A designer for humans | Vikrant Kudesia

What's my background?

I started coding in the sixth grade, before CSS was a thing.

When I was 17, I worked at Boston University's Engineering Information Technology department and became familiar with front end and back end languages and networking. In the meanwhile, I learned C++ while attending BU.

Though Microsoft Visual Basic made me want to cry at times, this underpinning in C++ gave me a great foundation in object-oriented code that I've appreciated, to this day.

User Experience and User Interface design allows me to combine the cooperative skills I honed in my work programming with the behavioral psychology and experiential design elements that are my passion

Exposure to different programming languages and frameworks has given me a solid understanding of the opportunities and constraints between different device types and operating systems. Because of this, I can build out actionable design library systems and have them piped over to a development team in a jiffy!

Where do I product?

For an overview of my work experience, check out my LinkedIn profile

Janeiro Digital

An agency that solves your big problems

I'm a Senior Product Designer at Janeiro Digital, an agency that specializes in custom enterprise software solutions. I design products that handle complex, realtime data in mission-critical situations. I work directly with clients to understand their painpoints and collaborate with them turn complex, data-rich tasks into quick, informed decisions.

What kinds of stuff do I work on?

Our clients can be in any phase in their software development lifecycle, but they typically have large, complex problems in industries such as logistics, energy, agriculture, supply chain and finance. Sometimes, they are encumbered by legacy software and requre careful change management. In these systems, errors, design flaws and shortcomings translate to millions of dollars in losses or, much worse, loss of life. We listen closely to our stakeholders and often carry projects end-to-end from conceptualizing, through design iterations and to development, support and maintenance. We are an agency, but we like to pretend like we are in-house and part of your shop.

UXUI Design and Research at Fresh Tilled Soil

Systematic instruction on iterative design, prototyping, wireframing, user interviewing, usability testing, and front end development topics such as accessibility, performance budgeting and atomic code architecture

Going into an apprenticeship after being in the technology industry for quite some time was a great way for me to identify gaps in my skill-set and ensure I stay current. Prior to the Apprentice User Experience (AUX) program at Fresh Tilled Soil, I was working as a network engineer and freelance product developer. I wanted to focus on creating digital products based in strong user experience research AUX was a natural choice.

Specifically, I apprenticed as a front end developer to take a deep dive into HTML and CSS architecture. During the program, world-class mentors reinforced the skills to write clean, semantic code and craft consistently awesome user experiences. The program culminated in participating in client work in different industry verticals.

So, what did I actually do?

AUX was structured as a complex set of problems and challenges, all solved and overcome by immersing oneself in evidence-based research and iterative design processes.

Highly competitive, entrance to AUX was gated by an initial case study on a previous project, which you can see here (it'll open in a new tab), filtered by a "bootcamp" design sprint, which you can read about here. Finally, the entrance process converged at a presentation of our sprint to the other applicants and directors of the program.

Four people get in to the program each cycle.

[below] Preliminary persona for my AUX entrance project

What's my process?

I talk before I design

I don't rush into designing something that doesn't solve the problem.

It's not agile if it has to be done all over again.

I focus on people

Designers sometimes forget to turn their design skills and empathetic eye inward to apply the ux methodologies and practices to themselves and their own team. In addition to end users and external stakeholders, I make sure to be supportive and candid with my team members to ensure we are building the best product we can.

People say, "content is king". Sadly, those people forgot about people.

Value-based design starts with listening

I do my best to enumerate the most pressing painpoints and unearth their related assumptions and dependecies. I try to create as many valid solutions as possible while aggressively editing down in coordination with business values, feasibility and product vision. I like to start out sketching with pen and paper, but I've been known to sit with my stakeholders and my laptop and take a crack at prototype while we are chatting about their needs. The key is listening really closely and getting feedback as soon as possible

I have used both object-oriented and procedural programming languages and continue to learn as much as I can about both ends of the spectrum. I push to understand how the basic semantic elements of my own design may be structured in HTML and how events bubble up through the DOM. I partner with my developers to craft design library systems that center around the user and evolve as our level of empathy for our users deepens.

I don't ever have "design handoffs" with my developers

My team coordinates a shift in responsibility between designers and developers to varying degrees throughout the lifetime of a project. We own the functional requirements and development specifications as a unified experience team and hold each other accountable to our users through usability sessions and previously identified key performance indicators. We understand that, when we launch a product, the responsibility and system burden shift to the user.

The more we own the product experience as a team, the more likely we create an interface that reliably empowers its users.

Speed comes from being thoughtful and organized. When my team understands the various usage scenarios from a user's perspective along with their associated painpoints, we can craft an adaptive design library system that responds to their needs. We iterate on the design as we manage our assumptions to craft a mosaic of services, interactive elements and information that coordinate on behalf of the user.

Check out my projects here to see some case studies that outline my creative process.

What else do I do?

I like riding my bike, drawing, gardening and obsessing over stationery. Maybe one day, I'll be cool enough to grow my own hops, or something.

I tried pickling for a bit. It got a little bit out of hand, I was pickling everything. So, I stopped.

Really, though, hanging out with my dog trumps all of the above.

Process ＆ Person

What's my deal?