Hi! This is Ebru from Volt Lines! I have been working as a Product Designer at Volt Lines for a little more than 4 months and so  far, I am loving it! It was like my dream to become a UX / UI Designer. Long story short, I took some risks, quit my previous job, invested in a good training (hello Ironhack Paris)  did a career change and started my career all over! I can’t tell how proud of myself I was when I shared my new title as a “Product Designer at Volt Lines”! I love you all, my Volt Lines team!

 

Anyways, (should stop being emotional before I start to cry) I am here to tell you about how I spend a day as a Product Designer at Volt Lines. I will document the day April 1st. With photos and snap shots of my daily work routine. Here we go :)

 

We start at 9:00, it takes me around 1 hour to arrive to work from home. As I arrive at our floor, leave the elevator, head to our office, the first thing I do is trying to stop myself from eating “simit”s on the table which are treats from Kolektif House. There is a small mountain of that small pieces of simit on the table every morning for breakfast!

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Around 9:30 - 10:00 we do the daily stand up, before that I check my emails or go through my notes and to-do’s to prepare for the meeting. Even though everyone is really busy and needs to rush something, we all know how important it is to do this daily stand ups to give updates about what we are working on and making sure the whole team is in sync. When i think of my earlier days, as someone new to the team who was trying to understand what is happening, who is doing what, i can tell these small meetings really help! Also the Kanban sticky notes! (I am a UX designer of course i love colorful sticky notes!)

 

After the daily stand up, I had a meeting with our Key Account Manager Dila to work on the research part of one of that sprint’s design tasks. The task is redesigning and improving the routing process for new customers joining in Volt Lines. Mostly I observe Dila as she prepares the new routes. What I do is; asking some questions, taking notes, getting her feedback on what to improve. Also, I take screenshots and videos of the flow. This really helps when I go back to my desk to analyse what I got from the research work.

 

When we finish, I check my notes, plan the next steps for this task and move on to another small task before lunch. I had some corrections to make on Marvel prototypes for our mobile app for drivers. I remember how nervous I was when I was working on this task in my first weeks. Our lovely Product Manager Burcu was always around to help and encourage me! Now as iOS and Android developers work on the UI, we sometimes have small things to change and I update the prototype talking with the guys beforehand.

 

Usually we have lunch around 12:00 at a restaurant just across the street. Since I started, every weekend I promise to prepare food at home and bring with me for lunch but i never could! I still didn’t lose my hope completely! Someday I will!

 

Around 13:00 I start with a UI task, for our HR web application. I am using Sketch and really happy with it. I am creating new offer screens and I am really excited about this project as it will be eliminating lots of manual work and it will help our business team to manage the offer process more effectively and hopefully save them some time. They are doing great work already but eliminating some manual work always makes lives better!

 

Around 14:00 we sit with Burcu, our Product Manager to go through the tasks of this sprint. Check how we are doing, change priorities for some tasks and spot the tasks I need to accelerate the speed or check if we have anything to park for a couple of days to move on to another task which gained importance.

 

 In the first weeks, agile world and startup environment was really challenging for me as I have more than ten years work background in the corporate world, mostly working with waterfall methods. But it didn’t take me too long to get the idea! The formula is “be quick to take action and build, ship it, see if it works, improve when needed and iterate.” And I remember one of my UX/UI design training instructor’s motto, “Perfect is too late!” now I really understand what it means!

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Around 15:00 I move on to another task which requires some “article reading & searching for inspiration”. I spend almost an hour for browsing and reading some articles on customer communications. I also look for some inspiration for the mailing design too. We are working on creating the ideal onboarding journey (for our passengers) with a product communication plan. We are starting with onboarding first and we will be expanding the scope in time.

 

Around 16:30, to get up from my chair and move a little, I ask the guys if anyone wants coffee! Here at Kolektif House, we also have cookies at 17:00 everyday. So coffee around this time is always a good idea! As all team members are really picky about their coffee, we are using a little “formula” to prepare it (we are not weird, I am a part of the engineering team that has a lot of developers!) Baran, Head of Engineering, has this perfect formula to decide the amount of the coffee to get the perfect taste. It works perfectly, but I will keep it to ourselves, it is kind of a “confidential” thing :)

 

After having my “engineered” coffee and cookies, I have enough energy to go back to some UX work! I start hand sketching for routing screens I mentioned before. Finish the day sketching a couple of screens to work on the next day with Burcu and iterate until we are ready for mid fidelity screens. With mid-fi versions we usually do another round with Ali, our CEO, get his feedback, iterate again. Share the mid-fi with the development team, get their feedback. Go back to user, check with them for the last time, do improvements and corrections ‘till we are ready to start the high fidelity screens.

 

On my way back home, I try to read at least one article on UX/UI design. If I am too tired, I just check Dribbble to see what people are creating and have some design inspiration. That day I had an article to read, it was a Nielsen-Norman one. Here is the link if you'd like to check; https://www.nngroup.com/articles/doing-ux-agile-world/

 

End of the day, I always have tons of things to do in my mind (just like the other members of the team!): Planning, trying to estimate if all sprint goals for design can be done on time. Sometimes it’s stressful and quite busy but so far I love what I do, it’s priceless to see the output and results of my efforts. Lastly, I am really happy and proud of being a part of Volt Lines team!