Episode 05: How Curiosity Drives Successful User Design
Curious rebels harness the power of curiosity in the way they think, to being who they are and driving what they do. They are the ones who rethink the status quo and are likely to have chosen unconventional paths, than follow the one laid out for them.
And today’s guest, Leonard Reese, is someone who has done just that.
After college, Leonard moved to East Africa to teach computer literacy to adults in rural Zanzibar. He continued to travel for the next several years, as he freelance nomadically. After attending grad school, Leonard lived in Brooklyn where he become an active organizer in the design and tech community. He started the Brooklyn Product Design group, which has since grown to over 4,000 members in the community. Last year, he moved to Singapore for work and has since sparked a similar tribe here in the Singapore Product Design group. His passion for building and organising design community, design writing and educating is evident. He loves interacting and collaborating with other designers and engineers, especially coaching and mentoring the young designers starting out in the industry.
As a Design Lead/Consultant in his day job, he also engages with key business stakeholders regularly to connect design requirements to commercial needs. We spoke about why businesses need to get more curious about their users, their challenges and how a carefully designed UX or customer experience makes all the difference for success.
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This episode:
How he became comfortable being a foreigner in most cultures, leaning in his own curiosity towards people and new norms
How good design is about changing “hearts and minds” to blend with business metrics - instead of being only the "visual" elements of colours and fonts
When projects go wrong - the complacency of thinking you know what's best for the users, instead of co-designing or creating participatory processes to get the actual experience right
How he copes with the difficulties of curiosity, especially when the learning curve is steep or contradicts what you already know
Why his personal mission is ‘to improve design quality in the world, to always do what is right by the user, and to lead others to do the same’
His ways of not blindly following hierarchy or bureaucracy and his own definition of what a curious rebel is
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You can find Leonard Reese on:
Website - https://leonardreese.squarespace.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-reese/
Singapore Product Design group - https://www.meetup.com/singapore-product-design/
Listen to the episode here: