My Experience At Adobe Max 2020
What I learned and how I’m applying it moving forward
Adobe Max is a conference hosted annually by Adobe for creatives around the world. There are sessions for basically every creative discipline you could imagine. This year, Max was FREE.
This presented a fantastic opportunity for young creatives like myself to join in on the fun that design conferences offer.
Sessions I Attended
I attended a total of eight sessions throughout the week that centered around digital product design and interviewing. In this article, I’ll talk about three of them.
- Making Innovation Accessible and Designing Inclusive Experiences with Mrudula Peddinti and Cat Noone
- Creating, Publishing, and Sharing Design Systems with Tor Gundersen and Zach Perkins
- How to be a Standout Applicant and Nail the Interview with Julie Sanduski
Accessibility — Something We Should All Care About As Designers
When it comes to designing for accessibility, we all need to do one thing — START.
It’s easy to completely disregard accessibility but we need to shift our perspectives because as designers, our job is to make sure EVERYONE can use what we’ve built.
How to Start Prioritizing Accessibility (Mrudula’s Take)
Mrudula Peddiniti and her team at Limbitless Solutions are utilizing technology and gamification to create personalized prosthetics for children. Amazing, right?
She shared three characteristics to benchmark and evaluate the effectiveness of products:
- Access
- Enjoyment
- Empowerment
She shared these tips as well:
- Place users in control of the interface
- Make it comfortable to interact with a product
- Reduce cognitive load
- Make user interfaces consistent
How to Start Prioritizing Accessibility (Cat’s Take)
Cat drove home the fact that accessibility takes very little effort to implement, and she’s right! Here are her tips for implementing accessibility:
- Colors matter, and so does contrast (use Stark to help you out here)
- Layouts should be consistent and clear
- Include a diverse group of people in user testing
- Diversify your team
- Write good alt-text (it helps folks with vision impairments and can even help those who may be experiencing slow internet)
💡 Insight from Cat: “Don’t make people have to miss out on the message you want to convey.”
Cat’s Benefits of Accessible Design
- Increased market reach
- Minimized financial and legal risk
- Maximized brand value
Let’s face it. We all need to practice empathy in the UX field. By designing for accessibility, we can ensure that no one is excluded from being able to use the wonderful things we create.
I’ll leave you with something that really resonated with me from Cat’s presentation:
“Accessibility is part of the product development process and shouldn’t be something you have to pitch to stakeholders.”
Design Systems — The Key To Productivity
The next session I attended was all about design systems. According to Zach Perkins and Tor Gundersen, the two speakers for this session, a design system is a set of guidelines.
“These guidelines are the building blocks that include a set of reusable styles and components that product experiences are built from.”
Consistency, reusability, scalability. Remember these three words the next time you find yourself in a conversation about design systems.
Besides explaining all the latest and greatest design system features in Adobe XD, Tor spoke about Atomic Design by Brad Frost. At its core, this methodology is comprised of atoms, molecules, and organisms. It’s an interesting concept that I urge you to read more about.
What I’d like to point out here is that even if you aren’t creating a fancy design system for a company, you can still implement the practices in your own work. It may take a little extra time upfront, but it’s worth it in the end.
You don’t want to have to spend time organizing your design file before client handoff, do you?
Been there, done that (😅).
I’ll be writing more about design systems in the future, so stay tuned.
How To Stand Out In The UX Field
Last but not least, I attended a career-oriented talk by Julie Sanduski, a former Adobe Creative Resident.
Julie provided an interesting perspective on networking and interviews that I’d like to share.
A Key Focus Area For Your Resume
Julie suggested focusing on the WHAT and the WHY.
Ask yourself these questions about your previous roles:
Why did you work on this project, what were the business goals, and how did you achieve them?
Business goals. I continuously hear experienced designers referring to them. But for less experienced designers like myself, they’re intimidating.
Companies want to know how YOU can help them achieve their goals.
Pretty much every job description mentions business goals so try your best to speak to them in your interviews (I’ll be working on this, too).
Networking
I know what you’re thinking. I was the same way. I completely dreaded networking at one point and it’s still not my favorite activity (🤫).
Your goal with networking should be to build relationships and to learn. Approach every conversation with a positive attitude.
Julie shared this neat tracker for keeping track of who you’re connecting with.
Share Your Work!
I cannot stress how important this is. You must put yourself out there. It’s something I only recently started doing and I was super nervous about it, but I’m happy I made the jump.
Julie’s Interviewing Tips
Landing an interview makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. Before every interview, I spend a good chunk of time researching and practicing and you should too.
Here are some questions to think about:
- What is the company's mission statement? What is their goal and how will you help achieve that goal by being hired?
- What’s the role and expectations?
- Tell me about yourself. What’s your story?
- Tell me about a time you made a mistake. How did you overcome it?
- Tell me about a time you worked in a team and experienced conflict.
- Why do you want to work for [company]? Why should we hire you?
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
- What are your strengths? Weaknesses? (Always spin a weakness with a strength). Here’s an example I came up with:
Sometimes I focus too much on the details. While this can be beneficial as a designer, I feel it can also hinder productivity and effect outcomes in an agile/lean environment. I’ve been striving to improve in this area by resorting to methods like time-boxing and the Pomodoro Method. I’ve also been attending meetups and workshops on productivity. This has allowed me to gain ideas from others and systematize tasks to meet deadlines without sacrificing quality.
Always refer back to your research during the interview. And after the interview, write a self-reflection:
- What did you do well?
- How could you have improved?
I’m someone who gets super nervous during interviews so to close out this article, I’d like to share a piece of advice from a mentor I spoke with on ADP List:
“Before an interview, just think you’re the shit. It will boost your confidence.”
