Free Webinar: UX in the early stages of building a product
Join us on the 17th of August for a free lecture on product design🚀
WHAT’S THIS FREE LECTURE ABOUT🧐?
Involving UX as early as possible is crucial to the success of a product because it allows user insight to guide the project, avoiding costly mistakes and development rework after the product is built. Almost every designer comes to a moment where they are faced with the possibility of redesigning a product that was built with no consideration for the “user-centered” mindset.
An increasingly large number of digital products are created every year. As the need to create products that satisfy user’s needs grow, so does the speed to which these products are developed and released to people.
👉About the instructor Catarina Ribeiro:
From a young age, I knew that design was my passion. Feeling real empathy for people’s needs and frustrations is the key to start designing meaningful products. With an academic background in multidisciplinary design, I have been working as a UI/UX designer in Vienna, Austria, for the last 5 years.
In 2019, I joined ready2order and have been responsible for redesigning parts of their product and new features, used by over 10K businesses in German-speaking countries. I focus on design research, usability evaluation, prototyping, and user interface design. I love conducting usability tests to gather feedback from users and continuously improve products.
🌱 Based on my previous experience of redesigning products for a large customer base, I invite you to join me in figuring out how to involve UX during the discovery phase and how to approach a redesign process when there is no other way.
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Save your spot for free: https://online.brainster.co/catarina-ribeiro-elite-webinar/
Meet your instructor:
Hi Catarina, thanks for being an instructor on our UX/UI Design Webinar series! First of all, can you tell us a bit about your current focus? What are you working on right now?
Since I joined ready2order at the beginning of 2019 my focus has been on redesigning different parts of their software — a Point-of-Sale with various features. At the end of last year, we started a large-scale redesign of the company’s website, an ongoing project that spread across six months and involved a lot of different teams. We went through a long discovery phase in which we invested in competitor research, heuristic analysis, and understanding our target audience better. Around four weeks ago we finally reached the final phase of designing and testing and entered the development phase, which was a big milestone for us. In parallel to that, I worked on smaller projects, which included an onboarding process for the company’s new payment solution.
Currently, I’m taking a holiday, enjoying the company of my dog and, of course, preparing my webinar with Brainster.
You have 5 years of working experience as a designer. What is some top advice for young designers wanting to make a career in Austria?
The nicest thing about being a UX designer in Austria is that there are a lot of great opportunities and cool companies for you to join. You should try different things to discover what matters to you. I started my career as a UX/UI designer working for agencies, which had some benefits in terms of being able to work on a variety of different projects and it made me more versatile. However, in a software company, you sometimes get to see long-range plans realized and you can influence the product that you are working on in a long-lasting way. If this product happens to touch a big customer base
you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the work you did with the team will influence a lot of people in a positive way.
Obviously, sometimes this process can be frustratingly slow, even in start-ups, and you might end up running into different agendas when you’re just trying to design meaningful products. You need to be able to make hard trade-offs, which is harder when you are someone with a hands-on mentality and passionate about your work. In the end, I found that working in a product for a long period of time, despite the bigger challenges, brought me more knowledge and joy than the agency work. It all depends on what your goals are.
What are your favourite industries/market segments/brands to design for?
I designed across different industries and brands, especially when working for agencies. I enjoyed all of it but what really matters to me is to work on something that solves a real problem. I have no preference for a certain industry or segment as long as I can keep doing that.
The design world is one big community of interconnected creatives. How has the design community contributed to your agency (knowledge, opportunities) and vice-versa?
Last year ready2order hosted the first Dribbble meet-up in Vienna, where some of my colleagues presented a bit of the work we were doing at the time and we also flew to Amsterdam to attend the UXCamp 2019. At the Camp, I had the pleasure of listening to very interesting UX talks from experienced speakers and got to know a lot of fun people at the after-party. Here in Vienna, the event that had a bigger impact on my work was the Usability Testessen organized by EmpaticUX. It gives companies the opportunity to test their products with a different range of users — it works like speed dating with a product. I was a regular presence at this event and it had a very positive impact for me because we were always able to test our ideas and solutions.
Being a designer means constantly seeking inspiration everywhere around you. What hobbies/interests inspire you the most in your work?
I enjoy traveling, especially if the destination is a beach, watching movies, eating out, wine tasting, and going for long walks or hikes with my dog, Dama. It allows me to turn off from work and get in touch with simpler things. As a designer you end up spending a lot of time in front of a screen, so taking the time to observe things around me is something relaxing and inspiring.
Do you admire any Austrian designers? :)
Having spent most of my life in Portugal I can mention a few Portuguese artists that I grew up admiring and whose work had a real influence on me when I was a student. I was very much into illustration at that time and one of my favourite artists was Ana Aragao.
Her unique style and incredibly detailed drawings of imaginary cities and urban places are something that I can spend hours looking at, even now. Other great names are Nadir Afonso and Paula Rego. From Austria, there is a photographer whose work I find really expressive — Ernst Haas. My boyfriend introduced me to his photographs a while back — he’s a photography lover so we have a big collection of books here at home.
What can the webinar participants expect from this lecture?
They can expect to see some real-life examples of design processes that I went through and hear some very honest opinions on the joys and challenges of redesigning highly used products. And if my dog shows up somewhere during the presentation — don’t be surprised!
