Five to inspire with Paul Hershey
Senior experience designer @ Electronic Arts
Who are you?
My name is Paul Hershey, and I am a senior experience designer at Electronic Arts, living in Orlando, FL. I’ve been working as a designer for over 10 years and have had the opportunity to work with Pluralsight, Code School, Southwest Airlines, and many others. My degree is actually in music so I’m a self-taught designer. My passion for design grew from creating websites and flyers for bands that I played in. Other bands began asking me to create flyers, T-Shirts, and websites for them which brought me to the realization that I was having more fun working on designs than working on songs.
More importantly, I’m also a husband and a father to two precious little girls. When I’m not spending time with my family or designing, I’m an avid cross-fitter and runner. My wife and I are both very athletic and we love participating in running and fitness events. When we’re not getting hella swole (lol), we like to spend time outside as a family. On the weekends you can usually find us at the beach or the theme parks.
What’s a typical day on Paul life like?
I usually get up around 7:00am to one of my daughters shaking my face, adamantly telling me it’s light out and apparently time to wake up. We usually go downstairs and watch cartoons — Regular Show, Adventure Time, Teen Titans — and have some breakfast, while my wife Amanda is at the gym. When she gets home, I shift gears from family time to work time. I like to immediately clear out my emails and any slack messages I may have received overnight. Then I create a to do list of everything I want to get done for the day. This helps me stay focused on the tasks at hand and not get overwhelmed by new requests that come in throughout the day. Being that I’m on the East coast, and the majority of the people I work with are on the West coast, I get a head start on the day and can really focus on my design work in the morning. Currently I’m working on a design system for our web and mobile experiences at EA. By noon, West coast comes online, and I spend the second half of my day in meetings and tackling issues in JIRA. Once the work day is done, I go to crossfit and get some exercise in. I like to think of it as recess for adults and something I really need to do since I sit at a desk all day. When I get home, we do dinner and after the kids go to bed, my wife and I hang out and work on our side hustles, while watching Simpsons reruns.
How would you define good design?
Good design is validating whether or not what you’re creating is truly needed, so it’s important to get the concept in front of potential customers as soon as possible. If you have a hypothesis on a feature you feel your customers need, start with a conversation. If it seems like there is interest, quickly evolve the hypothesis from a paper prototype to code while preference testing with your customers every step of the way. This will help you pivot the idea if needed, and will provide the best opportunity to deliver something the customer really needs.
Ultimately design is all about solving problems for real people. If the result is simple and delightful, and I can get them to a solution in the fastest way possible without letting design get in the way, I feel like I’ve done my job.
Share something you’d really like to do — but haven’t done yet. What’s keeping you from doing it?
Love this question. The biggest thing I always want to do is write a new album. I listen to a lot of music throughout the day and I’m constantly inspired by new things I find. I played in a lot of punk bands when I was younger, and I’m still pretty close with some of the people I was in those bands with. Whenever we hang out on the weekend, we always threaten to write a new album. But usually it falls short due to family life and being responsible adults. But mark my words, I will write a new album one day. It may not be until I’m retired, but I’ll keep you posted.
How do you imagine your life as a designer 10 years from now will be?
Hopefully I’ll be beachside in Belize with a daiquiri in my hand. But in the event that I don’t come into a windfall of money, I’d imagine I’d still be a designer. Its almost impossible to say what design in the tech industry will look like 10 years from now from an execution standpoint, but I do believe it will still be focused on solving problems for people and delighting them with engaging experiences. I love seeing the happiness or relief on someones face because I was able to design a solution that helped them or removed something stressful in their day to day life. As long as design is still effectively doing that, I want to be a part of it.
People and/or designers that inspire you? (personally and professionally)
The two people that inspired me the most professionally are Nate Walkingshaw, the CXO at Pluralsight, and Gregg Pollack, the founder of Code School. They both taught me what great leadership truly looks like and to this day I try to apply a lot of what I learned from them to my professional career.
Two designers I really look up to (and have gotten matching tattoos with on separate occasions) are Tyler Fortune, and Justin Mezzell. Beyond being outstanding designers, they are amazing humble people and two of the greatest friends I could ever ask for. Outside of my professional career, it would have to be my wife Amanda, who somehow has the patience to put up with someone as crazy as me. She truly is the Marge to my Homer Simpson.
Gregg Pollack — https://twitter.com/greggpollack
Nate Walkingshaw — https://twitter.com/nwalkingshaw
Justin Mezzell — https://dribbble.com/JustinMezzell
Tyler Fortune — https://dribbble.com/tylerfortune8
Where can we find Paul Hershey?
Web — https://www.paulhershey.com/
Twitter — https://twitter.com/paulhershey
Dribbble — https://dribbble.com/paulhershey
Insta — https://www.instagram.com/paulhershey.design/
