MayaBruck

Maya Bruck is a product designer at Etsy who has been designing for the web for over ten years.

“Being a product designer at Etsy is a ton of fun,” said Maya. “I get to be involved in almost every phase of the product development process, from research to design to front-end development.”

When she joined Etsy though, it was the first time she had the chance to start writing and pushing code. “I can now tweak designs in the browser to my heart’s content and prototype new flows using Etsy’s style guide,” said Maya. “It’s been a game-changing experience.”

We caught up with her in the meantime to get to know her a bit better.

Tell us a bit about your work.

I can’t tell you much about the project I’m working on at Etsy at the moment, but a past project I’m proud of is a marketing site I designed for the biotech startup Emerald Cloud Lab.

Emerald had only seven weeks to get their site up when they approached the consulting company where I worked. Typically, we wouldn’t take clients with such short timelines, but we found both Emerald’s founders and the project super compelling. The tight timeline also gave me an opportunity to test and validate a more collaborative process for our team. Thanks to the new approach we were able to deliver a rich, interactive site on budget and launch a day before the client’s deadline. The site was very well-received and helped Emerald close a major round of funding. I’ll be sharing some of the learnings from that project in my talk.

Where do you find inspiration?

A few of my go-tos:

  • Little Big Details is a curated collection of the thoughtful details that make an interface or product a pleasure to use. There are always many insights to be had here.
  • If I’m looking for pure design-y goodness (aka more form than function) I like Site Inspire.
  • When I’m designing mobile apps (especially for ios), I look at UX Archive. They’ve got a great collection of user flows from major apps for typical tasks like onboarding, signing up, purchasing, etc.

Why should people come to your session at Spotlight UX?

I’ll be sharing tips and techniques that can make your workflow more efficient, collaborative, and fun. Designing and building stuff for the web is complicated — your process should support your team, not get in your way.

One fun question: what’s your favourite travel destination?

I grew up in Vancouver, BC and spent almost every summer on the islands. I’ve done a lot of international travel, but nothing tops Vancouver Island for me. It’s my soul place.

You can find Maya on Twitter @mayabruck and on Instagram, and at FITC Spotlight UX this September 17th, 2016 in Toronto!

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