Interview with Kunal Patel, Sr Interaction Designer at Google Material Design
Kunal Patel is a friend of mine from Google. He was born in Queens, New York and grew up in Long Island; he is smart, eloquent, down to earth, funny, and always well dressed.
Kunal has a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA in Design in Technology from Parsons in New York. Before joining Google, he started his career in architecture at a small firm in NYC. After graduating Parsons, Kunal joined Huge in Brooklyn and worked on the UX team for 3 and a half years. After that, he moved to a startup called “Contently” where he worked as a UX designer turned Product Manager. In the last few years, Kunal has been working at Google: first on the Search team and currently the material design team.
Kunal currently lives in San Francisco and now that he’s not traveling for work, he’s considering getting a plant, although no final decisions have been made.
Kunal’s special talent is balancing things on his head, which he was happy to show me during our video call.
You can find Kunal on Instagram or LinkedIn.
If you have any questions relating to this interview or want to say hi, feel free to DM me on Instagram or reach out on LinkedIn!
How did you get into UX design?
My path from architecture to UX was pretty tenuous and unstructured. Even as it was happening, I knew I was fortunate that things worked out the way they did. While I was pursuing a degree and beginning my career in architecture, I was also organically creating a parallel path in digital design. If a few key moments and opportunities had gone differently, there’s an alternate universe where I’m still happily working in architecture today.
An architecture elective course in creating a web portfolio sparked my interest in Flash and web design, and was the first time I saw how my education could be applied to other domains. I took a few more classes in Flash and graphic design after that, helping me land an internship with an art history professor doing interface design for a children’s museum exhibit. He had assembled a team of programmers, 3d-modelers, and a cartoonist to produce a point-and-click adventure about a Mayan city. Knowing that something I helped create was used by so many people far away really stuck with me. The pride, satisfaction, and accomplishment I felt were more fulfilling than my architecture school projects or personal design work had been.
Kind of surprisingly, my web design work also helped me get a job in architecture. The small firm that hired me also wanted to redo their website, and part of their recruiting pitch was that I could work on it alongside my architecture projects. Eventually, I realized I was having more fun designing their site and other freelance projects than NYC apartments. I was still chasing that feeling I had working on the museum project, and to give my career transition the best chance of success I enrolled in the MFA Art, Media, & Technology program at Parsons. Throughout that whole time, I had kept in touch with the adjunct professor who taught the web portfolio class that started my journey. By the time I graduated, they had become a UX Director at Huge and helped me get my foot in the door there.
Do you have a design philosophy?
It’s not quite a “philosophy”, but over the years I have gotten a sense for what kinds of processes work best for me, and some principles informed by my time in architecture and product management.
From a process standpoint, I prefer to shape projects incrementally over time rather than work backwards from a fixed idea of the outcome. Early on, I don’t tend to have a sharp mental image of the “right” design or solution, but I do for strategy and how we’ll identify success. As such, I bias towards approaches that allow the team to be open to many outcomes with lots of opportunity for evaluation. Two things that help me do that are working cross-functionally from the start and having short design-to-development cycles. The upfront resourcing costs pay off in making your whole team invested advocates and the early identification of implementation efficiencies. Short, demo-focused cycles help both the team and users evaluate solutions with increasing context. You spend less time debating decisions in a doc or on a screen, can identify surrounding contextual issues, and get more realistic feedback from users about their experience rather than being surprised post-launch. Personally, this approach also allows me to maximize my range of skills. If I’m working with strong designers and engineers but lack product or program managers, I can focus on our strategy, UX principles, and managing the team. If design work is needed and we’re light on engineering, I’ll focus on higher-fidelity designs and prototyping.
As far as principles go, regardless of what process I’m using I try to keep the following in mind:
- Good design is responsible: No matter how well it looks or works in isolation, I don’t consider my projects successful if they did so at the cost of meeting user or business needs, ran way over time, or over budget.
- Design doesn’t end at the spec: Working on renovating old NYC apartments, I quickly learned that what you put down on paper will go through many iterations before it becomes reality. Issues we hadn’t anticipated would come up all the time, and I had to get comfortable adjusting my designs in the field. I’ve tried to carry the same mindset over to digital product design. I try to treat “final” design specs as just another incremental version that I expect to change, and stay involved during build to make sure the intent of the design is carried through even if every detail is not.
- Appreciate the opportunity costs: As designers we have incredible ideas for how to improve the products we work on, and it can be frustrating when many “obvious” fixes don’t get made. My time as a PM really helped me appreciate how scarce resources and opportunities are, and the accountability that comes with making those decisions. You’re constantly turning down worthwhile opportunities with the belief that what you’ve chosen to focus your team’s time on will be most impactful to long-term success. Back in a designer role, I think much more about opportunity costs and how to measure value than I did before.
What UX skills are useful, but not taught in school?
Acknowledging the design school challenge of focusing primarily on theory while students have the time to learn, vs. practice improve their professional readiness, here are 4 skills I’d like to see UX programs find ways to cover:
- Code literacy: In architecture school, we spent a lot of time learning about construction. What are the properties of different materials, how to create insulated building envelopes, calculate structural and snow loads, etc. The goal wasn’t for us to become contractors or structural engineers, but to expand our design possibilities and improve our collaboration with those partners. Setting aside “should designers code”, my hope is that UX programs are helping designers achieve “conversational code literacy” — enough of an understanding to identify design opportunities and have meaningful conversations with engineers.
- Understanding the business: Academic projects tend to present perfect briefs. They assume a business case has already been made and that you’ll follow some fixed process like discovery -> iteration -> research -> final design. In practice, these things are rarely true. More could be done to help students learn how to advocate for design-led projects and adapt their processes based on the time and resources available.
- Building relationships with other disciplines: A paradox of design programs is that your peers are all designers even though professionally your day-to-day team will mostly be non-designers. My time working in architecture and attending a multi-disciplinary graduate program allowed me to come in with experience collaborating with other disciplines, but I think I was an outlier in that regard.
- Advocating for your work: As you advance in your career, particularly inside a large company like Google, how you communicate your work, inspire other people to contribute, and pitch to leadership/clients become critical parts of your job. The harsh critique culture of architecture school helped me, as did my agency experience at Huge. Having the opportunity early in my career to be client-facing at a company that treated presenting as a critical skill was a big help.
What do you think makes a great designer?
There isn’t any single checklist to follow, which I think is a great thing. Two important, related traits that come to mind are the willingness to learn and ability to be critical of one’s own work. The best designers I know are not complacent. They are always working on improving their skills, and are able to do so effectively because they will ruthlessly analyze their own work and accept critical feedback to make the work better. I kind of subscribe to the idea of a “T-shaped” designer as well, or at least the idea that specialization isn’t effective without some broader understanding of design to pair with it. I’m probably more of an “M” shape myself given my background, but I’ve worked with all sorts of different skill-shaped designers in my career that I consider to be great.
Is it better to be a jack of all trades or master of one?
I believe you can create a successful path for yourself either way, and that one isn’t inherently better than the other. Specialization provides a straightforward path for professional development, makes it easier to find a community, and your value clearer to employers. However, it can be harder to adjust to changes to your job, navigate major industry shifts or uncertainties, or embark on a new career path.
My experience thus far leans towards jack-of-all-trades, so I’m able to speak the positives and negatives of that approach in a little more detail. Personally, I have appreciated the flexibility it’s given me to define my own career path and confidence in my ability to navigate industry changes. Professionally, I believe my versatility has been a positive — I can readily adapt my role to the needs of a project or team, approach problems from unique perspectives, and improve cross-functional collaboration and efficiency. I’m not advocating for a completely unstructured path to professional development, I think like vines you need to provide some structure for the growth to serve a useful purpose. For me, those structures have been interaction design, product strategy and measurement, education, and development.
The primary challenges I’ve faced are conveying my value to employers, finding positional stability, and avoiding the false equivalency of comparing rank to peers with similar industry tenure. When I was seeking to transition back from product management into design roles, I was surprised at the recency bias of both companies and myself. They would see the last line on my résumé was PM and ask why I wanted to apply for design, missing that my education and prior professional experience had all been in design. I also didn’t do myself any favors by talking about my work like a PM instead of like a designer. It took me some time and several rounds of interviews to reorient myself as a designer and communicate my value to companies in ways they expected. Trying to identify and fill ambiguous gaps within a team is valued, but is often an independent exercise without additional support, scaffolding, or existing measures for conveying that value. Lastly, in an industry obsessed with titles, it’s hard not to consider if I would be further along a professional path if I were wired to grow on a pure specialist path.
What do you think makes a bad designer?
Being inflexible in your approach and resistant to change. I believe in a team environment your quality as a colleague should be judged before the quality of your work. If you’re unwilling to collaborate with others, consider different points of view, consult multiple sources of information, adjust your process to match a problem, and internalize critical feedback, it will likely catch up to you at some point. Unless you’re Michael Jordan, it doesn’t matter how talented you are if people don’t believe they can work with you.
What are some of the challenges/obstacles you’ve faced at work?
I want to preface my answer by recognizing how fortunate and privileged I have been to have psychological safety in my workplaces. My primary challenges have been about opportunity-fit and not about a lack of relationship or trust with managers, support from employers, or discrimination based on my race, gender, or views. Given all the different environments I’ve worked in thus far, there hasn’t been a consistent challenge. The recurring theme that’s led to my transitions have been when I want to grow in ways that my current environment is not set up to support.
At the small, residential-focused architecture firm, the inherent challenge was scaling my work. I was proud of the apartments and residences I helped design, but they were always for a single client and I wanted my work to impact a larger community. When I finished graduate school and landed at Huge, I got to work on a variety of digital products that millions of people used. However, in an agency it’s inherently challenging to get continuous feedback about the products you work on and feel ownership as a consultant. Craving those things, I joined a startup and naturally became so attached to the product that I became a PM. In that role, the opportunities to drive strategy and work closely with engineers were great, but ultimately I realized I missed being a designer and being part of a larger UX community. At a company the scale of Google, the big obstacles are organizational scale and complexity. It takes a while to learn how things operate, how to have individual impact, and manage all of the inter- and intra-team dependencies connected to your work. Compared to past jobs, I spend more time thinking through how my work fits into team and company goals, pitching leadership on initiatives I believe are important, and communicating my work to peers and stakeholders.
What are the most important things when pitching your design work?
The two most important things for me are connecting the work to a broader strategy or team goal, and gathering as much information as I can to inform the direction. Part of making an effective pitch is setting it in a familiar context, or if your design work implies another direction making that explicitly clear (and why). This helps stakeholders properly evaluate a proposal and understand how it may contribute or challenge their larger vision. I don’t trust my intuition as much as I probably should, so oftentimes I am hesitant to pitch something that hasn’t been informed by external signals. Signals like a heuristic analysis or metrics of a live experience, feedback from users, and competitive analysis increase my confidence in the design work and preparedness to address questions about its value.
How do you see UX evolving in the future?
I don’t have any hot takes or bold visionary ideas, but this is a combination of things I expect and hope will happen:
- Increasing specialization: We’re going to hit a breaking point with the number of platforms and contexts that we expect designers to become experts in. Someone who has been working on websites for 10 years is not going to be a proficient voice designer overnight, and mastery of emerging platforms will require immersion. For larger companies expected to have a presence everywhere, we’ll wind up with horizontal “generalists” tasked with maintaining ecosystem coherence and platform “specialists” who optimize their local experience.
- Embracing vernacular design: Our industry has been dominated by American and European design aesthetics. Beyond making our workforces more inclusive (an incredibly necessary step), I hope there is a corresponding increase in design paradigms reflecting a more diverse cultural range of expectations and preferences.
- Forming a professional association: We’re starting to understand the unexpected impacts of our work on society, grapple with our ethical responsibilities, and recognizing our collective power to hold the industry accountable for change. I believe we’re overdue for a professional organization of our own to establish professional standards, establish a code of ethics, unify our communications, and provide structured paths for professional development.
What are the most common mistakes you see in UX portfolios?
The meta mistake I regularly see in case studies is that they ask the reviewer to do most of the work hunting for insights, interpreting the value of deliverables, and evaluating designs in context. Each small mistake quickly adds up to erode the little time and motivation a reviewer has per applicant. Some symptoms of this problem are:
- Treating a case study as a checklist: Including a gigantic site map or user flow on its own isn’t very helpful. Have you indicated why this was the right deliverable for the situation, and how it informed your design decisions? Otherwise, all you’ve demonstrated is that you can lay out boxes and arrows.
- Prefacing designs with long explanations: Adding context is important, but keep in mind how much you’re asking someone new to learn and track at once. Set up micro-moments for evaluation along the way.
- No context for designs: A common format includes a hero image of the final UI and then a barrage of screens at the end. By isolating designs from the process, how are indicating what should be evaluated? What are the key areas to focus on? Is this all your own design, or are you working within an existing system?
- Overloading on depth: Case study length is not a proxy for complexity of problem or competence of solution. Rather, it may imply that you don’t know how to succinctly communicate your work or match format to purpose. Are you sending samples for a screener or preparing for a final-round interview?
What’s your biggest design pet peeve?
I’m going to break the rules and list 2, both of which I’ve been guilty of in the past:
- “Validating” instead of “evaluating”: This may seem like a minor switch of terms, but it can hint at major team issues of post-rationalization and unhealthy measurement culture. Delaying project evaluation until 100% launch often makes it “too big to fail”. Selective interpretation is bound to creep in, and while this creates short-term satisfaction it can mask long-term issues that will be costlier to fix later. If you’re evaluating along the way, no direction becomes too precious and the team becomes accustomed to acknowledging failure and addressing it sooner.
- Lack of empathy for other roles: “Empathy” gets thrown around a lot as an essential UX skill for connecting with users, but what about with our own team? Before complaining about an engineer always pushing back on a solution, or a PM never prioritizing your ideas, have you tried to understand why? If their response always surprises you, then you haven’t done enough to get to know their work philosophy, constraints, and priorities.
Do you have any tips for anyone looking to get into the UX field?
Most of the advice I have is contextual to someone’s background and situation: am I talking to a student from the program at Parsons? A fellow architect thinking of switching? Someone already in the industry but in another role? Someone totally outside looking in? If you are in any of those situations, please feel free to reach out directly if you’re looking for advice. As my answer to the first question probably showed, my journey was somewhat naive and unstructured. It wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of help and I am happy to pay that forward.
Two general tips I can offer are (1) Start by investigating the skill gap, and (2) Find ways to get your feet wet before jumping in. Career transitions can come with big upfront costs, and knowing where to prioritize your time, energy, and resources can make a big difference. Look at job listings and UX curriculums to understand the critical skills required, assess how your past experience matches up, and identify the big gaps that you’ll need to prioritize learning.
That advice is a mix of reverse-engineering things I intuitively did and things I wish I did. I was doing freelance web design work on nights and weekends without much training, eventually realized I was hitting a skill wall and then looked into options for structured learning. From open house visits, I learned that many graduate programs liked having architects because many aspects of our education — concept-driven design, emphasis on iteration, consideration of human factors, etc. — readily transferred to other disciplines. That gave me a little more confidence that investing in graduate school was worth it.
Do you have any side projects you’re working on?
For the last 4+ years I’ve been working on Letters of San Francisco, a collection of my favorite found type in the city — from neon signs, hand-painted storefronts, tile vestibules, and more — that I have digitally recreated one letter at a time. It actually started as an analog drawing activity to practice lettering. I needed an easy, low-tech creative outlet to balance my move into corporate tech, its design complexity, and the loss of agency it comes with. At this point, I’ve recreated almost 500 letters and the project has evolved from a simple design exercise into my way of connecting to the city’s past and present. I’m hoping to wind the project down this year and have been slowly working on a proposal for a book to document it.
What traits do you think the best leaders have?
I think the best leaders set strong principles for decision-making, clearly communicate their intent, are effective at prioritization, active listeners, and accountable for their decisions. Strong principles reduce “direction churn” and help teams internalize change when it is needed. Related, a great vision is only helpful if everyone interprets it the same way. Clearly communicating intent is critical for inspiring teams and empowering individuals to make decisions in service of the vision. Not everything can be a “P0”, and effective leaders explicitly acknowledge what work isn’t a priority and why. Instead of waiting for feedback to come to them, they engage with their team and encourage honest, critical feedback to be heard and acted upon. When a decision doesn’t have a desired outcome, they address it critically and have a plan for how to move forward.
What do you do to improve your design skills?
My general approach is very project-driven. Without a separate goal to motivate me, I find it challenging to learn something for its own sake. At work, I’m always looking for projects that will stretch my boundaries. For example, last year I worked on a collaboration between the Material Design and ML Kit teams at Google. ML Kit provides a set of API’s for mobile developers to add machine learning-powered features like image search and text recognition to their apps. I had been interested in learning more about machine learning and its application to design for a while, but this project gave me the path I was missing. I was able to structure my learning around some clear use cases, work in a familiar context (mobile design patterns), and learn from in-house experts when I had questions.
Outside of work, I try to take a similar approach. Even though Letters of San Francisco started as a way for me to work on other skills, over time I started thinking about ways to share my work outside of Instagram. My passion for that project motivated me to learn Principle and Framer to explore site ideas and React to try and build something myself. I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I did make a handy tool for myself to visually browse my collection of letters by character, neighborhood, location type, etc.
