Designers🎤alk #34 with Radhika Gemawat( Product Designer at Uber)| PHASE 3 [IND Edition]

Date: 28th March 2021

Radhika is working as a Product Designer for Uber. She previously worked for Flipkart. In this talk, she has shared her opinions regarding:⁣

1️⃣ importance of internship for a designer;

2️⃣ tips before sending your resume for a design job;

3️⃣role of a product designer & etc;

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

I was recruited as a designer at one of the student-run group: Information Management Group, during my first year (back in 2014), wherein I got the opportunity to design products for people on campus.

I started out knowing nothing about the field, eventually designing and launching products. Back then, as designers, we were also expected to develop our front-end systems, which in retrospect provided me a good groundwork to empathise and collaborate with engineers.

The projects which I completed as a part of this group, helped me secure my internships at some of the leading product avenues in the country. My first internship was at Cleartrip, and then eventually at I spent my coming summers with Razorpay’s Design Team.

In 2019, I joined Flipkart as a Product Designer, wherein I worked in many focus areas, such as Designing for Growth and User Generated Content, Multimodal Design and Voice Interfaces. Currently, I am working with Uber.

Q2: Why an internship is important for a designer to start with? How one should apply those learnings for getting a design job?

An internship could be a gateway into solving real-time problems while being surrounded by folks who can steer you in the right direction.

They provide an avenue to practice your skills, learn stakeholder management, and participate in a complete product lifecycle.

Eventually, showcasing these learnings as well documented case studies could help secure future opportunities.

Q3: What are the qualities and skills a good designer should have apart from designing the product?

There are many! Being a team player, collaborative, empathetic.

Q4: What’re the tips or tricks you want to share with the designers to take care of before sending their resumes for the UI/UX or product designer job?

A small and sweet bio about yourself usually sets good expectations. Showcasing the impact that you brought to the organisation with your work could be valuable to highlight your overall professional background.

Stating the obvious, but make sure you have your portfolio attached within, core skills, and areas of expertise outlined.

Q5: What’s does a product designer do? Is it different from UI/UX designer?

I believe these terms keep getting tossed around, without people having to appreciate their implications. I have worked as a Product Designer for the most part of my career, and my role has spanned from developing product roadmaps, business & marketing collaboration, core product designing, execution, and launch.

While there might be some specialised roles out there, but for most of the part, job expectations differ from team to team and company to company.

Q6: As you are involved with “Designing for Voice and Conversational AI” could you please tell us what to keep in mind when designing for an AI-enabled product or service?

Futuristic technology doesn’t necessarily impart the message that we need to build futuristic interfaces. Keeping it simple, leveraging existing usage patterns, and progressive exposure to the features (to avoid fatigue) could be some useful tips.

Conveying the value proposition and indexing your experience around the same helps in building the right expectations, and prepares users for the new modes of interaction. The experience is bound to have a learning curve around it, and elegant recovery paths for users play a pivotal role in emerging successfully (for both; curators and users).

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 Uber?

We are aggressively hiring. Keep your portfolio handy and feel free to reach out to folks from Uber or apply directly on the job listings!

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

1. Design in one word: Ubiquitous
2. A product that inspires you: Pinterest
3. Favorite gadget: MacBook
4. Dribbble or Behance: Neither
5. Linkedin/Twitter/Instagram: All channels have different purposes
6. DesignersTalk in one word: Concise
7. Favorite Design Series/Video/Movie: Abstract
8. First Choice(Website/App): App
9. Favorite Design System: Material Design System
10. Android or iOS: iOS
11. XD/Figma/Sketch/Invision Studio: Figma
12. Go-To Tool for you as a designer: Figma
13. Taking Design Inspiration from: Everywhere
14. Recent Reads: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thank you 🙏 Radhika💚⁣⁣⁣ for giving your precious time
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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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