Nico Mizono

Finally got around to posting my favorite photos from the 100 day project I completed last fall. 

Insights From Irene Au, Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures

At Tradecraft, we make it a point to seek out advice and mentorship from the best in the business. We constantly reach out to people we admire, and we invite them to share their experiences, knowledge and advice.

So when Irene Au spoke at Tradecraft, we knew the experience would be illuminating. Irene is currently an operating partner at Khosla Ventures, but previously she was the former head of design at Yahoo!, Google and Udacity. In addition, Irene is a certified yoga instructor who speaks and writes about the practice, and she teaches a weekly class in Mountain View.

Below are 5 takeaways from Irene’s talk. I hope they resonate as much with you as they did for us.

If you’re the lone design wolf at your startup, you should:

1. Connect with other designers in your area and seek out their feedback. Bounce your ideas off them. Ask them to look at your work. Check with them to see if your process is sound.

2. Find people in your company who naturally think like a designer. People who think like a designer have a clear idea about what they want and can articulate their decisions with strong arguments and sound logic. They obsess over problems and are ruthless when it comes to finding the best solution.

If you're a junior designer, try and find a job at a later stage startup:

Junior designers should go to a big company for 2–4 years where they can work under senior designers. Junior designers don't have the authority or experience to drive design at an early stage company, which is why early stage startups who hire junior designers tend to have weaker design cultures. Junior designers who grow and flourish under senior designers will blossom at earlier stage companies.

How to make design successful in a non-design friendly startup:

1. Always strive to produce great work no matter how often your stakeholders question you.

2. Start small. Choose to work on projects on which you can add significant value, and which you won't face too much resistance. If you do this successfully, you will have the currency you need to move forward with projects that require bigger budgets, more social capital and time.

3. Connect your development and executive teams directly to your users. Do this by showing them artifacts like user interview videos, usability tests and personas. Sharing these artifacts helps build empathy for your users and wins you support for your future projects.

4. Develop enough emotional intelligence and social awareness to figure out how to effectively engage your stakeholders in different parts of the company. Often, design is reduced to “making things look pretty,” so it’s not always obvious to your colleagues how your work benefits the business. Thus, figure out how to win the support of your colleagues and get them to buy into what you're doing.

How do I figure out which areas in design to specialize in?

Pay attention to which projects give you energy and which projects sap your energy. Reflect on your experiences and write them down. Explore, study and try out different areas of design. For example, if you're a UX researcher, work on a visual design project or dive into some code. Also, ask yourself questions like:

Do I want to focus on the craft of design?

Do I want to be in a design management role?

Do I love working at a design consultancy?

Continuous experimentation and reflection will help you discover where your passions lie and help you determine where to specialize.

What are the top qualities you look for in a designer?

1. The ability to produce good work, which means having exacting taste. Great designers have to understand their craft well enough to explain what is good, what needs fixing and how to fix it. The only way to develop this ability is through study, practice and feedback.

2. Emotional intelligence. Design is often deemphasized in a business or engineering driven company. Designers need enough emotional intelligence and social awareness to navigate these situations effectively in order to drive design at their companies.

3. Passion, a deep curiosity and the insatiable desire to grow. Great designers have the ability to maintain intense passion for their craft while striving to satiate their curiosity with information. The kiss of death is a situation where you're not growing and not feeding your hunger with information.

Insights From Irene Au, Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures

At Tradecraft, we make it a point to seek out advice and mentorship from the best in the business. We constantly reach out to people we admire, and we invite them to share their experiences, knowledge and advice.

So when Irene Au spoke at Tradecraft, we knew the experience would be illuminating. Irene is currently an operating partner at Khosla Ventures, but previously she was the former head of design at Yahoo!, Google and Udacity. In addition, Irene is a certified yoga instructor who speaks and writes about the practice, and she teaches a weekly class in Mountain View.

Below are 5 takeaways from Irene’s talk. I hope they resonate as much with you as they did for us.

If you’re the lone design wolf at your startup, you should:

1. Connect with other designers in your area and seek out their feedback. Bounce your ideas off them. Ask them to look at your work. Check with them to see if your process is sound.

2. Find people in your company who naturally think like a designer. People who think like a designer have a clear idea about what they want and can articulate their decisions with strong arguments and sound logic. They obsess over problems and are ruthless when it comes to finding the best solution.

If you're a junior designer, try and find a job at a later stage startup:

Junior designers should go to a big company for 2–4 years where they can work under senior designers. Junior designers don't have the authority or experience to drive design at an early stage company, which is why early stage startups who hire junior designers tend to have weaker design cultures. Junior designers who grow and flourish under senior designers will blossom at earlier stage companies.

How to make design successful in a non-design friendly startup:

1. Always strive to produce great work no matter how often your stakeholders question you.

2. Start small. Choose to work on projects on which you can add significant value, and which you won't face too much resistance. If you do this successfully, you will have the currency you need to move forward with projects that require bigger budgets, more social capital and time.

3. Connect your development and executive teams directly to your users. Do this by showing them artifacts like user interview videos, usability tests and personas. Sharing these artifacts helps build empathy for your users and wins you support for your future projects.

4. Develop enough emotional intelligence and social awareness to figure out how to effectively engage your stakeholders in different parts of the company. Often, design is reduced to “making things look pretty,” so it’s not always obvious to your colleagues how your work benefits the business. Thus, figure out how to win the support of your colleagues and get them to buy into what you're doing.

How do I figure out which areas in design to specialize in?

Pay attention to which projects give you energy and which projects sap your energy. Reflect on your experiences and write them down. Explore, study and try out different areas of design. For example, if you're a UX researcher, work on a visual design project or dive into some code. Also, ask yourself questions like:

Do I want to focus on the craft of design?

Do I want to be in a design management role?

Do I love working at a design consultancy?

Continuous experimentation and reflection will help you discover where your passions lie and help you determine where to specialize.

What are the top qualities you look for in a designer?

1. The ability to produce good work, which means having exacting taste. Great designers have to understand their craft well enough to explain what is good, what needs fixing and how to fix it. The only way to develop this ability is through study, practice and feedback.

2. Emotional intelligence. Design is often deemphasized in a business or engineering driven company. Designers need enough emotional intelligence and social awareness to navigate these situations effectively in order to drive design at their companies.

3. Passion, a deep curiosity and the insatiable desire to grow. Great designers have the ability to maintain intense passion for their craft while striving to satiate their curiosity with information. The kiss of death is a situation where you're not growing and not feeding your hunger with information.

1) “Creating successful user experiences requires having explicitly defined reasons for every choice you make.”

I see this requirement in almost every UX design job description I find, “The ability to clearly articulate design decisions.” After reading Garrett’s book Elements of User Experience, I now understand why.

The ability to clearly articulate a design decision is crucial because it leaves nothing to chance when designing an experience. Often times, speedy or uninformed decisions are made because it’s convenient, or because designers are under a lot of pressure to deliver on a deadline.

However, the ability to explain why each decision was made and understanding the effect it will have on the entire product from top to bottom is the only way to ensure success when designing experiences.

2) “Any time a person uses a product, a sort of dance goes on between them.”

Within user experience design, I am particularly drawn to interaction design because it is what makes a product unique and fun to use. When I unlock my iPhone, I love the way the apps land onto the screen. When mobile app designers started integrating the “swipe right” action as an alternative to the back button, I cried tears of joy.

In the case of Garrett’s statement above, I appreciate the dance metaphor to describe interaction design. As UX designers, we must be able to predict what action(s) the user wants to perform at each stage of the product, and if we are able to “anticipate” the actions of the user we will be successful in guiding them through the product.

3) “Instead of evaluating visual design ideas solely in terms of what seems aesthetically pleasing, you should focus your attention on how well they work.”

To someone who appreciates and has a love for beauty and aesthetics, I often thought "good" design was determined by visual aesthetics. After digging a little deeper and doing a bit of reading, I found this to not be true and especially in the case of software and digital interfaces. 

Day 4 - Thoughts & reflections on Box

I am extremely fortunate and I am very proud to have worked on Box while at freelancing at BotnDolly. I collaborated with some of most talented people in the business, learned a ton from them, and had a shit load of fun along the way.

As I reflect back on the piece, I'd like to share some of the things I learned:

1) Refine. Refine. Refine.

-Box took nearly two years to make, which goes to show how much care went into making it. Since it was the first piece of its kind, the team had to overcome many technical and creative challenges along the way. So, it was necessary for the creative directors to discuss and review our progress to make sure we were headed in the right direction.

2) Experiment like a mad scientist & collaborate with others outside of your own domain.

Box is the amalgamation of different technologies & art forms, combining projection mapping, animation, robotics, graphic design, automated cinematography, and other tech unique to BotnDolly. It was through many small experiments and lots of trial and error that made the piece truly unique and magical.

This combination of design, storytelling and technology showed what's possible when people from different disciplines collaborate and work together. It reminds me of what Bran Ferren said in his TED talk,

"When you combine art and engineering, you can create amazing things that cannot be done in either domain alone," 

Day 3 - Splash screen for the redesign of my dad's photography website.