Alumni spotlight: Ninad Dalal
A quarterly series where we check in and learn what former HCDE alumni have been up to since graduation
ALB: Okay, first, thanks for chatting with us and sharing your story with the Alumni network. To get us started could you tell us when you graduated from the program and what you’ve been up to since.
Ninad: I completed my Bachelor’s in 2007, and that was pre-rebranding of the program name to HCDE, so I have a bachelor’s in Technical Communication. After I graduated I worked for a year and then decided to go back to get my Masters of HCDE in about 2008, graduating in 2010.
ALB: Two HCDE degrees, I love it. I’m curious — where did you work in that year in between?
Ninad: I was a junior researcher at Microsoft for the support team.
ALB: Oh wow, that’s interesting you started in research because I know that you’re more involved on the design side now. Could you talk a little bit about about what you’ve been up to since graduating?
Ninad: Sure, I’ll start from when I graduated with my Bachelor’s. I saw the opportunity at Microsoft that I just mentioned and interviewed for it. It was a research role but it included a little bit of everything -a little bit of design and a little bit of content strategy. I think that’s what really got me to start thinking “hey, this space is interesting, I might want to go and get more education in the space, which led me to the Master’s degree. So that’s how I ended up in the Master’s program. I also met my wife in the undergrad program so that may have been another reason I went back to do the master’s program, because she did [laughs].
After I earned my Master’s, I spent a couple of years working at an agency where we primarily worked with T Mobile web design. Eventually I joined Expedia and I have been here for nine years. I started as a junior designer and my team was tiny. I think it was like, maybe 35 to 50 people, and it exposed me to a lot of the business and the different roles each line of business plays. After I was a designer for awhile, I switched over to being a manager. Now I’m back into sort of an individual contributor designer type of role.
ALB: You’ve been up to a lot! It all sounds incredible — I don’t want to assume but do you feel like the HCDE program help set you up to be able to explore all those different spaces within UX? It seems like you’ve touched on almost all of them.
Ninad: Yeah, I definitely think it helped my design thinking because the program wasn’t limited to strictly design stuff, it went beyond basic understanding of the user centered design methodology. For example, the program taught me how to provide feedback in the content strategy space and at the same time I also understood what type of research we could do. Or learning how to tear down your product to figure out what pain points coupled with data might be worth solving.
I really did enjoy the research aspects of the program — I took a bunch of those courses in part because I wasn’t set in going into a design role at that time. I also took a bunch of courses in educational psychology and while I’ve never got to use those skills directly I think it was still so valuable. Just understanding the research space better has been useful.
Finally, just in general — the program helped me learn how to frame basically any type of problem, not only work stuff, but more generally approaching any problems. Every time I think about simple things like Gestalt in typography when I see a poorly designed road sign or a commercial.
ALB: That’s great, it sounds like the program has definitely had a lasting impact on you. Do any classes or memories from your time in either program stick out? Besides obviously meeting your wife.
Ninad: One of the unique pieces I remember is that at the time, the number of students in the undergraduate program was very small. The Master’s program was also very small, and they were both in the daytime at the time. So most of us were in the same cohort that entire length of time and we would see each other every day. It felt very comfortable — we would work together, go out for beers together sometimes, and generally we got to know each other well. That’s what made the classes fun for me. That kind of camaraderie and being in a tight knit group while all learning about the same thing, that’s been the coolest part.
ALB: I completely agree with you on that. I’ve made some life long friends from HCDE! The last thing I wanted to ask about, because you’ve been in the field for a while and you’ve seen it change often, what’s the first piece of advice that comes to mind for someone just getting into the career space?
Ninad: Having knowledge of other areas has helped me quite a bit and even outside of school I made time to learn outside of that formal setting. Coupling that with the way the program shapes your thinking will help you start thinking in a human centered way, and that will set you up for success across quite a few roles. For example, if you’re interested in research, you could learn more about educational psychology. Even if you don’t use it, you will still understand more aspects of experiment design, and when people are throwing statistics or numbers at you you’ll have some idea of how to interpret this information. Or, if you’ve been in web design strictly, you might gain some knowledge in basic HTML, CSS, and accessibility. I think that will help make you a better designer and a better partner for your engineering peers.
Outside of that I think design thinking can be applied to problems outside of the traditional digital space. I took a course in industrial design just for credits and for fun. It was cool because I had the opportunity to apply that design thinking to a parking meter redesign which involved physical design but also the parking meter experience and core user tasks like paying to park.
ALB: Well now I need to know what your opinion is on the Seattle parking meters.
Ninad: I think we use that as our product to redesign [laughs]. I think the best update has been that you don’t have to deal with parking meters anymore because you can just pay with the app. It’s so simple and it’s the best.
Major thanks to Ninad for taking time to chat with us this quarter!
You can reach Ninad on linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninaddalal/
