ABOUT

Tell us who you are!

Murtaza, Senior Product Designer, Intercom

So what do you actually do?

I design software - at the moment I'm helping improve the design of part of an app that is an Inbox where customer conversations stream into. I help take decisions on everything from the big things "what should this thing do" all the way down to the small things "how should this button look when it's pressed". I work with product teams to make sure the products we build together are easy to use and successful.

Outside of work I helped start Muslamic Makers - a community for Muslim makers to share ideas and grow their skills. We organise events like skills workshops and lightning talks with leading tech companies as a way of harbouring a safe space to learn and grow. I'm currently mentoring people who've joined the community through the digital kickstarter program to learn more about design.

What has your career path been?

I started out wanting to design physical products but I saw how exciting the internet was getting and decided to move into designing digital things.

My first proper job as a UX designer was quite stressful - I was the only designer in the agency so had loads of engineers and product managers asking me urgent questions. I didn't know the answers and it taught me that it's ok to ask for a bit of thinking time as long as you are transparent. Saying "I'm not sure, but I'm going to do x,y,z and get back to you" is really powerful.

My first two UX design roles ended in redundancy which was frustrating but luckily it didn't take much time to find new roles. Looking back, it was a blessing because it helped me get experience without getting too comfortable at the same time, I was forced to look onwards.

I then moved into doing freelance work quite early on because I was attracted to the day rates and not having to stick around in one place long term. My honest reflection about it is that it was really well paid which is important to me, but didn't push me to learn how to be a great designer. The work got repetitive and didn't push me to "own" my work as much as being embedded in a product team longer term. When I was freelancing I did work for big companies like Sky, BT, HSBC, Aviva but those corporate environments weren't hugely innovative and I found a lot of energy was taken up just navigating the corporate structure which didn't leave time to do high quality work.

I decided I needed to join a mission focused tech startup and at that time that meant taking a pay cut which was hard for me but fortunately, I was in a position were I could make that decision. I did it because I knew it would be worth the investment in my career and would help me grow at a much faster pace. I got a job at TransferWise which was an amazing experience in a hyper-growth fintech over a couple of years. I learnt about what being a mission driven startup meant and how ideas are refined and shipped into the real world rapidly.

More recently I joined Intercom - a company I've admired for a long time which is doing great things in the SaaS (Software as a service) world. Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal. When I was learning about design I would frequently read Intercom's design and product articles and now I'm lucky enough to work with the people that wrote them.

What is the best part of your job?

Seeing people use (and hopefully love) something you helped to craft and seeing their reactions is always really rewarding. I get to work with companies who care about the culture of their company and invest in their employees so they feel secure and motivated to do their best work.

What inspired you to do your job?

When I was helping start a social enterprise (casseroleclub.com) with FutureGov, I realised the part of the job I really enjoyed was exploring the design decisions that needed to be made. I didn't realise that I was making design decisions every day. After a couple of years, I decided to lean all the way into being a UX designer.

One piece of advice for someone starting in your role?

Don't get stuck "learning about design", just start designing stuff. There are definitely important things to learn about the design process and principles but the best thing is to get practice.

Start designing an app or website or look up some design challenges if you are stuck for ideas and along each step of the way you can find books, articles and courses to help you get better at each of the things you have to do. Practice is everything.

Check out Murtaza’s Twitter below!

DAY IN THE LIFE

The morning is a rush getting my son ready for nursery, we usually go on my bike which gives me a small workout in the morning and he loves it. That means I'm usually late for my team morning standup.

My team at work are flexible, a lot of us have kids and we all trust each other to work around our other responsibilities. The morning standup is a quick 15 min meeting where we all go through what we did yesterday and what we plan to get done today. We also check our weekly goals to see how we are progressing against them and to ensure we're not getting distracted with anything else.

I'll usually try and do an hour of focused deep work before any other meetings in the morning, this could be wireframing some concepts, building a prototype or writing a document to share with other teams about some work or ideas. For example, today I'm finishing up some concept wireframes of how new messages can be created and sent from an Inbox. I'm annotating some of the wireframes so that people viewing them can understand some finer details and I'm also writing up an internal blog post about the concepts.

My main aim is to share the problem, how it works today and what my ideas for changing it are so that people who read the post and view the designs can give me useful feedback.

We usually have at least one "working session" a day where we'll discuss something in detail to be able to make some decisions. I'll usually share my screen and walk through some design options in Figma (the tool we use to design) where I'll discuss the trade offs and ask for feedback.

Today I'm showing the team some micro interaction ideas on how new contacts can be added to a message (think about the tiny interactions in gmail when you enter a new email address, what happens when you type £ instead of @, what if you've sent to that person before, do we show you a list of matching email addresses as you are typing, how does that list display etc... you can break things down into smaller and smaller micro-decisions which help craft the overall experience of using the product.

I take 45-1hr for lunch and try and make sure I get away from my desk, in lockdown it's really easy to end up spending the whole day at your desk! I take some time to pray my afternoon prayers, which is a lot easier in lockdown being at home than it is in an office where I would normally try and find an empty meeting room or quiet area.

In the afternoon I'll take part in design reviews, this is where designers working on other projects will share their work with other designers to get feedback. We usually set the context up first and explain where we would like focused feedback, is it about the overall concept or is it about the specific UI (visual designs) being shared on the screen. Usually my son bursts in the room at some point when I'm talking to people but everyone loves it and after he's waved at them he runs away.

I wrap up by 6pm latest and usually make a note of things I need to pick up the next morning. I never work late or on weekends, I've done that before and found that it leads to major burn out.