User Experience Designer

Lauren: Hi, I’m Lauren. I’m a product designer at Xero.

Product design is a field of design heavily focused on software. We oversee both the UX and the UI. The UX being what is the experience our customers are having on our products and services and then the UI being the actual elements that they're interacting with. We're making sure that the navigation is as seamless as possible and that you understand the information that's in front of you.

My role is problem solving. How do you actually help businesses make better products?

Xero is an accounting platform that is easy for small businesses to use. We work with design researchers, we work with our product teams, stakeholders and our customers to find out what are our customer needs and what are the business objectives.

As a product designer we start with defining a problem and we understand that through research, data, analytics and experimentation. We work from that into wire-framing low fidelity designs. We move fast and we iterate quite quickly. We then prototype this into a higher fidelity design that we can actually put in front of our users and validate the approach that we've taken and then from that we have insights that help us to iterate and continue to improve those experiences.

So a day in the office usually starts with prioritising what I need to achieve that day. The product team does Agile practices. We have our stand-ups that's where we can all get together and we understand what each person's working on.

The user will come here entering in from...

Then we have things like design QA. I will catch up with our developers.

If we release this bit first.

I might run some co-design sessions with other designers. We can critique each other's work, we can give feedback, we can ask questions, we can give ideas and we can challenge some assumptions that have maybe been made.

I try to get the team as involved as possible early on so that we all have buy-in to the project and they understand how we can make the best user experience possible. Everyone brings in a different perspective and you need to make sure that you bring those perspectives together to try and meet that best customer outcome.

As a product designer you need to be able to adapt to circumstances that are always changing, to continually learn and hone your craft, to make sure that you're understanding what's happening out there in the market around you, to want to work in a collaborative environment because you're always working with multiple teams, with different people.

Once they've raised the case...

You need to be able to present because you are the voice of the end user and lastly, enjoy solving problems.

There are multiple different pathways that you can take to becoming a product designer. Myself, I went to university but some people learn on the job. Some people move from things like product owners or product managers into design.

Because we're in the design field there are so many different options. You can either work like I am - internally within a business or you can actually work in an agency where you might be working on different projects from different businesses.

You can also go into freelancing where you might be working for different clients all the time. There's a lot of opportunities also with remote working, so you might even be based in New Zealand but working for an American company.

What I love about the job is that I have the chance to change the lives of our small business customers. Because we're across the whole process, we actually have a lot of influence on what the product will be like, how the users might interact, making sure that they have the best possible experience. And that's a pretty awesome thing to be a part of.