"Over the past 20 years, UX and Visual design have come a long way - from simple drawings in Photoshop to complex development utilizing artificial intelligence. The profession of a designer itself has undergone significant changes: to be successful, professionals have to go beyond the boundaries of familiar tasks and constantly master new tools. However, proficiency in software is not the only limitation. In the era of advanced neural networks, why is it important for designers to return to the fundamentals of the profession, and how can they advance their careers using the latest technologies? We will discuss these topics with Karen Vardazaryan, an acclaimed product and UX designer, co-founder of Memopin, and partner at Nytstnd."
Karen, throughout your outstanding 20-year career in design, you have come a long way, starting as a freelancer and eventually becoming an internationally recognized designer, creating campaigns and interfaces for global brands and government projects, and even venturing into entrepreneurship. Which milestones do you consider crucial in your journey, and which projects have been the most successful for you?
I began my design career when the industry was just emerging both globally and in Armenia. I was fortunate from the start: I began creating website templates for sale, which allowed me to quickly see, create, and analyze a vast number of different layouts, ultimately building a strong portfolio. With this portfolio, I approached my first significant milestone: joining leading companies in Yerevan that were pioneers in the industry and were creating websites for major local businesses, eventually reaching international recognition. One such company was Fluger Studio, where I served as a senior web designer. At the time, it was the largest company of its kind in Yerevan, and it has since established its base in New York. Later on, leveraging my coding and mentoring skills, I became an art director in a couple of other companies.
Over time, I realized that I desired more international projects, leading to the second important stage: freelancing on one of the largest international platforms for designers, 99designs. It was a platform where designers of various specialties, from web design to logos, competed for client projects. I surpassed competitors more than 40 times and reached the highest status on the platform ("Platinum"), eventually building a pool of clients who approached me directly. With the experience I had accumulated, I created hundreds of design projects and participated in solving problems for numerous businesses, while the average in-house designer typically completes only 2-3 such projects per year. It was an excellent learning experience that provided me with tremendous expertise.
Then, I realized that I had fulfilled myself as a designer and now wanted to join a team that was working on something grand. This marked the third stage of my career, working for major international companies. For instance, I worked at Picsart, one of the world's most popular photo and video editing services. It had millions of monthly users and hundreds of millions of users overall. There, I conceptualized improvements for the application, developed prototypes, and tested them before successful ideas were ultimately implemented.
I also became interested in the B2B sector and served as the lead designer at Joomag. It is an American digital publishing platform founded in 2009, targeting both small and large businesses. The project has over half a million clients, including many companies from the Fortune 500 list, such as Sotheby's, Harvard University, Stanford, Levi's, Dillards, Verizon, AT&T, BBB, PWC, GoldCorp, Delta, and Airbus. Here, I led a team of designers to create a B2B product that significantly differed from end-user applications, providing valuable new experiences.
You have been in design for 20 years, but you have an engineering background. Why did you choose design after studying in a different field, and what advantages does this background give you?
At some point, I realized that if I didn't start creating something creative, I would simply be doing something I didn't enjoy. Besides, I had been involved in electronic music as a semi-professional and even founded the first group of this genre in Yerevan. Our songs received airplay on the radio, and albums were released by local labels. This creative spark eventually manifested itself in design.
Having a background in programming gives me a significant advantage over my colleagues: I can immediately create designs that take into account the technical capabilities of the product and the developers. Often, designers without an engineering background create aesthetically appealing projects that are disconnected from reality, making them impossible to implement. After all, design for digital products is primarily about structure and software. It should be user-friendly and well-thought-out from a technical perspective. Having knowledge of interface design nuances and how they are programmed has given me a clear understanding of how everything should look and function.
Over the past few years, you have shifted your focus towards entrepreneurship. Can you tell me about the ideas you're pursuing as a partner or founder and the projects you're involved in?
I ventured into entrepreneurship primarily because I had accumulated a wealth of experience and desired to take on a greater portion of the work. With each company and project, I found myself assuming new responsibilities for the product.
The specific business idea came from real-life experiences. Having traveled extensively, I decided to collaborate with an acquaintance to create the travel platform Memopin. It aimed to solve problems that existing services couldn't address. For example, with Memopin, a tourist in a new city can receive personalized recommendations on places to visit. Artificial intelligence helps create interesting itineraries and suggests additional places to explore along the way. Other services in the market lack this functionality. They either provide a simple map with route planning or offer generic recommendations that don't reflect the user's interests. Additionally, Memopin allows users to share their curated collections of interesting places, enabling direct recommendations from trusted individuals and providing brands with new promotional opportunities.
My second venture involves manufacturing wireless charging stations for gadgets called Nytstnd in the United States. It's a unique premium product with few equivalents on the market. It combines aesthetics, natural materials (wood, leather), cutting-edge technology, and the support of communities in the US. The wooden components of our devices are crafted by the Amish. Forbes and Mashable have already taken notice of our product, and I take pride in having designed the entire product, from its appearance and material selection to the website and advertising campaigns. Our future plans include adding a digital "sleep assistant" to Nytstnd. The device will recognize when a person sets and turns off their alarm, helping them fall asleep and wake up using gentle light and music.
In both projects, I have been successful in implementing innovations that blend an engineering and design approach to the product. In Nytstnd, I achieved maximum practicality in the product design while maintaining a premium look and using materials that attract customers and differentiate the product in the market. In Memopin, I focused on additional personalization for B2B clients and introduced new tools to facilitate easy sharing of routes and lists of places with friends and loved ones in unfamiliar cities.
Currently, humanity is experiencing an artificial intelligence (AI) boom, and you're right in the midst of it with the Memopin and Alias projects. How do you interact with AI in design, and what trends do you see in this field?
This issue has several aspects. The first aspect involves how designers interact with products that have an AI component. Typically, such products involve communication with neural networks through user interfaces like chatbots, buttons, or voice commands. In this regard, designers don't have to do anything particularly specific. It's standard interface design. However, for VR devices, for example, the design process is much more specialized, and designers have to explore fundamentally new forms of communication.
The other side of AI is its instrumental use. Here, there is undoubtedly a positive aspect: the speed at which it allows designers to work. Previously, tasks like photo retouching would require a significant amount of time, but now you can input a single request in software like Photoshop, and it can accomplish half an hour's worth of work in a matter of seconds. Design work has long been facilitated by products and plugins like Figma, which help eliminate routine tasks and allow designers to focus more on decision-making. AI takes this process to a new level.
On the other hand, due to the development of AI, specialized designers focused on specific tasks, such as illustration, photo retouching, or simple interfaces, need to exercise caution. Until now, everything has worked out well for these individuals, but now AI has the potential to quickly replace them. To minimize the risks, they will need to actively embrace progress, learn new tools, delve into writing prompts for neural networks, and take on more responsibility. Specialists who perform monotonous tasks will be the first ones left out. However, those who have mastered the entire set of technologies, understand what a product is, can communicate effectively with marketers and developers, participate in processes, and take on more tasks will find that AI becomes a helpful assistant rather than a replacement.
I anticipate that in the next few years, new technologies will enable designers to tackle more complex tasks, raising the bar in the profession. Human designers are unlikely to become unnecessary; rather, their tasks will change and expand thanks to intelligent tools that can handle much of the work for us. A similar process has occurred with the adoption of new technologies in the past. For example, programming languages were initially challenging to learn and yielded primitive results, leading many to believe that programmers would no longer be needed. However, as speed increased and task execution became simpler, the complexity of the tasks themselves evolved to a new level. Nevertheless, human involvement remains crucial for their execution.
What design trends do you consider to be the most relevant for the upcoming year? What should your industry colleagues focus on?
There are two aspects that designers should pay close attention to.
Firstly, it is important to quickly embrace everything related to simplifying your work. Let's take e-commerce as an example: there are many tools available that allow you to instantly generate multiple design solutions based on text descriptions of products, and the resulting images are already in the appropriate size for social media, advertising campaigns, and so on. These tools will continue to improve over time, and eventually, you may not even need to make any manual adjustments, significantly speeding up your work. If a designer doesn't start using these tools, someone else will surpass them by solving the same tasks faster and with better quality.
The other trend that designers must definitely keep an eye on is virtual and augmented reality. Thanks to advanced glasses like Apple's, this technology is gaining new momentum, reshaping our understanding of what a device is and how we interact with digital products. For example, if I put on augmented reality glasses, I can see Netflix, a chat window, and my work programs all in one space. All products will need to be adapted to this new environment, and some will require completely new ideas. Essentially, we are entering a new universe, and designers are needed for it.
The development of artificial intelligence and augmented reality can be compared to the introduction of the iPhone, which opened up a new world of applications for buttonless smartphones and created a lot of work for designers. A similar shift is happening now, and soon we will find ourselves in an entirely new digital world. There is no need to be afraid; on the contrary, we should strive to ride this wave. It may be uncomfortable for established professionals who are used to certain ways of working, as fear of change can gradually creep in. However, by overcoming this fear, staying in tune with trends, experimenting with our skills, and constantly learning, we can give our careers a significant boost. It will be much more challenging for those who choose to remain in their familiar comfort zones.
As your industry rapidly evolves, the skills that were sufficient just 5 years ago may no longer be enough for successful work. What competencies would you recommend for those taking their first steps in the profession?
In some ways, it is even easier for newcomers now: they spend less time mastering software and need a better understanding of what tasks a particular product solves. For example, what did newcomers do in the past to enter the design industry? They would learn Photoshop, CorelDRAW, Illustrator-hundreds of icons, technical nuances. The tools were cumbersome. Additionally, it is essential to develop an aesthetic sense, learn how colors are used, and how a product is created-these are the fundamental disciplines in design. Nowadays, software programs are much smarter and have greatly simplified the product creation process. However, knowledge of theory and the ability to solve design problems have become highly important and require in-depth study.
I communicate with newcomers a lot and serve as a mentor on various platforms, and I still see that some people simply want to know how to work with programs like Photoshop, Figma, or Sketch. This approach is outdated: nowadays, you can quickly learn any tool, and it can change even faster. However, understanding what a designer does and the impact it has on a company is far more important than knowing where the buttons are located in a graphic editor. Therefore, self-education is the most crucial activity for any specialist.
In your opinion, where is the best place for a UX/UI designer to learn? Higher education institutions, courses, internships at design studios?
The sooner a newcomer engages in solving real tasks, the better. As for the rest, it depends on personal preferences: some prefer group classes in courses, while others prefer to study alone with textbooks. However, the most important thing is the ability to formulate questions and independently seek answers to them. The reality is that no specialist, manager, supervisor, or mentor will answer questions for you that can be easily found in a search engine or through a dialogue with ChatGPT, or simply by watching an online tutorial. If a person cannot search for answers to their own questions, it can be the biggest hindrance to their development.
Another thing that will accelerate professional growth is to strive to solve practical tasks from A to Z: formulate an idea, understand what is needed for its implementation, find the right tools to solve the problem, describe how the product will work, create a design, test it, and make adjustments based on the test results. Going through this path will quickly transform even a newcomer into a capable specialist."
