Design x Felicia Wang
Product Designer at Okta
Illustration by Casey Magnuson
Interview conducted by Sarah Thompson on July 24, 2020
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Felicia Wang, and I’m a product designer at Okta in San Francisco. I grew up in Orange County, Southern California, and lived there my whole life until I moved away for college at Carnegie Mellon in Pennsylvania. After college, I spent a year in DC working at Capital One as a product designer. Finally, I moved back to California and started working at Okta.
Tell us about your journey to becoming a designer.
There wasn’t much of an “aha” moment for me. Several factors contributed to my decision to pursue design. The main thing was that I am a type-A person. The historical breakdown is as follows.
In high school, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be. I remember I had an art project in eighth grade that involved architecture. I just went all out with the assignment and sort of took it off the rails. That is when I realized that I liked architecture and design and thought about pursuing architecture. All throughout high school, I wanted to be an architect. During my junior year of high school, my mom took me on a college tour at some top architecture schools. It’s funny, I could feel she had a hunch I wouldn’t go for it. Well, she was correct! Becoming an architect is time-consuming. To become licensed, you have to do a minimum of five years in school, work as a junior architect (under firm partners), and take a certification test. I was too impatient and wanted to start working straight out of college.
I was also influenced by the fact that I was a varsity swimmer in high school and competitive swimming was something that had been a big part of my life. I wanted to swim in college, but I would be conflicted if I wanted to swim and be an architecture student. I decided that I wasn’t willing to let go of the swimming, so that was that.
I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do by my junior year of high school but decided to apply to CMU as a business major since it is both flexible and is something I can apply to any profession. The whole time I was applying to business school, I had my eye on the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) program, which could only be picked up as a secondary major at CMU, meaning you had to apply and be accepted into a main program before picking up HCI. Being the type-A person I am, and the fact that CMU is not the school to go to if you don’t know what you want to major in, I was worried this was a considerable risk. The entire point of me going to CMU for business was to have a relatively light workload so that I could focus on HCI. That was mainly the goal. I think I applied freshman year, didn’t get in, freaked out, then applied again, and was accepted my sophomore year.
During my time in college, I was trying to figure out where I fit in because HCI doesn’t fit into any one bucket and incorporates so many things. It’s computer science, it’s design, it’s psychology, and it’s problem-solving. That’s really what drew me to HCI in the first place. Initially, I don’t know if I thought that I would be a designer right away. But it became quickly apparent that product design was what I wanted to do.
Could you just briefly explain what HCI is for people that don’t know what it is?
As a discipline, HCI is not very old—it’s been around since the 1980s—the founders of HCI are still very much alive. Bonnie John is one of the founding leaders in the field. She was instrumental in starting up the HCI program at Carnegie Mellon actually. She also ended up being one of my mentors in graduate school at the University of California.
Bonnie defines HCI as being the study of the way people think and feel while using computers. The goal of this study is to make computers easier and more pleasurable to use. Her definition is a bit retro in that it was coined back when computers were still new to many people. The core of that definition hasn’t changed much, but how people interact with technology now is just so much more ubiquitous than what it was back then.
Another good definition of HCI is that it’s a study that tries to enable humans to expand the impact of our inventions. The definition of HCI is ever-evolving, as is the field of design.
“The definition of HCI is ever-evolving, as is the field of design.”
Design casts a wide net and incorporates a magnitude of subtopics. It is common for people to mix up what it means to be a product manager or product designer, a UX researcher or UX designer, and a UI designer or graphic designer.
Do you think that HCI has that same flexibility to it as well, meaning you can take HCI education and apply it to a plethora of jobs?
Yeah, you definitely can! It is a multidisciplinary field, and studying HCI doesn’t necessarily mean that you will become a UX designer or researcher. I know many people who studied HCI in addition to majoring in information systems or computer science, and they went on to be software engineers. It is a gateway to a multitude of professions. For researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers alike, having an HCI education is beneficial.
Additionally, with an HCI mindset, these professionals are more likely to be aware of what and how their decisions impact; people, society, and cultures. It’s essential to think like that, and approach everything as if you’re making technology that applies to A lot of different people. Ultimately, everything you make will result in people using or experiencing it.
Why did you decide to complete a master’s in HCI?
It wasn’t much of a decision process. It was purely curiosity for me. Literally the last two months of undergrad, I thought, “Why not?” I chose UC Irvine because I saw they had a new master’s program in HCI and design, which I had never seen before. The program was only a year-long, was remote and part-time, so I was able to keep working.
What did you gain from your master’s program? Did you learn anything new from it?
I’ll be honest; I don’t think I did learn any new technical skills. That’s not to say that I didn’t learn new applications of those skills. There is a difference between learning a skill and having actual experiences to apply those skills. Our capstone project was a perfect learning opportunity because it was more applied, and I saw a new framework for researching. I was able to exercise my project management skills working with the research team.
The HCI program’s biggest value is that it gives you access to many different people in the field. They have a really strong network, some of which are very influential people, like Bonnie John. Even though we had CMU in common, I would not have met her had I not taken the master’s program. It’s interesting to me because people like Bonnie give you perspective on HCI. Even if something you’ve worked on is not immediately actionable, it gives you a broader perspective on how technology is evolving and how quickly it’s changing the way we do things. As a society, we are continually adapting to new normals.
“As a society, we are continually adapting to new normals.”
In my freshman year in college, I had to take a bus to the airport. By the time I was in my sophomore year, I could call an Uber from my phone instead, something we all consider normal now. Or, like the fact that people wouldn’t think about sleeping in a rando’s house a few years ago, but now with Airbnb, it’s normal. Everyday life is evolving very quickly, and the way people think about technology is changing along with it.
What is your day-to-day like, working at Okta as a product designer?
Most days, I’m in lots of meetings.
Pre-pandemic, Thursdays were work from home days and were known to be technical days for engineers and designers. No meetings are scheduled for Thursdays, so that’s the day of the week I get work done. Perhaps it’ll be more helpful if I talk about feature development cycles. These are scheduled by my product manager, who lets me know when we have a new feature initiative. My job is to understand and adopt the product goals. PMs need to approach designers with ideas. When my PM tells me, “I want to do this,” the development cycle begins. The first thing I ask is, “What’s the timeline?” My PM will say, “I want a beta launch by this day, with these features.” My response will be, “What are your priorities? What are some of the usability goals?”
The main question for any project I am working on is, “Why is this important enough to need research?” There are mainly two buckets that research falls into: upfront research like interviews and exploratory analysis or more back-end stuff like user testing. Designers have to decide which ones to use (depending on time). Evaluating if you need to do research is a major decision point in a project. When we do need it, Okta has a dedicated UX research team.
“Evaluating if you need to do research is a major decision point in a project.”
All projects function on somewhat of an assembly line. My PM tells me what the product goals are, and I evaluate if research is needed. If it is, I ask the research team to do it. Once they come back to me, I design accordingly and finally pass the design over to the engineers.
Ideally, my PM tells me well in advance about a feature that needs to be shipped. Researchers need plenty of time to do their work, designers need time to design, and engineers need time to develop. It’s always good to be a little ahead of your engineers, so you have something to give them once they finish their current project.
The research tends to take some time. Researchers can be backlogged, and take a month or two to get back to me. I’ll put in a request and say, “I need research about this.” They’ll be like, “Okay, cool,” and book an exploratory meeting with my PM and me a month out to talk about goals. Then they’ll design the study, run it, and give us an analysis of what they found, or some design recommendations. Our research team is amazing. They’re an incredibly well-oiled machine.
From the research process, we move into making mock-ups and go through four, five, sometimes six rounds of iteration before starting to review with engineering. From there, engineers will tell you what is possible in a specific time frame or what is not possible, and then you start cutting scope. So they start building it, and as the design team, we support them. It’s very important to support the engineering team enough so that they understand what they need to build. The designer gives the final sign-off to make sure things look good.
At this point, you may or may not be doing user testing with your wireframes. It could be conceptual user testing, that’s low fidelity, or could be high fidelity, where you’re just adjusting little things and or just testing before beta. You don’t make any changes before beta, you launch it and work on the next iteration. There are many different ways to slice it, but that’s typically what you’re looking at. Finally, you ship the product and get a lot of feedback.
Rapid Fire Questions:
What is your favorite thing to do in your free time right now?
Think about skiing, play a lot of Pokémon, drink wine, and bake.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast at the moment?
One of my favorite books growing up was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s an old book from the 1940s. The author Betty Smith has a great way of writing this sweet story.
I recently read a book called Over the Edge which is a very different genre. It’s about Tommy Caldwell, a professional big wall rock-climber. Caldwell went to Kyrgyzstan with three other American climbers back in the 2000s, and they were taken hostage for six or seven days.
What or who inspires you?
Disney Imagineering has always been fascinating to me. I wanted to be a Disney Imagineer as a kid. It still resonates with me because that profession is multidisciplinary, and I identify as a multifaceted person.
Higher education is becoming more multidisciplinary and is disrupting the social norms of forcing professional people into these rigid boxes. Imagineering is just like that; you’re paid to build and try new technology as an Imagineer. I think it’s so cool.
There is a new documentary series on Disney+ called The Imagineering Story, which I also recommend watching. It is inspiring to see what is possible with technology and entertainment.
If you could live anywhere, where would that be? And why?
I love the mountains of California, so I would say Tahoe for skiing. I’m a nature girl, and Tahoe is a small town, just secluded enough, and not a ton of people. I could also see myself living happily in the backwoods too. Complete loner-ism.
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Pragmatic, straightforward, type-A personality.
