WHO AM I

My understanding when I got assigned at first was just to be a general facilitator that helps the participants when they got confused to accomplish the tasks they should do. I guess I was too naive. I didn't think further that my position there was as the IT vendor of the client too. I didn't expect that we could also encounter technical problems, like the website failed to load the data. The situation got even worse since I was there alone. My manager handled the other room.

It has been one year now after graduation that I am no longer coding something—or basically become the "IT person". I have decided to dive deeper into the role of UI/UX design instead. I am no longer opening VS Code or Google Colab as my must-open app, but Figma. Now, I focus more on designing how the app will look like: selecting the colors, ensuring UI elements concistency, developing design system, etc.

It's true that I have ever learned about database, cloud services, quality assurance, and machine learning. But since I don't get involved to handle those topics on daily basis now, I'm no longer can relate to them as I used to. So when I got faced to that issue and the participant demanded quick explanation immediately, while to get the response from my team can't be that fast (since they supported remotely from other city while also catching for the target next week), I couldn't help but just said anything that came to my mind, to at least let them feel answered. To let them felt that this IT representative knew what happened and felt somehow assured that the source problem was detected, so that they could explain it to all participants.

Unfortunately, my answer was not correct. When the data got failed to load, I asked my team the reason. I checked through the browser inspect element but forgot that it was still displayed through the projector and all participants could witness that an error had occurred. Then my team answered through group chat that the server is not strong enough. I directly tell the speaker about that and she said "Oh no, so what we can do about it?" I didn't know what to say. So, I made up an answer based on my common sense, "The IT team should study it first, maybe we can handle it by upscaling the server capacity. Ah iya, right now, this web is also get accessed by the training session in other region. Maybe that can also contribute to this issue."

Not long after that, I read again the answer from my team. Then I realized that my explanation was not correct. Error 504 means that the web servers aren't communicating with each other fast enough. The server specification maybe not enough to handle such huge amount of data processing so that it reached the time out limit and can't display it to the end user.

After that, I explained it again to the speaker. Then, the speaker explained to all participants that at that time, the reporting feature was unable to load because it was also got accessed by other region training. Now I realized, that this explanation could give negative perception towards the reliability of the system. With only two regions operating it but the system could not handle it? Hmm...

I reflected to myself a lot. I shouldn't have said that. I should have just kept calm and think of a more safe and assuring answer, yet explainable enough to let the participants understand what happened and still have the trust to use the system. My answer might not be 100% wrong. However, it's not right too.

But, that's the reality of working at a software house. Attending training session gives a designer the opportunity to meet the users directly and see how they use it. However, as my presence there was as the IT Team representative, I felt that the participants expected me to understand and give explanation for technical troubles they encountered. This one aspect is that I acknowledge I am still very lacking of.

That's why, now I'm committed to not only improving my skill on UX, digital product design, and human-computer interaction, but also the wide topics of IT. Maybe I can start by enrolling on Coursera classes, like cloud services, IT Support, data engineering, database management, AI, blockchain, etc. Not to become an expert, but to have enough knowledge to connect the dots and give an explainable answer on conditions when I need to. I hope that way I could grow better as a professional in a project-based IT industry. Bismillah 🤲🏻✨