Meet Flexport’s UX Team: Jonathan Barreto, Content Designer

Jonathan Barreto is a thoughtful & inspiring content designer whose work at Flexport has greatly impacted other designers on the Flexport UX team. He is based in our San Francisco Makers office and has driven design initiatives for our design system, tone of voice, and information architecture, while also consulting on content experiences for different Flexport products.

How did you get into content design?

Well, I’ve always loved the intersection of language and design. But when I was first starting my career, there really wasn’t a space for content design (or, I wasn’t aware of it at least).

I always wanted to educate and was passionate about learning technologies — so I found myself writing tech docs. I spent my time discovering how things worked and supporting developers and end-users with answers to their problems. Then, I was fortunate enough to work with a wonderful designer who brought me into an onboarding redesign based on docs I wrote. That really changed everything.

I moved into other roles where I found myself focusing on awareness, engagement, and retention — working across product, support, and marketing orgs. I learned so many different touch points and content types, and I was blown away by all the ways people communicate and build relationships with a business through a user interface.

That’s when it all clicked for me. Thinking about what happens when people engage with a website, when they enter a product, what kind of experience and expectation they have, what are we offering them, and what kind of impressions are we leaving them with? Those are the things I wanted to spend my time on — and it just so happened that the niche content designer role was growing too.

So you don’t have previous experience designing for freight forwarding. Was it hard to get up to speed?

Definitely! I’m still getting up to speed, and learning more and more each day.

One of my biggest challenges is around all the industry jargon — there are so many acronyms and abbreviations, and people often use different terms to mean the same things. But that’s what I love about it too! I get to come in with that “beginners mindset” to bridge the gap between people who are just starting and industry experts. I have a huge opportunity to make global trade more inclusive and accessible to everyone.

And, luckily we have a great team of smart people who know the industry and take the time to answer all my “dumb” questions.

What types of design challenges will you be working on in the coming year?

Next year is all about improving productivity so we can design, develop, and deliver experiences faster, while also improving the quality and consistency to help build credibility and trust with our users. Basically, I’m helping find ways for us to scale. But I’m also really pushing to do a little more — what if instead of just scaling decisions, we could also scale the rationale that led to those decisions too. And what if instead of just enabling fast work, our design system could also enable reflection and understanding.

Thinking about what factors impact design (like changing conditions and pressures faced on the job), what frameworks and patterns help solve for those factors, what components do we need to build fast and make it easier to maintain, and how can we measure and experiment with patterns for better user experiences — those are the things I’ll be asking myself every day.

It’s a great challenge to take on. I get to work with so many different teams to understand their challenges and the challenges they are trying to solve for, and then uncover patterns so we can all leverage that collective knowledge. It will eventually make its way to our design system, Latitude, so it’s accessible to everyone building Flexport experiences.

What’s the design culture like at Flexport? How do you stay connected with most of the team in remote times?

Our first team value is “leverage collective creativity,” and we all really take it to heart. We’re constantly sharing and borrowing knowledge from each other — whether that’s in our weekly UX Check-Ins or Design Reviews, or brainstorm sessions. We also schedule fun team events, things like cocktail making or baking classes, and even have themed happy hours (this week’s is horoscopes). We’ve all got so many interests, and people take the initiative to share it and make events happen.

I’m also amazed at how quickly we’ve all adapted since working remote during COVID. We’ve created guilds that get people who may have never worked together to collaborate on a project. And people are reaching out to others for pet projects — everyone is really self-motivated, transparent, and inclusive. It’s one of the best UX teams I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of.

Just to keep it interesting…What is your spirit animal?

Well… according to the spirit animal quiz I just took — turtle. Which feels right. 🐢

Creative outlets are so important to have as a designer, what do you like to do when you’re not designing to help inspire your work?

When I’m not designing, my main creative outlet is music. I started out DJing about a decade ago and found myself learning more and more about music production. The psychological relationship between sound and people’s emotion intrigues me. Just like design — it’s important to understand a person’s emotional state, and it’s just as important to help create positive experiences for them.

Anything else you’d like to share?

For all you other content designers out there, especially ones like me who are the only one at the company looking to build out the function — research, experiment, and learn to articulate the business value of content design, not just the value you provide the people using products. The content design network is an amazing group of giving people, so don’t be shy to reach out, connect, or ask for advice. Tons of content designers are the only ones at their company too, and are eager to learn and share their experiences.

And don’t forget, never underestimate the power of storytelling.

Interested in helping Jonathan make global trade easy for everyone? Connect with Jonathan on Linkedin and take a look at the available opportunities on our career page.