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Lydia is a French product designer with over 15 years experience. She is currently based in the USA after spending 10 years in Berlin.
During her career, she worked for various industries and organizations, from health tech to e-commerce, and from small startups to tech giants. She alternated roles in design management and as an Individual Contributor, leading the end-to-end product design experience and product strategy, while optimizing collaboration and processes for cross-discipline teams. Lydia is currently Staff Product Designer at Squarespace, NY.
Her passion is to improve people’s lives through design: understand their needs and motivations and reflect that knowledge into digital products, making a meaningful impact on their lives. Lydia sees interaction design as a continuous conversation with users, where her role is to serve them by making the conversation fluid, accessible, relevant and frictionless.
She considers every day as an opportunity to learn, grow and help others to grow.
When did you know that this career is what you wanted to do?
I have always been attracted to various forms of “design” or “art”, at least as long as I can remember. As a child, I spent countless hours drawing, building things and creating stories. I oriented myself toward fine arts at first, then graphic design and finally digital design (now product design). I feel it was a natural progression for me.
What’s one thing you wish you knew when you first started your career?
When I first started my career, I quickly realized that this industry is fast paced and continually evolving in terms of approaches, tools, platforms, and available technologies. Shortly after I graduated, the first smartphones and tablets arrived in Europe, opening a new world of possibilities in terms of design, but also reinforcing the need for established principles around people / computer interactions when designing for such platforms. This was a pivot for me, and introduced something radically different from the print and illustration-oriented work I had been doing thus far, but I embraced it with as much excitement and curiosity as possible. Since then I have had multiple pivots and learning moments in my career. I think this is the nature of our industry. So, being curious, eager to learn and resilient is probably the advice I would give to my younger self.
How do you unwind from work mode?
As a digital product designer and full time remote employee, I spend a lot of time indoors and in front of screens, so I’m naturally drawn to non-digital activities when I feel I need to unwind from work. I recently moved to the east coast and really enjoyed exploring my surroundings, especially the beautiful nature around me. If I feel more like staying at home, I found that simply reading a good fiction book in a cozy setup helps me to relax after a busy day at work.
How do you organize your mobile apps?
It used to be by color, then theme… But I have too many apps to make it work now so I switched it around: usage frequency > theme > color.
What other areas of creativity are you interested in exploring?
There are adjacent disciplines I have always had a strong interest in, like typography (I would love to learn and practice more and maybe try creating a new font one day), or illustration (I have been doing illustration both professionally and for passion projects for many years, especially at the beginning of my career, but I have struggled to find the time over the past years…).
What is your evaluation process for projects at the Davey Awards this year?
When evaluating a project, I take in to account the following: creative dimension of the entry and if it is adding to / revisiting the industry standards in an innovative way that is yet familiar and intuitive to users – accessibility, readability and usability, especially for interactive projects (web or mobile) – general layout, typography and spacing and how this is used to convey a clear hierarchy of information, cohesiveness and a clear message while expressing a brand and tone of voice – and of course, how well this project is actually serving its users / viewers, answering their needs and addressing their pain points.