<aside> đ Gilly Johnson is a Senior UX Designer at AKQA, a global digital creative agency. There, she crafts innovative and creative experiences for companies like Verizon, ADT, and Coca-Cola, among many others.
Check her out here: đ LinkedIn
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My name is Gilly Johnson, and Iâm a Senior UX Designer at AKQA in their DC location. Iâve been with them for about three and a half years. When things went remote, I moved up to Brooklyn but I was able to stay with the DC office remotely. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon School of Design in 2018 in the Environments track with a minor in Gender Studies.
AKQA is a creative digital agency with around 24 offices globally. I work for the DC office, and depending on the project it could get more global. In the DC office specifically, we have two main areas of expertise, products and services which focuses on things like mobile applications or web experiences, and gaming which has expertise in marketing in the gaming industry. Those are the two main areas for the DC office, but weâve also worked with other offices to create immersive retail experiences for H&M and Verizon, among other projects.
<aside> âźď¸ Check out AKQA and their DC location
https://player.vimeo.com/video/801249145
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The attention to craft and detail is unique advantage of hiring creative agencies like AKQA. Big companies like the ones I mentioned like to bring designers in with fresh perspectives that arenât bogged down by logistics or bureaucratic processes that an in-house team might have. We are afforded the flexibility to explore, and we can also add to existing concepts that they might have never thought about.
The type of collaboration depends project-to-project, and the parties involved change too. For instance, Delta is a big client out of the Atlanta studio of AKQA, and because of the amount and breadth of work they receive, there was engagement from designers in the DC studio because there was need for certain expertises that the DC studio could fill.
In terms of external collaboration, it definitely also depends. On the project Iâm working on right now for a security company, we are collaborating both with the client who has expertise in the product itself, and a third party development team with their own designers, product managers, and developers. They have worked on the product itself in the past, so when AKQA was brought on we had to figure out a way to lead in the design of the experience, while the other team still leads in the implementation of the product. Itâs just part of the challenge, to find creative ways of improving products that we are introduced to partway through the development process.
Something thatâs challenging for me personally is that between projects, thereâs a bit of ambiguity and uncertainty about what role Iâm going to play when I join a new project, and I get uncomfortable with not really having a lot on my plate. I had to figure out how to engage myself to keep moving in those slow periods.
An exciting challenge, though, is to be brought onto a completely new project. The onboarding process is often very intense and rigorous, since UX designers are usually brought on after the initial strategy has been established. Itâs definitely an intense process to get up to speed, and then having to pivot to shaping what the experience should be, but the result is incredibly rewarding.
The biggest reward at the end of a project is just to see a culmination of what my team has achieved in the usually six months weâve been working. Itâs amazing to see something that goes from black and white boxes and post-it notes, to something thatâs beautifully designed. And whatâs even more exciting is if and when the client actually decides to build it, you get to see it out in the world.
My favorite project was with ADT and that was definitely a very challenging but also very rewarding process. We were brought on in early 2019 to totally re-imagine the customer platform for ADTâs commercial system. Itâs basically a monitoring system for commercial space ownersâthink warehouses, storefronts, hospitalsâto track the security and health of their systems. Itâs a complex system, since you arenât just monitoring if something is armed or disarmed. You might need to see the humidity of a space, or whether fire alarms have gone off, as well as managing who has access to parts of the system remotely.
We were brought on to create the concept for the larger web experience, but then learned through research that customers really wanted something that was more useful on the go than a standard website. Something that could quickly add or remove a contact from accessing security features, or quickly lock or unlock a building. Those were quick actions that customers really wanted. In response to that research, we created a mobile app that serves as a streamlined, companion experience to the more complex and detailed desktop version. The entire process of reimagining an existing project was incredibly rewarding.
In the Environments track in Design, we were always tasked with thinking about the environment a user would find themselves in. You arenât just thinking about the one thing youâre designing, like a screen, youâre thinking about where that person is, what theyâre thinking, what issues have they experienced in the past that might impact how they think or operate in the future. Simply thinking about the larger context of a person is one of the most important thing I learned in school. You arenât just designing large physical immersive experiences or screens in an app, youâre designing for people.
If youâre interested in UX design in different contexts, Iâd recommend reaching out to different designers at different kinds of companies. Creative agencies like AKQA and more internal teams are wildly different, and itâs really important to get a first-hand perspective from someone of what their experience is like, and their day-to-day is like. People are generally very willing to talk to students and share their own experiences, and by talking to them you can hopefully make decisions based on what area feels right.
Even if you do all that research, itâs still a big guessing game on what exactly your future might look like. Be willing to not necessarily focus on your âdream jobâ and instead enjoying the twists and turns that life throws at you.