How I Got Here: Up’s Principal Product Designer on finding a seat at the table
WORDS BY DAISY HENRY
“Design is a choose-your-own-adventure career. There are so many variations of what a designer does.”
Have you ever stalked someone on LinkedIn and wondered how on earth they managed to land that wildly impressive job? While the internet and social media might have us believe that our ideal job is a mere pipe dream, the individuals who have these jobs were, believe it or not, in the same position once, fantasising over someone else’s seemingly unattainable job.
But behind the awe-inspiring titles and the fancy work events lies a heck of a lot of hard work. So what lessons have been learnt and what skills have proved invaluable in getting them from daydreaming about success to actually being at the top of their industry?
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Welcome to How I Got Here, where we talk to women who are killing it in their respective fields about how they landed their awe-inspiring jobs, exploring the peaks and pits, the failures and the wins, and most importantly the knowledge, advice and practical tips they’ve gleaned along the way.
This week we speak with Georgia Price-Bell, a Principal Product Designer at Up, a digital Australian bank that’s rethinking the banking experience. Growing up, Georgia always gravitated towards design and often used drawing as a problem-solving tool. After being exposed to different fields at university, she landed on product design and user experience (UX) design.
In the early years of Georgia’s career, she often found it hard to be heard and respected as a young, female designer. Now at Up, she has the most “creative freedom” she’s ever had. Below, Georgia speaks on creativity, collaboration and the importance of effectively communicating your ideas.
What do you do and what’s your official job title?
I’m Georgia and I’m a Principal Product Designer at Up, an Aussie digital bank. I’m part of the product team and we design features and experiences for our app that help young Australians take control of their money and improve their relationship with it.
Take us back to when you were first starting out. Did you study to get into your chosen field, or did you start out with an internship/entry level role and climb the ladder? Tell us the story.
I gravitated towards design at uni, I think it’s because I’ve always been designing – even before I really knew what it was. As a kid I would draw furniture, clothes and objects to try and solve a problem I had or saw something that could be better. Specifically, I studied communication design, with a focus on digital design, motion design, and film and animation.
I started my degree very determined about a career in film – I saw myself in production design, animation, or cinematography. The great thing about my time at uni though was the exposure to many design fields and the opportunity to explore them. This helped me realise that what I cared most about in design was making things that people used to make their lives easier.
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This steered me towards product design and UX design, which had all the fun parts of visually designing how websites and apps looked, but also had the complex problem-solving parts of conducting research, analysing data and understanding psychology to help shape how something should work too.
Once I found product design, my career has been pretty straightforward from there. I began working part-time in design during my final year of uni. I found an app development agency that was looking for a graduate designer and convinced them to take me on while I was finishing my last semester and doing freelance web design for small businesses.
After I graduated I continued working agency-side for a while. It was an amazing experience working with so many different clients, products, and problems. A lot of our clients were in health, education, and finance, and I realised how big the opportunity to help in these industries was. So I made the switch to work in-house and have worked on finance apps ever since.
What challenges/hurdles have you faced getting to where you are now? Can you tell us about one in particular?
Earlier in my career a regular hurdle for me was fighting for a seat at the table. Sometimes it was to be heard and respected as a young designer presenting to a board of directors. Sometimes it was for the importance of design in organisations that don’t understand why you’re there. Sometimes it was for equality in a room where you’re the only woman.
Although these challenges are not unique to being a product designer, learning how to navigate different audiences and refining how you talk about your work is an essential part of becoming a good designer. It’s not always about how good your designs are.
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What do you want people to know about your industry/your role?
Design is a choose-your-own-adventure career. There are so many variations of what a designer does, even just within tech, so you can find or create something that suits your interests and strengths. You can be a designer that’s focused on research and strategy and not create a single screen, or you can be fully into the craft side of things designing an interaction that’s one part of a larger whole.
You can be a systems designer that helps other designers, or a content designer that sets the tone and personality of a product, or a brand designer to add soul inside and outside of a product. Or you can be a bit of everything, which is how we do it at Up!
What’s the best part about your role?
Wrangling big problems into simple and easy experiences, celebrating small moments and making them something special, seeing what’s in my head come to life, and turning something that would normally be a chore for customers into something they love doing. Also getting to do all that alongside very smart and talented people and watching ideas improve and evolve as each person adds their thoughts – it’s very good to watch.
What would surprise people about your role?
When I told other designers that I was going to work for a bank so that I could “design fun and cool stuff”, it seemed like a bit of an oxymoron. But somehow while working at a bank of all places, I have the most creative freedom and power to make a difference than I’ve ever had.
Features like Hi-Fi for example, where I got to take an experience that in its simplest form is about reflecting on your relationship with money and building a system to help you manage your bills and save for the future, and turned it into an audio, visual, and haptic experience. Or Maybuy, where in its basic form it’s a savings account, but I created an experience that reflects the way we shop online and the constant internal debate about what we should or shouldn’t spend our money on.
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What skills have served you well in your industry?
A balance of passion, humility, and good collaboration. Genuinely caring about what, how, and why I do what I do has made me the designer I am today. I just want to design good stuff that I’m proud of, so that passion helps me work hard and keep the bar high. But passion without humility can sometimes seem inconsiderate, and without good collaboration you’re missing out on so many opportunities to evolve your idea and you risk people misunderstanding what you’re trying to achieve.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to be in a role like yours one day?
Being a good product designer isn’t just perfecting the craft of design, understanding business goals and articulating why your problem is worth solving is so important. Then explaining how your design addresses that problem is key, and making sure your explanation suits your audience will help advance your designs more than anything else will. Your designs won’t always speak for themselves, so until you can also tell a good story to the right people your designing isn’t done!
What about a practical tip?
Share early, share often.
Read the rest of the How I Got Here series here.
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