Kiril Karov
UX Designer and Editor specialising in Conversational Design
2019 The Next Web & Accenture's Top 500 digital talents with outstanding digital accomplishments in The Netherlands
2 years of working experience
Internships at Clockwork, Amsterdam and Living Map Company, Bath
UXD Editor for the Hague University that promotes the field in the Netherlands
Experience with building Google Actions using Dialogflow
Experience with the Scrum methodology
University projects for Zuiderpark Sportcampus, TomTom, CoolBlue
Works
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Skills & Tools
Research
Prototyping
Wireframing
Sketch
Dialogflow
Figma
Words
"Think about design even when you are not working" - Interview with Adriaan Oudijk, a UX Designer at Vodafone Ziggo
UXD is not just about designing beautiful things, it is about designing beautiful things for people. Customer experience is focusing on touch points, both digital and nondigital. You want to create meaningful contact with the customer.
"A designer with coding knowledge can design better interfaces" - Interview with Tim van den Bosch
In my experience a designer with coding knowledge can design better interfaces. When you know the materials and how they fit together, your basic design skills are more tuned to the medium. Having worked with HTML and CSS you can form an overview of the possibilities of the building blocks.
Takeaways from UX Insight conference at de Fabrique, Utrecht - 8th March, 2018
I volunteered at the annual UX Insight conference about User Research held at Utrecht. Speakers that delivered speeches worked for companies like Google and WeWork.
Key takeaways from the 8 hours event:
Don't use the word 'research', use "customer learning" instead.
Turn data into numbers: for example, when users leave, show how much money company loses per user.
Before doing research ask what they will do with it and then agree on the project.
Ask for previous company research even if they have forgotten they have already conducted.
Use Atomic Nuggets as reports rather than full reports, that means add ideas and make it visible so anyone can build reports based on them.
As a researcher, you will always have your own bias!
Psychology
Feedback nudge - for example, a bench could be placed at a bus stop to measure person's weight before buying the product displayed on the ad next to him.
"Watching eyes" makes people stay in the norms of behavior.
An essay: Should human micro-chipping be made mandatory?
One sphere of the human life that will be affected by compulsory microchipping would be medicine. The biggest benefit of having the microchip would lie in identification of patients who might be taken to emergency rooms unconscious or incapable of communicating their identity to caregivers after an accident
has occurred. By scanning the chip, the caregivers would see patient’s balance, and health status concerning previous disease and allergies.
Microsoft Display Dock - ranking the device according to UX Usability factors
Microsoft Display Dock, a small gadget that enables the function Continuum, could finally manifest user’s long time goal of using a smartphone as a PC. The product offers the ability to connect full- sized keyboard, mouse and speakers to your smartphone through the use of ports, making it a powerful portable hub.
Usability
Ease of use - Easy set-up of the device, requiring to merely connect the phone to the Display Dock through USB-C cable on the one side, and add numerous peripherals on the other.
Effectiveness - Fails to be achieved in a way that the phone currently doesn’t have advanced chips, so that heavy application like Adobe Photoshop won’t run on our small handset.
Learnability - Present are the typical ports you will find on any laptop or PC nowadays.
Engagement
Aesthetics - a sleek and clean design, with just a single subtle Microsoft logo on the top.
Adaptivity- Adapting to different screen sizes, contributing to a seamless transition.
Meaningful
Autonomy- freedom to transform the device through the connection of external peripherals to one’s liking so as to make the most use of it.
Popularity- the idea to make your smartphone a fully compatible PC has been revolving around for over 20 years.
Stimulation- the Display Dock merely transfers information to and from the smartphone.
Takeaways from my internship at Living Map Company
Simplicity and consistency - two keywords my mentor, Jean-Christophe Tabary at my first internship company Living Map used to frequently repeat. His most used and my favorite quote is “Keep it simple”. To achieve simplicity, he taught me to use more white space, light background, subtle lines and sans-serif fonts such as Helvetica Niue and Verdana which therefore I used most in my designs and documentation.
To achieve consistency, he always nudged me to use one maximum two font families, create artboards of same sizes and as close to A3 paper as possible so it is readable when printed out and reviewed by him or other designers, use shared text styles in Sketch and easily update them afterwards, same colors for more consistency when trying to create artboards in one sketch documents so I can easily compare them, and to reuse symbols instead of copying and pasting them from one document to another.
My Story
A Google (voice) Action - final presentation at Clockwork's headquarters
Conversation Design graduation project with a 4-month duration at Clockwork, The Netherlands
Meeting my hero - Jake Knapp
UX Insight Conference, 2018, Utrecht, The Netherlands
World Scholar's Cup competition held in Singapore and The U.S.
Bath, South West England
Travel
"Interviewing and volunteering at UX events around the Netherlands is what inspires me the most! I see great potential in connecting UX professionals with UX students to learn from each other."
"I firmly support the notion that companies should hold more discussions on AI ethics. I try to incorporate my moral values into all of my design decisions. As a UX Designer and tech enthusiast myself, I keep on innovating in the field of Conversation Design, however I always keep in mind that the technology I pioneer should serve humanity and have a positive impact on our society. I openly discuss the ethical implications of the projects I embark on with my team. Our crave for innovation should never undermine our code of ethics."