Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Fairy Lai

Highlights of 0518 Event by DesignX

I am so glad I was able to join this design career event organized by DesignX with the Toronto design community on May 18 at Sandbox by DMZ.

Kirill Zakharov from Unsplash had a demo about the product journey, and there were great panelists: Michael Halminen from Google, Melissa Da Silva from Loblaws Digital and Sebastian Speier from Nike.

Panelists of DesignX 0518

Product Journey of Unsplash

As a product designer at Unspash, Kirill shared the journey how Unsplash came from a small Tumblr blog at Crew when they had some extra photos to share online, to a big hit by being featured by Hacker News, to a side project of Crew with one full-time worker managing the site, to a platform with hundreds thousands of users with photos from NASA and Space X, to the most open photo community in the world, and to an independent company separated from Crew now.

From 2013 to 2017, the Unsplash page looks similar. They did some minor changes by adding features like following and collections, but they are trying to keep the simplicity of the design.

Check a GIF by Kirill to see the evolution of Unsplash page.

Evolution of @unsplash‘s homepage since 2013. https://t.co/g5tbeFpyQa

— @kirillz

Another important aspect of the growth of Unsplash is the community they are building.

Do whatever you want with the photos is their primary intention, and soon they found out amazingly people started to contribute back with some extremely high-quality pictures for free. The good circle is formed and more and more people started to be in the community. Unsplash also holds meet ups and has published photo book to give back to the community.

Summary of the evolution of Unsplash

Kirill also shared his learnings with product design:

1/Listen + understand your users

2/Balance gut + data

3/Ship fast and break things

4/Know when to retire a feature

5/Design around fundamentals

Learnings from Kirill

Highlights of Panel Discussion on Design Career

1/Designers at early stage

When designers at their early stage, especially for junior designers, it is easy for them to feel anxious and don’t know what to start. What kind of suggestions do you have for them?

Make good use of the network/environment/resources to get into the industry
No need to worry about whether the current job is going to be the forever job — try different stuff and skills, we might find out something unexpected
Use a creative way to catch attention (keeping sending emails is a thing, try to be a bit annoying but not too annoying :D)
Pick and choose right opportunities — learn along the way and keep learning

2/Learning

Learning is a forever topic. Designers learn hard skills at school, but when they come out of school they still need to keep learning. What do you do to keep learning?

Craft

Know what to learn and how to prioritize
Learn what is relevant at that time and to me — no need to compare too much on ourselves with others or focus too much on the trend
Do freelance/side projects to keep up to date
In management, show you can work well can earn trust from the team

Soft skills: communication and collaboration

Story-telling is a big thing: the hard skills we learned at school is important. But to take the user journey and explain why it is important, why made a specific decision, to prepare a deck and walk through a prototype is the key to stand out in the competition.
How to build relationship with both clients and the team
Learn how to defend the design while not being defensive
Learn how to sell the design

3/Imposter syndrome

In a managing role, are you still experiencing syndrome? How do you deal with it?

Embrace imposter syndrome — always learn from others. Feeling yourself is not good enough can always motivate you to continue to learn and grow. It can also be a good thing
Be brave to try things out and tell yourself you can do it well next time
Have your own identity as a designer

4/Last piece of advice

Michael: Walk out from your comfort zone, once you get comfortable, you are slowing down
Melissa: Get hands on and test different skill set, don’t limit yourself
Sebastian: Don’t be too hard to yourself. It is OK to learn from failure. Also, keep you own identity

Highlights from Q&A

1/How to sell creatives?

It is always a team score rather than a responsibility of the designers.
We need to prepare and plan before walking into the boardroom and talk with the executives.
Tell a good story
Make the design decisions with rationale and logic, not just looks good

2/In a management role, any challenge?

Fight the urge to take back the work from the juniors and finish it on my own
Have a switch of being a boss and a friend with the rest of the team
Manage the relationship with teammates

My Personal Learning

Before the event starts, I had a talk with Andy, a product design focused engineer and I was really inspired by what he shared with me.

Whenever I have an idea, think about whether people really need it, the market share, the competition, value proposition, because only in this way can you build a successful product which can attract capital markets, a product that truly solves a problem rather than an art piece purely from ego.

This talk was a great one for me. As the design team of one, I’m always wondering whether I’m not good enough that is why I couldn’t join large corporations, I’m always concerned that I can’t get enough growth. However, from the event, I know not everyone can be successful without efforts, whoever in the position that everyone wants to be really paid great efforts in the places where we couldn’t see.

And don’t worry, everyone has a starting point. I’m not alone and I’m not the only one.

Give it some time. Keep learning. Be patient and grateful. Then GROW.

Fairy is a product designer who is dedicated to utilizing technology to better connect the world. Welcome to connect me via Dribbble, Linkedin, and Twitter.

Building a Great Design Career Path was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building a Great Design Career Path

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