Product design is constantly evolving, with new technologies and user expectations driving constant change. We sat down with Nick Obrecht to get his insights on modern product design, evaluating design portfolios, the rapidly increasing role of AI in design, and much more.
Nick Obrecht, is a seasoned design professional with almost two decades of design experience, has recently transitioned to a full-time career as a Fractional Design Leader after previously serving as VP of Creative & Product Design at Achievers. In his role at Achievers, Nick combined his deep passion for user experience (UX) with his expertise in creative direction, driving transformative design initiatives to the platform. Throughout his career, Nick has been dedicated to fostering collaboration and encouraging fresh perspectives within cross-functional design teams.
Let’s dive in…
What modern product design means has evolved along with our technological capabilities and the expectations of today’s users. Early on, guiding the users with a clear set of directions and a content hierarchy for easy scannability was enough to stand out. Really, just making things usable in a very basic sense was seen as a functional goal—a good place to start.
Adaptability was the next wave of progress, recognizing the user's context and automatically adjusting for it, like responsive design, and seamless multi-device handoff, for example. This also included making things more accessible, accommodating a wider variety of users' abilities, and helping them overcome potential hurdles. This began to encourage a more personalized experience, software that felt like it was meeting you halfway.
I think modern design today encompasses all of the above, with an additional focus on intelligent anticipation. When design can help to anticipate your needs, and even educate you on what those needs might optimally be, it can feel like magic. On the other hand when software assumes something about you and is wrong, it degrades the trust you have invested in it. A persistent and comprehensive learning of each user’s behavior will only increase this ability to understand perspective, moving further away from a transactional experience towards an emotionally connected one.
The biggest miss I come across in reviewing design portfolios is when candidates include high-fidelity final product mockups & prototypes without context. It is so important to share the journey to get there, what was the ask + direction + challenge + result.
I think including fewer final polished product designs, and leaving more room for storytelling goes a long way. Tell me about difficult trade-offs and hard limits you needed to work around. Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so don’t be afraid to show some of the messiness of the process, dead ends you explored and abandoned, and why.
The other thing I’m always looking out for is versatility. I’m a big believer that there is no better way to showcase your design thinking than to see how you have applied it to a wide variety of challenges.
I’d love to see more standardization in how design case studies are requested and reviewed. I feel pretty strongly that if the case study has direct potential value to the business, their time should be paid for. Ideally, I’ll request a case study from something they already have in their portfolio; otherwise, I'll ask them to select something of personal interest or even humanitarian value.
The what is really secondary to unpacking their approach and thought process. I’m seeking someone with a wide perspective on the challenge, notes where and how they incorporated data (qualitative and quantitative insights), involved subject matter experts, and built preliminary models to review and test.
When they walk me through their design, I like to see stated goals, assumptions noted, and clear next steps. I want to see why decisions were made and their thinking behind them.
Absolutely. There is a lot of trepidation around incorporating AI tools into product design at the moment, but I expect this to change quickly as AI continues to demonstrate real value in decision-making and understanding.
Design is about communication, and you need to deeply understand your audience to communicate effectively. For example, persona development was a useful tool in aligning functional development towards a human example.
I think AI has the potential to take this up to a whole new level. Not only can it gather and collate millions of points of data, well beyond any reasonable amount a UX researcher could, but it can also build dynamic models from quantifiable behavioral data, and qualitative perspectives from directly gathered sentiment, distilling them down to actionable insights.
In the actual design process, I’m excited to see more mundane tasks being made easier so that designers can focus on more emotionally driven choices, for example. In the end, we should do what we are best at, allowing machines to do the same for us.
I think it is good advice to design your CV content for algorithms and your portfolio for humans. The first step to getting your portfolio looked at by a human is to get past the many screening tools businesses employ today.
Once you have accomplished that, you absolutely need to make a strong impression with your portfolio. I appreciate seeing polished renders of an app on a phone, but I also want to see snippets from the process to see why you started and the process you followed to get there.
I like seeing the diversity of thought and the wide variety of challenges you have faced. Illustrating ten examples of the same thing makes me wonder how you will handle the inevitable curveball.
I had a candidate once show me how they not only would redesign a mall directory mobile app but, after visiting, took pictures and showed examples of how they would ideally change wayfinding signage to match. I loved the depth of thinking and immersion of perspective, presented together with a great story; a lost mother trying to find a bathroom for her kid. 5 stars!
