Designer Journey: The Soloist

Tackling Data and Design in Dublin

The data scientists and engineers at Zalando’s Fashion Insights Centre in Dublin are working to design and build large scale products and services, pushing the boundaries of Zalando as a fashion knowledge platform. We are also building up a design team there, further ensuring that our customers, not just the newest technology, remain the company’s highest priority. At the moment, Rosarie O’Regan is the sole designer in the Dublin office. I thought this would be a great time to sit down with her, and hear how she puts her design skills to use in an office devoted to data.

What do you do at Zalando?

I’m a senior product designer (UX) in the Dublin Information Team within Digital Experience. I mainly work with the Fashion Content Platform, that specializes in ‘data science as a service’ as a way to democratize the power of data science across teams at Zalando. We enable further understanding of large datasets, help automate manual processes, and provide contextually relevant experiences to customers through AI techniques such as machine learning.

Zalando’s Dublin office is mainly made up of data scientists and engineers. What’s it like being the only designer (for now) in the office?

A lot of the data scientists I work with aren’t particularly used to being close to the customer, so I’ve become the customer’s advocate, asking questions from their point of view. We have a lot of great technology at our disposal in the Dublin office, but we also need to make sure that it’s useful to the customer and not just technology for technology’s sake.

A large part of my job is raising awareness about what designers actually do and conveying the idea that design thinking can be used no matter what problem we’re trying to solve.

How did you get here?

I studied business information systems, and during the third year of my course I did a six-month work experience with the web team for my local city council, working on an accessibility project. While there I learned about user experience and I was hooked! I then did a masters in multimedia and did my thesis on voice interaction guidelines for designing e-commerce websites for the visually impaired

I’ve worked as a UX designer for 10 years — six years with a UX consultancy, two with a mobile travel app company (Travelport Digital) and just under a year at Dropbox Ireland.

An engineer I worked with at Travelport Digital moved to Zalando and that’s how I learned about the company. I was always interested in designing with data and Zalando’s values of purpose, autonomy and mastery really aligned with my personal values. The fact that it was a fashion company was definitely a bonus so it seem like a natural fit for me.

What attracted you to this particular role?

The Dublin office is a data center, so obviously I knew I’d be working with a lot of data. I had worked with analytic dashboards in the past and was keen to work on information design and visualization. I was excited at the thought of working with new technologies like machine learning and image recognition and how these types of technology could be applied to fashion. User research is my favourite part of the job and I was interested in finding out how different people think about fashion.

And what are you currently working on?

At the moment I’m working on a feature to help customers find similar items in similar colors (for example, you like a red dress and you want to see other red dresses), with image extracted color tags. We are also working on a feature to showcase items in this season’s pantone colours

We are working with the search team to improve results by enriching products with ML learned tags such as categories, neckline types, patterns, dress styles, denim textures (e.g distressed) and lengths.

(I) spend a lot of time with the engineering teams trying to unpick problems to figure out what is best for our customers and again, make sure that we don’t use cool technology just because we can.

Day-to-day I also run workshops and spend a lot of time with the engineering teams trying to unpick problems to figure out what is best for our customers and again, make sure that we don’t use cool technology just because we can. I find the data scientists and data engineers are really interested and receptive to any user research we do and always like to be involved.

What have you learned since coming to Zalando?

Where to start? I have learned so much! First, I had to get up to speed with core ML concepts to help me understand how the data scientists work. I have also learned a lot about the lean engineering delivery processes and how it integrates with design processes. And maybe most importantly, given that I’m the only designer in the office, I’ve had to learn how to talk about design so it’s accessible to everyone, even if they don’t have a design background. Oh, and a lot of acronyms!

What is unique about the design culture at Zalando?

I would say three things:

-The culture of critique and sharing with the goal of achieving the best result for our customers.

-The designers all come from diverse backgrounds and this help us have more perspectives and see things through many different lenses.

-An awesome qualitative and quantitative research team 👏.

What is the most challenging aspect of your role?

It would definitely be the challenge of prototyping. To properly evaluate our product we need to conduct usability tests with the users’ own data and have the experience tailored to them. The content they see must be relevant to their history and preferences in order to give us some relevant insight. We strive for a high percentage of accuracy and sometimes it can be challenging to discover that tipping point…of just how precise we need to be to get practicable feedback. Also it’s important to understand the tolerance level of users regarding the accuracy of the data/recommendations we show them. For example, do we have the same understanding of what a tropical print is? Or, if we show coral-colored dresses when they filtered for red dresses — is that in-line with their expectations?

And the most rewarding?

It’s definitely seeing the data scientists and engineers become more human-centric in their work. The Dublin office started as super techy, with a definite start-up feel. As we’ve matured as an office, we’ve been able to focus more and more on what the customer needs.

What do you love about working in the Dublin office?

We are just on the cusp of really learning what AI and machine learning can do for the customer. It’s really exciting to be working on that, and I like being the voice of reason and ethics in the discussions.

Yes, we can do such and such, but should we? Are we being creepy? Transparent? Everything we do must always be in the customer’s best interest.

Also, I’ve learned so much from the data scientists and engineers. Working on a cross-functional team gives you different perspectives and helps create a truly great product. We’re not just working on wire-framing, but also customer journeys and setting rules for how the API should operate. It’s not just about the interface, but solving problems in a non-visual way.

Rosarie is a senior product designer with Zalando Dublin.

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We’re hiring designers in Dublin! Contact Zara McBrien to learn more.