Exploring Design With A Fin-Tech Product Designer

Welcome to the Do-Over Project, where we interview young professionals about their struggles, processes and journeys. We deliver it to you in a summarised version so that it can give you a better understanding of your career path and help you connect with them.

Illustration By Harsh Vardhan Singh

About The Speaker

Harshvardhan Singh is a product designer working at Swadesh, a Neo bank built for the Indian diaspora. He passed out in 2021, 2020 and 2019 due to excessive partying (XD). He graduated in 2021 as an IT engineer. He made a transition to the design industry by being a part of a design and media agency run by college students with over 20+ clients.

In this Interview We Cover….

1. What is Design
2. HarshVardhan’s First Encounter With Design
3. How He Explored The Field
4. How He Started Making Money In Design
5. Internship Insights
6. Landing His First Job

We have also provided a link for a huge list of design resources and communities referenced in this article along with the speaker contact info at the end. So let’s begin, shall we?

What Is Design

We think that this is the first and most common question where people get confused. According to Harsh Vardhan, design is nothing but how things work, how they are controlled and how we as users interact with them. He gives the example of how when you see a new TV remote, you always know that the power button is on the top and how the volume button will always have a + and — sign on them.

We even asked him to explain the most common aspects of product design namely UX and UI. He did so by taking the example of Spotify.

• He started by explaining that UI or User Interface is the layout and all the elements of the application that you interact with. He mentioned how the icons you see, the placement of the search bar at the bottom so that you reach it easily and the dark theme blending with the gradients are all a part of UI which makes the app look good.

• He then said that UX or User Experience deals with how you interact with the application i.e your overall experience on it. For example: providing a heart icon on every track to save your favourite songs quickly or helping you discover new music can improve your overall experience on the app and keep you attracted towards it so you keep the subscription active.

So naturally, the next question you have is how do I explore these fields? Rather than providing you with a general answer, we’ll be taking you through how Harshvardhan explored the field of design.

First Encounter

His first encounter with the design was back in 11th grade when he saw that a friend of his had designed a digital art that was featured in the school magazine and had also drawn a lot of praise from his friends. This attracted him enough to start exploring the field.

He started with learning photoshop and illustrator by making posters for his friend’s band but it was all just a fascination till he landed in college.

Exploring New Things

In college, Harshvardhan skilled himself by Watching YouTube Videos, Participating in Hackathons, Joining College Fest Committees etc. These were his learning from these experiences :

1. Just Participate: It doesn’t matter if you don’t know something fully. Just take part in competitions and socialise. Even the opportunity to interact and view other people’s designs will help you learn and grow your confidence.
2. Give it time: Design is a discipline, that requires discipline and patience. You might have a few good ideas but you need to give yourself time and be persistent to develop your process and build on your design thinking abilities.

All of this boosted his confidence enough for him to take it to the next level: Freelancing

Making Money

Freelancing was a major boost to Harshvardhan’s design career as this was the first time he was working for professional clients with strict deadlines. These were his key take away from the experience:

Mistakes

1. One big mistake he mentioned he did when designing websites, was that he focused too much on making the websites aesthetically pleasing, often forgetting that developing them would be a challenge.
2. The key lesson here was that it’s good to create beautiful designs but if they can’t be easily translated to code they exist only on a portfolio and never a real product.

Learnings

1. Stakeholder management: Handling different types of clients led him to understand how to deal with them. He learnt that it’s best to include them in the design process rather than just showing them the end product which they may or may not like.
2. User-Centric Design: He learnt how to create designs that people understand and love.
3. Colour Theory: Learnt about creating colour schemes and how colour combinations can change the user perception. You can read more about it here.
4. Budgeting & Timelines: Harshvardhan learnt how to estimate timelines and costs for delivering a project along with how much effort it would take in doing so. This allowed him to understand and utilise his bandwidth effectively.

Getting Serious: Internship Insights

Harsh pushed his interests further by joining start-ups as an intern. The pay was bad but he mentioned that the experience he got was much more valuable later in his career. These were the key insights:

Learnings

1. Loving The Problem: Harsh learnt about how to focus on the user problems before thinking about the solutions.
2. Make A Process: He learnt how designs are not just random bursts of inspiration but a systematic iterative process.
3. User Validation: He learnt that his opinion is not necessarily the opinion of the general population and that they may not like or understand what he thinks is obvious so it’s always best to get their opinions on things.
4. UX/UI Design: He understood the difference between UX and UI and how both fit into a user flow to make a product.

After this Harshvardhan’s interest in start-ups and product design grew and he started considering the prospects of making a career out of this. But there was still a long road ahead…

Landing The First Job

The Dilemma

Cut to Jan 2021, Harshvadhan was struggling to find a job in UX/UI design. Being an engineer, he was expected to get placed as an SDE. After the initial struggles, he decided to sit for his placements for an SDE role and even managed to land placements in Capgemini and Accenture.

He initially thought of taking them as he was unsure of his design career. He didn’t know if this was something that he wanted to do and whether it would even be enough to financially support him.

Harshvardhan carefully considered his options which included a couple of factors like:

1. Where he sees himself in the future
2. Gut Feeling
3. Interests
4. Job prospects and industry trends

Struggle In Breaking Into The Industry

After considering all options, he decided to take a leap of faith and didn’t accept the job offers. Although he had decided to pursue design as a career, he initially struggled to break into the industry. These are his key insights into the problems:

1. The design industry is super competitive so you need to know your niche and have a good portfolio to back up your skills.
2. People struggle for guidance and get overwhelmed with the amount of information available on the internet (Harsh mentioned that if he had known about the design communities he wouldn’t have faced this issue).
3. People prefer to overload their portfolios with a large number of mediocre projects.

How He Tackled These Problems

• He took a gap for a month and started building his portfolio and exploring what type of designer would he like to be
• He decided to pick the 3 projects that would best describe him as he discovered that quality is what gets the best result
• He became active on LinkedIn and started writing cold emails, putting himself out there as a designer for people to see his work
• He also reached out to his old clients for networking help as he had formed a good relationship with them while freelancing
• Networking on Twitter, Reddit and Design Communities on Discord were the most important aspects which helped him land a job. He got much-needed guidance, contacts and a platform to showcase his work.
• He also researched various industry trends and identified that the Fintech industry was growing in India and would have more opportunities for a design role hence becoming a good entry point for a starting out.

Research led to networking with the right people which eventually helped him land his first job at Swadesh where he’s working as a product designer. Since joining Swadesh, Harsh has helped in launching 3 projects for Swadesh called Ramayan Capital, St0nk and Mail Exchange.

Resources

Massive Design Resource Repo Link By Brad Traversy

Communities

1. Maker’s Guild
2. Design Buddies

If you’d like to talk to HarshVardhan regarding any further queries, you can do so by connecting with him on LinkedIn

Our talk with HarshVardhan was so fruitful that we have another article lined up about his thought process behind tackling a product problem. If you’d like to read it, do consider subscribing to our blog and we’d love it if you could suggest what other questions we should ask in this form here.

Thanks For Reading. Until Next Time!!