I am really passionate about my work. You can ask anybody that worked with me and you will see it in the 10 minutes in an interview. It sounds good but wait until I start asking questions around. I need to know why we are building this, what’s in it for the user and what is not working for the business. Good luck to the product managers that come to me with solutions and don’t articulate the problem that they are trying to solve. I am analytical and inquisitive but in a nice friendly manner, I couldn’t be rude even if I wanted. I promise that the product manager will end up loving me because I believe in teamwork and I help them succeed in their roles.

My favourite people? The developers. Some of them are complicated but they make things happen and that’s the biggest satisfaction in my work: to see the most elegant and useful version of my designs in front of the users. We all know that it’s very rare that a design will be implemented unaltered, there is always a time or a technical constraint. Involving the devs from the beginning it helps me come up with a design that actually can be implemented in the next sprints and not in 6 months.

I left the users at the end because all my work is about them. All my reading nowadays is to understand the human behaviour, how the brain works, how we learn and how we take decisions. I’m into anything from anthropology to behavioural economics. Knowledge is priceless if you use it when taking design decisions. I might break the rules of consistency because we need to design in context. If the user can’t achieve their goal or task in that particular screen he will never say “it doesn’t make sense but it’s consistent with the previous page’. I have worked on several design systems, I understand their value but I think they can be soul destroying if they are too rigid. Otherwise we would all build apps using wordpress templates.

My most important soft skill: empathy. If I would have to recruit designers I would focus on this skill. Empathy for users and for your colleagues. How can you design for people if you don’t care about them. You can teach someone a tool or a method but you can’t teach them empathy.

In 15 years of experience I’ve learnt that there is no one single way of working, each team is different, each project has slightly different needs. The designs are not my babies and my ego shouldn’t be the most important thing in a conversation. I’ve learnt to listen because only when you have all the information available you can come up with designs that people love and teams can implement.

Please go through my projects and let me know if you have questions about how and why i came to a particular design solution.