Designer spotlight: Angela Fox deep dive
We dive deeper into Angela's experience breaking into tech, building communication skills, and designing for AI tooling.
Earlier this week, we heard from Angela Fox, Staff Product Designer at Snorkel AI, about her career progression in design which you can read here. This issue, we’re diving deeper into her experience
breaking into tech from city planning,
building communication skills, and
designing AI tools
Next week, I’ll be interviewing a Design Lead at Carta, an equity management platform.
Breaking into tech
I got into architecture first then went to city planning. I did city planning for a bit, outputting maps, design guidelines policy, and community engagement. Then I went into grad school and got an internship for a software, product design role.
What brought you to tech from city planning?
I always had a resistance to tech. In my grad program, I grew appreciation for the influence that digital services have in all aspects of industry, including the delivery of public services.
As I was looking into what to do, there were a couple of things. Some were in design infused facilitation techniques with public agencies. There’s a small industry providing consulting services to different municipalities. That was the path I thought I was going to do.
There’s also a more technical and future side when it comes to changing the decision making process. When you write a policy, it will result in guidelines you have to follow. If you look from that particular angle, you start seeing services that are disseminated through digital interactions.
If I were to harness product design, there's the opportunity to approach the delivery of public service in a more tangible way because then you’re tackling how people understand their access to services.
What projects did you present to land your first product design role?
I presented three projects, none of them were screen based.
One was an interactive project around the experience of going through a museum. The other one was a public policy hackathon project. That included a workflow on how to deliver a service, so there is a component of service design there. The third one was the beginning of a capstone project, where I talked about user research and problem scoping.
Even if you're not someone who has shiny, screen based interaction projects, you can still use your past experience. But you have to be very clear around the applicable and parallel part, and present it the way that a product designer would.
What advice can you give to people trying to transition into UX design?
I was very, very lucky. I don't know if every company has a group of open-minded people that will take a bet on someone. I also don’t want to give the false impression that if you do this, it will work.
Some people say, “I have crafted my message the best I can, but I'm just missing the opportunity”. For those people, I believe that you can craft your message better.
There’s always a way to craft your message a little bit better. It’s about decision making. It's always a two way street. If your story is compelling, most people will turn around and ask you questions.
Why should someone interested in public benefit work in tech?
There are two things between you and the value you provide to society.
One is your craft. If you have good craft, you can solve problems well. The other is, what problem are you solving? Are you solving problems for rich people to get richer? Are you solving problems for people, who currently have nothing, to have access to something?
Tech is a good place to get good at your first problem: solving problems well. There’s a lot more pressure and competition to do your craft well because that is the competitive advantage.
A lot of early career folks doing civic tech establish their ground craft in engineering, research, and design, through industries where those practices are much more mature. They apply that base knowledge to tackle specific problems in the public domain.
Building communication skills
Everyone communicates and people communicate in different styles. One thing that helps is radical clarity in communication. There is an objective clarity of laying out the facts. There's also the clarity around how people read the message.
What is good communication?
The KPI of communication is not you, it's them.
It's not, look at this beautiful email I’ve written. It cannot be better written. It means nothing until the other person gets what you are saying or does the things that you wanted them to do.
Sometimes, all it could take is going out for coffee with a person. When they come back, they like you a little bit more and could be in a better mood to read your email and make a decision.
What are some things someone can do to become a better communicator?
You can always cut down two thirds of the words that you use. There is a visceral reaction when people see a long Slack message. Even if everything is condensed, people still don't want to read it.
Diagrams can help, but try not to make them too complicated. When you make a complicated diagram, everyone thinks, wow that’s cool. No one reads it. There is a wow factor in visual communication that some people like, but the learning of complexity is compensated by their perceived expertise of you. That’s going to be very case-by-case.
As someone who is interested in building your communication skills, try to think about communication not just through words and emails. You have to be interested in knowing how the other side receives the message.
What are unique ways for designers to be strong communicators?
There’s a very small layer of interactions. I’m going to be talking to an engineer differently from a leader in the organization. I will pick and choose the level of detail. If I want to drive decision making faster, I will have the DRI call out the singular person who makes the call and set a deadline.
At a startup, you're working on multiple projects and one of the few designers. By nature, you absorb a little bit of everything more than everyone else. You have the unique opportunity to know there are five things going on while presenting to Team A. Because I know of projects B, C, D, E, I’m making decisions as a collective consideration. I can explain my rationale in the most concise way that not only builds my reputation, but also helps folks learn how to further have impact or decrease collaterals.
How did you build your communication skills?
I contribute that to working in city planning. It’s different than tech. In tech, users can come from anywhere. When you design for cities, you're probably going to see the same group of people. You know exactly who you're designing for. That necessitates you to really understand who they are and what their motivations are.
Shadowing some of the more senior planners or looking at the people who are driving these processes, sometimes I didn’t really agree with their approach. But it works. That really challenged me to tell stories in different ways, not just the way that I think that is great, but the way that is going to be effective.
Designing AI tools
Look at the craziness around machine learning right now and throughout the past like a year and a half. I have such privilege to learn alongside very, very intelligent machine learning engineers. Snorkel AI is the place I can exponentially grow my machine learning knowledge.
What does a designer for AI tools do?
There’s a lot of talk around AI and design. Most of the time it’s about communicating AI generated results to users in a way that's ethical and doesn't involve dark patterns.
In Snorkel AI, the question is the ethics around the building of the machine learning itself.
What do you work on at Snorkel AI?
Right now, Snorkel, like every other machine learning company, is reorienting their product strategy to a world that utilizes foundation models. It impacts my day-to-day work to learn where they are and how they are going to impact our company, our business model, our customers.
As a product designer, what is my personal point of view in making people use these tools? There is always an ethical layer. Is that the right thing to do? How do I keep my working partners accountable so the service we provide is not something that can result in biases? That can be many layers: the models that we use, whether they are off the shelf or in-house, the way we educate our customers, who the customers are and what their use case is, how much influence that we have over them, all the way to the very small interaction design.
If I design something this way, am I making it too easy for them? If I'm showing you where the errors are, am I representing the information fairly or am I conceding too much to UX simplicity over the nuances?
Right now, my biggest priority is understanding the technical background, but also identifying the opportunities where I should be holding myself accountable.
How does a background in AI tooling support your career intentions?
There are a lot of people who appreciate the understanding of core knowledge. That could be a very interesting competitive advantage.
At Snorkel AI, I get to learn more about AI and machine learning. Then if I were to go back to government, I will have insight into its impact to governmental practices and applying specific ethics to decision making.
I'm not a technical person. It's an interesting exercise to see how much I can push my technical understanding and use that to influence my product design decision making.
This wraps up our designer spotlight with Angela Fox. I hope you enjoyed hearing her candid take about working in tech as much as I have.
Hear more from Angela’s design work in AI at Snorkel AI’s conference, The Future of Data-Centric AI 2023. You can also find her on LinkedIn and ADPList.
For new designers, you can access Angela’s free collection of design resources here.