Season 1 - Ep 4 - A Designer's Guide to Working in Tech- Alp Turgut In this episode, our host Dushyant Kanungo sat down with our guest Alp Turgut, UX/UI Design Lead & Creative Director of ArtX Design Studio. He has vast experience in the field and has worked with well-known companies like Nike, Atlassian, Rolls-Royce, Salesforce, O2, Zalando, and many more. He is a speaker, mentor, consultant, and an award-winning creative freelancer. Discussion Points: Can you share your journey of becoming a designer with us? What inspires you the most about UX & UI designing? 1:26 Coming from a technical background of computer sciences, how do you leverage your technical skills in product designing? What technical skills should people who are not from a technical background learn? 3:51 Can you tell us about any specific technical skill that you would recommend that the non-technical people in the design community should ideally learn or know about? 4:55 Since you’ve worked with some of the best brands covering a wide range of domains, what have been your key learnings from those projects? 7:34 Rapid Fire Segment : 12:19 Since you speak about having deep compassion for users you are designing for, can you tell us some practical ways of developing empathy or connecting with the users? 21:05 Can you tell us about your minimal content approach? How do you strike a balance between designing simple and minimal interfaces yet providing all the necessary information to the users? 23:01 What is some advice that you’d like to give someone who’s just starting out in the industry? 25:09 Show notes: As a UX UI designer, you are actually seeing the problem as a kind of opportunity to solve and create a better experience for the people who's going to be using that solution. 02:54 In terms of feasibility, talking in their language is helping me to create a bridge between the stakeholders and the development team and to create the best design that can be possible for all people to be happy at the end. 4:36 You don’t need a development background at all, to be one of the best UX UI designers. 5:06 If you want to be a master of something, I believe, the focus should be on that all the time. 5:20 In order to be a very good designer, you have to use your time from a design perspective, rather than coding. 6:30 You have to think carefully from a user perspective, because you are technically the first user at hand. You need to think if the design looks good and works well for you. You also have to do your research carefully with the competence of user research and market research. 21:47 You have to define the main problem in order to come up with the optimum solution, the problem that you want to solve might not be the priority, it is good to solve all the problems, but it is best to solve the main problem first. 22:21 If you are thinking the same thing that you did 10 years ago, you haven't lived it yet. Because you're changing, everything's changing, your ideas are changing too. 25:43 If you're starting your career as a UX designer, the first thing to keep in mind is to know the principles of UX, second is to know the industry, and third is to maintain a portfolio. 26:10 Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alpturgut/ Website: https://www.alpturgut.com/ Adp List: https://www.adplist.org/mentors/alp-turgut