Natalie Michalski has always been passionate about art and design – but she doesn’t just want to make beautiful things. Instead, she’s fascinated by the potential of design as a problem-solving tool.
Today, the 2012 graduate of the UTS Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication is a user experience (UX) designer for Capgemini, a global digital and technology consultancy. But it wasn’t always clear that UX design was where Michalski would wind up.
I was looking at university courses and the UTS Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication degree really stood out to me because of its breadth of subjects and the ability to learn lots of different things before being able to specialise in one of them.
I really enjoyed the course, but even towards the end of it, I still wasn’t really sure what career I was going to pursue.
It was during a final-year lecture from Deloitte Digital – organised as part of the UTS degree – that she was first introduced to the concept of UX design. That’s when things really started to click.
The Deloitte team came in and discussed how they were using design to solve problems, and they spoke about a specific case they’d worked on for New South Wales Police.
I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting!’ and I began to think that was something that I wanted to do.
At its core, UX design is all about people. Designers work with end users – usually customers of a particular product or service – to identify pain points in the user experience and design solutions to overcome them. In a nutshell, that’s what Michalski does at Capgemini, where she landed a grad position in the company’s Sydney office.
Today, Michalski is part of Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange team in London. She says the UX design process often starts – and ends – with research: first, she gets to know the customer and the challenges they face in using a product or service. Next, she explores the processes underpinning the product or service, or the company or industry in which it’s located.
Only then does she start designing a solution, but even this process that comes with constant iterating and testing with customers to see how well the proposed solution overcomes the challenge they’re trying to solve.
My time at UTS really gave me an understanding of what a problem is, how to go through the process of design – doing research, gaining empathy and then coming up with a solution.
If the client is happy with the insights we produce, I then use the skills I learnt at university to start developing a solution. If it’s an app, for example, then I’ll use software such as Adobe, Figma, Sketch to design out screens, Then, within our team we have developers, so I work closely with them in terms of bringing those designs to life.
Previous projects include a redesign of mail processing procedures for Royal Mail – the British equivalent of Australia Post – using emerging technologies, and a project for UK charity Action for Children that gave shoppers the chance to be a Secret Santa for a vulnerable child.
Here, Michalski and her colleagues created a digital experience called Elf.AI which used AI and machine learning to help shoppers choose a gift for a vulnerable child.
You would walk into the pop-up space and there would be a 50-inch touchscreen that would read ‘Hey, the elves from Action for Children want to help you decide what you’d like to donate this festive season.
It would show you a series of images, and based on your reaction to those images, it would provide you with a prediction of what you would most likely donate.
Towards the end of the journey, users would be greeted with a live filter that transformed them into a Secret Santa and given a QR code that allowed them to share the filter with family and friends. This was intended to spread the word about Action for Children and give shoppers a memento of their experience.
Whenever you design an experience you must think about every single touchpoint. What is the last thing that user will remember?
It may not be where she expected to wind up, but for Michalski, UX design combines all her passions – design, business and the human experience/interaction – in an emerging field with huge potential for growth.
User experience design is still a relatively new field, but now most businesses really need it in order to succeed.
UTS was definitely open in showing that there’s a lot more to design than the traditional paths.