A Junior Designer in B2B SaaS
One of our interviews was with a user interface/user experience designer at ClickTime, a business-to-business SaaS company specializing in time tracking and budgeting products. She studied industrial design as an undergraduate and has been working professionally for the last year. For her, design is “the discipline of producing strategies and solutions for a goal or purpose.”
An important part of the design discipline is user research. She explains that “understanding the users and contexts is essential when I begin skinning a product or interface.” As part of the user needs research process, stakeholder interviews are conducted and personas are created. Some internal factors to discover and incorporate are the product’s positioning and communication goals. It is also important to consult, update, or create the company’s style and brand guide. She says that she also does a large amount of her research on user research and design trends online, where “the research resources are endless and there is so much information out there.” However, It is often “a matter of sorting out fact from opinion” when it comes to online research.
She then produces multiple design compositions at each stage of fidelity for peer and/or client review. Her work involves cross-functional collaboration, so team buy-in is important and her “creative decision-making is calibrated in order to work successfully toward a common goal, purpose, or aesthetic.” It can sometimes be a challenge to find the right balance of information to display on an interface. It is often that “having an uncluttered and easy-to-use interface helps define a successful user experience.”
When she needs to introduce users to a new experience, she builds associations by building context a little at a time. This can mean starting with something familiar, if possible, so that the new experience isn’t as jarring. She finds creative inspiration in trying new things and meeting new people, and she predicts that the future is in VR: “Interactions will be a full-body experience.”
Virtual Reality Designer – Google
I got the chance to speak with a virtual reality designer at a conference in Los Angeles. He has been doing this work professionally for only 6 months, but the field is still relatively new. He received his MFA in motion graphics with an emphasis on three dimensional technologies.
When I asked him what his concept of VR design is, he replied that the goal is to create an immersive and memorable experience without making the user feel sick. Unfortunately, making someone feel vertigo or motion sickness is common in the virtual reality field. In order to not make someone’s first experience in this medium and uncomfortable one, constraining the design guidelines to optimize comfort is a prevailing emphasis on his team. Taking cues from human factors and ergonomics creates three dimensional “zones” to place user interface elements that do not strain the user’s neck or eyes.
Another interesting concept was the emphasis on acknowledging the viewers agency in the VR application. Because virtual reality is a very intimate medium (the user is a part of the experience, not simply viewing it) it is important to tell the user how he or she fits within this experience. Part of this involves identifying what they can do. Can they move their arms and interact with elements, are they a ghost in a scene, or are they simply being taken on a ride?
Furthermore, there is a lot of experimenting taking place to see how to best guide a user’s attention. Since we cannot confirm where he or she is looking, how can we use motion, lights, and sound to coax someone to look a certain direction? Inspiration from immersive theatre, haunted houses, and even restaurants provide great examples on how to establish ambience within a scene that does not force a certain perspective on the user.
Overall, it seemed like a lot of the design process involved trying new things, and seeing if they work. It’s hard to know how something will be perceived once in virtual reality, so rapid prototyping then experiencing it in VR is paramount. While some design choices are obviously not going to be ideal in three dimensions, two dimensional design principles should be challenged often. Although there is skepticism over how this new medium will take off, it’s undeniable that it is an exciting space for design.
Principal Product Designer at Salesforce
Mark is a well-liked and highly regarded product designer at Salesforce. He is a key design lead for a young and growing product in the Salesforce ecosystem, Wave Analytics.
His design philosophy sees experience more as a feeling. It might fill a need, but instead of being strictly utilitarian about the purpose behind it, there also needs to be some sort of emotional resonance. The emotion can be something as simple as the sense accomplishment, ie: I did this thing and I can move on to the next thing. Data can be applied design, but the most important thing to mark is the feeling that his designs illicit.
He also spent some time about design being both a team activity as well as a solo pursuit and how one can go back and forth and how it’s healthy to keep other people in the loop, but it is also good to put your head down to get some concentrated work done. This sense of back and forth, or give and take in design is present through much of the interview. He talked about how a design is never really fully complete and how you can keep iterating on the work to try to push it further and better every day. Along the same lines, we talked about how some days may be very productive and everything will be snapping together creativity wise, but other days will be a sluggish push to produce anything. This ebb and flow of activity, creativity, sociability, and production seem to be a common trait.
When asked about what he would do if he couldn’t design, he paused because I don’t think he ever thought about his life without design, but he quickly knew how he would spend his time. It was related to how he was always curious with how things work. As a child, one of his memories is about taking apart a remote control car and understanding how each piece fit together. And he thought about how each piece was designed for a purpose both alone and how to fit into a system. From remote control cars, he now cares about bicycles enough to be happy fixing them if he wasn’t designing. Other things in his life related to design are his passion for music, animation, and painting. I think each of these relate back to his connection to emotion in design, as well as representing different forms that he can take part in constructing.
Designer Interview
Designer: Sarah
Firm: Rapt Studio, San Francisco
About Sarah:
Sarah is now a designer in a bay area based design studio. She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from MIT. Prior to that, she studied film and media studies in Brown University. Sarah knew that she would become an architect when she was in high school. She was good at science and arts back then. After she found out that she could do her master’s degree without studying Architecture as her undergraduate major, she chose to do something else first. Sarah deems design as “problem solving with elegant solutions”. She thinks all her hobbies and interests are the sources keeping her energetic about design.
Process and Decision Making
In regards to the design process, Sarah always starts with an original concept. The concept may be from a variety of things that inspire her. Then, she would try to apply the concept almost everywhere to the design. For instance, she was asked to design a bunch of conference rooms for a tech company. The major concept for the whole project was “family”. Then, when it comes to the conference rooms, the concept was transferred to “living room”. Throughout the design iterations, she kept tracking all the ideas and decisions upon this concept and finally got to the final results. As the project moving to the construction phase, cost became a major constraint to the design. What Sarah did was trying to specify all the details and it worked out. She would be very satisfied to see people using the space really like it. Though as an architect, she is also exposed to a lot of other design field due to the studio she works for. She really enjoys the brainstorming process in her workplace, where she could have her colleague designers working at the same time to come up with ideas on a huge whiteboard.
Influences:
Her design process has changed as she becomes more confident and more experienced about the work. She also thinks as her ego turned down a bit, she becomes more capable of listening to others. To Sarah, thinking about people who will experience the space she designs mostly influences her work. Also, she also thinks having fun during the process will lead her to better work. Sarah has open-mind to almost everything, and she believes both her personal interests and work experience are important factors in her creative decision making process.
Perspectives of the design field:
To Sarah, aesthetics = simplicity, also it’s about making beautiful work. As an architect, Sarah appreciates details a lot. She values a lot on designer’s consciousness about any kind of details, on the drawings, at the construction site and so on. She thinks details reveal designer’s ability of control. In the future, Sarah sees the outlook of more hybrid practices in the design field, where people work across disciplines to create better work. As for most annoying thing about being a designer for Sarah, it’s the sexism in the construction field. There is such bias that the workers think architectural designers only care about design instead of building method and science. She’s working hard and making every effort she could as a way to advocate her attitude on that.