Tech in Asia redesigned with you in mind

This article was co-authored by Ian Tan and Celine Wong.

At Tech in Asia, our product team is always hard at work, constantly iterating to best serve our users. For the past nine months, we’ve been working double time to revamp our entire range of products – something that we hinted at a couple of times – and we’re finally ready to take the wrappers off our ground-up overhaul.

Motivation

Tech in Asia started off as a news blog centred around Asia’s then-fledgling startup and tech communities. Those communities have now become well-oiled hubs of innovation, and we’ve worked hard to keep pace. Since then, Tech in Asia has grown into a one-stop shop that provides the information, career opportunities, and networking demands of our communities. But at heart, Tech in Asia is not about jobs, news, or events: Our raison d’etre is – in a word – community.

Research

We spent months speaking and listening to our users and stakeholders, conducting user surveys and interviews, as well as dogfooding our products and running usability tests. We painstakingly gathered qualitative and quantitative data to identify and prioritize a list of problems related to our old design.

Problems

Over the years, our products have come into their own and outgrown our old design. Our information architecture became clunky and limiting as new features were added, making it tedious for users to navigate and scan for information. Think of it as like three kids who’ve gotten too big for their triple-decker beds, clamoring for space. We needed to restructure our site to give our products enough room to develop individually while driving synergy among them. A cohesive, clutter-free user experience was necessary.

Aside from that, improvements to features within individual products were long overdue. In media, for example, our database of community-contributed content has been thriving, but our content-creation tools left much to be desired. While in jobs, our employers dashboard remained useful, but it was fragmented and tedious to navigate.

Based on these insights, we made the tough decision to divert almost all available manpower in our product team to this revamp. Each of our products may be working well, but we’ve always believed that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Prototyping

Using data from our research, we went back to the drawing board and brainstormed as a team, designing and discarding countless sketches. The ones that survived were crafted into working prototypes to test, iterate, and validate.

Validating

We ran multiple rounds of usability tests with different permutations of user flows between products. After many iterations, we were able to confidently validate our solutions for the problems we set out to solve.

During the validation process, we learned that by restructuring the navigation, it eliminated unnecessary items from the navigation bar, providing a distraction-free environment for users to complete their tasks more efficiently.

Challenges

By essentially recreating all our assets – from our web apps to our mobile clients – we faced numerous design, product, and engineering challenges. What do our users really need? Could we realistically implement design solutions that cater to those needs?

Because our products have scaled up significantly, we decided to move our entire frontend to TypeScript, a statically typed variant of JavaScript that has greatly improved developer productivity and iteration speed.

We’ve also whittled down product and decision-making processes, digging deep into all available data to avoid wasting resources as we embarked on our somewhat Herculean task.

A True Community

We’ve taken great pains and put extra emphasis on this overarching goal of community. Media, jobs, and events now blend seamlessly together across our various apps, and we’ve seen to it that moving between each segment is as frictionless as possible.

We’ve also launched a custom-built community editor, which should not only boost community participation but also make it a pleasure for members to share their knowledge and expertise.

Looking Forward

While it’s been a grueling time for our product squad, rest assured that we’re not going to stop here.

Our redesign was not designed to be perfect, but to be perfected. During our research, we have identified flaws and more friction points in our products that we’re excited to tackle after this release. We hope you’ll be on this journey with us and let us how we can serve you better.

Our refreshed mobile apps are now available: