Creative Spotlight — Vikas Vadlapatla
Part of my 2015 mini-series, All The Designers
Today, I’d like to introduce you to Vikas Vadlapatla.
Spoiler alert — Vikas might be the nicest designer I’ve had the pleasure of meeting!
Vikas joined the Google Play team as a User Experience Researcher. Before that, he worked at Citrix and other startups like AudioVroom and FeZo in San Francisco. Vikas was kind enough to sit down with me over coffee to chat about #AllTheDesigners and his thoughts on design.
Vikas offered four recommendations to the design community, that I’d like to share with you today:
1) UX Reading Recommendation — “The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide.” $40 in print or online. Oh and they have a blog, too.
2) Work at startups — It is “hard not to do a little bit of everything,” keeping your day-to-day very rewarding and stimulating. No matter the opportunity or work environment, “If you don’t apply, you don’t know what chance you had” of joining a new team.
3) Daily UX’ing — On a daily basis, “Try to involve everyone possible into your design process.” Don’t be controlling. Rather, learn from everyone’s perspective and feedback. Try to optimize your work output by taking your team’s contributions into consideration.
“Try to involve everyone possible into your design process.”
4) The Optimal UX Process—When starting a new project or working with new clients, Vikas recommends writing your “design charter” and involve your stakeholders. Then, try to involve your stakeholders early, before getting too far into the project planning process. Vikas recommends assembling any tech-dream team with the “5-in-a-box” approach as a starting point:
- Research
- Design
- Product management
- Engineering
- Content
A big thank you to Vikas for your thoughts on design. And cheers for joining the Google team, too!
For more, follow Vikas on Twitter — @vkux
#allthedesigners
