A Coffee a Day, for 5 days — Day 1 with Teunis Vorsteveld
“A Coffee a Day, for 5 days” will feature a new discussion each day with a different UX professional. The goal is to understand their story and journey into the field, receive any advice and gems they can share for recent grads and junior designers such as myself, and receive feedback on my killer portfolio which can be found here: https://www.callmedak.com
Today, I’m sitting down with Teunis Vorsteveld, a friend of mine and former co-worker from when I worked as an account executive. You can read my first Medium article here detailing why I made the career pivot into design.
Teunis describes himself as a functional thinker that tries to connect people through technology. He is a UX designer, who has almost 10 years of experience working in an agency environment and will soon be transitioning into a freelancer role.
Let’s jump right in. I started by asking questions to learn more about Teunis as a designer and his journey.
D: Can you describe your journey towards the UX field? How did it start and what’s next for you?
T: I started as a production designer when I left school. I did a few creative services for a bunch of years and settled as a production designer. It really played into my attention to detail, and allowed me to focus on a project from beginning to end… to make it perfect. I did that for so long, I started to feel like I needed something else.
I was fortunate that some of the people coming into john st (advertising agency), through the studio department were creative developers and UX thinkers that were starting to make me aware of what UX was. I took a one-week intro-course to UX at Akendi. We did a UI class, a psychology class and others. A lot of the teachers were actually psychologists, so my first understanding of what UX was, was understanding people’s behaviour. I then brought that knowledge back to john st. Within the studio we were building iPad apps for sales reps within healthcare who would talk to doctors. What I didn’t realize was while I was working on those I was already thinking about the experience and doing some UI design. I was putting together the actual flow and figuring out how people were going to use this app on the iPad. I didn’t realize I was doing it until I found out what it was.
I got lucky when john st started a new team called the Digital ignition Unit (DIU). I reached out to the right people and they took me on. I jumped on their team and it was my first foray into what UX design could be.
What’s next for me is a lifestyle change and getting back into freelance. I’ll remain in UX at some capacity because I love it. However, going freelance allows me to spend time at home because I have a young son. After the summer when my son goes back to school I’ll look at my options and consider going back into full time within the tech industry, but not necessarily advertising. I want to build products that we can iterate and work on and make better overtime. I want to keep building!
D: What led you towards agency side vs being an in-house UX designer?
T: I never knew about going in-house until some time after my first course. I started going to a lot of presentations, conferences, and a lot of talks. And that’s when I learned the different dynamic between the two. Now that I can make a decision, I’m leaning towards the in-house side.
One thing for me would be that you’re working on one client. You can focus all your attention on that one client. Even if it’s different projects within the one client, you’re still working on one whole experience. Also, it’s easier to get sign-off with a client, you can move onto things quicker, and timelines are more efficient as well.
D: Were there any challenges you faced early in your UX career? How did you overcome them?
T: There’s a lot of challenges. UX is huge! There’s a lot to do within the space. Understanding what the role is and trying to define it was very difficult. So when I learned about what my role could be, it felt large. The agency need was kind of defining the “unicorn”. The person that does everything from the UX research through visual design and up to dev, with testing after that.
Getting over that challenge was learning more about the methodologies. Not every project requires every single step. You can focus on which methodology to use and focus on what you’re strong at, and gain the right insights from there.
D: What led you to choose going to a “UX bootcamp” at this stage of your career?
T: I was in the field for two years on the agency side and there was never a digital process established for how we do work from beginning to end. Learning about the process was important to me. The way the course at Miami Ad School was structured was going through the UX methodology from beginning to end in a structural and linear way. That was the thinking I wanted to take back.
Having done that course I could go back and start doing work. Based on the briefs that I had and the timelines, I could start figuring out which methodologies would apply and what approach I should first with, if any, and then just get work done. It was more, how do I work in an environment that doesn’t have a process that I can run with on my own until something was established.
Taking what I learned back to the agency was a challenge. We were starting to define what our UX process would be and it wasn’t necessarily the same as what I had learned in school. I had to adapt quickly because the process is being defined but I still had to get work done.
Advice for junior designers
As someone with the amount of experience he has, I found it would be truly helpful to hear what sort of advice Teunis would have for junior designers.
D: What sort of advice would you give to UX designers that want to strive in an agency environment instead of in-house?
T: One is to be a critical thinker. You’re around a lot of creative types, which is great because you can tap into those minds. A lot of the creatives we run into now, at least in my experience, think with the traditional advertising mind. Meaning they want to do a commercial, a website, a splash page, when instead you can sort of help define what the experience can become. Based on the project, we can see if augmented reality or conversational UI make sense.
Using critical thinking skills, you’re looking at different technology and hopefully having an understanding of what the different tech can do and how to build them.
D: What are some of the key skills junior designers should have?
- Learning prototyping tools is great and will allow you to communicate transitions and motion which can get lost in the translation of your functional specifications. Sometimes words don’t exactly portray what you mean.
- Copywriting is super important. It can help with writing stakeholder interviews, discussion guides and functional specifications since you want to be as accurate as you can.
- Coming up with ideas. It’s hard to call this a skill but thinking about creative solutions when you’re in the ideation phase. You can easily get trapped into thinking about one thing. For example, if you’re making a splash page, you might just get stuck in the content hierarchy instead of looking at completely different avenues. You don’t want to get stuck on one idea. Try to find others. Try things that are bonkers and bananas. If something comes in your head, just write it down because you might get something out of it that will make sense.
D: Would you recommend that UX designers start freelancing in the beginning of their career to gain real client experience or to land a position at a company first?
T: I would suggest landing a position at a company with an established team as the first step. So if you’re fresh, you want to keep working within the process that you were taught. If you go away from that you might start to forget. Working in a team environment, you can learn from each other and grow your skills. If you are struggling to do something in Principle, maybe there’s someone on your team that can help you with that. I think this is the right approach in the beginning. However, it all depends on how great of a designer you are out the gate and your previous experience.
D: What sort of advice would you give to new “bootcamp” grads transitioning into the field from a non-design related career.
T: Figure out what you want to do and you’ll be able to figure out the right place to go. After you’ve figured that out, you can define your portfolio with that direction. As an example, I want to focus on interaction design, so my portfolio isn’t going to have a strong focus on research over visual design. I’ll start with the research insights that were either provided or extracted by me, then focus on the IA, structural components, wireframes, and concepts. You want to gear your portfolio towards the area you want to work in.
- Find out what you want to do
- Make sure your portfolio suits what you want
- Define and vocalize your career path to potential employers.
Portfolio review
I shared my portfolio with Teunis a few days in advance so we could spend more time discussing feedback rather than going through it for the first time. Here are some of the comments he gave:
- I like the structure — you’re showing why you’re doing the project, who you’re building it for, you demonstrate the insights and you show your thinking.
- I like that you’re showing your iterations of the prototype. You’re not afraid to show where you can make improvements.
- I really like the reflection and next steps at the end of your case studies. This speaks your ideas on how to iterate and improve a product and speaks to your commitment to those improvements.
Key Takeaways
I learned a lot in my short chat with Teunis. Here were some of the standout takeaways:
- It’s important to know what you want to do early within the UX umbrella. Sure, it’s important to know a bit of everything but you should also have that area that you can specialize and grow within.
- Have an understanding of different UX methodologies and learn to adapt based on the project and deliverables at hand. You’re not always going to have the time or resources to cross off every step of the UX process. Learning to adapt is crucial.
- Never stop learning. Teunis is someone that took it upon himself to continue learning more about the UX process while already working on client projects. He saw an opportunity to learn valuable information that he could bring back to his team and went for it.
Hope you all enjoyed this one as it’s the first instalment of a 5 article series I’ll be releasing throughout the week. Cheers!
