Khanversations — May-Li and Priya
A conversation about music, the design world, and how we got started in design from two designers at Khan Academy
Tell us a little about yourself and your role at Khan Academy
May-Li: Hi! I’ve been at Khan Academy for about four and a half years: I started out by creating a long-term research and development group, as well as leading mobile design, but since then I’ve experienced some scope creep to… taking care of all of design and user research. I’m also a DJ and dancer. And, I might have recently accidentally started a band.
Priya: I’m new at Khan Academy, it’s been about six months. I help with designing tools for people who are creating content for learners. In my spare time, I try to learn every instrument I can get my hands on.
What’s something you both have in common?
May-Li: I think it’s music, right? How’d you get into music?
Priya: When I was little, I would make anyone that visited my parents sit on the couch and watch me sing. I taught myself piano and later the guitar because someone told me that girls couldn’t play the guitar. I’ve also been in a few bands.
How’d you get into DJing?
May-Li:
I probably started DJing because I was a dancer with strong opinions about what I wanted to dance to.
I wound up providing music for a bunch of parties in college. Then around 2008, a few friends and I went to a music festival in Colombia called the Festival Petronio Alvarez. It was an amazing experience and we wished there were parties with that vibe and energy level back home. We knew we all had pretty deep crates, so we decided to found our DJ coalition, La Pelanga. We specialize in international party music, mostly from between the tropics.
Like you, I’ve also always loved singing. When I was in high school I started classically training; I was a soprano and coloratura. After college, I dropped off for a while and got a little shy. Just recently I’ve picked it back up, particularly singing and playing music from the Colombian Pacific region. I’m still insecure about it, but I just have a good time, and the style of music doesn’t give me space to stay shy. I want to be a mariachi band front woman when I get older, because I don’t think anyone expects a tiny Asian grandma to do that.
What does the design world need more of?
Priya: It needs more clarity on how to work with design systems while also giving designers room to be innovative. Standardization and consistency are cool, but they can sometimes keep designers from thinking outside the box. Whenever somebody comes across a new scenario that’s not well defined, they just fall back on or are restricted by the guides, and I wish that didn’t have to always be the case. We definitely need to explore this problem further.
May-Li: I think we did a good job with this at Apple. Steve Jobs always believed that the teams should be able to leapfrog each other, so that there was room to push style forward. Things stayed cohesive at Apple, but style was not exactly uniform across all the products all of the time. That’s what I want us to be able to do at Khan Academy.
It’s also natural, depending on what stage a company is at, for things to diverge and converge. Styles naturally splinter, and then there will moments when it makes sense to consolidate. People gotta keep the long game in mind, and flex to the timing and company stage. A lot of designers don’t have that perspective yet because they haven’t had a chance to see a lot of different company growth stages (last I checked, the average tenure designers stuck around a place was 11 months!)
Priya: What do you think the design world needs more of?
May-Li: We need to talk way more about what we’re designing for. What are the real ramifications of what we’re designing? Technology is a tool, and we have to think about what the tool enables humans and societies to do and be — not just how pixels move on a screen.
What are we making easy for people to do? What about groups of people? What kind of life are we making it the default to live? What is worthwhile doing but really hard to do, and how do we get people to do that rather than optimizing everything for convenience and data collection?
Priya: It’s such a relief to work at Khan Academy. I was worried that I’d get here and find out it wasn’t really working toward good. But I’m here and the mission is real and there isn’t a weird secret agenda!
How did you get into design?
Priya: In middle school, I would sit in my room and try to understand how my windows machine was organized. That’s what I thought was fun.
In high school, I taught myself Photoshop 4 and fell in love. I also learned any design program that I could download. Then I started getting freelance jobs from Craigslist.
May-Li: So you started getting paid to design in high school? Remember any clients?
Priya: There was a guy on Craigslist that hired me and a developer to redesign his website. I had never redesigned an entire site or worked with a developer before so this was a huge learning opportunity for me. I also learned a ton from that developer — basic stuff, like what the little knife tool in Photoshop did.
After college, I got a random job and took on extra work helping the in-house designer there. After a few months, she retired and recommended me for the job. So in 11 months, I went from receptionist to the company’s only designer. And that’s when my design career really came to life.
I feel so thankful that somehow — from geeking out in my room I was able to build this amazing career and have a job that I love and feel like I was meant to do.
May-Li: That is an amazing story.
Priya: How did you get into design May-Li?
May-Li: I was super lucky my Dad could get our family a Mac when I was a kid; my earliest memories of making digital things are in MacPaint, KidPix, and Hypercard. In high school, my boyfriend had Photoshop; we’d sit in his living room and design things for fun.
In college, I noticed time would fly by if I was designing; I’d forget myself, which made me realize that I love doing it.
That’s when I started picking up opportunities to design as much as I could: creating the front-end of a research project at the MIT MediaLab, building out UI for student projects, working on t-shirts, posters — anything to build up a portfolio. When I graduated, hiring teams only wanted me to work as an engineer and all my classmates were going into management consulting — I took the only job that let me design and build. I was paid half as much, but was able to gain experience as an engineer, designer, and prototyper. I don’t regret the decision.
Khanversations are a series of dialogues between designers at Khan Academy as a way of getting to know one another.
P.S. We’re hiring, if you’re interested, check out our job listings!
Links to the series
👉🏽 Here’s May-Li’s introduction to the series, including a list of all the countries that were involved in our formation.
👉🏽 Elizabeth and Vivek talk about sneakers, fashion, capitalism, how they got into design (they even share some vintage work) and MORE. These two have incredible taste BTW I always want to know where they look
👉🏽 Louis and Erica on rearranging the furniture, skeuomorphic icons, working in the federal government and more
👉🏽 Cassey and Jacob on how neuropsychology, being an executive assistant, and not wanting to draw Mickey Mouse 1000 times could lead to a career in design
