Pencil is a growing EdTech startup focused on building tools to help educators provide better teaching and learning experiences. I primarily worked on a tool that provides educators a seamless and flexible experience to author education content. This tool adds values by tackling their frustrations and pain points, and as a result optimizing teacher workflows. Among all the projects I've taken part in, I typically worked in teams of 3 to 5 consisting of other designers, PMs, and business analysts.

While this project is under NDA and I can't elaborate on the product and features itself, I can share a few of the responsibilities that I had and what I did to reach my goal.

With most projects I worked on, there wasn't much guidance or product direction which required me to take initiative to gain a better understanding of the problem and how the product should solve our user's needs. I often started by breaking down the problem at a high-level and scoping out potential solutions alongside the PM before getting to any wireframes or mocks. As well, most projects required input from other teams which I took the initiative reach out so that I could be fully aware of potentially conflicting demands and dependencies. From there, I would go through multiple explorations, evaluate and get feedback on each, before coming to an informed decision on the optimal approach. The bulk of my time was mainly devoted to iterating on user flows, interface designs, and content while receiving a constant flow of feedback from daily design critiques and syncs with the PM.

From this process, I realized how important it was to get a clear product perspective and a high-level overview before jumping into any details. With this, I found that my explorations were designed with much more consideration for various use-cases and user needs. Another key learning point was the benefits of constant critique and rapid iteration. Since I produced new flows and explorations daily, hearing feedback from the UX team enabled me to iterate quickly and consolidate not only what worked for a particular design, but also what didn't work which was great to note for future projects.

It was not an easy 4 months but the various projects I worked on and high-performing team always kept me on my toes with new design challenges. I was able to exponentially grow my design knowledge and repertoire of UI patterns through a variety of projects, some of which resulted in 1000+ frames. I went from an intern who struggled to express her design process to a global expert in the product she took design ownership with.

In addition, I was able to get a front row seat to the daily ups and downs of a growing startup. The fast-paced work environment propelled me to grow but simultaneously threw my shortcomings under a spotlight to which I took as an opportunity for improvement, such as communicating my design decisions and designing for edge cases. I was also able to practice adapting to context-switches and being flexible with sudden priority changes.

Overall, I learned about how to apply a combination of product and design thinking in my work, and I've gained more confidence in my skills as a growing designer and become more familiar with working in fast-paced, cross-functional teams.