For Jing, her journey from a designer to a full-stack developer, then to an entrepreneur, is similar to the 0 to 1 experience.
One year after she graduated Le Wagon in China, we had a chat with Jing.
Could you please introduce yourself?
I am UI designer who knows how to code. Now I am running my own WeChat Official account "UIrush" and publish original content and tutorials on programming, design, and entrepreneurship.
What were you doing before joining Le Wagon and what motivates you to join?
When I graduated from RMIT in 2014, I started a business with my buddies. At the time I attended the camp at Le Wagon, I was the art director of
Hey Shop. From my experience, when you have reached a certain level in design, you will hope to make a bigger breakthrough and want to develop your own design. And that’s why I decided to join the coding bootcamp at Le Wagon.
What’s your Le Wagon experience like?
Attending the bootcamp was a turning point in my recent career life. It gave me a chance to systematically learn how to code. Though there were some difficulties at the beginning, I became fascinated with programming very soon. Actually, I have always been exposed to programming and I also tried learning on my own. At first, I taught myself how to use Adobe Dreamweaver, then I used Wordpress to build a website and later I could write some static websites. However, these skills were far from enough to develop a real product.
What inspirations have you gained from the camp?
I have been very grateful for my Le Wagon experience because it toughened me up. I felt that I met a bottleneck in the field of design because I was involved in almost every part of the product design process, except for technical development. The technical development part is like a frosted glass door that blocks me out: I was really close to it and I vaguely knew what is inside, but I could not see it clearly. In order to move on, I have to break this door.
Could you share one thing that impressed you the most during the camp?
During the last two weeks of the bootcamp, I developed Wedtale, a tool for generating electronic wedding invitations online, along with two other members of the team. I want to thank them for joining my team and completing the project. The process of developing this product was very fun!
In fact, before starting Hey Shop, we produced an H5 tool called the Music Box. The Music Box is an H5 tool that can generate invitations for events, stories for friends and idols, promotions for businesses. Essentially, we want to include all possible scenarios for making H5 pages because we believed that it’s the only way to appeal to the capital market. However, in practice, we found our product is mostly used in wedding scenes and the newly-married couples have the greatest willingness to pay for our product. We gained this industry insight, but we are not decisively enough to focus on this area.
By that time, it was too late for us to continue trial and error. So to avoid going broke, we immediately change our core product to SaaS products, which is the idea of Hey Shop. The development process for Hey Shop was quite smooth since we have grown a lot in the process of creating the Music Box.
Despite that, I always wanted to recreate the “Music Box”, which I believe is a good product that can survive in the market without the interferences from capital and others. So I brought up this idea when we were deciding the final project for the Le Wagon bootcamp. We reorganized the development process for the product, redesigned the visuals, and made a dedicated online wedding invitation generator tool.
There were three members on our team for the Le Wagon final project. Each of us had different focus areas: I am good at design and front-end, one team member is good at the back-end, and another team member has interest in all areas.
Therefore, in order to expand our skill sets, I deliberately choose to write the procedures for the back-end while my back-end buddy wrote the style for front-end, and our third team member worked on whatever part needed. We had a really good time working as a team, giving each other feedback and support.
What’s your transition out of Le Wagon look like?
First, I wrote a website that combines resources in web development, design, and operations called uirush.com and attracted many traffic and WeChat followers. Furthermore, now I can get outsourced tasks that include both design and technical development. This allows me to have a much greater economic reward compared to doing solely design, which is usually compensated for only 10% of the whole project outsourcing fee.
UI Design, Development Resources, Tutorials
Now I am considering starting my own business again because I have the skill set to complete the planning, designing, and development of the product. Meanwhile, I plan to give some online and offline open classes and share experiences in design and coding. I believe this is a meaningful work.
