Design tip of the day

My name is Anders, I'm 26 years old, and have spent 1,5 of those working at Bekk. I did my Masters's degree at the University of Oslo, in a program called Informatics: Design, Use, Interaction.

I’ve always been drawn toward creating things. Growing up, I spent countless hours building complex things with Lego, taking them apart, and creating something different with the same pieces. As I grew older, I also developed an interest in technology and spent many hours staring at a screen. I wanted to work with something in the intersection of creativity and technology, in which interaction design fits beautifully.

My current client is OBOS. Since April 2021 my team and I have been developing a website for OBOS Living Lab, an apartment building built to experiment with new ways of building better housing. Right now we’re in the process of transitioning into redesigning the property listings at OBOS, to help people find new places to live.

The fun bits

We have gotten the opportunity to build a solid interdisciplinary team, with me as a designer, developers, editors, content producers, and representatives from the business part of OBOS. Being able to gather all these great minds together has had an enormous impact on how fast and effectively we can deliver value in production. I’ve learned so much throughout the process of building the team. I also want to give a shout-out to Henning and Sindre, the developers on my team. Instead of having to spend hours in Figma, building complex wireframes and speccing spacing, they are happy to look at a rough sketch with a sharpie on a piece of paper.

The challenging bits

That being said, the process of building and putting together such a team has not been a cakewalk. As I imagine is common with most larger corporations, facilitating discussions and anchoring decisions across divisions takes a long time and can be frustrating. I have spent many hours staring at scheduling assistants in Outlook to try and find a time slot for a quick and simple discussion. For a while, I felt like I was working as a meeting manager rather than as an interaction designer. However, making people talk together is a big part of being a designer, isn't it?

Not everything (in fact most of the things I design) has to be made in detail in Figma. Paper and a sharpie, or a rough drawing in FigJam are usually enough. And if there is a need for more details you can always do them when the need arises.