College to Career: Product Design 💻✏️

On June 12, Kedar and I sat down with two graduating members of UCLA Sigma Eta Pi to chat about their experiences as product designers. Product design is a misunderstood field, often mistakenly lumped into other careers like art and illustration. We wanted to discuss what it means to be a product designer and help anyone who’s aspiring to become a designer or who’s interested in the field.

First up, meet Annie Yu, a Design & Media Arts (DESMA) major. She has worked at Tinder as a Product Design intern, at UCLA’s DESMA summer program as a summer counselor, and at the UCLA Game Lab as a teaching assistant for 3D modeling and mobile games.

Next is Rohan Kapoor, a CS-major-turned-product-designer whose internship experience includes Software Engineering at HelloTech and American Express, Product Design at Facebook, and Innovation Engineering at Uber. He will be joining Facebook as a full-time Product Designer in the fall.

We chose to interview two product designers studying different majors in order to show two things: that you can pursue product design regardless of your background, but that you may need to figure out your own approach to entering the field based on your own strengths and experiences.

Kedar: How did you end up pursuing design?

Annie: In high school I was searching for a major and a college because I really liked art but I didn’t want to be a painter. I looked at all the UCs and found the Design & Media Arts program at UCLA and really liked the video work they did, so I applied and ended up here.

Rohan: It’s important to point out that design is a broad field and I’m specifically doing digital product design. In freshman year, my dad needed someone to redo his company’s website and was thinking about paying someone to do it. I was like, well I’m a CS major—I can figure it out. So I took on the project and realized along the way that I liked the user interaction side of building the website more than the actual development of it. From there, I played around with some design stuff and worked on some side projects, but I never took it seriously until my third year, when I decided I wanted to make a career switch out of software engineering (SWE).

K: Can you define digital product design?

R: Digital product design is the intersection of interaction design, visual design, product strategy, and product thinking. It’s an end-to-end process that encompasses everything from user research all the way to designing the product both in terms of user experience (UX) and visual design, and it includes testing and making sure the product meets what the team is trying to accomplish.

A: I would define product design as solving problems for other people through design. There’s way more to it but that’s my basic understanding. The principle is to make people work as little as possible to get the most value out of a product.

K: Rohan has experience in software engineering and Annie has experience in art. Can you guys explain how they’re related to design and how they affected your interest in design?

A: The areas of design I know, which are illustration, digital design, and 3D modeling, are all pretty similar in that they’re visual-heavy. If you’re doing visual design you’re more designing to your own taste whereas product design is for other people.

R: For me, the distinction is that art is something you do for yourself to express your creativity while design is about solving a problem.

A: Exactly — when I entered UCLA, one of the first things we were taught was that design is a tool for communication and it should be one of its primary functions. There’s a quote out there about form over function, but function definitely matters more than form. Form follows function.

K: Rohan, could you talk a bit more about the relationship between tech and design?

R: Coming from a SWE perspective, my background is more frontend.

frontend: a loosely-defined term which, in this context, refers to the design and user interface of an application

It was a lot of designers and product managers (PMs) handing me specs and saying “build this.” When I got those specs I remember thinking I’d want to be part of the discussion about why we’re building these features. Obviously it’s hard to get that perspective as an intern, but as a designer you do. Having a SWE background has helped me become a better designer as it allows me to be empathetic towards engineers by considering a lot of things other designers wouldn’t, such as implementation constraints, implementation time, and edge cases.

K: A lot of beginners may think of design as using tools such as Illustrator or Sketch, but it seems like there’s a lot more process to it. Can you talk about what you actually do on the job as a designer, and how beginners can prepare?

R: When I first started at Facebook, my manager said that 90% of his job is meetings and 10% is working. To address your point about beginners not knowing how to start, I’d say start with an idea you’re trying to solve. With a lot of my earlier projects, I started with user research to find a problem, and when it came to actually designing a solution, I didn’t really care what software I used; it was more about getting it done as quickly as possible. In fact, for one of my first projects, I prototyped my design in Keynote. A lot of people told me to use Framer, but the learning curve for Framer is steep and I didn’t need it for my project. In terms of what a normal day looked like for my internship, it was not so much actually sitting down and designing—it was more about figuring out the problem and making sure our solutions achieved our goals.

A: I would agree that if you’re a beginner, I think the funnest way for you to get into design is personal projects, doing something for yourself so you have more motivation to work on it. At my internship, the first half of it consisted of design sprints with PMs who’d always have ideas but maybe not have the resources to execute them.

design sprint: a design process framework that involves rapidly iterating on designs and testing them on users

We did a lot of drawing — that’s what they tried to instill in me, that you should sketch with pencil and paper as long as possible before ever opening a program. Then, I spent three weeks drawing out flows.

design flow: a flow chart of sequential user interfaces that a user will encounter in the process of performing an action

It was a pretty rigorous process — I’d demo several flows and people would offer corrections and I’d continue on, and that taught me that drawing dead ends means we’ll find the right solution eventually. After that, you get to fine-tuning the details. Once you have the flow and sketches, actually designing them is so much easier.

K: A designer trying to get their first job or internship would obviously need a portfolio. What type of content should it contain and how robust should it be?

A: You should always go for your strongest work. Don’t go for quantity — it should definitely be your top 5 pieces. As of late, people really enjoy storytelling, so you should talk about why you’ve done the things you’ve done, what you’ve explored, and your sketches and processes. At every interview for a design job, the interviewers will ask you about one or two of your projects and you should be able to explain them. Obviously, this applies mostly to product design and UX, since they are research-heavy.

R: It’s important to focus on why you’re working on a certain project and what you want to accomplish. For me, it worked out well that I had projects where I began with user research and found meaningful problems that led to meaningful projects. When it came time to put my portfolio together I already had a few different pieces that were pretty thorough in terms of the entire process. From what I’ve seen, a portfolio is one of the most important things for job applications — especially for me, because I’m not a design major. I’ve kinda had to shove my portfolio in a lot of these people’s faces, and when they saw my work they’d realize I was serious about design.

K: It’s interesting that you mentioned that a lot of recruiters didn’t take you seriously. Could you talk more about that and general stigmas or difficulties you’ve faced as a non-major?

R: Once, I went to a career fair when I was first transitioning into design and I gave this recruiter my resume, and he started asking me engineering questions. I told him I was actually interested in a design role, and he took me aside and went on this whole ten minute long tangent about how it’s almost impossible to become a designer at a large company — he was at Adobe — if you don’t have a design degree. I was pretty taken aback because he hadn’t even looked at my portfolio, and I realized that I had to be more aggressive in looking for jobs. I basically stopped applying online and cold emailed every recruiter email I could get my hands on. I probably emailed 100 recruiters…I’d say I had a 10% response rate and a 1% interview rate. It’s all a numbers game given my background, but once I was able to get my portfolio in front of their faces, from there it wasn’t too hard. So yeah, it was pretty tough.

K: Annie, did you find that going into college, you weren’t sure about whether design would be a financially stable career?

A: I was never uncertain about the major, but in terms of financial stability I’m still unsure and so are all my DESMA friends. But money’s never the reason you choose a design or art career path.

R: Yeah, I literally took a pay cut to get into this career.

A: Especially versus software engineering.

R: But one thing that’s important to know, at least for UX and product design at a tech company, they will pay you very well. Maybe not as well as software engineers, but at Facebook it’s very similar.

A: I don’t think anyone is in it to make money, because that would be unrealistic.

K: Design has blown up a lot in recent years — what do you think contributed to this?

R: In the tech world, a lot of it started with these leading companies. Airbnb was founded by two designers and that was one of the first major tech companies to place design at the same level as engineering and management. A lot of major players realized the importance of product design—in the past, a lot of companies just had the engineers do the design work, not realizing that this is a complicated process and there’s a lot to gain from having a good design.

A: After one company does it and the public experiences its product, they’re ahead of the game. Having a good experience wins out for a tech product.

R: A lot of its growth comes from iterative development. Many big companies are software companies, and the way they work is they produce a minimal viable product (MVP), and then iterate on it.

minimal viable product: a product with the simplest possible features required to work; intended to be an early release for gaining initial user feedback

They really emphasize that once you throw out an MVP to the public and test it, you need to figure out what’s working and what’s not—that’s where product design comes in. This software development model is relatively new compared to those of the 90s, where they would plan everything, take months to build something, and then ship it out.

A: Yeah, if you don’t test it, and people are so unpredictable, you can think you’re intuitive enough to understand what people want, but when you actually give it to them you might find out it’s the exact opposite.

Nina: I remember when we went on the Tinder office tour together, they talked about how users in one country were behind on design trends, so they thought the app was broken because they would tap it and nothing would happen, not realizing that they could swipe the screen.

A: Yeah, I think a very small percentage of users would just open the app, perform no actions, and then never come back. And so that became an opportunity to create a new onboarding feature, where the app moves things around for you when you first open it to show you how it works. And there are other things like globalization that are hard, because some people read right to left instead of left to right.

K: What does the hiring process look like for a design job?

A: My interview for product design was split into two parts. First was on my visual design skills and portfolio, and the second was focused on product: things like why product design, what is product to you, with a really heavy emphasis on explaining my design process. They want to know that you iterate while looking for the “right” solution.

R: My interviews were pretty straightforward — always a portfolio review, sometimes an app critique, and usually a design challenge where I’d sketch out designs given a problem. Some of the places asked me to write some code but the far majority did not.

N: Was that knowing you had a software background?

R: No, this was at Quora where they required all designers to write frontend code, so they didn’t care what my background was. Another interview I had at a startup was more behavioral, so I tried to reverse-engineer it by figuring out what exactly this type of startup wants from a product design intern and then answering the questions based on that.

K: My experience in design is more individual because I’ve never had an actual design job, but a lot of these jobs require you to work with a team. Could you talk about how that process is different?

A: I really like getting feedback. Sometimes when you’re working on a project by yourself, you become obsessed with it and your eyes start blurring and you can’t really tell what’s changing. It helped a lot to get a second opinion from a different designer or from a PM. I was encouraged to even show flows to random people that weren’t on the product team—you want people without a design background to give their opinions, because those are the majority of people who will end up using your product.

R: A team tackles problems much more thoroughly. Everyone comes from a different background both professionally and personally, and that’s important.

K: Last question — what type of person do you think is suited for a design role? Not in terms of skills, but in terms of personality.

A: Empathy is huge. If you’re trying to solve a problem for someone else, you need to step into their shoes.

R: Most people can become product designers if they really want to. A lot of people say they’re not creative or artistic, but my job is probably 1% artistic. Creativity and every other trait required in my job can be learned. I agree that empathy is important — so is being business-minded and detail-oriented. Because this field is so young, a willingness to create and innovate is also important, not just because the problems you’re solving require creative solutions, but because we’re in a very special time in terms of product design. It’s such a new and upcoming field that I think people right now can have a large impact on it in ways they can’t in other fields.

That’s it, folks! Thanks for sticking with us—whether you are an aspiring designer or not, we hope that this article helped you understand the field of product design a bit better.

Contact Annie via LinkedIn and view her portfolio here, and contact Rohan via Facebook or LinkedIn. Also, check out Sigma Eta Pi if you are a UCLA student looking to join a family of incredibly talented and motivated people to help you in your career.

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