my favorite thing to do, to discover a new cafe in town and add it to my Google Map Saved List. And these cafes are certainly good looking for the Gram.
Just a desk and my 15 inches Macbook Pro, and an okay view to look out from time to time
This image captures perfectly the two apps that I can’t live without:
iPhone 13 Mini.
I’m a sucker for small phones and the iPhone 13 Mini blew me away. Remember back in the day, Steve Jobs went against making bigger phones and even Apple made a commercial about thumb reachability? iPhone 13 Mini brings me back to those days. I miss the old days when phones have a size of a phone, which are friendly to our thumbs, yet pack the power of a flagship, rather than trying to be a computer or a media consumption machine. It’s really a shame that smartphone makers exclude making smaller phones. Smaller phone sizes don’t mean that the smartphone experience is obsolete.
