Beyond the px — Asana’s Catt Small on facilitation, research, and understanding your users
Catt Small is a hybrid designer / developer working at Asana Design doing amazing work in the productivity space. Not only does she juggle work, speaking opportunities, and create great digital games, she runs a Game Devs of Color Expo too.
Enjoy.
Who are Asana?
Asana helps teams focus on what matters most by enabling them to quickly track, organize, and manage their work.
What has been your design journey up until now?
My formal introduction to design occurred in high school. Like many developers and designers of my generation, I learned how to code and make digital artwork as a preteen through websites like Neopets and Livejournal. However, I didn’t know I wanted to be a designer until later in my teen years. I took a computer graphics class and liked it enough to take the class twice. I then volunteered for an agency that gave young women design work experience in exchange for their opinions about the brands that targeted them.
As my high school years ended, I decided to focus fully on design by attending the School of Visual Arts. SVA was the place that helped me dive deep into traditional design. It’s also where I learned that the digital wave was coming and my programming skills would be beneficial; in 2008 web design was popular, but mobile design was just becoming a formal practice. I took on several digital design internships and landed a junior web design job at Nasdaq, where I worked until I graduated. Jumping on the digital wave was the best decision I ever made!
My web design job wound down right before I graduated from SVA in 2011, so I decided to join a small startup as an interface designer in order to get more mobile design experience. I worked there for a little under a year because I was offered a better position back at Nasdaq: Product Designer! That role once again forever changed my career trajectory — I learned how to conduct user research and work with agile developers.
After Nasdaq I worked for another tiny startup for almost a year, then SoundCloud for two years, then Etsy for three years. Now I’m at Asana. It’s been over ten years since my first real job, and I’m so thankful for where my career had brought me so far.
What does your typical morning look like?
These days, I roll out of bed at 8am and play 30 minutes of Just Dance.
Then I clean myself up and start my workday by 10am. Luckily, I have an apartment with two bedrooms; I turned one of the bedrooms into my office.
Around 11am I usually have peach tea with honey, then I eat my first meal at lunch. Not sure why, but I find myself less hungry in the morning — it’s probably because I’m more sedentary now!
What does your tool stack look like?
I exclusively design interfaces using Figma these days, but occasionally you’ll find me making icons in Adobe Illustrator.
If I need to jump into code, I’ll open Sublime Text and push my code in iTerm. When I am writing documentation, I use Dropbox Paper — but I make slides using Google Slides and save my files in Google Drive.
Do you have any design hacks, or particularly smart processes?
Figma’s Auto Layout feature is absolutely amazing and has saved me so much time. I no longer have to move a bunch of stuff when I make a small change. Mix Auto Layouts with their Components feature and it’s truly next level.
Do you find it hard to define what you do to your friends?
I think most people understand what design is in the abstract sense but they think I sit around drawing all day. In reality, most of my time is spent facilitating conversations. A day in which I quietly move pixels is quite rare — although it’s easier to achieve at Asana because we have No Meeting Wednesdays.
How do you design ‘for the future’?
I fully believe research is the way to design for the future.
Listening to people, addressing their concerns, and reading between the lines to see past surface-level issues has helped me predict future outcomes numerous times.
You can’t create cookie-cutter designs if you have properly identified and designed for your audience because the solutions wouldn’t work if they were copied.
What was it that attracted you to working in the productivity space?
I first had the opportunity to work on productivity tools during my second stint at Nasdaq. I found myself in a project that aimed to help lawyers read through acquisition-related documentation as quickly as possible.
The project was incredibly interesting, and I knew I wanted to work on more software at some point in my career.
Even at Etsy, an e-commerce company, I still focused on tools; in that case, I designed software that helped sellers.
When Asana reached out, I saw this as an opportunity to progress further as a designer of complex systems.
What’s your team dynamic?
I directly work on a cross-functional team of about ten people.
That being said, we also often collaborate with several other teams across the company. On one day, I might interact with 20 to 30 individuals about my project. When I joined Asana, I knew I would be scaling my efforts so we could enable multiple teams worth of engineers (and other roles) to move quickly.
I’m thankful for the amount of impact I currently have, and my entire career so far feels like it’s been leading up to this role.
What advice do you have for junior designers?
Design is about people. Focus on understanding your audience. Create solutions with them.
I’m sure some of the new designers will create awesome work that pushes our industry in a completely new direction I can’t even imagine. As I continue to grow in my career, I find myself working to maintain the curiosity and excitement that new graduates tend to have. It’s inspiring, and I hope to continue to have chances to collaborate with new designers!
Do you have any side projects bubbling along?
I occasionally take on freelance projects; whether or not I accept a freelance client depends on my bandwidth. These days, I don’t have design gigs outside my job at Asana, and it feels great!
However, I am working on producing an online version of the Game Devs of Color Expo, which is an annual event that centers game creators of color.
How good was that? Some brilliant insight from Catt about placing the user right at the centre of your design process. And I’m really jealous just how accomplished she is at all of her disciplines.
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