Transitioning from Grad School to Product Designer at Chewy
by Chad Cooper, Product Designer @ Chewy
It’s the final few weeks of your graduate tenure. You’ve been pulling 16 hour days to complete your thesis, update and refine your portfolio, applying to jobs and staying on top of your coursework. At this point in the semester cold brew coffee is your best friend. And then one day while on campus you receive an email from a talent representative at Chewy asking to talk. A few hours later, you find out you’ll be traveling to Boston for an onsite interview the following Friday.
You travel to the interview, still balancing all of your deliverables as a student and trying to prepare for the interview. The interview happens and things seem to have gone really well, you also find out the office has nitro cold brew on tap! But there’s no time to relax, you have to get back to school. It’s still the end of the semester and your thesis defense is just a few days away.
The weekend passes and Monday rolls around. The talent representative lets you know the creative director wants to have a conversation. You chat with the creative director and it also goes well. A few hours pass and the talent representative lets you know that things are looking great and there might be an offer the next day, the same day that you’re supposed to defend your thesis. The rest of the day is spent with cautious excitement and also final preparations for your thesis defense.
It’s defense day.
You’re on edge with the upcoming presentation and the possibility of an incoming job offer. Sitting in the campus coffee shop double and triple checking your phone to make sure the ringer is on and frequently glancing at your screen to make sure you didn’t miss the potential call. Your thesis defense is quickly approaching and you start to worry the call will come during your presentation.
Then your phone rings.
You’re offered the job and you accept. The feeling is amazing. You check the time and find your defense starts in 10 minutes so you rush to the studio. The excitement from the offer makes thesis defense a breeze.
Three days later you graduate from graduate school. Now what?
All of that actually happened as I finished the Visual Communication Design MFA program at the Rochester Institute of Technology(RIT). My time at RIT truly made me feel prepared to enter the workforce as a designer. Our professors at RIT groomed us for two years to ensure our readiness as designers. I knew I was ready for the job but I had one question.
How do we design for e-commerce?
In school we could personally direct our projects and it wasn’t until now that I realized that I never focused a project on e-commerce. I quickly found out that this wasn’t something to be stressing about.
Sure, the first week finally rolled around and I went into work with a lot of questions. I found myself trying to figure out all sorts of new acronyms and trying to understand all of the flows and scenarios of our experience. After feeling slightly overwhelmed by day three, I realized I was approaching things wrong.
I was trying to solve for everything and understand everything at once. After noticing this, I made changes to how I was approaching my work. The following are some of the ways I helped ease myself into my new role.
1.Know Your Audience and Empathize with Them
I know it’s said over and over again, but keeping users at the center of design decisions truly matters for any design to be successful. It was essential to take time to really learn about our users before jumping into design. We need to consider all sorts of scenarios in which a user might be using our product in order to minimize drop-off and increase genuine user satisfaction with our service. Friction points can quickly halt a user’s experience. Finding ways to minimize and remove friction will create a better experience, but this can’t be done without having empathy for your users.
2. Ask Questions, A Lot of Them
Don’t just sit back and watch things happen. If you don’t understand something that is being discussed, just ask. I’ve found that a lot of the questions I asked were received with positive feedback. This is because the person I asked was happy with the angle I was approaching the task with, or simply that I was invested in the project. At the same time, my question was answered or there was at least some direction given. Getting over the potential awkwardness and being comfortable with asking questions is much better is much better than aimlessly wandering around a server or searching the internet for an answer.
3. Figure Out Your Network
You’re new with the company, it’s important to try to figure out your go-to people. There will be all sorts of questions you’ll have and not everyone will have answers, but finding out who to reach out to for assistance helps immensely. It’s also important to find people you can talk to about work in-progress. We’re designers after all, and I’ve found that the best work I’ve created came from collaboration, critique and asking questions.
4. Understand the Design System and Structure
Take time to familiarize yourself with the company’s design system. Learn how to work with the type, color, icon libraries and UI patterns. Dig through the files and see how they were made. If you have time, design overtop of existing screens to understand the hierarchy and various subtle treatments.
5. Ask About Making Changes (If It Feels Right)
Don’t assume all design decisions are final. After digging through the design system and remaking screens, you may find that things could be tweaked. I was initially hesitant to ask about changing things in our designs since I was new on the team, but I found that our team is really open to new considerations and suggestions.
No matter the design challenge, the goal is the same.
While the type of content and Chewy’s intended outcomes may be different than what I designed for in graduate school, the ultimate goal is still to provide the best user experience; something that I have always been trained to do. And with this, comes the openness to new ideas and changes.
Thanks for reading this post! If you have any questions or comments send me an email at ccooper3@chewy.com.
by Chad Cooper
Product Designer @ Chewy
Chad is a Product Designer at Chewy, he is the owner of the Android experience. Chad has his MFA in Visual Communication Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology and his B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). In his free time he enjoys photography and 3D/Motion design.
If you have any questions about careers at Chewy, please visit https://www.chewy.com/jobs
