Meet Kelsey: Getting to the next level in her design career
Short stories about Product Design Pro students
I personally teach product design because friends started asking me to help them become better designers. They had a lot of questions. All the same questions I had when I was learning product design, like:
- Am I doing this right?
- How do other designers work?
- Will someone please give me some good feedback?
- I don’t have a process. How do I learn process?
- Something feels off, but I don’t know what. What am I missing?
- What are the best ways to become a better designer?
- How do I explain what I do is important to other people at my company?
- I think I want to become a product designer… how do I know if its right for me?
Because I’ve been in their shoes before and know exactly where they are coming from, I love to mentor and answer those exact questions. I also share what I’ve learned at Google designing products.
Software is a magical thing and can really help a lot of people in almost every industry, and we need more designers to design software. There are lots of decisions and impact to be made, and the more empathy and sketching we can do to help make those decisions, the better.
So far, most my students fall into UX and UI design without much training. Some are just starting, others have 10 years of experience. Here are some of their stories to inspire others that are learning and growing.
So first, Meet Kelsey.
After graduating with a degree in Graphic Design, Kelsey kicked off her career working as a Visual Designer at Magento/eBay. She designed branding and marketing collateral, and website graphics. She learned UX on the job, assisting a senior designer, who trained her in UX design and thinking. After a year at eBay, she had the itch to switch it up, and made the move to LA to work in Silicon Beach.
During the course, Kelsey was working at Thrive Market (Series B, $159M) as a UI Designer. She was kicking butt, working on the Product Design team. Kelsey was already a talented designer with a great job at a fast-growing startup in LA… so why did she enroll in Product Design Pro?
“I’ve been working under the Product Design team at my current job, but of course there is no formal training in this area of design, so it would be nice to use this course as a comparison for what I “think” I know, verses your experience in the industry.”
- Filled in the gaps in her design process
Kelsey was good at doing individual design exercises and practices, but she didn’t have a mental map that tied it all together for her. Product Design Pro validated a lot of Kelsey’s own intuition, and filled in the gaps in her knowledge. She was able to get hired in the UI role, but she knew she needed to supplement her work with more education to feel more confident in what she was doing. After going through Product Design Pro, Kelsey was able to confidently sit in her new title and position at her growing startup.
“I think I was a 4 or a 5 [in confidence] because I knew some of the elements but I didn’t have a clear process on how to use the elements. Now I’m an 8 because I refined what I knew and learned how to implement things right [so that] was crucial to understanding product design as a whole.”
2. Learned how to design faster than ever
Kelsey learned a ton of things she didn’t expect to… like how to efficiently mock-up an entire app in a day. Before the course it would have taken her a week using her old method. She really appreciated the tools, tactics and exercises like Lightning Demos and Solution Sketches to help her design faster and more efficiently than she had before.
3. Experienced how an all-star designer works
Getting insight into another designer’s process is how most designers grow. I remember sitting next to a designer at Google and just watching him use Sketch for two hours. It was one of the most helpful things ever for me. For Kelsey, she got insight into how I work and what I learned working in tech in the Bay Area and at Google. Coming from a background in Graphic Design that mostly emphasized print, Kelsey was able to better see through Product Design Pro how a career in UX/UI design could successfully and confidently unfold in the next stage of her career.
I’m accepting applications for the February class of Product Design Pro now.
