Making the Transition from Design Student to Working Professional: Yana Barysheva, UX Designer
This is episode five of a series of edited conversations between David Karlins and accomplished communication designers on the theme of making the transition from being a student to becoming a working professional. The conversations explore the challenges of making that transition, the insights of people who have made that transition decades, years, or even months ago, and observations of the relationship between one’s passions and talents, making a living, and changing the world.
In this installment, David speaks with Yana Barysheva, a UX and product designer by trade. She is also the co-founder of Kurochka Gifts, a company that sells handmade gifts inspired by Russian and Ukrainian culture. In this interview, she spoke with us on how she got her first design job, the process of user research in her role as a UI/UX designer, her Ukrainian art and volunteer work, and advice to women trying to get into tech for the first time.
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DK: Can you tell us what you are doing now, and how did you get from student to what you’re doing now?
YB: I’m a lead designer at a company called Originate, which is a digital consultancy specializing in software design and engineering. The software engineering aspect is what we’re more focused on, less so than the design part. As for how I started, I actually attended City Tech. I took design classes, but I was also majoring in creative writing at the same time. When I graduated, I started to look for a design job, and I was planning to move to San Francisco at the time for personal reasons. There was a forum on a Meetup group for designers in San Francisco, and so I posted there and just said something like: “Hey, does anybody have any guidance or insight? Where can I look? What can I do?”. I wasn’t specifically looking for a job by posting; I was just asking for advice. A guy who was starting a company and was looking for a designer to hire, reached out to me there and wanted to talk about my portfolio. So we met up, talked, and he hired me.
DK: There’s a point to highlight, which is exactly how many people still really get their jobs through a conventional job application, or signing up on places like LinkedIn, Indeed, or Glassdoor? As opposed to the model that you’re describing, of reaching out and networking.
YB: Yeah, I think a lot of jobs come from connections and networking, and the funny thing is that I used to hear this all the time when I hear about how important networking is. It felt demoralizing to me, because I’m not a proactive person when it comes to socializing, and I don’t want to talk to people just to get a job from them. But I realized it’s not about that.
First of all, networking, and it suddenly clicked very recently, is not a sleazy thing where you’re socializing with someone with an ulterior motive. That’s not networking. Networking is when you have a question, a professional question, or a need for professional advice, and you reach out to people who might have that answer. And those people are, for the most part, willing to help. Most people are actually very kind and helpful. You talk to people and you keep your connections warm. It’s not that you have to fake anything. And you really shouldn’t fake anything because they’ll see right through that.
Going back to how I got my job, I posted on this forum genuinely asking for advice, and I also posted a link to my portfolio because it was relevant. This guy found me, and it’s a shockingly small industry, so the networking also kind of just happens on its own. You can work somewhere, you have an internship or a job, and you’ll get to know these people at that point. Those people, you’re going to keep running into, or if you don’t, you can always reach out to them. No one’s going to mind it if you do that. Most people are super happy to help.
If I think about my career, and I graduated ten years ago, I got one job through that forum posting, another job through a recruiter, and I got my current job by applying. But other things I’ve gotten aside from those three that I mentioned, was just through people that I’ve worked with, and past conversations with people who have recommended me to other people because I happen to know them. When I would be looking to hire, I’m constantly on a regular basis asking my network: “Do you know anybody? Do you know this kind of designer that you could recommend me?”. We do have a posting on LinkedIn, so it’s not as if we’re not hiring through that, and if somebody personally sends me a reference, it’s not even necessarily that I’m going to consider them more than someone coming in through a listing. But it’s a direct connection to me as a hiring manager.
Networking is when you have a question, a professional question, or a need for professional advice, and you reach out to people who might have that answer. And those people are, for the most part, willing to help.
DK: So I come from a cultural background where “bragging” is socially acceptable, but not everyone does. The rest of the world isn’t like that, and it may be considered a bit pushy in some countries. But there’s a way to talk about yourself where you’re not looking at it as bragging; you’re just genuinely sharing what you’re doing. You might be new to the industry, but you might have insights that someone who’s been in the game for a while, doesn’t. It’s a matter of being interested in what other people think, which can lead to doors opening.
YB: “Bragging”, or self-promoting, really does come in handy as a designer. But to build on what you said about how it doesn’t come naturally for everyone, that was definitely true for me. I come from a culture where that’s considered to be very crass. You don’t brag, and you don’t talk about yourself. I’m from Ukraine and it is a collectivist culture. It’s about the community, it’s not about yourself. You put the community’s needs first, and to talk about yourself is looked down upon. When I came to America, I had this moment of wondering if I could have any success in this culture, where the thing that brings you success is a thing that feels awful for me to do. But I realized that it doesn’t have to be that way. Talking about your accomplishments, skills, and what you’re good at is not that kind of empty “bragging”. You know you have confidence in the things that you’re good at, and you talk about those things. It’s not bragging; it’s just objectively describing the things you’re good at.
As for listening to other people, if you’re genuinely curious about them, they will gravitate towards you. This is completely universal: everyone just wants to be understood and they just want to be heard.
Talking about your accomplishments, skills, and what you’re good at is not that kind of empty “bragging”. You know you have confidence in the things that you’re good at, and you talk about those things.
DK: What’s your day like at your current job?
YB: So I work for a consultancy and we’re not working on a specific internal product; we get clients. Our clients usually come to us with different levels of problems, either wanting to build something that doesn’t exist, or modernize something that exists but it’s a super old system.
Starting out, at a high level, we divide up our understanding needs into two sections. One thing we have to understand is the user’s needs. Who is the user of this product, website, or software? What do they need to accomplish? And then on the other side, we need to understand business requirements. So we have a company as the client and they have some kind of goal. And there are different constraints, such as a set of constraints coming from the technological side. And you might have a design idea that is not feasible or possible to build on a technological level. What the user needs to accomplish, and the business and tech constraints define what you will be designing.
So these are all things you have to uncover, and basically, the first half of a project is just asking a lot of questions. For example, if you wanted to create a calorie tracking app, you then talk to users and ask them what their concerns and hopes are, and what they want to accomplish. It might turn out that they don’t want to track calories, they want to live a healthy life. And you might even discover that maybe tracking calories is not the way to live a healthy life. Maybe the way to live a healthy life is that you’re encouraging people to go outside and walk more, eating more healthy meals, or practicing mindfulness rather than counting calories. You need to find that out by talking to subject matter experts and researching to understand what you’re even designing. Whatever you’re designing, it’s probably going to be in a field that you don’t know that much about. So there’s always this element of: “I don’t know much about this, but I guess I’ll figure it out by asking a lot of questions”.
As a designer, your job is to solve problems, and you have to understand what those problems are. So you have to understand the people you’re talking to. In product design, which is a mix of UX and UI design, that is your first step along with understanding who you are designing for. And you need to approach them with a completely open mind. When you start any project, it’s completely understandable that you’re going to feel kind of lost. The way that you can start is by asking questions, so you can understand what you’re supposed to be designing, who we are designing for, what are the constraints, what are we looking to do, and what are the issues?
In a larger company, they would have user researchers, whose entire job is just asking questions. At my company, we were all generalists, because it’s a small company, and the designers are expected to be able to work end-to-end on a product. This means a person has to stay on a project from the beginning to the end of our deliverable and can do all of it. During user research, you had to ask questions in a very specific way, because you want to get the truth out of people. That requires finesse and a certain approach. It’s a lot of social science or psychology, and soft skills. You just have to ask a lot of questions, and I think people will be much more impressed by being approached with openness and curiosity. The biggest thing that I found that helps, is that you just approach it with honesty and openness. That’s what gets you the best response.
For what my day-to-day is like, it depends on whatever the phase of the project is. So if we’re working on the beginning research part, maybe I’m researching that day and or doing user interviews. I’m talking to people, taking notes, and then I’m looking over my notes to see if there are any insights that I could collect. Maybe it’s more of a meeting-heavy day, where I’m discussing with people what we are doing and how we should approach this. Maybe it’s more of a workshop situation, which is working sessions with other people and brainstorming on what features we need, and what does or doesn’t work. Or maybe it’s more of a heads-down day, where I need to design these two screens today or design the login screen for an app. The day-to-day differs quite a bit depending on the size of the project, which I like about my job.
As a designer, your job is to solve problems, and you have to understand what those problems are. So you have to understand the people you’re talking to.
DK: I want to give you a chance to talk about the work you do with your mom, and your involvement with Ukrainian art. How does that balance with your professional career? I’m curious.
YB: Yeah, it’s really hard to have a full-time job and a side project. As much as I do love my job, it can sometimes be a little spiritually unfulfilling, because the reality is that there’s a lot of money in certain industries, and those industries are finance and real estate. To each their own, but to me those aren’t fields that I feel passionate about. My latest side project, which took 7 years to fulfill, is a cookbook I wrote with my mom, who’s also a designer and a teacher at City Tech. It’s got Russian and Ukrainian recipes because that’s where we’re from. The book has a whole section on history, which we did a bunch of research for, and it’s got a bunch of literature and art. Honestly having design skills saved me so much money, because I did the website, layout, and social media content myself. Now we’re doing videos, and I never learned Premiere, but I’m just teaching myself because once you learn one Adobe program, you’ve learned all of them.
The things that would feel good to work in are usually nonprofit organizations or social justice initiatives, which are industries that don’t have a lot of money. But over the summer, when there were a lot of protests happening, I volunteered. I don’t consider myself an activist. I’m quiet, and it’s really hard for me to get into debates with people or to organize. But I felt like I needed to do something and the thing that I can do is use my design skills. So I did volunteer work for some organizations related to BLM(Black Lives Matter). For me, it felt like I wasn’t just sitting back and lamenting about how bad the world is. At least I’m doing something. In-between side projects and volunteering, I’ve been able to put my design skills towards something that is spiritually and emotionally fulfilling. Those projects were enriching.
In-between side projects and volunteering, I’ve been able to put my design skills towards something that is spiritually and emotionally fulfilling.
[A student asks if she has any advice for a woman entering tech and on negotiating her first salary.]
YB: Don’t doubt yourself. Don’t be afraid of negotiating. I know we’re sort of conditioned to be nice, and be like: “Well I was thinking maybe…”. You should be polite and respectful, but don’t put yourself down or lessen yourself. Just approach it professionally. Some people will be mean, and that’s just how it is, but if you know your worth, use that to boost yourself and to give yourself the confidence to negotiate. And ask for a raise every year. They might say no, but men ask for a raise every year. Honestly, everybody should be asking for a raise every year, even if you’re told no.
Some people will be mean, and that’s just how it is, but if you know your worth, use that to boost yourself and to give yourself the confidence to negotiate.
[Student brings up that men apply for jobs they’re not necessarily 100% qualified for, while women feel really intimidated by that. She says that she thinks it’s important to advocate for women in tech.]
YB: I mean if you’re not qualified for that job, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? If you don’t hear back, then you can just move on. But the best that could happen is that you’re going to get that job. And then once you’re in that job, you can advocate, with understanding, respect, and politeness, for the change that you want to see in that company. It’s not easy though.
DK: Thank you, Yana.
Editor’s note: At the time of this publication, Yana is no longer working at Originate.
David Karlins is an adjunct professor of design and digital and written communication at NYU and CUNY, and author of 40 books on digital design technology and culture. His courses are distributed through LinkedIn Learning and other channels.
The following links to the rest of the episodes in this series are here:
