Notes

Acknowledgement
I would like to give a special thanks to my work supervisor, Lowene S K Chan, who gives a lot of opportunities for me to learn and grow with her precise, comprehensive and supportive comments and guidelines.

Objectives of Placement
To gain a year-long working experience as a "Full-time" worker in HSBC, so as to get an overall picture of the feelings to work in such a large multinational enterprise in the IT related aspect. Moreover, I wish to find the answer whether I am really interested and prospected in the IT field which would definitely provide more insights for me to choose my future career path. Last, I want to know more about myself, especially about my strengths and weaknesses in the workplace so as to improve myself as a more valuable employee to the company.

Description of the company
I am working in one of the biggest bank in the world - HSBC. And of course, as a bank in the financial sector, HSBC's objective will be earning more money by launch more services and applications which provides accessibility and benefits to its global customers. Moreover, HSBC is now trying to make itself as a world-local bank, which means being a local bank all over the world.
For the company structure, it is complicated because of HSBC's huge company scale and thus there are many different kinds of departments and teams working closely.

Description of the department
The department that I am working in is called Software Delivery (SWD). And within SWD, there are other sub-departments such as Global Channels, Regional Channels, Global Information Services, Deployment and more. All departments in SWD just work for the objective to delivery software in different aspects. For example, we have the Business Analyst (BA) team to collect business requirements. Then we visualize these requirements by User-Centered Design (UCD) team. Then we will pass the designs to the development teams and deployment team to launch the software at the latest stage. Therefore, we all have good relationships with other teams in the department.

Assignments
I am working in the UCD team. UCD is a design team which responsible in design issues such as designing the websites interfaces, mobile apps interfaces, every buttons' size and shape or font color on the screen, the navigation among the user journeys and so on.
Moreover, we are also focused on how to optimize the user experience. For example, the mobile screen size is much smaller than that of a computer, therefore, we are responsible in designing and improving the apps interfaces by minimizing the steps to complete user stories.

There are 7 members in UCD in Hong Kong, and we all work closely with the other 6 members in Guangzhou. We have regular meetings every week to share our current works and thoughts.

Apart from the main design works stated above, we are also in a good relationship with another department in UK, called DCE, who is responsible to approve our designs. So, we have regular meeting with DCE every week so as to collect their comments and feedback to improve our designs and get their approval to adopt the designs. Even, when the deadline approaches, we will have call every day to discuss the designs for the projects.

And personally, my works are 1) collect and discuss requirements with BA, 2) Design interfaces with optimized user experience 3) Discuss with teammates about the designs (peer evaluations) 4) Show improved designs to DCE until approval obtained 5) Explain the designs to the businesses 6) Describe all details of the designs to developers and provide support 7) check the develop processes and find out any defects occurred 8) Manage all the devices in UCD Room and UCD Lab 9) Manage UCD Lab 10) Team support 11) Provide screen changes design for other colleagues' projects

Indeed, I found it is quite satisfactory to work in UCD. UCD provides a lot of training opportunities for me to practice my oral English since we have many kinds of meetings with different cultures of colleagues. And also, design work is quite interesting to me that I have to think thoroughly for every user stories before I can optimize them. Therefore, it helps me to think more comprehensively and carefully. Meanwhile, I feel proud when new ideas came into my mind and got appreciated when showing the new designs. And for the achievement in my work in HSBC, I believe that my designs are being used in the real HSBC apps interface is the greatest achievement for me. (The current HSBC mobile and tablet apps are using my designs, of course not all of them, but a significant part of the designs) Therefore, I am so enjoy my work that my current objective is to perform better in order to grab the return offer.