<aside> 💡 Ryan Azucena is a UX Design Manager at DreamBox Learning. He originally majored in Graphic Design and gradually entered into the UX industry. Let’s learn about what he is doing for his job and what some advice he has is!
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What is your role in the team?
I lead the whole UX team and help support individual designers in the team. I used to be a UX designer too, but my job now is less of doing the actual design but more of supporting UX designers. I am also responsible for recruiting new UX designers—reviewing portfolios and interviewing applicants.
How is the collaboration with your team like?
We mainly use Slack for communication with different channels. We work remotely and each designer owns one or more projects. Every week we have design team meetings, and we have meetings specifically for UX design every two weeks. There are a bunch of different forms for us to collaborate.
What is one project that your team is working on?
DreamBox Learning is a platform for K-8 and K-12 math and literacy learning. It can be used and downloaded by individual or schools can purchase it. The main project that our team is currently working on is collaboratively do curriculum design with our internal educating staff and engineers for, for example, algebra class for middle schoolers. We design the courses for students to take, and teachers can keep track of the data to see students’ performances.
What are some challenges that you face during work?
One challenge is that teaching on a digital platform can be really different from teaching in a physical classroom. For instance, how you teach algebra using pencils and paper versus teaching it with digital software tools. It is more about how we can teach the content through interaction design, animation, scaffolding, etc.
Also, designing remotely is pretty difficult. I used to use whiteboard in office to design and collaboratively work in person.
How did you enter the UX industry?
I was originally trained in graphic design, learning typography, color theory, layout, etc. After graduating, I worked for a startup and I mainly worked on mobile apps and designed some iOS and Android applications. Now I have been working at DreamBox for six years now, working on mobile, desktop responsive, and helping grow the UX team.