Arlo Jamrog is a Senior product designer at Strava, a social network for athletes. With fifteen years of experience Arlo has worked with different teams on design and development of projects ranging from record labels to architecture firms to leading advertising agencies. He took up lot of interesting projects meeting new people and working on new things and finally went ahead for something consistent, Strava.

After Nikkel Blaase’s interview , I decided to continue to get deeper understanding of who really is a product designer? With this I went ahead in conversation with Arlo Jamrog focussing on keynotes like his experience of 15 years, his work life at strava, rapid prototyping, the past, present and future of UI/UX and much more.

How did you decide to become a designer?

Arlo: “I used to draw a lot as a kid, and my dad was always interested in computers. I pursued both as a teenager, and as desktop publishing came into being I experimented with fonts, digital art (the lasso and paint bucket tool in MacPaint) and BBSes, which ended up parlaying into freelance web design in college.”

What are the best things you have experienced working as a product designer and not just as a designer?

Arlo: “The main thing I enjoy specific to product is being able to iterate and improve on things, as opposed to designing, building and launching something and never revisiting it. That’s the main difference between product design and other types of design, which took me until embarrassingly late in my career to learn — receiving user feedback, responding to it and evolving your product.”

Where do you look for inspiration for design patterns?

Arlo: “It sounds cliché but by traveling, observing, and paying attention. Being curious helps too, trying to understand why things are the way they are, and how they came into being. I like to try a lot of things and stay open to ideas and input, be they experiences, objects, foods or music.”

So you have 15 years of experience. Would you like to share your professional journey?

Arlo: “I grew up in a tiny, rural town in Maine. After high school, I went to Syracuse University and got a fine arts degree in Computer Graphics. While there, I fell into freelance web design via some friends and met a web producer named Kurt Noble via a referral on IRC (never-ending thank you to Daniel Box for that). I started doing contract design and development for Kurt, doing websites mostly for the music industry, and after graduating I moved to San Francisco. Upon arrival we opened the first KNI San Francisco office in Hayes Valley and for the next 12 years I worked on design and development of projects ranging from record labels to architecture firms to leading advertising agencies. People seem to think it’s a long time, but web technology evolved over that period (DHTML, web 2.0, flash, APIs, etc) and our skillsets kept evolving with it. Eventually I outgrew the nest, and had to go out on my own. I got a private office in the Mission district and did design consulting for a broad range of clients from individuals to small startups to contracting for Google, it was fun, challenging and I got to meet a ton of interesting, smart people. However, earlier this year I wanted to focus my time on something more consistent, steady and challenging, which led me to Strava.”

Camden International Film Festival, design by Arlo Jamrog

How do you collaborate with Developers?

Arlo: “It depends on the developer, but the thing I think what matters the most as a designer working with developers is being able to articulate why your design decisions are made. If as a designer you don’t understand your own process and aren’t able to communicate it, you won’t be able to rally anyone around your thinking and a lot will get lost in translation. Another thing I like to do is ask developers to review my design work while it’s in progress. Oftentimes they’ll have a better understanding of data, edge cases and a familiarity with other parts of the system that I may have missed.”

What according to you is the most significant part of a designer’s portfolio?

Arlo: “Designer to me means a wide range of roles. If we’re talking about art directors or visual designers, obviously the use of color, type, visual weight and hierarchy- where the eye goes and how the entire composition comes together. If it’s more functional design, I want to see the thinking behind decisions, their understanding of contexts and some indication of how the end result worked out (how it was received). Design is the manifestation of intent, and if we’re to work together, I need to know how your ideas materialize and what your intent was. Not just how things look or move when all is said and done, but how you got to the end and ideally how it was received by its users (and what tradeoffs/compromises you may have had to make).”

How is your Product Design experience at Strava different from the former company?

Arlo: “Mainly in audience size and complexity of product, Strava has a lot of very dedicated users and it satisfies a range of users from commuters and casual types to elite professional athletes. Serving the needs of this spectrum of people is really challenging and at the same time super interesting to work on. My previous company was a small, boutique firm and had more of the agency-style of output: pour a ton of blood, sweat and tears into an amazing project and sent it out into the world. Then roll up the sleeves again and start a whole new different project. It made for super polished work and we won a bunch of awards and recognition, but the frames of mind between a larger company focused on a single product and a boutique agency are very different.”

Can you share some of your best work?

Arlo: “Unfortunately, I don’t maintain a portfolio site anymore. I’d like to think I’ll revisit it someday and put something up, but we all know how that goes. But you can view this..”

Farmer’s business network

How do you do rapid prototyping with your team?

Arlo: “Early and often and I use whatever tool best suits the goal at hand. I’ve tried almost every prototyping tool and have boiled it down to using two or three fairly often.

I use InVision for proof of concept on things that require no very little animation. This is usually to illustrate button placement, and testing task flows such as launching something and getting a feel for how much friction it takes to get to a desired end screen. InVision falls short once you want to make some interactions outside of vertical scrolling and tapping.

I’ve recently been into Principle for more advanced things involving scrolling, horizontal motion, sticky elements, or things involving dependencies between elements: you move this part, and this other part does something else. This is helpful for showing how a transition should work, or how subtleties in motion should happen. I do find that Principle can become a little unwieldy when you just want one screen to switch to another, a la InVision. Principle also can’t simply embed a prototype on the web, so it’s slightly harder to present and/or share.

For really fine-grained control, or when I need text fields that can display dynamic data, I use Framer. Obviously Framer is also a little slower to assemble prototypes, but the level of detail you can get with it is amazing. It’s also very good for presentation and sharing. I used to write a lot of code (including, yes, AS3), so Framer is pretty easy in that sense. It’s main drawback is that it’s a little too much firepower for a simple screen-to-screen step-through prototype.

And I’ve tried the rest- but no single one is that magic wand that can do it all quite yet.”

“Prototyping helps designers visualize an idea” — Arlo Jamrog on Thoughts on a Prototyping Panel Talk

What do you think is the biggest UI/UX problem today or may be coming in the future?

Arlo: “Well first off, we as designers are a lot better off today than we were even 5 years ago. Prototyping tools are really good, mostly free and easy to learn, and design software is sophisticated and also relatively cheap. Ten years ago everyone had to use Photoshop and prototyping wasn’t even thing we knew about. We just made whatever we thought looked good and figured that was the end. Things in that respect have come a long way, so I’d say a lot of the ‘problems’ at least with the creation practice of UI/UX are behind us.

I think as far as what’s coming in the future, you can just pick up Wired and get freaked out by that anytime you want. But instinctively I don’t think the problems will be with UI and UX, they’ll be around how we wean ourselves off of interfaces and stay in tune and engaged with the real world and each other.”

To know more about Arlo Jamrog you can follow him on twitter and his writings on medium and also on tumblr. Arlo has a cool list of software he uses, you can have a look.

After Nikkel’s and Arlo’s interview I wish to share more experiences of different experienced product designers. Stay updated. :)

Blog Source: https://blog.zipboard.co/the-design-life-of-a-product-designer-interview-with-arlo-jamrog-b85744c8d461