The Deep Dive events organized by Brainster are gatherings for the global tech community that include companies, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, thought leaders, students and policymakers.
The first Deep Dive; Into UX/UI conference was a two-day event organized in the field of UX and UI design. The goal of this conference was to give back to our community as sharing knowledge and building connections lays at the core of Brainster’s initiative.
Nina Georgieva was a speaker on the second day of the conference that gave us more insight regarding “How to prevent the murder of your design“.
Before the conference, we spoke with Nina about UX/UI, how she got a job at Google and what keep her up at night!
Nina, let’s talk about your own background for a moment. Did you go to a fancy design school or work at fancy design studios? How did you get this job at Google?
I didn’t go to a fancy design school; I didn’t go to a design school, or any school for that matter. I started off by designing event posters for my laptop quarter because I was the only one who had Photoshop. It was an old pirated version, but it did the job. I liked the process so much that I stopped doing anything else (including performing with my band) and only did posters for a couple of months until my first job offer at a startup in Skopje. I learned the basics of graphic design on the job, did some freelance and published more design work which landed me some offers outside of Macedonia.
Soon after I moved to Vienna where I worked at a design agency, and then I freelanced in Berlin, right before moving to Singapore where I stayed for about 5 years. Over there I built my skills as a Product Designer working at different startups, from the top dating startup in Southeast Asia to the ride-sharing startup that acquired Uber Singapore.
Getting a job at Google wasn’t simple. Even with all the awards, official endorsements and even design work going viral, I still got a devastating rejection the first time around. After that, I regrouped and decided to continue improving until I felt confident to try again. But one day out of the blue, Google got in touch with me, and I joined the Next Billion Users team, launched a successful payment app in India, joined the global Google Pay team and last year I moved to Google Maps in Tokyo.
There is a myth that the most important thing that people really want in a product is a pretty design. What is it that people want?
It’s hard to answer this without defining who those people are. Different groups of people will have different preferences, and that’s ok. There might be a group of people who prefer form over function (me 7 years ago!), but I’m willing to bet that when it comes down to tools and apps we rely on daily, most people would take usability over pretty design. I don’t consider those two mutually exclusive though.
Tell us what keeps you up at night?
Forgetting to turn off notifications definitely keeps me up at night. But also, being mildly afraid that I’ll never settle down in one place and I’ll keep on hopping from country to country forever. Or that I’ll lose my edge as a Visual Designer just because I spend so much time thinking about product and business and UX at work. Or that designers will become obsolete because machine learning improves at an incredible pace and it’s just a matter of time. Or that I forgot to reply to Wendy once again and she’ll send me yet another reminder OH GAWD GOTTA GO!!
You can check out this recorded lecture with her
