What does it mean to be an in-house UX/UI Designer in a tech company?
I think I went through all the phases a graphic designer can go throughout their career, as technology and (trendy) titles changes over time:
Graphic Designer > Art Director > Web Designer > UX/UI designer
As you move through career changes over the years — your inner designer core is still there. It does not matter if you master the Adobe tools to do anything (your laundry in photoshop, for example) or can create the best wireframes in Axure, the core principles to create compositions (you learned from your legendary lecturer from art school) are still there.
14 years ago 😲 I worked as an Art Director in advertising agencies. It included creative thinking, visual concepts for campaigns, photo shooting and more. All cool stuff. But as time went by I realised my job’s main objective was to convince people to buy stuff they didn’t necessarily need.
I rerouted my career and found my new passion — designing digital products. Working for the right companies with good products would enable me to make products better, more useful, intuitive and fun to use.
Without any UX/UI background, I dived straight into the cold water and worked with different agencies on different projects. From E-commerce websites to marketing landing pages. It was great to work on several projects at the same time, to explore the different target audiences and design needs for each one.
Now, ready to take my next step to focus on one single product design, or to be the in-house UX/UI designer in a tech company, this is an opportunity to dive deeper.
Kudos is exactly the type of tech product company I was looking for — to design a better Kudos product is basically to help researchers all over the world.
As the UX/UI designer, an integral member of the product team, we design from the smallest of components, to an overview of the product as a whole. Based on real data, testing cycles, analysing users in real-time, the design decision-making is well based and meaningful.
Connecting Design with Dev — Sketch + Invision are the tools we use
In order to collaborate with the team, we use prototype and UX/UI design tools. Sketch was the pioneer in UX/UI design and new tools followed: Figma, Adobe XD, UXPin and InVision Studio.
Different working environments have different needs.
I tried Studio (by Invision) a year ago, it was still in Beta version and not fully developed back then (hence it didn’t meet all the design needs).
Here in Kudos I kept Sketch as my main UI design tool, together with Invision prototype tool — for me the combination between Sketch and Invision is the perfect way to create designs, share, collaborate with the team and perform quick iterations.
Sketch + Invision is useful for the dev team. Not only a way to view the prototype in the browser, the ‘dev view’ reveals the component’s CSS values.
Invision prototypes are also used by the marketing team, allowing them to present the mock-up product to potential clients. The insights that are fed back from the clients to the product team have a great value and integral part of Kudos’ agile process — prototyping, testing, analysing and refining our product.
If you like what you read and think you could contribute to our team at Kudos then take a look at our careers page to see what roles we currently have open.
