Meet Yingxiao Ouyang

We recently connected with Yingxiao Ouyang and have shared our conversation below.

Yingxiao, thank you so much for making time for us today. We’re excited to discuss a handful of topics with you, but perhaps the most important one is around decision making. The ability to make decisions is a key requirement for anyone who wants to make a difference and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your decision-making skills.

As a product designer, my decisions involves user needs, feature details and implementation details. These decisions affect users’ experience, affects engineering efforts, and affects business reputation. If product design is like throwing an axe, we cannot guarantee we always hit the target, but we can keep on trying until we increase our success rate.

When I first graduated from college, my decision-making was so focused on proving to others that I am right and i am qualified. However, after 6 years of practicing product design, my attitude towards it changed. Making the wrong decision doesn’t mean i am not qualified, it means there is something unknown i need to figure out in the user, in the business or in the technology field. Regardless of if we make the right or wrong decisions, it is always the lessons that is more important. I take these lessons to my next project and continuously reflecting how do i make my design better serve the users, development team and business teams next time. This mindset change is crucial in developing my decision-making skills.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My name is Yingxiao Ouyang, I am a product designer focusing on information design and data product design. I specialize in making data stories compelling and intriguing. In order to start with design, I figure out what users are going to do with these data. I strive to make data aligned with the exact answers users are trying to find out. Even though there are a lot of metrics related to one process, users may just need a few of them in order to make right decisions. My design process and collaboration mode aims to find out what are those critical metrics, and what is the best way to display them. As a product designer, I have worked with Fortune 500 companies to create meaningful data experience for retail and finance. My recent project has won multiple industry awards, like UX Design Award (Nominated), NY Product Design Award (Gold), Muse Design Award (Silver), etc.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

My storytelling skills have been acknowledged by multiple teams across globe. Telling a compelling and convincing story to a new audience requires deep understanding of a topic and dedicated practice to make things clear. I always strive to simplify information and help my audience focus on the part that they need most. This quality has helped me a lot in presentation, interviews and ux critique sessions.

My second skill is to make complex things simple. This quality has heavily influenced my data projects. Understanding what users really want to know is crucial. The complexity of a feature can come from the engineering implementation methods or business needs. Tailoring these informations for specific using scenarios is key to simplifying requirements or features.

My last skill is to be open to others ideas. Product design involves designing things that represent the best of our product team, engineering team and our user group. When these people give their honest ideas, I am extremely open to them as my goal is to create something they Love instead of something that Works. Being open to others’ feelings and feedback is crucial to my design journey.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?

As a product designer, i need to face many feedback throughout my design career, some of them can be extremely negative and overwhelming. Respecting others‘ opinions is definitely necessary, but sticking to design principles can also win them over in the end through positive user feedback.

As a product designer, it is always easy to do what Product Manager tell us to do. But being able to reflect on their decisions and give suggestions is a hard-core skill we also needs to master. It is never easy to talk someone off their ideas, I need to be specific and clear when explaining the reasons. Sometimes, it also mean we have to let them make mistakes.

Many designers gave up on design careers due to these overwhelming feedbacks, especially for junior designers. One advice i found useful is “Choose your fight” from Mike Ellis, a product design director who manages me at Walmart. This advice has been super helpful to help me focus on things i really want to make a difference, while allowing others to have ownership on the product equally.

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Yingxiao Ouyang

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