AMA with Facebook Product Designer, Kristina Varshavskaya
March 27th, 2015 via Day One: Design
A significant speed-bump for the beginner or young designer is the issue of maintaining self confidence. We’ve all been there: either discouraged, unsure of our work or generally uninspired. It can be a battle to sit down and allow yourself to start creating… and yet that is usually the solution to roll over that speed-bump— simply putting something out there or on paper.
Kristina Varshavskaya, currently a product designer at Facebook, gifted her time to answer questions submitted by the Day One: Design community. The AMA revealed encouraging advice to beginners, her journey as an individual who naturally fell into the field, and how working at Facebook has sharpened her skills in creating solutions to real design problems. I found it very inspiring, as did the community at large and I hope it helps you get that pen on paper or cursor back in action.
Wesley: Where are you from and how did you develop your initial interest in product design? Any first memories that inspired you?
I’m originally from a cold place in Siberia, but I moved to the US when I was young and grew up in New Jersey. My first memory of being interested in creative pursuits / design is when my dad gave me an old computer of his when I was 8 or 9, and soon after I discovered neopets.com (for those unfamiliar, it was basically a virtual world for kids with it’s own currency and guilds). I learned html/css because I wanted to make cool profile and guild layouts for myself and other players, that was kind of the first step. I also taught myself how to use Adobe Illustrator around the same time because I wanted my class projects to look really cool. The rest is, as they say, history.
Sindu: What do companies think about side projects when they review our portfolios?
Side projects like these are fantastic, and something we get excited about when we’re looking at new designers’ work. Of course turning your ideas into real world projects is a great way to build up your experience, but I know it’s difficult to do this practically as you may not have the resources to do so (time, engineers, etc.). There are still plenty of things you can do to build up experience. Something that has consistently made me a better designer, no matter how many times I do it, is user research.
Get out and talk to people about your ideas and show them your work and ask them if they would use it. Give them your prototypes and observe how they use it. You can get really far doing this, before needing to build something real. You also learn very quickly what mistakes you made, what interaction patterns/visual cues are not clear to people, etc. and you can start to build up your pattern library of how to best solve specific design problems. And continuing to learn prototyping via Framer (or QC, Flinto, anything really) is really helpful. Just being able to hold a design of yours in your hands and see if it makes sense goes a long way.
Luka: How did you get interested in Facebook? How did you end up there? How does it feel to be there as a designer? ☺
I was a Facebook skeptic for a while, actually. I’m generally skeptical of large companies and don’t believe that they work in the best interest of their users, but I was proven wrong (about Facebook in particular) after having a conversation with my friend J.T. Trollman (he’s also a product designer there who has worked on the Facebook Android app as well as some of our Protect & Care projects and an all around awesome guy). He told me about some initiatives that Facebook was working on, like internet.org, and why they matter to the company.
Something that Mark Zuckerberg has said before that really resonated with me is that (paraphrasing here, I don’t remember exactly),
“…most companies build services to make money. Facebook makes money to build services”.
There’s a lot we can do for the world and a lot of ways we can give back, and we’re in a really unique position to do so. How I ended up at Facebook was that JT roped me into an interview over a year ago, and here I am.
It feels empowering and exciting to be a designer at Facebook for a number of reasons. Unlike startups (which I did for 3 years prior to FB), because we’re this big, we can afford to take time to pursue the best solution to a problem, and designers at Facebook are able to be extremely thorough in their work and pursue a lot of blue sky ideas in the process. It’s extremely rewarding to see the positive impact on people’s lives by the tools you build for them. I can go on forever, but I would like to get to everyone’s questions!
Brian: When did you know you were a designer?
I’m still constantly asking myself this question.
At Wanelo (my previous company) I started in an open role and kind of fell into design as a necessity for the company. We wanted to build an iPhone app and at the time had no design resources to make this happen, so I decided to take it on and figure it out.
I felt like an imposter for a very long time, because I was learning and making things up as I went. But after a while I felt the shoes begin to fit more and felt more comfortable calling myself a designer. I don’t think there was any point in time that I knew I was a designer, I think there was just a point in time where I could call myself one and people would believe me ☺
Timotius: What were some projects that you worked on while in school? What is your day to day like?
I didn’t go to college, if you were asking about that.
In high school I messed around with designing and screen printing shirts and swag for the math team (I know, so cool) and my high school. I also kept playing around with html/css and making websites. We had to take a mandatory web design class and all of my classmates were failing miserably because the teacher didn’t do a great job of explaining how to make web pages, so at some point I just made all of their websites for them to save them from F’s.
My day-to-day — it’s hard to pin down any specific day, because it changes depending on the stage of the project I’m working on. I try to get in as much maker time as possible to work on design proposals, and then spend some time gathering feedback from other designers on my team and at the company.
On a normal day I probably spend 30–40% of my time in meetings and 60–70% working in sketch/quartz composer and sharing my work and gathering feedback.
Kyle: How do you effectively communicate your design process in a portfolio? What is the experience of doing design at a huge company with a pretty consistent UI?
I hate having to communicate my design process in my portfolio, so unfortunately I probably don’t have very good advice here, it’s something I will avoid doing like the plague. What I’ve done in the past is put up all of my projects on my online portfolio in their final state, and when I have to present it in interviews, I will just speak to the process while I’m presenting and use various older files on my computer to illustrate my points.
To your second question about designing at a large company with a consistent UI — this is interesting because it actually means that a lot of your design work ends up not being a creative endeavor. We are more problem solvers than artists. A lot of people have said a lot of things about the differences between art and design — I think with user interface design specifically, it is a job and there is a purpose to it. So if your goal is to design the most intuitive and simple way to allow a user to accomplish something, then having consistent, familiar visual elements and predictable interactions help you achieve that.
Norman: What kinds of blogs, books, courses do you use to stay ahead of the curve in design?
The longer I’ve been a designer, the further I’ve deviated from reading books/other resources specifically about design, because there’s only so much to be said and learned in this area. Some of the books I’ve been reading recently that have surprised me in how they relate to my work:
We Seven: This was written in 1962 by the first seven American astronauts to go to space in Project Mercury, and it’s about their experiences designing the project leading up to the first mission and what they learned along the missions. There are a lot of nuggets of wisdom here about project management and how to manage external expectations. NASA surprisingly dealt with a lot of shit from American press about how long it was taking them to send a man to space.
Coco Chanel — An Intimate Life: Without knowing a lot about the industry, it seems like fashion designers have to rely very heavily on their intuition to do good work (whereas we can lean pretty heavily on qualitative and quantitative research to inform our work), and Chanel was exceptionally good at this, there’s a lot to learn from her.
I also just ordered The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why and Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. Not sure how those will go.
What part of the design process do you enjoy most? least? For the least enjoyable parts, how do you make it fun for yourself?
User research is always fascinating to me and constantly breaks my assumptions. I like the early exploration phase of a project when I can go really wide with my approaches and try crazy blue sky solutions. Distilling those ideas into practical designs that can be implemented is also tricky but rewarding. The part where my interest wanes is the final spec work and asset-exporting. I haven’t figured out a good way to make this fun for myself, I will procrastinate until the end of time when I have to do this.
Fahran: I constantly find my self in fluctuating productivity when it comes to designing a product, any tips on how to be a super productive designer?
I struggle with this as well. A really useful skill as a designer is being able to explain why your proposed solution makes sense and works best. If you do this well, you can get really good at rationalizing and justifying just about anything. If that happens for you, you can actually do this to yourself and can find the interesting side to any project that you have to work on. I’m not naturally a very productive person (I have wasted an embarrassing amount of time playing Threes over the past year), but I always try to find that interesting side to any project that I’m working on, whether I naturally find it enjoyable or if it’s just something that needs to be done for the larger mission of the work.
James: What projects have you worked on?
At my previous company (Wanelo), I designed the website, which is more or less in the same form it was when I left (www.wanelo.com), as well as the iOS and Android apps. At Facebook I’ve been on the business tools team for the past year, and worked on a number of small projects but the most recent big one was the Facebook Ads Manager app (feel free to download it from the app store although it probably won’t be of any use to you ☺), and I’m currently working on the Android version of this.
Yang: In your experience, what has been some of the more common reasons why a product or feature failed or were not well adopted by users?
The most common reasons are that the designers (not just UI designers, but whoever is responsible for the product) failed to identify a real problem, or that they failed to discover a real solution. I know this is a very broad answer, but it’s true. There are a lot of things that may appear to be “real” problems, but they’re often a symptom of something bigger (in which case your solution would just be a bandaid), or they are a different problem masquerading as the problem you think you’re looking at. It’s extremely difficult to be good enough at identifying what is a real, tangible, and also solvable problem.
+ Were you involved with the suicide prevention feature? I thought it was SO COOL that you guys did that.
I did not work on the suicide prevention project, but I am super lucky that the incredibly talented and thoughtful designer who did (Andrew Lu) has recently joined my team!
Maggie: What advice do you have for people who are just starting out in design?
This is a tough one, but two things that I tried that seem to have worked out for me:
- Be a sponge, and read as much and absorb as much as you can. Reach out to other designers, sometimes they’re busy but often times they are willing to share what they know, just be respectful and appreciative of their time. Read any and every book/article on design and other people’s/companies’ processes, but don’t forget to form your own opinions based on this information. After a while you’ll get better at determining what advice is worth following and who actually knows what they’re talking about.
- Side projects! I know, they are hard, and take a lot of time, and are scary to share with the world because you don’t want to look stupid. But none of that is worth getting in the way of improving as a designer. I’ve turned away from a lot of my own project ideas because I thought they could be stupid or might not work out, and I wish I actually pursued them further to see what they could have become. Also, imitation can get you far in the beginning. Unsolicited redesigns make some people groan but they are great practice, personally. Feel free to take inspiration from other people’s work, as long as you are questioning their decisions and drawing your own conclusions from them.
Nils: If there’s one lesson you’ve learnt while being at Facebook that you could tell your younger self, what would it be?
It’d be that nobody knows what they’re doing (seriously, none of us), we just get progressively better at pretending.
Sanny: What are you personally trying to learn/grow in nowadays?
One area that I’m trying to improve in is actually visual design. Because I don’t have a formal design education I feel like I’ve missed out on learning about classic graphic design principals, so I’m trying to make up for it by reading about different topics such as typography (I also just got my copy of the NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual by Massimo Vignelli, it’s fascinating). I’d also like to get better at managing my time, specifically being intentional about my time and avoiding the trap of constantly being busy. I’m still working on figuring out solutions to this.
Jake: Has there been a situation where you made an assumption about how people use Facebook, but were wrong in the end?
Tons of examples here. A lot of them come from how people in non-Western cultures use Facebook, mostly because those cultures are unfamiliar to us as designers. Unfortunately I don’t actually know which of these examples I can share, so I’m going to avoid that minefield for now.
Jessica: How do you define UX vs UI?
I don’t really use these terms to describe design work, but if I had to, I would define UX as the how, and UI as the what.
The why would be defining the problem that you are trying to solve with design (at a large company like Facebook, this isn’t actually any one person’s job [except maybe Mark’s], it’s on all of us to some extent).
— wipes sweat off brow —
“That’s all I’ve got folks! Thank you for all of your awesome questions, I hope I was of some help”
You can reach Kristina on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kristinatastic
