Numerade Flashcards
Tell me about yourself?
I began my career in graphic design after graduating college for visual communication.
And after some time, I was more drawn to digital design so I became a UI designer and had my first opportunity as a UI designer at an early stage startup called Yourder. Which was a restaurant table ordering system. It was back in 2016 and it was ahead of its time. And it was at Yourder, where I worked alongside a UX designer for the first time, and just learned about this multidisciplinary field in design. And I was adamant that I’ll become a UX/UI/Product designer.
So I started my UX education with Interaction Design Foundation.
And got my first job as a UX/UI designer with another early stage startup called OYA.
OYA is an iOS mobile application that aims to bring women entrepreneurs and customers who want to support WOB together to support each other.
And a few months after covid broke out, I decided to further educate myself in UX design especially with user research and testing so I enrolled myself in a Bootcamp with CareerFoundry and worked as a freelancer while completing the certificate.
I freelanced mainly with design agencies and worked on projects with Chegg, Terra Kaffe, LGC, Netflix, and Acura.
I’m still currently freelancing while I’m looking for a position at an ed-tech company.
Do you know anything about Numerade?
I want to first start off by congratulating you guys on raising $26 million. You must be so proud of the company! Yeah, that’s epic!
I checked out the website and some of your guy’s social media.
and Techcrunch wrote a great article on you guys.
So basically from my understanding, Numerade is high-quality tutoring at an affordable price. You guys sell subscriptions to step-by-step videos that explain how certain equations and experiments work and then use AI to make those explainers better suited to the learner’s comprehension style.
Why do you want to work for Numerade?
So many reasons..
First, In previous roles, I didn’t get to do much user research as I would like. They were more user research sprints, and it’s something I really feel is important. I noticed that your company values user research based on the job responsibilities.
and conducting and analyzing user research as UI design is where I feel like I can bring a lot to the team.
I also see this opportunity as a way to contribute to an industry that I’m VERY passionate about.
and on top of working in the ed-tech industry, I’ll have the opportunity to work for an exciting, forward-thinking, mission-driven, ambitious company(you know.. “aiming to become #1 ed-tech learning platform”).
I want to be a part of the whole design process of that. That sounds really cool!
Why do you want to work in Ed-tech?
Given my experiences growing up, I’m extremely passionate about closing the opportunity gap and believe that everyone of all races and ages deserves access to skilled teachers, mentors, high-quality learning environments, AND learning in the style that suits them best.
and personally, I wouldn’t even have this opportunity without online learning and courses. So there’s a lot of motivation for me to make an impact in this industry as a product designer.
Can you walk me through one of your projects?
Of course! I’ll walk you through Chegg.
This was an exciting project because it’s my first ed-tech experience.
So Chegg outsourced a creative & advertising agency called Friendsatwork.
And the agency hired me as a freelance UX/UI designer.
They partnered up to do a full brand refresh. It included tweaking the logo, updating visual language, color palette, etc.
My role was to conduct a competitive analysis of their competitor’s dashboard in the research and discovery phase as well as update the UI of their landing page and dashboard based on the user research data and their new brand guideline. I’ve worked with multiple team members but mainly with the creative director, creative strategist, and developer to come out with a clear concept for how we would move forward with the dashboard.
Describe a challenge you faced.
There’s a project I worked on years ago at OYA. We really thought we were on the right track and we were about to launch the app. We’ve done user research, we’ve done mutiple concepting stages, been collaborative in the workplace, and even built prototypes. And then we realized towards the testing phase, that we had built our prototypes and done our user research on the wrong topics. We realized we misdefined the problem. and we were solving the wrong thing. It was a small team. We felt like failures and the way we moved forward as a team was to acknowledge that we’d made a mistake that would really affect the success of the app. The mistake was we should have focused on the WOB and thier use journey before the customers. So we re-accessed the situation, Use as must of what we had already, and reframe it in a different way.
or
When I worked with an agency that was working on rebranding with Chegg.
I worked directly with a creative director, product manager and a developer.
It was a challenge because I had never experienced being the sole designer and we had a short amount of time, but it was a great opportunity because I was able to overcome the challenge of getting the goals clear of what the client exactly wanted, analyzing their feedback, and setting milestones to track my progress.
Do you have experience working on a large-scale, multi-modal consumer(web, mobile, tablet) product?
While I’ve not had any experience working on a large scale, multi modal consumer product, I am a fast learner because I will put in time that’s needed to learn it, and I’m confident that I could manage working on a large scale product like this when i had my first experience working at a small startup, I had to learn things fast and wear multiple hats which is how I got into UX in the first place.
Do you have experience working with industry-standard design tools?
I enjoy keeping up with industry-standard design tools. Learning design software is a hobby of mine.
I’ve used Sketch and InVision in the past but I moved over to Figma about two years ago.
I haven’t tried Framer yet, but a lot of these design tools are very similar so I’ll be able to pick it up fairly quickly.
I haven’t tried Mural either. But I’ve used InVision to collaborate in real-time.
Do you have experience articulating, negotiating and refining designs with cross functional teams?
How do you work in cross-functional teams?
How do you work with developers/product managers/other designers?
Yes, I do.
Relationships are so important within an organization. A great product comes from a great team. and that involves involving different stakeholders including marketing and development in the product design process.
and to have a great cross-functional team involves clear communication, a good plan, and strong focus, and great leadership.
and from my experience, working in a cross-functional team, we increase that mutual trust and learn a lot of respect towards each other because we’re working as a team during the entire project.
How do you work with the development team?
I like to include the development early on in the UX process to assess technical feasibility.
I want to know if it can be built before I even start designing.
Once I hand off designs to development, I’ll work with them to make sure that design requirements are properly translated. I’ll also structure and document the designs for the developer in the Figma file. Stylistic, structural, and Interactions.
Once the development is finished I help test to make sure that it aligns with the original designs and works properly.
What would you do if the development team said they can’t build something?
I’ll work with them to try to find a compromise between what can be built and UX best practices.
How have you handed off before?
Either using softwares like zeplin or sending figma link.
What is your design process?
I always have the 5 phases of design thinking in mind: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
So depending on the work that is given to me by usually a PM,
I would either update myself on the user research that’s already been done, or conduct
user research to help me understand who I’m designing for.
And then create user personas, list pain points and objectives, etc. from the user research data.
I’ll start ideating solutions with other team members and stakeholders.
And then I’ll start the UI process of prototyping the solution.
So I’ll create wireframes, storyboards, low-high fidelity prototypes, etc.
Then comes testing the prototype where the team and I will conduct usability testing.
And this whole process basically iterates so we can refine the problem statement and come up with better
Solutions.
Are you familiar with funnel metrics, key KPIs and their usage in data-informed design?
I am familiar with working with KPIs to help measure success in our designs. Usually, after a feature has been developed and launched, myteam and I will observe the data usually using something like amplitude(analytic software) and we’re checking to see if there has been any improvements on the KPIs.
The KPIs we usually focused on were drop-off, organic signups, task success rate, user error rate, etc
Do you have experience with user research(orchestrating, conducting, and analyzing)?
Yes for example,
At OYA, the team and I conducted qualitative user research.
For example,
We reached out to women entrepreneurs through Instagram and a lot of them were willing to help out for free. We sent open-ended customer surveys to learn about what features they would be most interested in seeing on our app.
And then we would examine the data and created personas, user flows, wireframes, and prototypes.
