What Does a Product Designer Do at the Volt Lines Office?

Hi 🙂 I have been working as a Product Designer at Volt Lines for a little over four months. I set out on this path with a decision to change career that I took last year (in March 2018), and late in November this year I took my first step into my new career at Volt Lines!

Even in the short time since, what I have learned from my Volt Lines experience is genuinely enormous and priceless to me! I am really happy to be part of this team and to have had the chance to start here.

After that sentimental opening, let's get to the point: in this post I am going to share with you what a day in the life of a Product Designer at Volt Lines looks like. 1 April 2019began like any normal morning 🙂 I set off to be at work by 9:00 a.m. and after a journey of about an hour I am at Kolektif House Maslak. Trying to ignore the little simit rolls Kolektif puts out on the tables in the shared area (one of the hardest moments of the day), I headed for our office. Reaching for these cute little rolls every day can lead to unwanted consequences! Cute little kilos that have to be shed later. 

The little simits I run into every morning.

We started the day, as we do every morning, with our "daily stand-up meeting" . In a quick meeting on our feet, everyone gave an update on what they worked on yesterday and what their plan for the day is. Compared with my previous working life, I can see that these short meetings are far more useful than meetings that run for hours, get nowhere, and usually end with "let's set another meeting for such-and-such a date".

After our short meeting, I started work with Dila, our Customer Manager,on redesigning the routing process, one of the important topics in the sprint we are in. In this piece of work, which I would describe as user research, my tasks were mostly observing users, taking notes and recording feedback. We also captured screen recordings so we could work on and analyse the whole process later.

At the end of the session, once I had tidied up my notes and planned the next steps, I moved to my desk to get a couple of smaller things done before lunch. The first was pulling together my notes from a workshop we had run earlier. The other was making a few updates to our driver mobile app on Marvel, where we build our prototypes. 

Did I mention I adore colourful Post-its?

At around 2:00 p.m. we have a short meeting with Burcu, our Product Manager, to go over the work in this sprint. Sometimes the priority of certain tasks has to change and newly urgent work has to be slotted in; that dynamism is part of the job too.

Lunchtime is approaching — usually at around 12 the "what shall we eat today" questions start going round the team. Even though I have promised every single week since I started that "this week I'll make my lunch at home and bring it in", so far I have not managed it! But I will one day; I have not lost hope yet 🙂

At around 1:00 p.m. I am in Sketch working on a UI task. I have always worked with Sketch and I can say I am very happy with it. I might give other tools a chance in future, and perhaps I will write a post about that to share the experience with you. To say a little about the UI task I am working on — it is actually a project that has me quite excited! It is a piece of work that will free our Sales team from the traditional way they currently run the quoting process: sharing files by email, and rebuilding the whole thing, the spreadsheets and the PDFs, at every small change. I am working on an interface where we will be able to prepare and share quotes on our online panel instead — screens that will save us both time and effort while giving our team and the prospective partners we send quotes to a good user experience. Everyone is waiting excitedly to see the result! Working on a project that will save a little more time for a Sales team that is already producing great work is enjoyable for all of us.

When I first started, the Agile world was quite a challenge for me. After a working life of projects spread over months, long meetings and planning that took weeks, I have to admit I felt a bit like a fish out of water when I first entered the start-up world! Everything moves incredibly fast in this world, but I can say that the "ship it quickly, see how it goes, improve it if we need to" approach genuinely works. Looking back at what we have done as a whole team in just 4 months, I honestly cannot believe it! I have enough experience to make the comparison (roughly 12 years, easier said than done) and I can see that in an efficient "traditional" organisation what we have done would have taken about a year to eighteen months. Some of it would have been overtaken by changes in the world and in trends before it shipped, and the work would have lost its point.

Back to the flow of the day. At around 3:00 p.m., I move on to another task that calls for some reading and research. We are working on a communication plan for our passengers that starts with "Welcome" and informs them step by step about the next stage, right up to their first journey. This will be the first component of the passenger "customer journey" at Volt Lines, and its scope will grow over time. At this stage of the work, after researching visuals to draw inspiration from for the email designs and doing a bit of reading, I get up for a coffee break.

Kolektif House's 5:00 p.m. biscuits are not far off. They go well with coffee 🙂 With our own coffee machine, fresh coffee is ready in no time! Because my cool developer colleagues like their coffee at the consistency of tar (which for me counts as concentrate), I add a little hot water to get it to the strength that suits me.

I think Will Ferrell is drinking "Developer coffee" here, with no hot water added.

We have reached the end of the day (although the day almost never ends at 18:00 for the team) and I still have time for a bit of UX work. For a few ideas I have in mind about the routing screens we worked on with a user during the day, I start creating low-fidelity designs by hand sketching — in other words "scribbling" what is in my head onto paper. Tomorrow Burcu and I will go over these first "scribbles" and iterate on them together, and after that we will go through the mid-fidelity wireframes I will build in Sketch with the whole team and with Ali, our CEO . Once I have all the feedback, I will produce the final versions of the designs that go into the prototype — the hi-fidelity screens. 

On the way home, if I am still in a state to read anything (sometimes I am tired enough to just focus on a point in space and stare at it for minutes on end :)), I look through the articles and posts sent to me by friends who are as immersed in the UX/UI world as I am, or that come from the design platforms I subscribe to. Sometimes I settle for just browsing "inspiring" work on Behance and Dribbble. 

Using our own Volt Lines shuttles is the best opportunity to observe how the app is used!

At the end of the day I head home with dozens of things flying around my head (like the whole team). I finish the day thinking about whether we will hit the targets by the end of this sprint, that this task has to be done by such-and-such a day, that I will start on that on Thursday. Even though it is sometimes stressful and very busy, I love the work I do and being part of this team! I am so glad I made the decision to change career, and so glad I am here. See you in another post! Love.

Bye-bye!