My journey at EF Class

I have been working at EF Class since 2016 as a product designer. Over the years this experience allowed me to deeply understand how humans learn and teach and how differently they can experience this around the world. Here is my journey so far.

I started at EF Class as a product designer with the responsibility of design great experiences for the product. For each feature or project designed, I own it from research phase into development. This entails:

User research: quantitative and qualitative - such as interviews, surveys, user diaries studies, user observation, etc.

UX exploration: user flows, site/app maps, information architecture, wire-framing and prototyping;

Usability testing: remote and present sessions, guerrilla testing, high volume online testing through digital tools;

Data analysis and data driven decisions based on business goals;

User interface design: high detailed designs for development both for web apps and iOS platforms;

Team collaboration in design workshops, design show and tell sessions (to gather feedback from all areas of expertise), example mapping sessions (or Amigo sessions as we call it) for development kick off, etc;

Becoming the Lead designer

In 2018 I took the leadership of the design team and focused on helping designers working as smoothly as possible based on our design values and business goals.

We evolved our process into a more robust and structured workflow so we have constant design feedback with the remaining team - every week we have what we call a ‘Design show and tell’ session;

We build a testers group (with our real users) and started arranging user interviews and usability tests more often so we can make decisions with less assumptions or better awareness of the users’ needs;

With the help of our product owner we started to get more data about the product and make design decision based on it - this had a massive impact on how we design and think about the product.

Principal Designer

In April 2019 I started focusing on the public side of our product. Until this year we always had a low profile communication online and in the education world. We want to change this and spread the word about EF Class. So this year I will be helping the product and growth teams to communicate better and use different media and platforms to achieve our goals.

At the same time I started to feel that it was time to help other designers grow and motivate them to become great team leaders. I am quite excited to see my colleagues (and friends) growing into new positions and becoming better designers. So with this all in mind I shifted into a more technical role again so I can dedicate myself towards our mission and help coaching other designers into leadership positions.

Lessons learned

Having a product that an entire team believes in is crucial for everyone's success in the team. I truly believe that EF Class has a lot of potential and is offering something unique in the education industry.

Creating and nurturing a team is hard, but rewarding. At the end of the day, the success of a product is only achieved by the effort and work of the people that build it. So hiring people more clever than me and that can bring something new to the table is extremely important.

Is not always easy, and there are a lot of bumps along the way, but that makes it exciting and challenging to me. So in every problem that I solve or help solving I get more reassurance and confidence in the people and product I help building every day.