Technically, this is the journey to product design, and also from that product design to another product design.

I left Samsara in November 2023 after 6+ years of working on the same scrappy little team of hardware product designers. Or, I guess you could’ve called us hardware product design engineers. Or hardware design, mechanical engineers. Or product design engineers - hardware. The actual title was always WIP. Besides, what’s in a title anyway?

When I was back in undergrad at University of Illinois, I majored in Mechanical Engineering. After a tough first semester of freshman year and after learning about the existence of Industrial Design, all I wanted to do was sneak away from the Engineering campus and walk along the halls of the Art and Design Building. When I visited for an introductory meeting with the advisors, I saw rows and rows of student projects showcased along the wall - futuristic looking teapot renders, quick sketches of headphones, and bright and colorful packaging design concepts. The creativity was jumping off the walls and shaking me by the shoulders to wake up and be more creative in my own endeavors. I thought maybe industrial design had been my true calling and that I had wasted my high school years being “good at math” and declaring too proudly and naively that I wanted to be a mechanical engineer.

I applied to the Art school, and one of my application projects was a squirrel I painstakingly made out of granola, lots of super glue, and one almond.

*Granola Squirrel, 2012*

(Side note: My mom still has this little guy in the China cabinet, proudly on display. It may be more likely that she’s forgotten about its existence, but we’ll go with the former.)

Long story short and to nobody’s surprise, my booksmart, strict (but loving!) immigrant parents immediately shot down my brilliant idea to pursue a dual degree in Art and Engineering. “You can make money as an engineer and do art on the side,” they argued. Fine. I would settle for an Art minor.

This, too, was a short-lived pursuit, as the only one I could get while not being enrolled in the Art program was an Art History minor. I ended up being too preoccupied with waking nightmares about vector calculus to even finish the first Art History 101 assignment: Watch a 20 minute video titled, “What Is a Chair?” Back to Engineering I went…

I am so thankful for the elective I took my junior year that introduced me to Product Design. It was the first time I was in a classroom with both Art students and Engineering students! For a final project, my groupmates and I chose to design a Modular Air Filtration Mask, where we got to think through solving real world problems and 3D model and print out a prototyped solution.

*Modular Air Filtration Mask, 2015*

(2015 was also the year I fell in love with Fusion 360’s rendering capabilities)

Fast forward ten whole years later (!) and I’m still in love with Product Design. Like any true love, it has grown and shifted with time and tenure. At Prynt, I got really great experience designing consumer products that were fun and aesthetic. I learned about packaging design, industrial design, and working with overseas vendors. At Samsara, I got my hands wet, literally, designing industrial sensors and gateways that were environmentally rugged and produced at high volumes. I designed custom accessories and cables, which are often overlooked - your wired product is only as good as the cable connecting it, after all. I got lots of exposure working with electrical engineers, product managers, and seeing the full lifecycle of a product. I got to touch every part of the product, from working with tooling engineers to make sure the injection mold was flowing properly, to fixing the pixel alignment on the packaging label. The most satisfying thing about hardware was getting to hold a tangible finished product that only existed as a mere thought just a few months prior, the hard work and sense of ownership materialized.

After so much time with manufacturing, though, Hardware Product Design started to appeal less to me due to the long product cycles and lead times, Groundhog Day-esque reliability trials, and last minute overseas calls and meetings. I started to fall more in love with Digital Product Design due the fast feedback loops and iterative cycles, flexible working environment, and opportunities in almost every industry. Though there are many differences between Hardware and Digital design, at its core, they’re so very much alike. At the end of the day, both challenge you to solve problems for a user in a delightful and effective way while balancing business needs and keeping things time and cost efficient.

*Adhesive and waterproof testing for EM31, Samsara, 2023*

(A lot of problem solving at Samsara included throwing units in a thermal chamber and wondering how disappointed you might be when you take the units back out a few hours later)

During my last few months at Samsara, I started exploring internal improvements to the installation guide process and how to incorporate better install instructions onto the packaging. It was interesting to work with different teams to focus on the full user experience across product families and user interfaces beyond just the hardware design itself. As I veered from the path of hardware design, it solidified my curiosity and decision to go down a new avenue. Since November 2023 and during my time off from the corporate world, I’ve been able to travel (and birdwatch), spend more time with friends and family, take a variety of classes at CCSF for the love of learning (thank you, Free City!), and truly recharge. I am so grateful to be in a position where I can stop and actually smell the roses.

This last July, I’ve really taken the idea of moving into Digital Product Design seriously, specifically in UX/UI Design. I’ve been in an online program at Designlab, where I started in their UX Foundations course, which threw me in the deep end of Figma and visual design, and have now been in the UX Academy course for ~6 months and will be finishing up soon. UX Academy has taught me the building blocks and basics of UX Research as well as UX/UI Design. It’s been quite the journey of ups and downs and eye twitches, since projects have lots of deliverables in a very condensed timeline, but I have truly been enjoying the process. The Designlab courses couldn’t have come at a better time as my personal life was also blowing up in parallel and devoting all of my free time and mental energy to UX served as a great distraction*.

*shout out to my therapists and all my friends on speed dial - y’all are the real heroes.

*Hi-Fi prototype for Yond, 2024*

(If anyone needs me, I’ll be dragging arrows around Figma)

UX Academy has challenged my tendencies of perfectionism, encouraged me to share my design process with peers and mentors, and allowed me to connect with people both old and new on a deeper level throughout the research and design stages. Because getting work done each day is so important to staying on track for this accelerated program, I have also been forced to make bite-sized goals and milestones to stay organized. I am currently on the part time track, which estimates 20 hours of work per week, though that’s not nearly an accurate representation of the active and inactive work required of this program. I have peers in my cohort doing the full time track, which is as insane as it is impressive to me. Between feedback from my mentor and discussions during weekly group critiques, I use a lot of my additional time thinking about how to iterate and make improvements to my projects. I can’t imagine going at twice the speed, but ultimately it’s not helpful to compare and I just gotta keep moving forward. I’ve been constantly reminding myself to not lose sight of the forest for the trees and to keep up the positive spirit!

I have found so much joy and energy in conducting user interviews and learning about people’s experiences, humility and inspiration in the design process, and pride in my final work. The level of pride in my work is different from that of hardware, likely because I have been able to choose projects where I identify with the end user. Since part of the role of a product designer is to empathize with the end user anyway, it made dipping my toes into UX design more accessible. My first end-to-end app design was Yond, an app that gets you outside and gamifies finding new hobbies. This was very personal to me, since I was experiencing grief in my life and needed motivation to get moving in a new direction and feel normal again. My next project was app improvement was for Yelp Collections, in which users can access and organize their bookmarked businesses in a more intuitive way. I also felt very passionate about this project. As someone who has been using Yelp for 10+ years to discover local places to eat, I would use all the features I implemented and believe they are all incredibly useful.

*An overview of the screens, showcasing proposed improvements and new features to the Yelp app*

I am currently working on is a website refinement for Muttville, a local senior dog shelter and rescue that led me to my little 15 year old sweetie pie angel smushy peanut chihuahua, Lenny. (As a former foster and current adopter, I may be biased, but I think everyone could benefit from a senior dog in their life.)

I’m excited to continue solving everyday problems for everyday people and put my experience in designing hardware to good use. I used to say I wanted to make products that made people feel the way that Milton from Office Space felt about his Swingline stapler. I guess I still do, but just on a digital level. (Maybe a 2025 version of Office Space would have Milton’s emotional connection be with his text editor?) The long journey from Product Design to Product Design has been full of interesting turns, but looking back, I wouldn’t trade any of the detours for a more direct route.

And to the recruiters on LinkedIn who have used automated tools to scan my profile all these years, I am looking forward to finally, actually being a great fit for your digital product design team. Let’s get in touch!

The Journey from Product Design to Product Design

Where am I going?