How did you get into design?
Growing up, I was a huuuge nerd!
In middle school, I found old, discarded computer parts and reassembled them into low cost internet portals. With the composability of Linux, I learned that I could tweak the entire desktop experience to be anything I needed, and I got hooked on designing unique UIs for my use cases. I quickly picked up web development, and in high school I ran websites generating revenue off Google Adsense.
I spent a few years after high school working on my own startup, doing design consulting (including stints at Airbnb and Volkswagen), and trying out different lines of work including in a restaurant, a bike shop, and a car rental company.
When I returned to school for my Bachelor's, I designed software for patients and healthcare providers at Curology and for data analysts at Alation.
After graduating with a Bachelor's in Design in 2020, I spent two years at New Relic, where I was the Senior Product Designer on large cross-functional projects such as introducing a new user type and piloting new pricing models that helped pivot the company to a consumption-based model.
Most recently, I've been on an adventure helping startups like Writ (backed by Google's Gradient Ventures) and Ampersand (backed by Matrix Partners and the founders of Dropbox and Airtable) from the perspective of my solo practice, Sider Studios, helping them build confidence via quick prototyping, testing, and learning.
My deep understanding of technology and my broad set of experiences allows me to go beyond the typical job description of a product designer to uncover new markets, inspire engineering teams, and lead organizations toward healthier and more effective process.
What is your background in code, business, and user research?
Code
As a tinkerer growing up, I spent a lot of time on alternative OS's like Linux and Rockbox and flashing phones. I learned basic web dev, how to use terminal, tracking things via Git, and I regularly keep up with what's new via Hacker News. I know how to use things like CSS preprocessors, templating languages with partials and includes, MJML for emails, optimizing for web performance etc. All of this helps me better understand engineering constraints and workflows.
Business
Besides starting my own startup, which won a few competitions and a seed grant, my favorite two classes in college were Financial Accounting and Managing Change. Financial Acounting helped me understand how business is measured, and Managing Change gave me frameworks I still use as a designer, like triple constraints, flexibility matrix, change curve, ladder of inference, root cause analysis, SIPOC, system map.
User research
My background in user research comes from both class and industry. The best training I had for user research was a journalism class I took, where I learned that often the richest insights come from drawing a story out of people rather than being overly clinical. However, in evaluative research, I've also run studies that are extremely precise, where measures like task success, task confidence, and task time result in scientific results with a high level of replicability. At New Relic, I've had the pleasure of massively revamping the research recruitment and scheduling process, using automations with Calendly and Airtable to reduce manual work and back-and-forth with scheduling interviewees.
What is your design process?
Every design project is different and deserves a unique process. However, most design projects have these phases:
Problem exploration and convergence
I start by doing user research, market research, and literature review to understand who we are designing for, the problem space, and the technological best practices and capabilities in the space. My experience in recruiting users and running engaging, high-value interviews helps me get through this rapidly, especially since I've found that many early-stage teams are wary of too much research without building. I prefer to involve all functions of the three-legged stool (design-PM-engineering) in research, so we can use affinity mapping and organically align on the most valuable problems we've seen talking to users.
Solution exploration and convergence
With a set of problems prioritized, I check to see what we still don't know. Taking into account engineering constraints and architectural direction, I build clickable prototypes based on some intentional assumptions, and I get them in front of users to see their reaction and observe how well it fits into their lives and solves their problem. This feedback allows us to shake off some unknowns, and we in turn have more confidence and a better tuned product prototype. I go through several rounds of adjusting the prototype, putting it in front of users, and shaking off more unknowns until the team and I feel highly confident that what we are building solves the user's problem. Sometimes, during this process, I may have to check with the team on making the hard decision to scrap the solution or to go in a totally direction with the solution, depending on how users react.
Getting the solution shovel-ready
At this point, the team has high confidence on the general flow; it's my turn to work through the nitty gritty details of the design, often with close input from engineering. This is when I work on defining metrics, interaction details, microanimations, copy changes, responsive behavior, onboarding considerations, hover states, empty states, error states, and making sure everything aligns with the design system. Depending on timeline, the engineering team may already be building the backend or the scaffolding at this time, which means it's even more important for me to get them finalized specs on how these details should work. How I communicate these details to the engineering side depends on the team's preference, but I've found that writing these details in engineering tickets is often the most effective way to ensure no detail is lost.
QA, communication, and monitoring
Of course, the role of the designer is not over. I often help QA the staging environment as things are built, prioritize bugs found, and communicate with product marketing managers to help them shape the narrative around what we are launching and why we are launching it. On teams without the product marketing function, the PM or I take responsibility to create a blog post and socialize our updates both internally and to customers.
Post-launch, the PM and I often share responsibility in monitoring metrics, reviewing user feedback, and ensuring bugs are brought up and worked on. Depending on the findings, we may choose to jump into another design project to evolve what we've built or to build new things on top.