Behind the Screens: A Conversation with Our Product Designer
For the past 2 years, Pavlina has been our UI/UX Designer, crafting the appearance of our self-storage software.
Can you walk us through how a new feature comes to life from a design perspective?
Our design process is highly collaborative. It starts with our product manager conducting extensive research through user interviews and stakeholder discussions to understand needs and requirements. This helps validate our assumptions and ensures we’re solving real problems.
After the initial research phase, I begin exploring various solutions through sketches, wireframes, and prototypes. Then I draft multiple design options and iterate on them to find the most promising directions.
These design concepts then go through technical review sessions with our development team. During these reviews, developers provide useful insights about technical feasibility, helping us refine the designs to ensure they’re not just user-friendly, but also technically viable to implement.
How do you ensure that features truly meet user needs?
Our team maintains continuous contact with self-storage operators – both existing Kinnovis customers and potential ones. Through user interviews and testing, we create detailed experience maps that help us better understand the opportunity space and potential solutions. This approach helps us avoid developing features that users don’t find valuable, ultimately saving development costs and ensuring we deliver meaningful solutions.
What's your collaboration process with other teams?
Design at Kinnovis is truly a team effort. I work hand-in-hand with our product manager, engineers, and other stakeholders throughout the process. Engineers are particularly valuable partners in our discovery process, as they bring unique technical insights that complement our design perspective.
How do you maintain consistency across the product?
We maintain a comprehensive design system and focus heavily on user experience within it. Every new feature goes through multiple design iterations and review cycles in Figma – our collaborative design tool that allows the whole team to add feedback and notes as comments. We can also easily refer to and learn from previous design solutions in our library. This helps us experiment with different drafts together and ensures we’re delivering the best possible experience.
What's the most rewarding part of your role?
The most rewarding aspect is seeing how our careful attention to design directly impacts user satisfaction. In fact, feedback shows our user experience is one of the biggest reasons why customers choose Kinnovis! This validates our design-first approach and shows that investing in thoughtful, user-centered design really pays off. When we receive feedback from customers about how intuitive and pleasant our interface is to use, it reinforces our commitment to excellence in design.
And when we can validate that a feature we’ve designed truly solves a user’s problem and makes their work easier, that’s when we know we’ve succeeded in our mission. It’s particularly gratifying to see how our design choices benefit our users, making their daily operations more efficient and enjoyable.
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