Episode 30: The Impact of AI in UX Design with Chenmu Wu
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Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at QRIS Core.

Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year. Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design.

Welcome to our session where we have a very special guest. His name is Chenmu Wu. Chenmu is actually a UI/UX lead at Daras, which is a startup and he works there on a full-time basis. Before he joined Daras, Chenmu was actually the senior UX designer at Shopee itself and

And one of the things we're going to talk about today with our special guest is the impact of AI in UX design. And the reason why we invited Chen Mu to come to our session today is because he has actually created a plugin that allows you to generate wireframes

instantly and that plugin is actually connected with ChatGPT and his plugin went viral and Chenwu claims that it's just a weekend project so he's on his way to improve it a lot more but it looks like it has been quite popular. So today we're going to talk about all things AI

And just to share a little bit more about Shen Wu's background, he graduated from university with a degree in architecture and he has worked for Sharpie for four years and has played a pivotal role in initiating the migration from Sketch to Figma. And definitely he's very, very passionate about Figma and how Figma is going to help designers do better work.

He's one of the primary contributors for the Shopee design system. So if you're a user of Shopee, probably see his work over there. Dara's is part of Alibaba. Is that right, Chengu? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're currently under Alibaba. Yeah, that's awesome. So this is really quite interesting. And he oversees a team of five designers from Pakistan and Singapore where they are driving innovation and fostering a user-centric design solutions.

within the organization. So Cheng Wu, we're really excited to have you here. I believe probably this is the first time you're speaking publicly about your app outside of your own LinkedIn profile. Am I right? - Yes, yes. It's the first time. Yeah, and it's a pleasure to be here.

Awesome. First of all, thank you for being on the show. And I want to actually ask you a very quick question. What exactly do you do for Alibaba and what exactly do you do at work? Yeah, so currently I'm the lead UI/UX designer in DaRust. So we are actually the leading e-commerce platform in South Asia.

So you can think of if you use Shopee or Lazada, then we are the South Asia version of Lazada called Aras. So I guess none of the participants are from South Asia, so you may not heard of the company, but we are doing exactly the same thing. Not exactly like a very similar model of business model, but we are just doing it in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, these countries.

So as the lead UI/UX designer, what I do is not only leading the design team, overseeing the design, but personally, I also do the design for all the buyer side related design requests. So all the apps, our app and our desktop web app, I'm actually the designer for these platforms.

and in the team we are also designing for our seller platform for our advertisement platform our life and then financial services so that's the entire design team's job so for me usually i will just uh you know review and oversee the designs in order to for all the product managers and ui designers to collaborate well we need work process and also a good design system so

So I'm leveraging my experience in building a short piece design system. So I'm trying to build up a very quick setup of the design system here. Yeah, that's basically it. Thank you so much for sharing all that. It's interesting that you're working on a foreign market. Do you have to travel to Pakistan often or what's going on? Are you working fully remote?

Most of the time it's remote. Actually, I just traveled to Pakistan last week or the week before. So it's the first time I go there and I interviewed our sellers, our users. And it's a very interesting experience there. And I'm planning to go to Bangladesh soon. Okay, that's awesome. But yeah, today we are here to talk about this plugin that you created. And I'm just going to quickly share my screen.

I believe it's called wireframe designer, right? So this particular plugin that you, you have it's used by 25,500 people. It's got 700 likes, I would say by,

any standards, I would consider that going viral and you're using ChatGPT. So maybe you want to share with us like what prompted you to create something like that on Figma? Like what prompted you to write a plugin yourself?

For me, actually, chat GPT has been the viral thing for quite a long time. And to me, actually, it is to my surprise that there isn't a very good UI generation

tool out in the market yet. You know, we have Midjourney that generate a lot of images and we have ChatGPT for text generation. But it's very natural as a UI designer to think about whether we can have a tool that can use AI to generate UI design easily.

So it's actually to my surprise, there isn't a very complete product yet. Even as of now, I think the most complete product that I see out in the market is probably Framer. Recently they released their AI.

But when I tried out that it's more suitable only for landing page, the kind of basic layout. So to me, it's actually a very natural thing to think about what we can do to leverage AI's power to generate UI design. Well, thank you for sharing. And how early were you experimenting with ChatGPT? So you released this in April, but how early were you playing with ChatGPT already?

It's since GPT-3, I guess, because GPT-3 is really something that is good enough for us to have a very meaningful conversation. Yeah, it's a good enough model for us to experiment a lot of possibilities with it. So I think since the release of GPT-3, it's

It's already a hit on Twitter and all other platforms. Yeah, you catch on it pretty... I just want to add an information. You catch on it pretty fast because GPT-3 was only released in the middle of March. So it looks like you were experimenting and then immediately within a month you decided to build it.

a plugin. March 2022, sorry, corrections on that. So it was about slightly more than a year ago where it was released and you spent some time playing with it before you decided to actually build a plugin. Yes, 3.5 is actually really next big hit that I would say its level of intelligence really is another level comparing to GPT-3.

So I just feel very excited about it and it can code and it's also that it can definitely generate some content that can be easily processed by machine. So that's a great opportunity. Yeah.

So while you're preparing a demo, maybe let me just sort of like frame a few questions that maybe people have in mind. I want to kind of give Shenmue a chance to show off his work and his plugin as well. So Shenmue, are we ready to do like a quick demo by any chance? Anytime. So yeah, feel free to share your screen.

And for those of you who are listening over on our podcast or just listening in, I'll be describing as Chen Lu is kind of like doing some of his demo. So what you can do is on Figma, you can search for the plugin wireframe designer.

And then you can run it. So the current published version I did completed in April. So there is a very simple version that you can just type what you want to design and click on design and you'll generate the wireframe for that. So it's a very simple concept. Probably, you know, any of you can give an example of what you want to design, what you have in mind now. What would you say is a good use case? Like what is a good app?

Yeah, it's probably we should actually have one that is more for UI, but make Mona Lisa the second. Actually, I'm not sure what will happen if we type in that, but it's fine that if we can... Make Mona Lisa the second. Oh, interesting. Wow.

I can't actually wait. How is this? How would they even know? Yeah. So basically it will definitely generate some result, but based on the quality of input that you have,

It will be, it really depends. For example, this one, it does not make a lot of sense to me, but at least Gbt knows that, okay, Mona Lisa is a painting. Probably we should put a big image on top. And then we probably need some description reviews for that. And then probably you want to buy the image.

So that is his guess. So what the plugin does is really just to use, I didn't do any fine tune of the model. Probably that's a future thing that we can do. But basically it will just take whatever tri-GBT is response to this sentence and using UI components to generate a UI based on that.

I think it's actually really, really cool. And while you think about a second prom, I want to just describe this to people who are listening over audio. So basically, it is a one-screen wireframe of Mona Lisa II. There is no image.

But it assumes that someone is actually going to buy a painting of it. And because they're going to buy a painting, it allows for size selection and there are actually customer reviews. So you can actually add it to cart, which is actually pretty, pretty cool. The reviews are definitely relevant. Yes. Which is why I gave such a big wow just now, because I was surprised that they were able to generate relevant reviews.

Yeah, so if we want a more serious one, we can have... Let's do something around e-commerce. Yeah, so basically we can have a homepage for e-commerce or a fashion shop.

Yeah, so basically the content generation is not really on me on the plugin. It's really all whatever strategy returns fashion shop new arrivals, women, men, kids. Probably there are types that you can choose the categories.

featured products or brands. OK, it says there are three brands and then you can select some price range. Yeah, that's that's its response. I would say it's actually really cool. So actually for the same

same prompt. Let's see if it generates something different. Yeah, so every time it will generate a different, slightly different answer. And if you really adjust the temperature of the model, you can also adjust to see, you know, get a very wild answer or a very ordinary answer. That's cool. I mean, even with the same prompt, you see a totally different wireframe. Yeah. So for this one, okay, men, women, this time there is no kiss, but

but it's fine and it has trending now. There are three items, new arrivals, email. Yeah, I think that's probably important and customer review as well. Yeah, that's another answer. That's basically the idea of that. So I won't say that this, the design generated is perfect. Of course it's not, but it's very relevant and sometimes it's inspiring.

So we can really take some good ideas from it. Like when I'm designing something that I don't even have a reference because like, for example, from the backend, people enter very innovative app ideas that they can't even find a good reference in the market. That's the time when they can actually use this one and then see what's the result and take some ideas from it. I have a question.

Do you actually use this at work? No, but not for my own work, but for some other ideas generation, I will use it.

because it can really put up things very quickly for discussion. I would say if I just need a rough UI wireframe for a homepage, no matter what it is, I need something like this quickly, then it's very useful. But when we dive into the very details of design, there are a lot of complications that obviously the current AI can't solve. So in my actual work, I don't use this plugin.

But for example, if I want to design a side project by myself on an app that I don't know, like some crazy idea, then this would be very useful. Well, yeah. And I think people are getting excited. We're seeing a lot of different prompts, but we're not going to go into that. If you want to give it a try, please go sign up for a free... Probably we can have another one. Let's just have another one. Make what's in my fridge app. Yeah, this is a very good example of...

make what's in my fridge app something that you can't even find any reference out in the market but it will definitely give you some answer no matter good or bad and it's let's see what a bit it comes it's sometimes very interesting to look at what the result is okay it has a banner on top as well select ingredient and search recipes videos articles

recipes, popular ingredients. It assumes you're going to cook. So as you can see, there are a lot of similarities generated for those. So actually they are preset components. So what ChubbGPD does is just to populate the content inside.

So when I'm building these components, I try to make it as universal as possible, like the very common ones like product cards and then selections tabs so that it can be easily used in a lot of situations. But due to the limitation of the number of components and the fixed template that you have,

It does definitely, there are some repetitions and patterns that we can see, but I guess there's always room for improvement. So to me, adding component is definitely possible, but it's a very, to me, a tedious task.

and not so fun process. Right now it has eight components. If I have time, I can add to 400 components, but it just takes a lot of time out of me. So for me, what I'm really interested in just to explore the idea, okay, this is definitely possible. Yeah. So if we have

100 components, then the result generated can be very different every time and it's very inspiring every time. It just needs a lot of work. But for this demo, for this demo of the plugin, we'll just know that, okay, it's definitely possible.

Thank you so much for showing the demo and thank you for all your prompts. If you would like to try this for yourself, please sign up for a free Figma account, figma.com, and download the plugin Wireframe Designer by Chen Mu Wu, and you'll be able to see for yourself what it generates. So far, I think the results are very, very interesting and somewhat also surprising.

Yeah, so I think we can stop sharing. I actually wanted to share some more because recently I'm also, you know, by popular demand, I'm also... Oh, you have a beta version that you're working on development. So we get to see the preview. Yes, go on. I'm actually planning to publish it soon. So this one, the main improvement that we did is to add a desktop capability. So right now you see just now there isn't any... It's always mobile.

yes mobile and then i added the desktop components so and also the paid version i'm trying to get this project sustainable but uh that's cool for the free version uh you are already able to generate uh mobile or desktop design

And then there is a separate text field for you to enter the context. For example, what's in my fridge app. And then the actual design tasks a lot of times is not about the context. For example, what I want is a homepage with a homepage about recipes, for example. Or a homepage about...

shopping list. I'm not sure. Like anything. Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, so basically these are two different types of information. What's in my fridge app for teenagers? This is the background of the app.

but the design task is probably a home page about shopping list you can change the design tags for example like my my account page or different pages but the context is usually a fixed thing right and then you can generate the desktop design right now oh that this is something that actually i love that little gif that you created yeah i created the drift

And right now it is streaming the design so you can see how the design... It's literally like the design has been printed. Yes, yes. It generated component by component. So right now, okay, it says shopping list. You can add item or items, add items to shopping list. Okay. Sometimes I think it's a valid design. So...

Yeah. So basically we have added a homepage for grocery. I'm not sure like grocery store. Okay. Stock. Let's just. So basically all the content is generated by chat GPT, whether it's good or bad or you know, so I'm not controlling that yet. Yeah, that's it. So what it generates. Okay. My grocery store, you can search for items.

my stock you can clear or add item so each one you can clear or add and diary and chicken or anything and then shopping list you can clear and add and then there is your profile so it's making sense and it's uh doing I think a good job because it has you know

teenager, you see what the context is providing, you know, and also it's actually very relevant and then it can take some good inspirations from it. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for showing us a preview. And someone did ask like what would happen if there are very detailed prompts. I'm sure you will be able to find out if you give it a try later when Chen Mu releases the final version.

But thank you for showing a preview. Very impressive demo. I'm just wondering, since we're on this topic, right? It's generative AI. We see AI actually generating written content. We see AI generating images and photography.

Now we see AI generating wireframes. Are UX designers going to lose their jobs very soon? I think for UX, especially UX designers, I think it's not so effective. I think it will really empower UX designers.

And for UI designers, I would also feel that UI designers will be more focusing on design system. And then another part of the UI designers are probably going to be PMs. So basically, if we have a very complete design system, as demonstrated in the plugin, if we have a very good set of components, not only eight, but you know, like 100.

And then we have a very good content generation system that uses the design system. Then I think the work is more solving the problem itself, which most of the time product managers do. And for UI, if you only do UI, you will be very focusing on the generation of the components. That's what I feel.

Either way, we will always get a job and make our lives easier by using AI. For UI designers, I really feel that it's just a very helpful tool that can quickly incorporate some ideas we have in mind and then quickly generate

visualize our ideas. I think we will not lose job is just what we will do about it. Because AI is machine, in my opinion, the problem of generated AI in terms of product is that a lot of times we have a very strong will to control the product which AI won't provide.

We have such a strong will to control the product, control our business that the AI can't be accountable for. We have nobody to blame if we just use the AIS version. I think it's a reality. We need to let people to do it, to make it accountable for the result, to be able to implement our will to control what we want to have. So usually what AI can generate, even for me, Journey and ChatGPT,

is that it can generate an 80% good result to me. So for example, if I use ChatGPT for my email, I never copy the entire result into my email. I always have to make edit.

Probably you can say that that's not good enough yet. But I will say that it's because people are so willing to control the result that they have to do some modifications on top of even for image generation. If you don't know how to draw, actually, you can use mid journey to generate 80% good result.

But if you're a professional designer, you will know that the result generated is still not exactly what you want. So you must work on top of it. So basically, that's what I feel about the AI technology right now. It's always...

a very helpful tool for us to start with but eventually we still need to decide what the end result looks like. Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. So UX designers, your jobs are not at risk yet.

At least with the current AI technology. Yeah, when we are talking about the job as risk, I feel that it's not a good term to use. I feel even if UX researcher, we don't need UX researcher anymore. The problem, the thing we should think of right now is that if I use AI, what kind of contribution can I do for what we want to do? It's like another era.

when the industrial revolution comes, people think that, okay, workers will lose their jobs because machine will take over the works. But right now we are all good, right? Because

It's more about how you can do with the machines. It's actually creating much more needs and much more jobs. It's the same thing. I guess it's the same thing that will happen to AI. We are afraid that AI will take a lot of jobs, but actually AI is taking over a lot of jobs that is boring for us. And then we can focus on a lot more meaningful things.

Like we don't need to do repetitive work in the factory because machine take over the work. Now we don't have to do UX research.

we can think about our own business and let AI do the UX research in the future. Probably everyone can be an entrepreneur very easily and you can get UX research results very easily in the future. That's also possible, but probably not in the near future. Even if it's possible, even all the UX researchers are replaced by machine is also fine. Like we can focus on more interesting stuff, you know?

So that's my, yeah. Yeah. Timu, thank you for bringing that important distinction into the discussion because just like computers, people are thinking computers are going to replace a lot of our workers or software is going to replace a lot of our workers. But eventually we just learn to work with computers. Eventually we just learn to work with software.

So AI is like the next thing that we have to learn how to work with. And we have a participant over here who said she read somewhere that AI will not replace people's jobs. It will just replace people who refuse to learn to work with it. Agree, disagree? Yeah, for me, I completely agree. So we really should embrace it and to see what we can do with it. Don't

be afraid to try out and get our hands dirty on trying out whatever technology available. You are working on an AI plugin, you are experimenting with AI and you've been working in the design industry for a long time. So I'm just trying to understand from you, if you're hiring people right now, if you're hiring UX designers right now,

Do you have the expectation for them to be open to using AI? Or is there anything that you're looking out for as a hiring manager? Because you're a UX lead yourself. What are the attributes that you're looking out for for modern designers? I think having the interest for technology is definitely a plus. If you have experience in doing that, it's nice.

Definitely a plus, but I think especially for a designer being open-minded is very important. But in terms of work, actually, it's really about what kind of specialization we want. It is really paying attention to the details kind because different job scopes have very different, very distinctive requirements.

So for example, like UI designer, I really hope that we can have people that's really paying attention to the details. Because if UI designers are not doing it and nobody is doing it, like PMs can generate wireframes themselves. Our job is really to make it into the pixels, like all the icons align and then things are doing well. And then we can consolidate these into components that can be reused.

so that we can make our work more efficient. So that's really about UI, paying attention to details and consolidate components. But you know, for

UX researchers is really about finding problems, being able to generate a process for us to have the next step vision for the product, getting to know the users, what we should do next. The focus are very different, I would say, but something in common, for example, like being keen and sensitive and open for the new technology is definitely a plus. Yeah, also, I think...

Being able to make our work more efficient is also important. Whether it is using AI or creating a SOP or consolidated documents and sharings, I think

Whatever the tool is, making our work more efficient is a good point, I would say. Thank you so much for sharing that with our listeners. And I'm wondering, you know, how should designers prepare for the future? Now with technology, now with so much disruption, how should they prepare themselves?

themselves, whether they're interested in joining the industry or whether they're actually already in the industry, how should they prepare for the future where product development is actually going to be even more enabled by technology? Yeah, I think it's really we need to focus on the important things.

And there are skills that are timeless, which I feel that we should really focus on. You know, in terms of product thinking, this kind of timeless qualities and skills are really important. I think one of the listeners saying, you know, we got to remember that UX wasn't even a thing 10 years ago. And it's true. I work in education, right? So we actually teach people not just the hard skills, but also the soft skills and

and building products and designing products as well. So I'm just gonna list a few things and you can tell me whether they make sense. And actually these are so-called the timeless skills that you want. Number one is critical thinking. Would you consider that a timeless skill?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Okay. Number two is I would say something along the lines of like communication and stakeholder management. Yeah, that's super important for designers. I think designers are actually a communication role sometimes because we communicate using the design that we have. Because a lot of times PMs and business, they can't talk to each other.

before we put a design in front of them and they can appraise it or criticize it. It's a communication role as a designer. Number three, I would say facilitation skills, being able to get people in the room and facilitate something. Number four would be, I would say maybe to a certain degree, project management skills. I mean, it sounds really old fashioned, but being able to manage a project. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so there are definitely a lot of more, I think, as you progress in your career. I think not only soft skills, but even hard skills, like the things that we feel that, you know, it's very, can be replaced by machine to a certain extent. If your hard skills are good enough and you have good enough critical thinking, you will become the one who developing those tools.

like I did for the wireframe designers. For hard skills, if you go into a level, you will try to consolidate and summarize and having a set of rules by yourself so that people can reduce it.

And that is the very good, very meaningful thing about Haskell. So, for example, like designers, what actually I'm thinking, especially with the use of AI, what we are doing as a designer, exactly what we are doing. So basically we have a set of information like design requirements. What needs to be displayed on the page, right?

Then the next thing what we do is we structuralize this information, make it into good with good information hierarchy. With our product thinking, we think about what information is important, what is not, what we want the user to see first, then second.

So we make a good structure of the information. Then with our visual sense, with a good UI sense, we make it into a good looking interface. And that is only the interface level. We also think about interactions, motions, and also the entire user flow, not only one page, right? Okay, like this plugin. So GPT is very good at structure content.

you can generate very good structure. If you ask it anything, it will structure it like first, second, third. It will give you points, and then it will give you a structured answer. GPT is very good at this. And then what we do is taking this information

and using our visual skills to structure the content even more and making realizing them into good UI components. That is essentially the job of a designer. If you think about in first principle what we are doing, if we are a machine, our input is the information, our output is the flow. But what happens in between?

We structure the information, then we do the UI. And we absorb it. Yeah. So if you have very good hard skills, for example, how you structure the information hierarchy, right? And how you make this information into UIs. If you have a very solid methodology of your own, you can actually productize it and into a tool. That is really...

good level hard skill that I think is very important as well. Like this is timeless as well, that you can build things that automate by itself. I love your line of thought because I'm trying to maybe bring an analogy to it. It's like you are a craftsman, right? Maybe you built swords like in the past, right? And you know how to build the best sword.

But one day you decide that, you know what, I'm going to build the best tools to build the best sword. Yeah, yeah, that's it. You know all the details of how to build a good sword, then you are the best man to design the machine that builds the best sword. That's the thing that we should use with AI as well. It's an empowering tool for us to think about how we can do. So the hard skills are actually very important.

If you don't know the very details of how to build a sword, how to make it sharp, what's the process?

you can't build a good machine of building SWOT. That is true. Yeah, so I don't think we're going to get replaced anytime, but we do need to maybe go to a higher order of thinking to think about things at a system level, to think about the principles, to think about even like things at a component level and the building blocks so that we can actually empower ourselves and

And if possible, even empower others like what Chen Mu is doing right now with his plugin. This is really interesting. What can we expect for your future development phases? Now that we saw that you're going to try and monetize it, you have the desktop version of it coming out. What are you looking to do more with your plugin? For me, we have a lot of plans in mind, but to me it's already good enough.

to be honest so this is always a fun project for me so making it monetized is just a way for it to be self-sustainable because i'm right now paying for the api myself so i don't want to pay for that every month

I wanted someone probably you appreciate enough that can pay for the cost of the plugin so it can become self-sustainable. Because I think it's the thing about side project. At first, it's very fun. The idea is very scrappy, but it's very fun. And then to an extent, it will go into a stage of that is not so fun. You know, you are adding components and adding function requests coming from people.

If there isn't a very strong incentive, for example, the plugin made a lot of money, then probably I will consider investing more time on it. But the idea is the thing that fascinates me the most. Hopefully I have more incentives to work on it in the future. But the thing that I have in mind right now is that first,

it can definitely generate the entire flow instead of a single screen. So if you want an entire flow, for example, the entire purchase flow from homepage to product details to checkout and then payment, that's definitely possible that we just need GPT to generate multiple results. Something else is more fine tuning the model because right now I think GPT is already a good enough model.

But there is potential to fine tune it. For example, we can have a voting system after each result. So yeah, make Mona Lisa the second result we generate is like this. How do you think? Like it's five or ten, right? And then with the voting, we can actually fine tune the model and make it become better and better in UI design.

so like if you voted very bad then probably next time it won't generate this kind of in this direction so that's fine tuning and of course if i have time we can really incorporate a lot of components not only wireframe components but ui components with integration into design system for example you can choose

theme color, you can choose whatever UI styles you want. It's really depending on how many sets of components we have, right? The Framer AI that we have right now is only one set. But I think Adobe also have this recent feature called Shuffle Color that you can click to generate the color theme.

And then you can actually choose from whatever color theme that the AI generates that's suitable. So that's also definitely possible. In another direction, to the more personalized direction, right now there are a lot of existing design systems with a lot of components.

So with the right parameter input, we can actually integrate the AI into existing components. I'm not sure like material design. We can generate exact material themed design instead of using this wireframe component that I wrote and design for enterprise products. Yeah.

I think it's incredibly exciting. Please don't review all your ideas. And Adobe, if you're listening to this, you should definitely hire Chen Wu right here. I think it's going to give a big push to whatever you're building over there. I'm just curious. I'm going to ask it on behalf of some of the audience members. Writing a plugin requires you to learn how to code. How much coding knowledge did you need to have to get this up and running?

For Figma plugin, okay, so if you really want to do a Figma plugin, I think it's a more easier job than developing a full-fledged web app because Figma already have a good documentation, a good support, everything is very clear and up to date. So Figma is really amazing that the plugin API document is very well written.

and up to date. And I think developing Figma plugin is one of the easier thing that you can do with some basic coding knowledge for JavaScript and HTML. And you know, the front end stuff, you don't need to worry about backend. You can just do it with all pure front end knowledge.

So what I hear you say, it's actually quite easy if someone's willing to invest some time to learn about frontend and be able to pick it up quite quickly because of the amazing documentation. I think if you want to learn about frontend, probably it's still good to take a course. But if you already know a bit of frontend and you want to set up a basic Figma plugin,

you can just read the first chapter of the plugin document. Then you can have a drawing rectangle plugin set up already. At the end of the document, you should be able to set up a plugin that helps you to draw rectangles, which is very basic, but it helps you set up. And then there is ready-made templates that you can use. And there are a lot of code based on GitHub that you can just grab them.

So I think it's comparing to building a fully functional web app. I think my plugin is actually more simple. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that. And you know, the other thing I noticed when you were talking about your product and you seem really excited about it is that

all the different tangents you go to in terms of thinking about the product. And I'm just wondering, you know, how can designers refine or train their product thinking? Because I realize you're actually maybe one of the few designers I've met that actually have very, very interesting, I would say very, very in-depth product sense. Like, how did you train yours up?

I guess it has to be learned through work or the actual project that you do and get criticized by

good people, good teachers. Yeah, that's how we learn. We should not be afraid of being criticized and then take the feedback that we have. Basically, the product is for users if we are targeting and then whatever we think we need to should be aligned. And then we should also have the vision of what they want. And then I think most of the knowledge I learned through work on

actual products and get criticized by good people. And then we learn how to think. And then I think that's basically it. I don't read a lot. I read some very classic UX books, but most of the knowledge is actually learned from getting my hands dirty. And, you know, at the end of each project that we do, we really do some ritual.

to think about what we learned and what can be carried forward. Because, for example, a lot of people in their resume say, okay, 10 years of experience, right? And then 20 years of experience as a designer. But what does it mean? You can be 20 years and then doing icons, not saying doing icons is meaningless, but you can spend one year, but getting

very intensely criticized by very intense discussion and exercise on how you think about the product, realizing a product. So I think the actual knowledge that we have is really important for each project that we do. We really think about what we have learned, what we should do in the future or not. That's it.

Yeah, it sounds like a combination of really good feedback from really good people, right? Who are, well, most likely better than you. And the practice and the culture of actually constantly reflecting continuously and regularly, which is really great. I'm very heartened to hear about this because when we design our programs, especially for our four-month UX program, that's the way we teach our students as well.

So that's amazing. And you're a designer that is...

Doing a side hustle. Do you feel more positive if you see a candidate, someone apply for a job at your team or your company and you see they have a side hustle, right? They run a small business or they do some fun projects on the side or they do some volunteer work for a charity or something like that. Would you have a better impression of the candidate provided that their skills are competent? Yeah, sure, sure.

Sure. Because it's mutual. I think good hiring manager will understand that side hustles can actually always become the inspirations from work. And also work will also be the inspirations for our side hustles. So it's like very mutual contribution. Yeah, that's what I feel. Because, for example, for Figma plugins I did,

You can consider it as work because it's like making myself more efficient. Not only this plugin and also the other plugins that I did. And I also did some internal plugins for the companies I worked and I'm planning to do for Dara currently as well. So the knowledge I learned for work empowered me to, you know, work on top of it and do something on my own.

But while I'm doing, for example, wireframe designer, I start to think about what is the essence of design and what is the thing that we should focus on and how do we consolidate our experience and knowledge into a tool that can empower others. That is basically if you are a good designer enough, if you want to become a design leader and empower other designers,

What you need to do is really consolidate your knowledge and teach it to other designers. Making the plugin really makes me think about how can I do it? So it's very helpful for my work as well. Yeah, definitely. If your side hustle is from a pure hiring perspective, your side hustle is related to your work, it's definitely good. Even if it's not, I think it's also good. Also fine. Yeah.

Well, thank you for the encouragement. And I'm just wondering, you know, you working on this site hustle, you're also like volunteering for this session to share your knowledge and your experience. Is there anything you're looking for? Like, are you looking for volunteers to test your app? Are you looking for people to fund your product roadmap? Or are you looking to, you know, connect with certain types of people? Is there anything that you're on the lookout for?

Right now, actually, I'm about to publish this new version of plugin very soon. So I'm looking for users. So basically, please follow me on LinkedIn. And when I post it, please give it a show your support. It's really very meaningful to me.

And then I'm planning to launch in Product Hunt as well. So don't hesitate to give a comment and give up for it if you really enjoy the plugin. So basically, that's it. I'm always willing to share the knowledge and my thoughts to other people because that's very helpful for me myself as well. Yeah. If you ask about what I'm looking for this session is really, you know,

Please keep in tune, follow me on LinkedIn and then try it out, try the plugin out.

So, ladies and gentlemen, Chenmue Wu from Daras, UX and UI lead of Daras. Feel free to find him on LinkedIn, connect with him, and he is going to release it on Product Hunt as well as the next version of his plugin. So do give your support, whether it's monetary or whether it's just typing a nice comment, because so many people have

A lot of critical things to say. I remember when I was reading your first post, when you first published the plugin, I was like, why are people saying such nasty things about your plugin? This is just a demo. So...

But they are very good discussions. I like their comments as well. Exactly. So I think it would benefit the discussion. It would definitely help Chum's work if you all give your honest feedback and also add meaningful contribution to it and test it. Like good users, give him some feedback as well.

so that he can further improve it and help more designers be able to ideate nice wireframes when they are doing their design process. Any parting advice for designers to prepare for the future or in general? Okay, I think the audience are all... It's a mix. Some are designers, some are non-designers. But they are all from different parts of the world.

Yeah, I hope that more designers are more willing to share your work. I think that's the most important thing. Share your work and get feedback. I think there's this book called Show Your Work, right? That's very important. Show your work and get feedback, no matter how scrappy the idea is or how not confident you are.

and being willing to get good and bad feedback from others because that's how we learn. Yeah, I think that's it.

I think that's very inspiring advice and show your work designers and don't be afraid to iterate from your very initial versions, even if you're a little embarrassed about it. And with that, I would like to end the live session. Thank you everyone for attending and we shall see you again in our next episode and next session, working in UX design. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you. Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.