Meet Maddie, product designer at Sniip
Madeleine Kingsley is a product designer at Sniip which is doing a mobile bill payment app. She had also been tutoring human-computer interaction design at the University of Queensland. We recently sat down to chat about stories she has been working on, how to elaborate the bill payment experience and how to grow as a relatively-new designer in the industry(as she said).
What’s your background and how did you get into design?
It’s always quite different, isn’t it?
I did a couple of years over at Jakarta International School in Indonesia. I lived with an American girl called Ali at that time. She used to play around Photoshop and was a bit of a Photoshop guru. My mom is a music teacher and she painted as well which is evident in my grandpa’s house, which is surrounded by paintings. I was around and influenced by creative people.
After I graduated high school, I didn’t really know what I was going to do, so I applied for the University of Queensland just wanting to get in and I found myself applying for IT. I remember for the first year, I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not, and by the time I hit my third year, I really enjoyed a course called physical computing, which is design thinking, interaction design, development and building into a subject. That course really fueled my love for technology.
After I graduated from UQ, I just went straight to Sydney because there were a lot of job opportunities down there. I worked as a graphic designer for 3 months then got another job afterwards for a small company of 8 as a designer slash front-end dev. I worked there for a year and a half. After getting some experience, I decided to come back to Brisbane. All of my friends are here and this is where I wanted to be, which brings us to now.
What are you responsible for as a designer at Sniip?
We’re payment app and we have roughly 20,000 users signed up.
The first thing I do every morning is I go into our support page and look to see if any tickets have come through. We get support tickets and a lot of spam come through maybe every third day.
Next thing I do during the week is testing. We have an automated developer, and with him, I write test cases. We figured out what can be automated, then throughout the sprint we work hand in hand to make sure nothing is broken and that the new functionality looks and works as designed.
We have different staging environments UAT and DEV, once the sprint is complete we push to from DEV to UAT making sure it’s suitable to go out to users.
When I’m not doing these sort of things, I’ve been designing! Designing the UI and usability testing. I’ve been interviewing a lot of people lately, a process we trying to get better at and do every 2 weeks. We’re a very technical team which could be a dangerous thing especially when there are 2 designers and a team of 8 in the tech team.
What tools are you or your product team are using for producing and collaboration?
We use Atlassian software such as Jira, Confluence. For design work we use Sketch, Invision and Lookback. To bridge the gap between designers and developers, we use Zeplin.
Also paper and pen. For me, personally, I still write in pencil on paper and it’s just like word vomit that comes out. Put the paper on so I can start. I use post-it notes. For customer journeys.
For other tools, I personally use Evernote and sometimes Asana.
How often do designers in Sniip update or maintain the features?
We run in 2-week sprints therefore the app is getting updated every 2 weeks.
Every 2 weeks, we push out new updates and some of them are turned off depending on the scale of the functionality. Essentially we have new features going in every two weeks. Whatever developers are doing in 2 weeks we push it out, just sometimes it’s toggled off and hidden from the users.
Currently, we’re working on schedule a bill, which has 2 small stories left. Actually, it’s in production at the moment but it’s turned off.
What’s the most enjoyable and frustrating thing when you work as a designer?
It’s hard to take all these different problems that come from the business or the tech team and find the solutions.
It’s a tough gig. The thing about this role, that I’m learning is that it takes experience. It’s not like development where the computer says ‘no’. Everyday I learn. How to present my designs clearer or displaying the data I have gathered and how that links.
I understand why people want experienced designers as it’s hard to take all these different problems that come from the business or the tech team and find the solutions. That’s probably the hardest thing at the moment.
We’re tech-driven at the moment, the frustration is we have only two designers and we’re wearing a lot of hats. I would love to spend more time talking to our users, doing switch interviews, testing ideas, but we also need to keep the dev team running. That’s really my biggest frustration at the moment. Start-up life. We are funded and until we go public that’s when we have the opportunity to really grow.
I also heard you’ve been tutoring user-centred design in UQ, any takeaways from that?
It’s for the process but not for the end product.
I have tutored a few courses at UQ. Human-Computer Interaction design, Design Computing Studio and Social Mobile Computing. The best part of the job is to sit down with students and get in the design thinking mindset. Getting them to think outside the box about a domain or problem space. An example is a team investigated the role of technology in supporting the interactions of people with dementia. How do we help the problem around people with dementia and their carers in homes? Themes emerged around sharing memories and appreciating the present through music.
It’s fun to discussing with students and listening to them to help them funnel down their scope and get them on track. Encouraging them to look at what previous researchers have done in the past, how they might look at went well, what didn’t they do so well and what they might try and do differently. Obviously, they aren’t going to find a viable solution, it’s a university subject but the fact that they’ve gone out they tested it, done the research and feed the feedback from users into the user-centred design process is what we mark highly on. It’s for the process but not for the end product.
Where do you see your design career 5 years from now?
I could’ve seen myself been up there running a design management team and understanding the importance of UX, using those findings to drive the technical team.
5 years time. I can see myself in a management role. The way I look at my manager at the moment. He’s brilliant at what he does. He is going on 40 and he started as a developer, he’s got a very technical mind. Hence why I think our technical team is brilliant. I could’ve seen myself been up there running a design management team and understanding the importance of UX, using those findings to drive the technical team.
What’s the most important one thing or things you think to become a great UX designer?
Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you’re struggling or help for that matter.
I think that’s the attitude. I’ve read a lot of Medium articles and I listen to some podcast, but for me it comes down to doing it.
Also, ask questions. I’ve been lucky as I’ve got a good team. At the end of the day, I asked dumb questions (no such thing as a dumb question!?) — now I know and that’s okay I’m not fumbling around the dark. Don’t be afraid to ask questions if you’re struggling or help for that matter.
The design communities are brilliant here in Brisbane. Meeting people like Andy (UI + VD Meetup), meeting people like Hans (UX design Meetup), they actually tutored me when I went to UQ and been encouraging the community. Even though we haven’t really sat down one and one, they are both hard working and they inspire me to become a better designer.
How do you juggle your life, work and keep up with the design industry?
I really love what I do so what I’m doing at Sniip, it’s an exciting time for us at the moment. But I do a lot of work outside of hours In terms of tutoring, I probably sort of block it out myself for three hours and catch up on everything we need to. It has forced me to be more organised which isn’t a bad thing for me!
Where can people contact and follow you?
My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleine-kingsley/
🤖 🤖 🤖 Next episode: Meet Joseph, UXD consultant at Servian.
Joseph is currently the UXD Consultant at Servian. He walked me through how’s the process like designing a Chatbot during the interview. He also said facilitations also matter other than wireframes.
Wanna know more about Chatbot design? Stayed tuned by following Meeting the Designers at Brisbane.
🔥 🔥 🔥Wanna share your design stories or interested in the “Meeting the Designers at Brisbane”? Don’t be shy and drop me a line on Linkedin.
👩🏻 👩🏻 👩🏻 Who’s behind “Meeting the Designers at Brisbane”?
Hey, My name is Chelsea. The person behind “Meeting the designer at Brisbane”. I came to Australia one and a half year ago. I landed at Canberra first and stayed there for about 5 months. Later on, I got a UI/UX design gig from NetEngine at Brisbane. Hooray!
While I’m staying at Brisbane, I’m always as keen as mustard to attend different design meetups and chat with other like-minded people in the community. I also want to dive into the cool design stories behind different industries. Within the limited networking time, I found it’s tricky to systemically know more about those amazing designers.
So that’s sort of why I came to start reaching out to some great and nice designers with different disciplines across the various industries at Brisbane.
