Takeaways from my talks with 24 MailChimp designers and leads
To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people.
For the second episode of “Feels Like a Magic” internship series, I’d love to start with this quote from Julie Zhuo. Not only because talking to users is of the essence in design, but also I found myself sometimes can be too heads down: I put on my headset and start to navigate design ideas for hours without noticing what’s happening around.
This is why I decided to talk to in total 24 MailChimp designers, design leads, and the CEO who was also a designer during my design internship, about their experience and their suggestions for me as a junior designer.
I asked them 4 questions: 1)How was it for you when you first started as a designer? What has changed for your over years? 2)What did you do to stay competitive in this industry? What makes you irreplaceable? 3) What do you think is the biggest gap between design interns and junior designers? What suggests you would give me to improve my hard/soft design skills in school? 4) Any helpful resources/books/websites you recommend to keep updated?
Here are some quotes and design resources I found very inspiring (a big shout out to Caleb Andrews and Matthew Pence for putting together so many helpful resources). I sorted the takeaways by the levels of the designers they came from so maybe you can look at them in a career spectrum.
1) What has been changed for you as a designer?
“Become a confident influencer.”
Junior:
“School is more about confidence building. Working in a company helps me understand how to make design decisions: from a high-level, data analysis, testing(sitting with users), and critiques.”
“I start to find my specialized niche and really work on building my expertise.”
“Really understand the design process and how to work with engineers and researchers.”
Senior:
“The more I work, the more I trust myself: having a strong opinion of what you are doing, digging deeply, and iterating. Usually, I go to a design critique pod with no more than 2 options and am ready to explain them from bottom to top. Otherwise, you will be very easily moved around by other people: They feel like they need to help you.”
“How to apply design thinking in a multi-functional team and influence other people who are not designers: connect people and forge conversations.”
“From a problem solvers to a problem identifiers: gain the ability to identify the “people problem” (A good example is the Old VCR). ”
“ Learned to understand business and use it to support my design. Harvard Business Review is a good resource.”
Lead:
“As a design lead, I learned to avoid being attached to an idea or a mentality also deal with ambiguities all the time.”
2) How to stay competitive/irreplaceable?
The most important thing is communication: tell the story of your design, open a two-way conversation, and get feedback.
Junior:
“ Read a lot outside design and bring the foundations of how other experts solve problems in their area back to design.”
“ Find your personal interests, perhaps design in VR, research in design, designing for accessibility, etc. Dig down into that particular part and absorb everything new.”
“ I’m excited of exploring how other people pushing their design boundary by talking with them and observing.”
Senior:
“Thinks as a product designer: support your design with business value, data, research, technology, frame the problem and convey it in a way that makes sense to everybody, even those outside of design (executives, marketing, developers, etc.).”
“Networking: go to design hubs, attend design meetups and talk to people.”
Leads:
“Really understand users and build empathy: my former CEO spends 30%-40% of his time with users.”
“I do side projects even now.”
“Read a lot: newsletter, Medium/LinkedIn articles, books, whatever you can get!”
3）Design and career suggestions:
“ Some skills I notice lacking among design students are the command of their design process (connecting the dots), design expertise, and product strategy (a well-rounded notion of why).”
Junior:
“ Don’t treat yourself as an intern or a junior designer. Don’t say that I can’t do this because I am an intern. No one knows everything. Push yourself to the boundary.”
“ I like to work at growing companies that are not set. ”
Senior:
“Do more side projects: If possible, do it within cross-functional teams and build a healthy respect to other disciplinaries.”
“Looking for smart people who can mentor you and share your work early and often with as many people as possible.”
“Work hard: We will truly value someone who is passionate about work, flexible to see what’s lacking, and take the initiative to make an impact.”
“Work for big companies at the early stage of your career. In-house design work can give you more time to understand deeply about your user.”
Leads:
“Mock up other designs as practice: The ability to use your toolset to communicate/craft your design is very important, especially for junior designers. But later, you should go beyond craft and execution, moving towards product thinking, then influence others.”
“Build relationships with and empathy for your co-workers: create win-win situations.”
“As design students, think about how to apply what you learned from school to an agile environment. Two books called Inspired and Lean Startup can be can be a good start.”
“ Write your resume in a year: Look at your dream job’s description. What skills you are lacking now? Work backward and keep yourself motivated.”
“A small job-hunting secret: check other designer’s work. Send out emails and questions to the ones interest you. During winter break, go meet with them!”
4）Design Resources that keep you updated:
“ When recruiting, we try to find the talents who are curious about the industry and articulate their design in an engaging way.”
Design expertise:
- Designer News: Surfacing design-related news.
- Invision Newsletter: Lots of helpful blogs
- Common creatives: Unsplash/Rawpiexl/Pexels/Freepik
- Page Flows: Inspirations of user flow videos and screenshots
- Font Pair & TypeWolf: Font inspiration
- The Importance of Good Animation in UX: A breakdown of hard and fast rules on what works best. Also, check out animation principles in UI.
- The Noun Project: Icon trends
- Visual Design Glossary: A quick link to visual design terms that are nice to scan. Also, check out a Canva blog.
- Others: Medium, Podcasts, Dribbble
Research methods/guidelines:
- Books: Interviewing Users, Validating Product Ideas, The User Experience Team of One
- The Six Phases of Design Research: Help guide product design agenda and focus on what matters most.
- 18F Method Cards: Leveraging research as apart of your design toolkit.
- Nielsen Norman Group’s Mobile & Web Topic: Latest design research helps to build your case.
Learning your medium/constraints:
- A Book Apart: a series of short books that coverage for topics ranging from technical to design theory.
- Human Interface Guidelines: Design standards on Apple platforms.
- Material Design: A design guideline for Android.
- Awesome iOS: A robust list of iOS frameworks, libraries, tutorials.
- The DevOps Glossary: Understand key terms that Development and Operations abide by.
Business/Product management:
- Books: Inspired, The Lean Startup, Competing Against Luck.
- The Complete Project Management Glossary: Keep close when understanding the language of a project manager.
- Harvard Business Review: Get familiar with how business works.
Heartfelt thanks to
Everyone that spent their precious time talking with me! Designers on web team: Make Davis, Jacob Davidson, Gabe Will, Christina Lingga, Holly Tiwari, Matthew Pence, Sarah Shapiro, Oluwaseyi Amole, Sarah Lashinsky, Chris Blair. Designers on mobile team: Caleb Andrews, Chad Urbanick, Bryan Lewis, Shuli Liu, Izuchukwu Elechi. Researchers: Khalida Nicole Allen, Carrie Heffner. Design Mangers/Directors: Ryan West, Eric Toledo, Jon Bell. MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut.
Please stay tuned for the following blogs in this internship blog series where I will talk in depth about MailChimp Culture, and Design Reflections.
If you have any question or suggestion, please reach out via email: doutian@iu.edu
More about my work at www.iamdoutian.com or find me on Linkedin.
