Design Strategist. A wild duck who always fly high.
Hi there! My name is Julia, and I am a design strategist who draws.
My Story
I grew up in Hong Kong, a very international city where you can find Eastern and Western culture melted from both sides, especially food. I spent most of my time in my childhood studying hard under our famous cramming education. Memorizing all the book content and scoring high in examinations are the common goal for Hong Kong students.
Yet besides studies, I was fortunate to explore the arts of ancient Chinese literature, ballet, and music, where I play piano and percussion in my leisure time.
All…
Get rid of obsolete photos and files. Keep your device light.
Check your phone now. How many photos you currently have on it? Then — how many of them would you like to bring along with your life?
Like many others, I keep loads of photos on my mobile. Thanks to the generous phone storage, I never need to declutter my mess and so used to allow my photo album to grow infinitely.
Until one day, my phone alerted me about hitting the repository’s maximum. I had no choice but to transfer all the photos to the external hard disk.
Ironic as it may seem, while I was looking through my…
It is way more than a checklist item in the Design Thinking approach
Persona is an essential tool when Design Thinking becomes a rock star in the business world. As Interaction Design Foundation introduced, “Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.” By visualizing each user group’s summary based on the insights derived from research synthesis, the team emphasizes the users’ needs and wants, thus developing something meaningful for them. …
Should it really be the ultimate pursuit in life?
Eight years ago, I started working as a consultant in the technology industry. In my first week, some of my colleagues were saying that “Forget about work-life balance. In here, we do work-life integration.” I freaked out when I heard this for the first time. It felt like I needed to devote my entire life to a company, a project, or a client. I thought I would no longer have the weekend, spending quality time with the people I love, and be able to actually live a life.
After working for a while, I realize that “work-life integration” does not…
11 solutions to bring your iPhone up to speed again
After using my iPhone for 3 years, I notice that it is a lot slower and takes time to load up. Below are 11 resolutions from my research:
My device:
iPhone 7
Version: iOS 14.4.1
# 1 — Restart your iPhone
Like all the other gadgets, this is always the first step.
# 2 — Clear iPhone RAM
iPhone is slow sometimes because it does not have enough RAM to store everything. As such, from time to time, we need to help release it.
If you have a Home button on your iPhone:
- Press and hold the power button until the “slide to power off” option is displayed
- Press and hold the…
Abandoning books is not a crime but may do more good for you
I want to confess here to all the books that I purchased but failed to finish. Books are an art piece on their own since authors put so much effort into them. It is a pity that some of them did not spark joy in me, but I am sure there are other people outside who would find the books inspiring.
Have you ever purchased the book that people highly recommend or the one from the top-selling? You brought it home and started reading it, but you paused after a few pages. …
Apply this strategy when you cannot do random grouping or pre-assign participants into the groups.
Running remote sessions is never a piece of cake and requires much more preparation, especially on technical set-up. In best cases scenario, if you have your participants’ Zoom accounts in hand, you can refer to this guide to pre-assign them into the breakout room before the sessions, then remind everyone to log in with the same email address for the identification.
However, in some scenarios, you might not have your participants’ Zoom accounts. This situation would leave you no other choice but to group people on the spot when people dial-in.
Below I summarised the potentials approach to quickly map…
Try not to bite more than you can chew.
I want to talk about one of the foundations of human — we are all greedy. Time and money — we always want more. I used to fail in the pitfall while running workshops that we included too many exercises and kept pushing the discussion forward just to finish everything on the agenda.
Weird as it may seem, a workshop with a packed schedule may lead to a sense of achievement as if we finish the marathon after a long run. Within 8 hours, we can talk about the past, the now, and the future; We can cover topics in…
To fully unleash the potentials of Design Thinking, we need to acknowledge both edges of the knife.
Earlier last week, I was talking about Design Thinking as a guest speaker in a university course. Of course, it was always pleasant to be the first one to introduce this powerful way of thinking to people. And I am particularly delighted to provoke students’ thinking on building a human-centric product, rather than charming by the cutting-edge technology by itself. At the end of the session, one student asked a question that got me thinking —
“What are the flaws of Design Thinking”?
Ever since I became a Design Thinking coach, I advocate the importance of bringing human sentiment into…
I am stronger, tougher, and a lot happier.
When I was a kid, I loved shopping and collecting all kinds of things, like shells, stones, coins, and stamps. Therefore, my room was always packed with a lot of random objects that I found.
Toys caused a big clutter in my place, too, as my dad brought me to the toy store from time to time and allowed me to choose any toys that were within a budget. I was always excited and ran around to hunt. Sometimes, I could easily pick the new toys that excited me and leave the shop in 10 minutes. …
Julia Tsoi
Design Strategist in Tech | Ex-IBMer | Apple Developer Academy Alumni. Bird without legs and I would always fly high. https://juliatsoi.com/
