The brief

It was time to update our websites, and we wanted to bring out the personality and character of our brands. What better way to tell our brand story than with bespoke illustrations?

We wanted our brand to be likable, warm, and welcoming — after all, our apps touch people directly every day. Millions of ecommerce shoppers use ReferralCandy, thousands of in-store customers check in on CandyBar, not to mention the people working in the businesses using our apps.

We decided we wanted a library of bespoke illustrations for our brand. The right images can tell a story better than a thousand words, and help merchants and retailers get to know our brand better.

The pitch

We began by putting together a get-to-know-us document, explaining our business model, the target audience, and some examples of illustration styles we liked. We also needed to make sure the illustrations had the right flavor for ReferralCandy and CandyBar: not too serious, slightly slapstick, and deliciously fun.

And we found someone who hit the sweet spot — Mathew Wong of Hyperfolk Studios. Mathew was great at communicating his ideas and offered us plenty of unique concepts. What we gravitated towards most of all was his willingness to collaborate.

Mathew kept us regularly updated by asking plenty of questions and providing fast feedback, which was perfect for our remote working style. That gave us the confidence that we would brainstorm together, and build a long-term partnership.

The process

For the second half of this article, we asked Mathew to share a little more about his creative process in a mini-interview. Take it away, Mathew!

Q: Hey Mathew! Tell us a bit more about yourself and Hyperfolk studio.

A: I’m Mathew Wong, an independent illustrator and visual designer. My background is in web and user interface design. I’m originally from the Philippines, but I have been living and working here in Singapore for the last 10 years.

Hyperfolk Studio started in July 2019. It’s a pretty lean operation. It’s just basically me and my wife. I do design work and execution, while she’s in charge of strategy and comms.

We wanted to focus our efforts to do more illustration and visual design work and explore what we could do in that space. We wanted to target SMEs, start-ups, and budding businesses, and help these folks out by offering our design services to them.

Q: How do you go from brief to concept to final illustration?

A: As with all projects, I think the very first step is really to understand the brief and to know the client that you’re working with. For ReferralCandy and CandyBar, the project brief was pretty simple, however, I still had to research what the product was and what it aimed to achieve.

Once I have a clear understanding of the brief and the product goals, I’ll start mind mapping and write down keywords and phrases and word association with images. I’ll use those as starting points to do some drawings and sketches.

At this stage, I would keep it simple, just basic figures, or shapes. From here I’ll be able to collate all the different ideas and drawings into specific themes. That’s when I start putting more details into the drawings.

Creating themes help me filter and edit out what I need and don’t need for each concept. This also helps me in composing the scene that makes more sense. I try to be more intentional with the placement of elements rather than just being arbitrary. Ultimately, the goal of this stage is to develop a detailed illustration that you can present to the client.

The final concept is approved after a few rounds of feedback, and then I move on to rendering the actual illustration. For ReferralCandy, it was pretty smooth — but sometimes it can take several rounds of back-and-forth.

I used Adobe Illustrator to create the final vector illustrations and make the final adjustments. Once that’s done…tada! All approved!

Q: Many of the illustrations feature anthropomorphic, half-human, half-candy figures. What qualities did you want them to have? What was the inspiration behind them?

A: It was because of the names ‘ReferralCandy’ and ‘CandyBar’. I wanted to do something quirky to match the name, which led to the final characters created.

One early idea I had was to use the CandyPeople throughout. Good thing we didn’t, because that might have been a bit too much, haha. We did however retain some of them as part of the visuals and supporting elements, especially on the smaller spots and icons.

Q: Which illustration is your favorite and why?

A: That’s a tough one. I think it’s a toss between “Why CandyBar” and “New Tricks, New Treats” for the Pet Store pages. No specific reason really, except they were both just really fun illustrations to make.

Q: Are there any illustrations that didn’t make the final cut but you still like?

A: Haha that’s a great question! There are two that I do like. The first is one of the early concepts for Promo Messages. It’s an illustration of a girl flying on a carrier/messenger pigeon, while she releases and sends off a bunch of flying letters. I thought the idea was pretty clever for that particular section of the page.

The other one is an early concept for “Why CandyBar”, where it shows a CandyBar hero protecting this group of candy people and driving out an old-school-looking robot. I wanted to present the idea of small companies versus bigger tech corporations.

Ultimately, this didn’t make the cut, because it felt a bit too confrontational, but it was a funny idea. Luckily, the final version is also a favorite of mine. :)

The final product

Mathew’s illustrations can be seen all over our websites, ReferralCandy.com and CandyBar.co, and even on our Shopify AppStore page. You can check out more of his illustrations on Hyperfolk Studio’s Instagram account here.

Darren F. also contributed to this article.

Storytelling Through Images: How We Rebranded ReferralCandy Using Bespoke Illustrations was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The most impactful work is nonlinear

I recently joined ReferralCandy as a Senior Marketing Manager, moving from an individual contributor role to a more managerial role. One interesting aspect of leveling up from a junior marketer to a senior marketer is the work I do becomes more nonlinear.

Linear work vs nonlinear work

When I first started in marketing, my work was mostly linear. Generally speaking, to get more social media impressions, I would post more and better social media posts. To get more page views for our blog, I would write more and better blog posts. For sure, not every social media post or blog post will get the same number of impressions or page views. But the change in the output (i.e. impressions or page views) is roughly proportional to the change in the input (i.e. number of social media posts or blog posts).

On the other hand, my work at ReferralCandy is becoming more nonlinear. Results are less proportional to my efforts. For example, together with the marketing team, I am responsible for the number of (quality) signups. Besides doing marketing work, I also want to think about how well the marketing team works together, do we have a good culture, do we need to hire more people, do we need to reorganize the team, do we need to try different things, and more. I could spend a lot of effort on these and get no signups at all. Or I could do a little and get a lot of signups. It is nonlinear.

To understand this concept of nonlinear work, I found it helpful to look at a CEO’s job. A CEO’s work is all nonlinear. Her main responsibility is to grow the company. She needs to set the direction, hire great people, cultivate a good culture, and maybe raise investments. All these intertwine to produce the results. But the results will not be proportional to her efforts. She could hire a lot of people and get either no growth or a lot of growth.

For nonlinear work, we have to stop thinking about inputs having a direct and proportional effect on the outputs.

Career progression

In my experience so far, the progression seems to look like this:

1. Do something linear X times (e.g. write 2 blog posts a week)
2. Do something linear X times to get Y results (e.g. write 2 blog posts a week to get at least 1,000 page views)
3. Get Y results through linear work (e.g. get 10,000 page views a month by writing regularly)
4. Start doing nonlinear work (e.g. create a writing guide, help with hiring, help with setting team goals)
5. Get Z results through nonlinear work (e.g. get 100 signups a month by reorganizing the team)

At the start of our career, we usually start with linear work because it’s psychologically easier to deal with. We get out what we put in. But as we grow in our careers, our work becomes more nonlinear.

Going from linear work to nonlinear work is a big step in the learning curve. When we do linear work, the output is proportional to our input. We do X, we get Y. But nonlinear work will not feel like fulfilling work initially. Making a meeting more productive has no immediate output. Interviewing 10 applicants for a new role will not change your team’s output. Increasing the morale of the team doesn’t directly grow the number of signups.

Juniors-turning-seniors (like me) can get frustrated by this. Despite doing seemingly right (nonlinear) things, we don’t see any changes in the output. So we incorrectly choose to stick to linear work because it is easier to see the direct impact of our work.

But we should be doing more nonlinear work.

Getting used to nonlinear work

To overcome that, we should get used to the fact that nonlinear work is important work even though the feedback loop is not as short as linear work. (In fact, my CEO likes to say nonlinear work is more important than linear work.)

In some cases, we could come up with proxy metrics to get some feedback on the progress. For example, I talked about my proposed marketing strategy for ReferralCandy. The marketing strategy is a hypothesis, based on my experience, that if we do each component (double down on content, build our distribution engine, and start exploring product marketing) well, we should see the number of quality signups go up. We have metrics for each component, such as content page views and email subscribers, to give us a measure of progress. What we are going to do is to monitor both the signups number and the component metrics. If the component metrics increase but the number of signups does not, it might be that our hypothesis is wrong. This is the trigger for us to investigate whether we need to change anything. We might change some things but we could also decide that our strategy needs a few more months to play out because growing the number of signups is nonlinear and we should just keep at it.

There is also nonlinear work that is hard to have a proxy metric, such as improving team collaboration or morale. For now, I’m going to base it on my intuition because I believe it is possible to sense the progress even if there is no number attached to it. And I am not sure we need a number for these.

All work becomes nonlinear

People who are growing in their careers will eventually be doing all nonlinear work. Remember, a CEO’s work is all nonlinear?

It is probably good to understand nonlinear work early so that when we need to start doing it, we can make the transition. Even as I am writing this, I am still trying to wrap my head around the concept. It is hard. But it is fulfilling too.

Growing in your career means doing more nonlinear work was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How MVPs help me zoom out and focus on the big picture

Perfectionists, unite!

For most of my life, I’ve been a perfectionist. And in a way, perfectionism makes sense in the graphic design world I was formerly immersed in. But after becoming a product designer, I realised that there’s no place for perfectionism in our work flow. Iterative design is our lifeblood, and it means that we make successive versions of our product, all the while tailoring it to new insights.

This iterative approach is much more forgiving than the classic idea of creating and debuting a masterpiece after secretly toiling away on it. Since there’s no final product, there’s always a chance to correct and learn. And it all begins with an MVP or Minimum Viable Product, not “Most Valuable Player” or “Madam Vice President.”

Think like a lazy designer

I’m defining MVPs as unfussy products which can be used to validate a hypothesis. Simply put, they are bare-boned products that get the job done. And if you’re a maximizer like me, “minimum” sounds a lot like “subpar.” And why would I want to launch a so-so and subpar product?!

It took me some time to understand the value of MVPs. They make sense in the SaaS ecosystem because they prevent you from squandering time on low-value changes. Instead, you’re forced to focus on the most crucial and beneficial parts. Let’s say you’re tasked with designing an MVP for a money transfer app. Spend time on the main flow of transferring and receiving money, not on whether to have rounded or straight-edged buttons.

As our head of design told me, ‘think like a lazy designer’. Find the most efficient way to accomplish a task. Ask yourself what must be built in order for your product to deliver value. Then get it into the hands of your customers as soon as possible. Another way of phrasing this is the Pareto Principle, or “what’s the 20% you need to do in order to get 80% of the returns?”

“Good enough” really is good enough

“Can we do something good enough that solves the problem, so that the customer can start using the product?” A fellow designer asked me this when we were struggling to launch a feature in a short timeline.

When you hoard a design because you want to protect your ego from criticism, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to get feedback. As empathetic as you may be, nothing beats getting your product into the hands of your customers. They’re the ones who can quite literally show you what works well and what could be improved.

We’ve found that time-boxed MVPs and “good enough” smaller feature releases are better because you can get feedback faster. Also, if you fail, it’s better to fail faster rather than fail spectacularly. So keep moving and keep iterating, and let “good enough is good enough” become your mantra.

Low-value changes aren’t worth blocking a project

I like pushing pixels because it makes me feel like I’m getting a design just right. Because of this, I need reminders that pixel perfection is often not the goal for the projects I work on. There’s a time and place for beautiful UI designs (hello Dribbble!) but pixel perfection shouldn’t block your MVP from launching.

When I’m itching to upend a project so that I can make tiny, superficial changes, I think of Zoom. Their UI isn’t ultra aesthetic but when working from home and video conferences became the norm, customers flocked to them because their valuable product got the job done.

Sometimes you should prioritize function over form, and sometimes you shouldn’t. It really depends on context and what you’re looking to accomplish. But if you’re like me, remember that most people don’t have time to scrutinize pixels with a magnifying glass.

Don’t lose sight of the big picture

When I’m stuck, taking a step back helps. Looking at things from a higher level reminds me that I just need a usable solution, not the most ingenious solution. As a result my anxiety is tamed, complicated ideas are pared down, and we’re able to provide value to our customers sooner rather than later.

Involve other people because you don’t have to fight perfectionism (or any struggle) alone. Judgement-free “sanity checks” with my team always help reassure me. And if you’re not a perfectionist but have one in your life, find out what helps them zoom out. It’ll make them feel seen and heard.

Former perfectionists, onwards!

When I pivoted to UX design, I knew I was leaving familiar territory, but I didn’t expect to confront my fierce inner critic. I’m glad though, not just cause I’ve become a better designer but because I’m also more content. Moving the right project forward yields far greater returns, so pursue for progress instead of perfection. Former perfectionists, onwards!

TL;DR

• Deliver MVPs (Minimum VIable Products), not masterpieces
• Think like a lazy designer
• “Good enough” really is good enough
• Low-value changes aren’t worth blocking a project
• Don’t lose sight of the big picture

Many thanks to Darren

Becoming a product designer killed the perfectionist in me was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi! My name is Joo Tat. I’m a product designer, and I worked at a salad bar for a day to become better at developing our product. Here’s why.

Understanding the customer better to build a better product

At CandyBar, we believe that serving our customers exceptionally well is the only way to persist as a company. And we believe that the only way to do that is to understand our customers exceptionally well. That means obsessing over what our customers go through and seeking out all the nuances that others would have overlooked.

But getting such nuanced understanding is easier said than done.

The problem with interviews

We rely alot on interviewing customers and potential customers to build understanding. But we realised that sometimes that is not the most ideal learning method.

CandyBar helps small-medium brick-and-mortar businesses nurture loyal customers with a digital loyalty program. Something we realized early on about brick-and-mortar businesses was how big of a deal it is to ensure that daily operations are smooth.

To understand deeper about that, we made sure to schedule regular interviews with our merchants and their staff.

But although the interviews were helpful, we faced some challenges:

• Learning context via interviews is slow
  None of us had worked for a brick-and-mortar store before. To understand the context behind the pain points, we were spending a lot of time listening to lengthy explanations about how things were done.
• Not everyone can recall and articulate well
  Sometimes we would find holes in stories that the interviewees struggle to fill. We could keep probing, but there is a limit because we also need to respect our interviewees’ time.
• Difficulty in sharing learnings
  Sharing so much context and nuances with the rest of the team is tricky. A digestable summary wouldn’t do justice to the nuances. But if we were to share anything longer than 1 page, we would likely lose our readers.

The plan: Become the user to learn about the user

We started thinking about alternatives to make learning more efficient. That was when we entertained the idea of working for our merchants as a cashier for a day. On top of being able to quickly see for ourselves what daily operations look like, we would be literally putting ourselves in the shoes of our users.

So we approached a few of our merchants and asked if we could be cashiers for them. Turns out that while the stores were not ready to let us newbies handle the cashiering (we learnt that usually even part-timers don’t get to handle it), they were willing to let us handle simpler tasks around the cashier such as sprinkling garnishes and bagging food for deliveries. Good enough!

Before we knew it, we were donning aprons, getting briefed by outlet managers, and bracing ourselves for the hangry lunch crowd.

10 lunch shifts later, pretty much everyone in our product team has had a taste of what it’s like to be a frontline staff during lunch hour. Here’s why we think it was helpful.

1. Feeling the pain helped us identify what matters

Intellectually, we already knew from interviews that cashiers operate in a fast-paced and stressful environment. But just like you can’t know what swimming is like until you get in the water, we only truly experienced the craziness of being a front-line worker when we stepped up to the frontline itself.

We felt our anxiety build up as the line grew longer and longer, as customers looked over shoulders and made disgruntled faces. We experienced how seconds of inefficiencies felt like eternities during crunch time. We felt our faces fluster with helplessness when something went wrong but we couldn’t pause to think because new customers just kept coming.

Going through all that first-hand helped us understand the pain points of cashiers more viscerally and rapidly than any number of interviews would. It enabled us to quickly identify what matters most with much greater clarity and specificity.

What a stressful moment during my shift taught me

For example, one of my most stressful moments during my shift was when a delivery order went “missing” during rush hour. I could not tell if it was because of a system bug, an error by one of the staff, or an error by the customer. It was stressful because I couldn’t just drop what I was doing to investigate — my tasks were streaming in non-stop and stopping to investigate would mean becoming the bottleneck. I also didn’t have the authority to make a decision whether to redo the order or offer something to appease the customer either — that authority belongs to the manager. But the manager was not readily available and going to find the manager would mean leaving my station and becoming the bottleneck. Basically, all my options sucked, and while I was trying to decide which sucky option was least sucky, I was already becoming the bottleneck.

Even though CandyBar was not part of that experience, CandyBar exists in the same type of environment where uncertainty is especially stressful. After that shift, it became crystal clear to me why it is important to make sure our products do not land our cashiers in that type of situations.

By working in the same kind of environment as our cashiers, we were able to feel for ourselves which type of pain points hurt most. And most importantly, we were able to do so much quicker than going through lengthy interviews.

2. Seeing the full context helped us zoom out

When working on our products, there is a tendency to get sucked into the weeds and think too narrowly on the interaction design level — how our users interact with our product, how to make those interactions as seamless as possible etc. In doing so, sometimes we forget to zoom out to see the larger picture and question if the user should even interact with the product.

For example, on paper, getting customers to join a CandyBar loyalty program seemed simple enough — prompt the customer to enter their mobile number, 2 taps, and boom — you’re serving the next customer. It’s easy, it’s fast — no excuses for the cashier to skip it right?

But as the shift went by and we saw for ourselves just how many other things the cashiers needed to do that were operationally critical and time sensitive — keying orders, checking orders, collecting payment, troubleshooting payment errors, printing receipts, refilling receipt papers, answering questions, refilling cutlery, handling ad-hoc requests — those few steps suddenly felt difficult to fit in. Of course you would not prompt the customers and add to the ton of time sensitive things you are already juggling, unless there is a very good incentive to do so.

Some cashiers also didn’t have a good command of English, which hindered their confidence in prompting anything with the customer.

Seeing all that reminded us that there is a whole host of contextual forces that we need to be sensitive to if we want our product to succeed. Don’t assume that your users want to use your product. At the end of the day, most products are parts of larger systems, and only products that work well with the larger systems succeed.

3. Being there helped us spot hidden issues

People get comfortable living with flaws over time. It can be quite challenging to fish out those kinds of struggles with just interviews. But if you are right there with your users, you will be able to spot those struggling moments as they happen.

For example, during one of the shifts, one of our engineers noticed that a staff was intentionally blocking off the cashier interface from the customers’ eyes. When he probed further, it turned out that the staff doesn’t want the customers to see the cashier interface because the cashier interface showed a number misled a previous customer and caused confusion before.

By being in the environment itself as the staff worked, we were able to more easily and efficiently spot issues that may not have been brought up during interviews.

4. Doing it as a team helped align the team

One of the most helpful outcomes was that experiencing such rich context as a team helped align the product team.

For example, now the whole team has an unspoken understanding of how much cashiers have on their plate. So when we were discussing how to help merchants get more customers to join the loyalty program, we were all instantly aligned on how we should not depend on cashiers to take the initiative to prompt customers to join.

We could have relied on forcing everyone to read long pages of user research reports. But doing this together as a team was just more efficient, impactful, and fun!

Do what helps you learn better and faster

It is not easy to maintain an exceptional understanding of your customers. But it is important work. If you don’t do it, your competitors will. That is why it is important to always question if the approach that you have picked is the best fit for whatever you are trying to learn.

In this case, we felt that interviewing was too clunky when trying to get up to speed about the challenges of daily operations in brick & mortar businesses. That led us to get down and dirty in the trenches, which turned out to be a good way to learn quickly while still be able to pick up the nuances.

But that is just one way to learn, and depending on your context, constraints, and learning objectives, another approach could be a better fit. The point is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It is up to us to constantly keep a lookout for ways to learn better and faster based on our unique position.

So the next time you find yourself spending a lot of time doing interviews but feel like you are not learning quickly enough, instead of sacrificing sleep to cram in more interviews, perhaps you can take a step back and consider what alternatives you can try!

How working at a salad bar helped us become better at building our product was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why you should say no to UX take-home exercises

Speculative work, or take-home assignment — is still prevalent in many design, advertising, and communication industries. Spec work is a controversial concept, and the glorious and maddening industry I happen to work in suffers from the delusion that take-home assignments are a good way to assess candidates. Here’s why spec work is a poor way of understanding how candidates will perform in a job.

Design work for free

Imagine contacting a carpenter and saying “Look, I see you’re skilled at fixing chairs, but our chairs are unique. Come over and just fix one, and if we like it, we’ll talk about a contract.” You’d get smacked with a hammer for even suggesting it! Nobody in skilled trades works in this manner, so why do we hold designers to a different standard?

Take-home tasks are fundamentally flawed because there are companies exploiting people with the “solve my problem for free, and I’ll hire you if I like your idea” mindset. I’ll give you three reasons to why this is appalling:

1. It is uncompensated labour, and by definition, unfair.
2. It is not backed by real research or data.
3. If it is the company’s niche problem, it can’t be shared on a portfolio or blog.

Design is not engineering

While on paper, it sounds great, but that’s far from reality. I imagine take-home assignments emerged as a practice since coding challenges were the norm in software engineering. The thing is, coding challenges are way more direct than design challenges. There are objectively better ways to solve engineering problems where the outcome is predetermined.

UX design had to overcome its perception of just being about visual design by demonstrating rigour, data and science. Unfortunately, the same is not at all true for design. There are numerous approaches to a problem that requires testing and iteration to get to anything like a good solution.

Good design requires collaboration

Any good designer worth their salt knows that collaboration is necessary for quality outcomes. Good design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The design process takes time, with plenty of conversations between multiple stakeholders and many hours of research and fine-tuning to produce something “delightful”.

Take-home exercises are a one-way, one-time process that forces designers to utilise their creative talents for free, often with nothing more than a short design brief and a promise of a job.

That’s like asking a nutritionist to cook a ‘healthy meal’ in an interview. You’re not really changing someone’s diet, learning about them and suited to their day-to-day needs; you’re getting a free meal.

Take-home assignments tell you they don’t trust your portfolio

One of the more alarming aspects of take-home challenges is the lack of trust. Trust is essential to all working relationships — to ALL relationships.

Take-home exercises tell designers right off the bat that their portfolios, case-studies, qualifications, and testimonials aren’t enough and that they have to prove themselves further by working on an assignment.

A good designer needs to be able to understand the nuances for the people using their products and blend qualitative insights with analytics data. No take-home assignment can ever give you a complete picture of the full range of skills in a designer’s arsenal. If you want to learn what specific parts the designer worked on, the responsibilities they took up, the impact they had on the business — you need to learn to probe better. Giving them a take-home assignment isn’t the answer.

Take-home isn’t inclusive for people with obligations

What really grates my cheese about take-home assignments are that they don’t reflect how real-world products are built. Plus, they are super unfair to specific demographics. Young people with free time and some financial stability will be able to put a lot more effort on the assignment that the expected “4–6 hours” than, let’s say, a single parent whose time at home is focused on their children, and can only spend time on it after the kids are asleep and when they’re likely exhausted.

Shown to be highly biased against women and people of color, especially those who come from cultures where questioning or interrupting authoritative strangers is seen as social insubordination.
— Jared Spool

The average UX designer interviews at 6–12 companies before being hired. One of the most painful parts I and some of the designers I’ve spoken to experience is when one is interviewing at different companies concurrently and all the companies expect you to do one of these dreaded assignments. More recently, I’ve noticed some companies offering to pay people for a week while they do a take-home exercise. While this is slightly better than not paying candidates at all, it still is a terrible practice if you care about hiring a diverse group of individuals in your team. Some of the best designers I know point-blank reject take-home assignments which also means you’re losing out on a talented pool of designers too.

How do we hire Product Designers?

At ReferralCandy, we understand that all designers don’t solve problems in the same way. Some designers take in a lot of data, go off into a cave, fiddle on it for a while, and then come out with something great. Others iterate and prototype almost right from the kick-off, uncovering solutions through refinement. Some require thinking out loud, and collaboration to do their best work. A good organization has people with a variety of problem-solving approaches, which enables the organization to better tackle a wide array of challenges.

Design exercises are typically time-boxed, and candidates are asked to solve a problem on the spot under the scrutiny of others. The nature of these exercises already favours a narrow range of problem-solving technique. A take-home exercise, by its very nature, is inclined towards superficial solutions, and biases teams towards visual designers. There’s not really any room for depth.

Our ideal hiring process is unbiased, thoughtful and most importantly, human. Candidates are evaluated on their experience and portfolio. For us to get a deeper sense of candidates and their working styles, we speak to a few people the candidate has worked with. All candidates answer a questionnaire, talk to a few people on the team, walk us through an in-depth presentation of their work and collaborate on a whiteboarding exercise. While this seems like a lot of interview rounds to go through, we are intentional about our process to get a varied perspective from the various interviewers. To keep this process unbiased, only the hiring manager is privy to the feedback — not any of the team members

1. Portfolio review

In a portfolio review candidates typically first walk us through a few projects in detail. We are a curious bunch and love learning about your approach, intentionality, and overall design awareness.

What we hope to see in a portfolio

• Show us 2–3 of your best work — be engaging! Which projects make you giddy with excitement? Pixel-perfect projects are great and abundant on Dribbble, but a project that shows you learned something tells us that you are able to reflect and want to grow.
• Your problem solving and user-centric approach during the product cycle.
• A well-framed story: What was the problem, what were the considerations and how you arrived at your final decision.
• Talk about what research or data-informed your design decisions.
• Describe your role on each project: how you contributed individually, how you led your team and how you worked cross-functionally with other teams.
• Dig into details: Show us prototypes, wireframes, sketches, ideas — you will be speaking with product designers who like to see the whole gamut from concept through to ship.
• Describe how you quantified success during this project, how you tested it before it reached its final form.
• Reflect on what worked and what didn’t and what you would / could have done differently.

2. Whiteboarding exercise

After the portfolio review, our team of designers work on a whiteboarding exercise with the candidate for an hour as we tackle a specific problem.

What we hope to see in a whiteboard exercise

• Problem definition — how do you explore the problem space and identify big problems to go after?
• Solution space — how comfortable are you with generating multiple ideas without being married to an idea and figure out the best one to develop further?
• Design knowledge — how well can you make trade-offs between platforms, global and local interaction patterns?
• Collaboration — how well do you work with your teammates by responding to their prompts and getting them interested in the approach that you’re taking?

What makes our whiteboard exercise different

• We send candidates an email a few days before the whiteboarding exercise where we outline the objective and the signals we’re looking for. This gives every candidate a fair understanding of the things to focus on during the exercise.
• The design prompt is very different from what ReferralCandy does as a business. If any company gives you an exercise that is suspiciously similar to their business model or even blatantly asks you to redesign their product, they’re trying to get you to work for free.
• Our team members collaborate with the candidate during the challenge, and apart from the hiring manager, no one else knows what the exercise is ahead of time. This is because we don’t want any team member to have an unfair advantage, and no exercise is recycled and used again.
• One of the designers acts as a co-lead because we want to see how the candidate collaborates with a team, in the real world. The co-lead helps candidates bounce ideas, give feedback and plan their time wisely.
• Other designers roleplay various roles to learn how candidates respond to new learnings, constraints and treat both users & internal stakeholders.
• All team members evaluate candidates based on a written, measurable rubric.

Hiring managers, if you’ve been giving designers take-home assignments without realizing the weight of your requests, stop! All is forgiven — go forth and mindfully treat designers with care and consideration. To those of you who have been deliberately giving out take-home assignments as an easy way to generate ideas — shame on you. You are perpetuating an ugly cycle of free labour, cheapening the very industry you’re working in, and likely losing out on good candidates along the way.

Dear designers, interviewing can be a nervous, stressful time filled with moments of insecurities and struggling with rejections and self-doubt. Remember that interviewing is part of the journey. Hold your head high and stand your ground against spec work! 💪

We’re looking to add software engineers to our amazing team! Apply on Angel.co and share with your favourite engineers! ❤️

• Senior Software Engineer
• Software Engineer
• Graduate Software Engineer

Why you should say no to take-home exercises was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I was a UX bootcamp student, instead of paying attention during my Zoom lesson I would dream of graduation and landing my first UX job. I expected that it’d be 70% Figma, 20% asking people ‘what do you think that button does?’ and 10% bonding with super cool mentors by the water cooler.

Now that I’ve joined ReferralCandy as a product designer, the past few weeks have been amazing, surprising, and challenging. Reality has been a little different from what I imagined. I do spend time in Figma, but I’ve spent twice as much time in Google Slides. We do ask people what they think a particular element should do, but I’ve been asked the very same question by other designers. As for a water cooler, it’s an imaginary one because we work remotely, but I’ve met and shared a meal (and a few terrible puns) with my colleagues.

I feel like I’m actively using 110% of my brainpower (all that cognitive load!), and I don’t regret resigning and joining a UX bootcamp in the middle of a pandemic. But that’s a story for another time. My bootcamp did more or less prepare me but if I could go back in time, here are four tips I’d give my younger, starry-eyed self.

TL;DR

• Document EVERYTHING! And get comfortable with an online data management app (we love Notion here at ReferralCandy).
• Learn how to summarise and present your findings confidently. Practise what you’re going to say out loud and time yourself.
• Try everything while you can. Volunteer and see what other departments are up to and get a more well-rounded view of the company.
• Don’t be scared by protocols or new tools. You’ll learn on the job and ask for help when needed.

1. Get ready to document EVERYTHING

In the age of magical design unicorns where hiring managers are looking for UI/UX/graphic designers who can animate and code, writing is an overlooked skill. Many of the tasks I completed during my first weeks were related to documentation. I transcribed research calls and posted TL;DR’s in Slack, I took notes during retros between engineering and design, and I created decks reviewing ReferralCandy and its sibling CandyBar.

Documentation is important because it’s a buffer against miscommunication. It forces you to organise your thoughts and is much more dependable than memory.

Make it a habit and document everything (retros, findings, assets) in an online, organised system. At ReferralCandy we love Notion (and I’ve visited it so often that when I type “n” in my search field, Safari now suggests notion.so instead of the former champion netflix.com 😂).

2. Learn how to summarise and present your findings confidently

All those time-checked presentations I had during my bootcamp paid off! If you only have 5 minutes, make it count. Everybody’s got a full calendar. If you don’t keep within your timeslot, you could be cut off. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened to me yet — thanks to the practice in bootcamp.

Distil notes into relevant takeaways because nobody likes aimless presentations that drag on. Following the company’s mission to “optimise relentlessly” and “accelerate action,” TL;DRs are a great way to keep everyone updated.

As to presenting publicly, you may say, ‘but I’m a designer! Why do I need to care about public speaking?’ Well, at some point you’ll probably be asked to speak publicly — maybe to the entire company, and maybe at an external event where you’re repping your company 💪. If you can speak confidently and calmly, your point will have a higher chance of getting across.

I’ve never regretted spending time practising beforehand and when I was told to prepare a 6 min introductory deck for my first all-hands presentation, I set a timer and practised out loud to myself. Each time I practised, I looked at my notes less and less until I was able to present without relying on them. I also prepped this way for my 1/2 hour portfolio presentation for my current position.

3. Try everything (while you can)

When you first join a company, there’s a short and sweet time when you’re given a grace period to learn how things are done. Your plate won’t be as full as your colleagues so this is a great time to volunteer and see what other teams are doing.

For me this meant being the note-taker during research calls, joining other designers on in-person visits to merchants, and shadowing the success team as they replied to live customer inquiries.

I did all this, sometimes eagerly and sometimes apprehensively, because it was a great way to see real problems, interact with people in other teams, and develop empathy for my non-design counterparts by seeing their struggles and wins. And empathy is what UX is all about.

Try everything and proactively ask to join meetings and events that are listed on the company calendar.

4. Don’t be scared by protocols or tools

You should familiarise yourself with industry-standard apps (i.e. Slack, Figma) and methodologies (i.e. agile), but each organisation still has its own way of doing things. If you’ve never worked in a tech company before like me, it can be overwhelming to be introduced to so many new things at once.

Have faith — you’ll learn by doing and as technology continues to evolve, so must we. You might have to watch some how-to videos in your spare time or ping a colleague to ask them how they set something up, but it’s all part of the process.

TL;DR — Be a sponge! 🧽

In summary, when you land your first UX job, just think of yourself as a sponge. You’re there to absorb as much you can by getting involved, observing, and asking questions. If you start your UX career with a growth mindset, you’ll learn as much from other departments as you will from your fellow designers. Good luck and all the best on your UX journey!

What To Expect At Your First UX Job was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At CandyBar, we put a premium on how quickly we can put an idea in front of customers. We believe the faster the product can be in the hands of a customer, the faster we can receive actual feedback on whether it is useful — or not.

However, we need to balance this goal with not releasing half tested/poorly designed features. It is important that we do not simply release a feature for the sake of releasing a feature.

This balance of priorities exists at the center of any healthy product company, and is, I think, one of the most fun parts of being an engineer at a startup. I want to share a technique that has helped us move fast, and still deliver a polished product.

The Problem

CandyBar gives brick and mortar merchants a way to offer loyalty rewards to attract regular, repeat customers. A crucial aspect of this is providing quality info on their customers. For example, in a recent feature, we wanted to show merchants which customers have been ‘slipping away’ — which customers have made fewer store visits this month, compared to last month.

It is part of our design philosophy that our merchants should not feel overwhelmed with information. We design our features to have a clear CTA (call to action); the merchant sees the info displayed, and can easily take remedial action with the CTA. In this feature, we provide a button for our merchants to act on this information and try to rescue these customers.

From our research we know that our merchants wanted to know about this information. However, we didn’t get any clear indicators of what are some concrete actions that could be done to help them act on this information.

Be Creative with your Compromises

At this stage, we could have decided to release this feature without the CTA. After all, even without the CTA, the widget was still providing useful information for the merchant on which of their customers are starting to slip away. However, we felt doing so would take away a valuable opportunity to gather information from our merchants and for them to feel heard.

We didn’t want to link to a half-baked solution. Instead, we chose to leave in the button, have it open up the Intercom messenger with a preset message, which starts a conversation with our Customer Success team.

The team is prepped to expect these messages. We begin by gathering some preliminary information about the merchant (who they are, what they do, gist of their problem). We will then schedule a follow up user research session, where we can deep dive into their problems a bit more.

Our user research sessions are very open ended. More often than not, after we get the merchant comfortable and talking, we get much better ideas on what their true pain points are. It often leads us to rethink how we’ve approached the problem, and has led us to develop more useful and relevant features for our merchants.

Open a Dialogue with your Customers

Instead of rushing a half-baked feature, or going without, start a conversation with your customers. It is a simple technique, requiring minimal engineering and design time, which still helps the merchant feel catered for. We also found good engagement from our merchants, and this is now a part of our toolbox when designing and building new features. The insight we gather from being able to release a feature earlier and faster, has helped us make building future features much more robust.

If you’re interested in implementing this for your own product work flows, here is a link to the Intercom developer pages on the API to do this. I also recommend pairing this with an analytics solution to get data on how many people click the button without going through with the Intercom chat.

Thank you for reading.

Test out feature demand quickly with Intercom was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, we’re launching our new logo as part of the effort to refresh the ReferralCandy brand.

The same brand, but with more space to grow

ReferralCandy has been growing for more than 8 years. Our users, a community of small to medium sized business owners, have been at the heart of the brand for all that time — and still are. Just as the community and our users are constantly evolving, so does our company and the brand.

As an evolving brand, it’s important for us to continue connecting to a wider variety of e-commerce merchants of different sizes and industries. Our brand should look playful and modern, yet credible.

Meanwhile, in 2011…

The old ReferralCandy logo was a playful piece of hard candy with a distinctive swirl, in the shape of a speech bubble. It conveys the friendliness and the energy of our brand, as well as the idea of “word-of-mouth marketing”.

As we modernised our brand to stay connected to our ever-changing merchants, we refreshed everything from our website to our product. Our old logo began to look out of place. The typeface was hard to read on dark background and at smaller sizes. The spirals didn’t have consistent thickness, and they were not centralised. The gradient on the logo didn’t fit in with the rest of our brand, where we utilised flat design and emphasised simplicity and credibility.

Meet the new ReferralCandy logo

We worked with the super talented designer Saravana to give our logo a much needed makeover.

First, we refined our logo mark.

With the 5:4 circular grid foundation, the swirls look much more streamlined and perfect. The tail follows the natural curve of the logo body, which is more pleasant to the eyes.

We updated the logo colours to summer sky blue and candy pink. This resonates with our brighter colour palette, which aims to convey elements of fun and friendliness.

Introducing our new typeface — INTER

We chose Inter as our new logo typeface. Inter is a relatively young font created by Figma designer Rasmus Andersson. The typeface is optimised for digital products and computer screen display.

Rasmus created Inter during his time in Figma and based the typeface loosely on Roboto, a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface developed by Google.

Inter takes after Roboto in being modern yet approachable. Rasmus improved Inter to be more readable at small sizes, compared to Roboto.

Inter is one of the newer and more modern typefaces, but it exudes the characteristics we wished to convey with our brand: simplicity, strength and friendliness.

See our new logo in the wild!

The new logo has been rolled out at a couple of places.

Spot the new candy swirl on our marketing channels and products, and stay tuned for our future brand updates!

ReferralCandy Has a New Logo was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the past couple of years, I’ve started taking on more of a leadership position within various technical teams. As I reflect upon this experience, I’d like to share what may help others on a similar journey.

I’ve never identified myself as a leader. I suspect most other developers in the tech industry don’t. Some combination of imposter syndrome (I did not have a CS background), my Chinese upbringing (which emphasizes obedience and filial piety), and popular stereotypes of leaders (as infallible and always correct) had put a distorted definition into my head. I had put the position of a leader/manager on a pedestal, someone to be viewed with admiration and not to be achieved by a mere lowly mortal such as myself.

With leadership feeling like an unachievable goal, I focused more on my technical abilities. However, no matter how good I understood a topic or how convinced I was that a particular technology would help us, when it came down to putting into practise within a company or team, I’d always inevitably hit some barrier - A colleague who ‘just doesn’t get it’, or a boss who wouldn’t let me even try.

It felt so frustrating, and I started to develop unhealthy habits to deal with the situation. Passive aggressive code review comments, or stealthily implementing a library before people caught on. These tactics sometimes gave me the results that I wanted, but most of the time would backfire, causing more fallout that had to be dealt with in an increasing hostile manner. It made me resent my colleagues, and think ‘if I was in charge, I’d do it differently”.

But even as I was employing these tactics, I felt there must be a better way; I could see others around me not afflicted with these types of failures.

There’s a famous quote by John Maxwell: “Leadership is influence — nothing more, nothing less”. I came across this whilst reading his book “360 Degree Leader”. I took it to mean that, no matter where you are hierarchically in an organisation, you could still lead by influencing others around you, whether it’s your manager, your peers, or your juniors. This quote unlocked a mental barrier that I had in my head.

The conundrum that I had in my mind was that whilst I would like to be a leader, I could never understand how one practises to become a leader. For technical skills, I could learn about a new skill/framework/idea, then practise through code katas, or personal projects until I was proficient at it before using it ‘in the real world’. My main concern was that if I used a technology or skill before I was comfortable with it, I could fail at a particular job and disappoint the people who were depending on me.

Leadership however, by definition, is a skill that requires you to interact with people. With my previous hierarchical definition of leadership, this meant that if I wanted to practise, I’d first have to be put in a position of power, and then my mistakes could actually hurt those underneath’s chances of doing their jobs and their careers — something which I’d seen happen in past jobs.

My new definition of leadership helped me see how I could practise my leadership skills in a low risk way, by influencing those around me. It helped me to see that, actually, I’d been practising already, whenever I convinced others to adopt a framework, or when I taught a junior something that I knew, or when I gave feedback to my team leads on what was a good idea or not.

As a consequence of this, these types of activities took on a new meaning for me. No longer did they seem like the drudgery in the way of productive coding work, I reframed the tasks to be opportunities to practise my leadership.

The new mindset helped me navigate a particular problem our team had been butting up against. At the time, the company wanted to modernise the look and feel of the product. There was internal disagreement about which approach we should take. Some preferred sticking to a server-side MVC framework (Our backend team used C#, so ASP.NET MVC was the preferred choice there), others wanted to use a client-side JS framework. It had been discussed a few times but no consensus formed. The lack of movement on the subject was starting to be felt by the product leadership.

The problem we had was not a lack of ability; The team had the skills to execute well on any solution. Rather, it was a lack of clear direction. Through my new definition of leadership, I could see that, although I was not in a position of leadership to decide for the team which direction we were going, I had the ability to clearly lay out what the options were.

I made a presentation that clearly laid out what our current architecture was, why it was deficient for what the product goals were, and what the available options we had considered are and how they solved it. I presented not just to the engineering group, but to other groups within the organisation. I did not try to gloss over the technical details, but did my best to explain it in a way that a lay person could understand. This helped build buy-in from the rest of the company, and restore some confidence within our team.

As a result of the presentation, we decided that going with a frontend framework would be the best decision for the company. Even better, the decision was arrived at with greater clarity and understanding for all people involved. Our teams could now move forward with greater confidence and direction.

I felt the same sense of accomplishment that I get when I solve a tough engineering problem. For the first time, it was my leadership abilities, not my technical abilities that had solved an issue. It gave me confidence that my mindset was in the right direction.

I started to actively seek out more and more of these tasks; I would start chairing meetings. I helped run a book club. I helped run a weekly coding lesson for new comers in the industry. Through some heavy pushing by a fellow colleague and mentor, I even ended up talking up on the Web Directions Code stage on ES6 Symbols (overcoming a personal fear of public speaking).

Eventually after a few years of doing this, the organisation started to recognise the skills I’d been demonstrating and gave me a few direct reports. By this point, I definitely felt a lot more confident in my ability to lead.

I see a lot of confident technical people around me not taking up the mantle of leadership, which I suspect has a similar root cause as mine. And I see how it causes them strife, because whilst they are right about the particular domain they specialise in, they never seem to be able to convince others of the ideas in their heads.

If you are in this position, I recommend “360 Degree Leader” by John Maxwell. It may help you see something new to leadership like I did.

Please share your thoughts with me. I’d love to hear them.

Leading with influence was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I don’t like making decisions based on FOMO. I’m personally very picky on which events I attend since the real value of a conference relies on the people you meet. Shopify Unite made my cut and it was an amazing experience. Here are my thoughts on the people I met and what I learned from them.

Wait, who are you?

I’m Raul Galera (enter Troy McClure voice). You may remember me from such films as How ReferralCandy Works.

Jokes aside, I’m ReferralCandy’s Partner Manager. In other words, I’m the business development guy whose job it is to make sure everyone in the ecommerce universe knows (and loves) our products. One of the best places in the world to get to know the who’s who in ecommerce is Shopify’s annual partner conference, Shopify Unite. It takes place once a year and we as a company have attended it since it started in 2016. Unite has been growing year on year, and in 2019 saw close to 1,000 attendees (by my count).

In this post, you’ll also hear about Zach Cheng, ReferralCandy’s co-founder.

Shopify Unite 2019 Recap

Day 1: Partner day… and happy hour

I’ll start my story with Partner Day, which took place on Tuesday, June 18th.

The actual conference and keynotes started on the 19th but a series of pre-Unite events had been taking place since Sunday; A dinner for Shopify app CEOs, a meetup for Shopify meetup organizers, happy hours, workshops organized by Google and Facebook… this years’ edition was full of events.

Zach and I started off by visiting the Shopify headquarters in Toronto with Sarah Tan, who oversees partnerships for Shopify in Singapore:

After the visit, I headed to one of the first activities of the event, a happy hour sponsored by Omnisend where I had the chance to finally meet some long-time Shopify friends like Sam from Union Works and my friend Rytis (Omnisend’s CEO) in person, and many other apps and agencies. What a great way to start the week!

Day 2: Shopify keynotes & workshops, Asia Partners dinner and After Party

Day two was the first day of the conference, focused on keynotes and workshops. I picked up my badge, got a coffee and some breakfast in the cafe room and headed to the main stage where Shopify’s announcements were about to be made. It was the first time everyone at Unite was under the same roof and saw lots of familiar faces.

Shopify Announcements

Here are Shopify’s biggest announcements this year, in my opinion (see all of them here):

Fulfillment Network

Probably the most interesting announcement for merchants since this will allow them to compete with Amazon merchants by offering 1–2 day shipping as a standard.

Shopify POS

The new POS has a quick access to apps, which makes it easier for merchants to discover new tools. It will also allow merchants to see loyalty details directly in the checkout without having to tap away from it,

Order Editing APIs

Shopify will now allow their merchants to edit an order at the buyer’s request. According to them: “[Shopify] will enable apps to add, remove, or replace items before the line item has been fulfilled”.

Dinner with Asia Partners

Sarah, who I met on Partner Day, did an amazing job getting a bunch of Shopify apps and agencies from all over Asia to bond over Mexican food. Companies like PushOwl, Bento&Co, PageFly, WaveCommerce, Zestard, WebLife, AkoHub and ApparelWeb were there and it was a great opportunity to learn about what other companies are doing and plan future collaborations.

After Party

Right after our Asia Partners dinner, I headed to Rebel Nightclub, Shopify’s last event of the day. The Shopify After Party, called “The Night Ahead” this year, was co-organized by PayPal and is always everyone’s favorite part of Unite. It was my favorite part too, for a couple of very different reasons:

First, from the relationship-building point of view, it was the best opportunity to meet new people. It’s a fun environment to mingle with attendees, with more faces starting to look familiar by now. It was super easy to walk around and join conversations compared to the more focused air during workshops or keynotes.

The other reason was strictly personal. Shopify had announced a “special headliner performance”, and although I was secretly hoping it was going to be Drake (he’s from Toronto and his official store uses Shopify) I was not disappointed at all when Lupe Fiasco jumped on stage. Lupe was one of my favorite rappers during my college days and his performance was a nice little trip down memory lane for me.

Needless to say — Day 2 was great, but the jet lag and lack of sleep started to kick in around midnight and I decided to call it a night. I still had Day 3 (and a post-Unite event) ahead of me.

Day 3

Zach and I started off Day 3 by attending workshops and had a few meetings with other app developers. The most interesting part of the day was being able to sit down with a member of the Shopify apps team to learn more about how the app store works and how we could improve our profile and make the most out of it.

After all the keynotes and workshops were done, I headed back to my Airbnb to get some rest and later that night I went to have dinner with people from Loox, ReCart, Chaterr, SMSBump and Rise.ai.

After Unite: De:Brief Event

Shopify Unite 2019 was over. But we had one last meetup in our list before heading to the airport. Cat and Keir, two Shopify Partners, organized the De:brief event, a session with different panel discussions about Shopify’s new announcements and how they affect the work of Shopify partners, app developers and agencies.

It was a very interesting event overall. The event included some small networking sessions during the breaks and the panel discussions were an easy way to learn more about what agencies are doing. For all app developers in the room, hearing the founders of agencies like WeMakeWebsites, Disco, Blubolt or Alt & Dot talk about how they work with their clients gave us a few tips on how to improve our service offering to Shopify experts in the future.

What we learned

Networking: building relationships that develop value

The real value of the conference relies on the networking sessions, and Unite did not disappoint.

Relationship-building during Shopify Unite can be very powerful. Almost all of the marketing efforts we’ve done with partners the past two years were follow ups from meetings at the 2017 conference. This year was no different, and I went back to work with a lot of new leads and future ideas for collaboration.

We have a distinctive brand

Everybody seemed to know about ReferralCandy, especially those who had been in the Shopify ecosystem for a while. It helped that our logo was easily recognized on our t-shirts and lots of people approached both Zach and I because they knew the brand. Somebody even congratulated us for having the best looking website in the Shopify ecosystem. They wanted to know which agency we used so they could hire them (it was all in-house) — good job design team!

Bonus lesson: How to Stand out at Conferences

Conferences like Shopify Unite with thousands of people under one roof are an amazing way to build business relationships with almost no effort. Sitting down next to someone at a workshop or waiting in line for coffee are great opportunities to introduce yourself and learn more about the other person and their business.

At the same time, since there’s so many people to talk to, standing out is a bit harder. There were, however, some companies that came up with very original ideas to stand out and break the ice in an initial conversation. These are some examples.

Pushowl gave away envelopes like these with a collection of stickers:

Some partners like Shopify Agency The Cut made custom t-shirts, highlighting their long journey from Perth to Toronto. Not only was the t-shirt funny, but I’m sure a lot of different people approached them asking how their trip was. It also shows how important Shopify Unite is that they flew all the way from the other side of the world (like we did!).

And last but not least, Rise.ai made personalized physical gift cards! The really cool thing about this is (beyond the fact that it already had my name printed in it) that if you follow the QR code, it takes you to a landing page with some of their merchants, and you can get a discount when you buy anything from them.

I thought it was a great way to:

1) make your customers happy (you’re getting them new sales!),

2) make people happy because they’re receiving a truly personalized gift

3) showcase your product (Rise makes gift cards for Shopify stores), and

4) stand out and generate word of mouth!

And that’s a wrap!

Shopify Unite was a great experience as always and we can’t wait for 2020. But now the actual work starts — time to reconnect with everyone we met and put into practice all the things we learned.

Any questions? Let me know: raulg [at] candybar.co.

—

Raul Galera is the Partner Manager at ReferralCandy and CandyBar.

ReferralCandy at Shopify Unite 2019 was originally published in Bytes of Candy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.