Designers🎤alk #38 with Manan Adhikari ( Product Designer II at HackerRank)| PHASE 3 [IND Edition]

Date: 18h April 2021

Manan is an engineer turned Product Designer. He’s working at HackerRank. In this talk, he has shared his opinions regarding:

1️⃣ product design;

2️⃣ importance of mentor;

3️⃣how to make design decisions & etc;

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

Growing up, I didn’t even know that a field like product design exists. While I was studying computer science, during my 2nd semester I started making graphics for college fests which got me intrigued about other disciplines of design.

I started learning about Product/UX/UI design from the internet. Some of my seniors were kind enough to help me out figuring what to study and from where.

Started reading books on the same and tried to apply that knowledge to academic projects. Started doing internships and some freelance work before I graduated and started working as a full-time product designer at Innovaccer.

Q2: What do you love most about design? What product design is all about?

It’s the fact that good design is invisible and hence obvious.

There’s so much that goes into building a good product. There could be a million different ways to approach a problem and reach a solution but the process of finding the most optimal solution for your users taking into account your business needs and making sure that its sustainability is what product design means to me.

As a product designer, you’re involved at every step in the process of making a product and you’re not just focused on delivering a great user experience but also aware of high-level vision, strategy, and goals, and revenue for the product and at times, there are tradeoffs between the above mentioned.

As a product designer, you need to strike a balance between them through your designs

Q3: What’s the most difficult task you’ve encountered when working as a product designer?

It was designing an android app for a group of users (farmers in remote areas for this case) who have never used a smartphone or a tablet before.

A lot of our design decisions come from heuristics and our knowledge of what people have adapted over the years and how our brain perceives things.

If these heuristics are not present, would your design decisions remain the same? For example, Fitt’s law would recommend you to place the most used functionality close to your thumb on a mobile device but imagine if you find out that less than 20% of people are using the device one-handed due to n number of factors. It was super fun and interesting to see and evaluate all these things from a fresh perspective.

Q4: “As you have come from an engineering background”, what’s the importance of a mentor in your design journey?

I feel I was lucky enough to have some really good mentors during my journey who constantly helped me and motivated me to pursue what I wanted. Seniors while I was still in college, senior designers during my internships, design directors in my subsequent jobs.

I learned a lot from every single person I worked with. It’s a blessing to have such people around you to guide you and work with.

Q5: What does the term ‘ design-thinking ’ mean to you?

Design thinking enables you to understand the user better, ask the right questions, falsify assumptions, iterate, and test out your solutions in order to solve a real-life problem or improve products or services.

One may call it a tool, approach, framework, school of thought which has various phases like Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

Design thinking is not just limited to design but we see it being applied in day-to-day life everywhere in various domains like business, art, music, architecture, engineering.

Q6: How will you evaluate the design and the decisions that you make during the entire process?

At an early stage, it’s important to check if you’re solving the right problem.

Sometimes, while designing it’s easy to deviate from the actual problem statement. After you identify that and the business goals, the next step would be to look at various alternative approaches and gather evidence why a particular approach might/might not work, and discuss it with various stakeholders to reach a conclusion.

Once you have an approach in mind, it’s always great to test it out with a prototype even if it’s internal or on a small scale. After your designs are shipped, the next way to evaluate would be to monitor or track data to understand how the product or a particular feature is being used and perceived by users and to see how your designs score against the UX metrics.

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 HackerRank?

• Just be enthusiastic about what you do.
• Keep an open mind.
• Be creative in whatever task you’re doing.
• Explore and experiment as much as you can.
• Be ready to take the lead and it’s okay to accept that you don’t know things so that you can learn something new.
• Be ready to take and own unorthodox approaches and I’m sure you’ll have a blast working at HackerRank :)

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

1. Design in one word: Obvious
2. A product that inspires you: Miro
3. Favorite design blog/publication: Muzli
4. Favorite gadget: Apple pencil + Ipad Pro
5. Dribbble or Behance: Dribbble
6. Linkedin/Twitter/Instagram: LinkedIn
7. DesignersTalk in one word: Tasteful
8. Favorite Design Series/Video/Movie: Abstract
9. First Choice(Website/App): Website
10. Favorite Design System: Uber
11. Android or iOS: iOS
12. XD/Figma/Sketch/Invision Studio: Figma
13. Go-To Tool for you as a designer: Figma
14. Taking Design Inspiration from: Everywhere
15. Design Hero: Mr. Don Norman

Thank you 🙏 Manan💚⁣⁣⁣ 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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