Designers🎤alk #30 with Rohan Mishra( Senior Product Designer at Urban Company)| PHASE 3 [IND Edition]

Date: 28th February 2021

Rohan is an engineer turned designer and currently working as Sr. Product Designer. Also, he previously worked for Zomato. He’s a gem for the community as he’s mentoring designers as well as sharing knowledge through his YouTube channel. In this talk, he has shared his opinions regarding :

1️⃣ to-do list for design interviews;

2️⃣ how to approach research;

3️⃣ biggest mistakes in the portfolios and etc.

Q1. Hi Rohan, nice to meet you. Let’s start with a short background story. How did you get started in design?

Hi Akash, thanks for having me and documenting my story. I hope this adds some value in people’s lives.

• When I started out in college, I had no idea what I would be doing. The conditioning had been such that I wanted to become a programmer and write code that would eventually help me earn a great livelihood.
• Life had bigger and better plans for me.
• Little did I know I will fall in love with something that is meant for me.

So, I came to know about design when I was studying in an engineering college.

• My first interaction with the design was when one of my seniors was creating a Poster for some event on Photoshop (to set some context back then doing a UI Design on photoshop wasn’t unusual)
• It was fascinating for me at first and then I started hanging out with a senior group and working with them in capacity, got to work on a lot of Apps and Websites for the educational institutions (mostly government).

Sooner I realised the power I have had in my hands, by talking to a few designers working at companies. So, it all worked out.

Q2: What’s the must-to-do list for a designer that they can prepare before appearing for a design interview?

Probably, I am not the right person to answer this because in my life I have given like 2–3 Interviews for jobs because I have applied to like 5 Jobs in total in my career and ended up not pursuing most of them.

I think when you go for a Design Job Interview, you need to understand:

1. What’s the role,
2. what does the company do,
3. Have a fair share of projects to run people through your process, some Bigger goals in mind, and
4. soft skills.

Bare minimum, “Be an awesome human being”.

I can’t stress on this enough. I was able to build a great rapport with people and that tipped the scales in my favour.

Q3: Making a website and apps as a side project, Do you keep in mind users with disabilities?

I care and respect the people who are going to use our products, and also due to the scale at which the companies I have worked with operate, if we skip the implementation of accessibility principles in any of our products, we will be leaving out a big chunk of potential users. And, will be indirectly telling users that we don’t care for them.

So, I always do like to check the products we ship for accessibility. With the new tools and plugins, it doesn’t even take a lot of time.

Have I achieved a product which I can say is 100% accessible, not yet!

But, I try to have that empathy and take one step at a time in this direction.

Q4: How do you normally approach research in UX projects?

The way I see it is research helps you get answers to the questions you have. And, talking to the users is the best way to figure out the answers.

To find Ideas, find problems; To find problems, talk to people. ~Julie Zhuo

There are two types of research in any UX project that I practice and preach:

1. The purpose of the first one which is also called User Research is to find out the user’s problems ( To answer the question “Are we building the right thing?”) and once you do the process you will have clarity on the User’s Goals, Challenges, and Motivations. It will be helpful in building the solution.
2. Once you build the solution you need to go back to the users to answer the question “Have you built the thing right?” We called it Usability testing.

I like to make it a priority to do both even if I get to do it with 5 people because it brings tons of insights for us. which helps in making the product better for our users.

Even for my personal projects, I like to send out 2–3 surveys every month to learn what the audience cares about.

I follow this framework in most of my projects.

Q5: Do you have a system or process in place for building your case studies?

The most important thing in a case study is to Tell a Story (The journey). Where you are not the hero but the Storyteller.

And, like a good story you need to take people along with you.

In the hindsight, the case studies that helped me the most had very less to do with the solutions itself but a lot to do with the User’s Problem, How well I could understand it? My Approach towards solving it, and How it made the user’s life better or solved a problem for them (Impact).

Like a great story.

Q6: What are some of the biggest mistakes you see designers make in their portfolios? What’re your suggestions to improve those mistakes to stand out?

Most Designers are in this trap of fancy, shiny UIs (What is also called the Dribbblisation of Design).

They are solving a visual problem. But even so, they have no clue about what a visual problem looks like (Why a round-edged button v/s sharpened edge ones).

Most Designers don’t look for clarity or a brief about why they should be working on it in the first place, why does it matter. They straight away start working on solving the problem, and more often than not those problems are not even worth solving.

And, One of my personal no-gos (Red Flag) is the use of sticky notes in a way that it looks fancy but if you try you can’t read anything at all.

Here are my 3 tips:

• I think first of all tell a story, not just random facts. It’s an experience, make it a great one.
• Solve a problem, but first show if it’s a problem worth solving?
• And last, Make the audience of the portfolio care about those problems.

Q7: Would you want to share a few tips with folks out there who want to join as interns or a UI/UX or product designer at Zomato?

Keep the user at the center of everything to do. You will be responsible for millions of users and billions of experiences.

Q8: Designers Talk: Wrap Up round(One word or Choice-based)

1. Design in one word: Problem-Solving
2. A product that inspires you: Instagram
3. Favorite design blog/publication: Nielsen Norman Group
4. Favorite gadget: Apple Watch
5. Dribbble or Behance : Medium
6. Linkedin/Twitter/Instagram: Instagram
7. DesignersTalk in one word: Expression
8. Favorite Design Series/Video/Movie: Product & Design Series by Design Sundays
9. First Choice(Website/App): PWA bundled as App
10. Favorite Design System: Sushi
11. Android or iOS: iOS
12. XD/Figma/Sketch/Invision Studio: Figma
13. Go-To Tool for you as a designer: Notion, Concepts on iPad
14. Taking Design Inspiration from: Real Life
15. Go-To Typeface: Okra
16. Design Hero: Jony Ive
17. Books: How to Win Friends and Influence People, Talking to Humans

Thank you 🙏 Rohan💚⁣⁣⁣ for giving your precious time
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HOSTED BY: designer.akash

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The motto for this DesignersTalk is to “Bridge the gap between Industry Standard Designers and New Designers”.

Why text-based? Because it’s precise, to-the-point opinions and it also gives freedom to those designers who want to share but not comfortable in front of the camera and who don’t want to give their too much time but still wanted to contribute.

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