About Me

It’s a lot to ask to entrust your product to a stranger, and it’s especially difficult to decide who to work with when each UI UX designer has a unique story.

It’s not enough to read a book or two and pass an online course to be a UI UX designer. Design is a way of thinking. It’s beaten into you. You need to live, breath, bleed UX design for years until it sticks. And you need to practice-practice-practice to make it look good.

In my design schooling I labored over group projects, designed activities to ideate in a diverse group, resolved team conflicts, tinkered in research labs, tested prototypes on real people, stayed late writing group reports with my peers, and stood up in font of crowds to present my product to the judgement of a public critique. It was ideate, prototype, test, iterate, critique, iterate, and present — on repeat — 2 times a quarter for 16 quarters like clockwork.

And I did this all while working part-time as a UI UX designer for a research lab as well as volunteering for an early-stage startup in parallel.

If the AGILE philosophy says testing and iteration is key to great products, then the same can be said for building great professionals. Taking risks, making mistakes, is what builds the foundation of a great designer.

I’ve been broken and remolded more times than I care to count. The sting of failure is life’s greatest teacher and I had four years more than most to experiment with my process and learn from my mistakes.

Now I am responsible for products used by hundreds of people everyday. I design both software interfaces and holistic experiences for smart shopping carts and checkout machines live in major grocery chains like Kroger, Circle K, and Sobeys.

If you want to learn more, here is my full story →

• Behance/lilitbala
• Dribble/lilitbalag
• Twitter @lilitbalag
• Medium/lilitbalag
• Design@lilit.me
• 

  Clubhouse @lilitb