Any design ultimately faces "people" - Interview with Saori Kawasaki just before "Web Industry Evolution #05"

[mdabuhasan]

On Thursday, April 22nd, Mynavi Creator will be holding an online seminar, Web Industry Evolution Practical Course #05, "How to approach 'design' to accelerate your growth as a designer."

The fifth installment of the "Web Industry Evolution Practical Course" is aimed at web designers who want to know how to expand their careers. Saori Kawasaki, who is active as a manager in a company and also serves as the representative of the community " Service Design Quest ," will be the guest to talk about career options and specific information gathering.

In this interview just before the event, we asked Kawasaki about his career so far, the management of the community he hosts, and his future career plans.

Profile Introduction

Saori Kawasaki,
Representative Director of Service Design Quest / Member of the Japan Direction Association

He started out as a banner craftsman at a venture company, then gradually shifted to upstream design as a UI designer and then a service designer. He is in charge of everything from service design to UI design for client work, and has joined many projects as a director and designer. He currently works as a system development manager, in charge of UX/UI and information design, mainly in new product development projects. In addition to personally providing career advice to designers and supporting corporate designer training, he is also the representative of Service Design Quest , a community that provides training in service design by likening it to a RPG.

The underlying motivation is the question, "How can we do business comfortably?"
-- First, please tell us about your career so far. When did you first decide you wanted to be a designer?

Kawasaki: Actually, I started my career in sales. A friend from my school days created an original CMS for a website and started a student business, and I was involved in sales to sell that service. However, I didn't know much about the web at the time, so I would take on projects without really understanding how they worked, and I would be told, "We can't do that."

So I started to think that it's difficult to sell things without knowing the maker, and that I wanted to sell things after I was more convinced. But I don't have the skills to aim to be an engineer now, and I've always loved drawing, so I thought I'd start with design! That's what made me want to become a designer.

--So you continued working as a designer after graduating from university.

Kawasaki: That's right. Since I was hired as a graphic designer at a venture company as a new graduate, my current company is my fifth. However, what I have done at each company is completely different. But they are connected to me.

- Could you tell me more about it?

Kawasaki: At my first company, I was just making icons and promotional materials. I was what they call a "banner craftsman." After a while, I was in charge of making them and I realized that "no matter how hard I worked on designing banners and icons, it didn't improve the overall flow of the service." I wanted to think about business from a broader perspective, so I became interested in UI/UX.

At first, I continued to work hard as a graphic designer at my second company. However, I wasn't satisfied with my own output, and I was overwhelmed by the high quality of the graphics made by the other designers, so I lacked confidence and it was a tough time. Amidst all of this, a turning point came when I was involved in renovating the UI for some of the functions of the game I was in charge of at the time. Although I was fumbling around while renovating the UI, we were able to increase sales. The results gave me a lot of confidence, and this experience was the catalyst for me to change my career direction from graphic designer to UI designer.

- Will you continue doing UI/UX design at your third company?

Kawasaki: Yes. I wanted to experience a wider variety of projects, so I moved to a contract development company for my third job. I gradually gained experience in service design, which is a step beyond UI design. I was in charge of the core aspects of the service, such as planning and idea generation.

On the other hand, the service design and UX design requests he received at the time were often highly abstract, such as "services using machine learning and IoT" and "DX," and he began to feel a strong need to "improve his understanding of technology" in order to bring them to reality. He also felt that "it was difficult to understand and commit to the relationship between building a business model and UX in client work."

So, when I was wondering if there was an environment where I could solve these problems, I received an invitation from a company that had strengths in edge computing and machine learning and was about to launch a new business, so I thought the timing was right and decided to change jobs.

At my fourth company, I joined the new business development team and learned how the service structure and system configuration affect UX/UI when thinking about our own business, which was impressive as it opened my eyes to another dimension. In addition, I felt strongly at that time how important the team is in developing a business. No matter how good the idea and money you have, it won't work if the team isn't good...Moreover, I felt that it was necessary for the business side and the development side to discuss things without barriers and make compromises with each other.

Then, I felt a strong desire to be able to work on development as a team while harmonizing the expectations of the business side with what the development side could achieve, so I took the first step of becoming a Scrum industry email list Master and began to focus more on my interactions with engineers.

-- It seems like you've come a long way from being a banner maker. What motivates you to dig so deep into your career?

Kawasaki: Ever since I graduated, I have had the idea of ​​"How can I do business comfortably?" I also wondered why it is so difficult to make new businesses like overseas successful with IT services, even though there are many talented people.

Japan has always been good at UI/UX. For example, Japanese gardens are designed with the flow and layout of the garden in mind, taking into account the changing of the seasons and the line of sight of visitors. Even though we have this foundation, when we try to create a new service, it doesn't work. As I dug deeper into the question of what the constraints were, the number of things that interested me increased.

The depth of "design" that extends to team building