In the Spotlight / Spilling Tea

This week, we had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Shelkovnikov as part of our Designer Interviews series where we talk to a wide range of incredible designers whose work has inspired us and will hopefully inspire you too. Tell us a bit about yourself – who are you and what do you do? Hi! My name is Alex Shelkovnikov, I’m… Read More ￫

Welcome to the first Designer Interviews, a new series of monthly conversations featuring incredible designers.

Learn about how this product designer organises her design workflow and which tool is her one source of truth.

Find out how co-founder Martin Ollivere built Archetype, a typographical design system editable live in the browser.

Interview with Edoardo Rainoldi, founder of rooki.design about his design workflow and challenges of his passion project

Learn how Josh keeps organised with his workflow and how you can turn your developers into design advocates.

How did you get into Research? Like most people I seem to speak to, via a set of happy coincidences fuelled by a healthy dose of curiosity. I’ve always been passionate about the human element – in a past life I did a Physiotherapy degree before realising that path wasn’t for me. After a few years of job-hopping, I serendipitously… Read More ￫

How did you get into Research? When I was a student, I used to work for a marketing research company, helping them with recruiting participants and taking notes during focus groups and individual interviews. I was very fascinated by the job of the researcher. Once my study was done, I started as an intern and then as a permanent employee… Read More ￫

How did you get into UX Research? Like a lot of graduates, I didn’t have a strong sense of my destiny after leaving uni. I’d studied psychology and I’ve always been interested in unpicking human behaviour and motivations. I also knew I wanted to work in a role that relied heavily on communication – real face-to-face communication. I love listening… Read More ￫

In your own words, what is ResearchOps? ResearchOps is about offering support and infrastructure to ‘people who do research’, which I’ve shorted to PwDR. This is because in a lot of bigger organisations like Atlassian it’s not just researchers doing research, there’s also PMs and designers doing research. “Of course, the holy grail is to have only skilled, practised researchers… Read More ￫

What was the moment that you knew you wanted to work in design? I think I’d always done design. It’s funny, at school I studied information technology and always gravitated much more to the design of the interface, rather than the underlying software and systems – which is really what it’s trying to teach. It was only after leaving, after… Read More ￫

What was the moment you knew you wanted to work in design? I had no idea what I wanted to study in college, so I picked something that sounded fun: film. And it was! But I had lots of other interests and also took classes in psychology, computer science, theatre design. When I saw a web design course listed it… Read More ￫