Events

Welcome social for Product Classroom students to get to know each other! This is a chance to play some fun games and meet the admin team + other students :)

Hosted by Christine, Carolina, and Sanjana

Product Classroom Social 🥳 (Session 1)

Product Classroom Social 🥳 (Session 2)

Guest Lecture by Ehsan Noursalehi, Senior Product Designer @ Samsara (

Ehsan believes that designers and technologists have a responsibility to shape the future of interfaces into something responsible. He will take a historical look at interfaces to build an understanding of how they allow us to utilize information in such powerful ways that they can fundamentally change what it means to be human.

Ehsan Noursalehi is an Iranian American interface designer who has helped more than 12 hardware products get to market. He is the author of Why Do We Interface? (

http://www.everyonedeservesgreatdesign.com/

). He grew up in the Chicagoland area and now lives and works in San Francisco.

This guest lecture is part of Product Classroom Week 1: Intro to Product Design, the first week in a 13-week design curriculum. Product Classroom is a remote classroom for students self-learning product design. Learn more: 

https://www.notion.so/Product-Classroom-c53fe393f18a4ed6815c9191b6d7114e

Why Do We Interface

Typographic hierarchy is an often underrated yet foundational element of well designed digital products. In this lecture we'll cover the importance of hierarchy in user experience and how to determine and establish visual hierarchy within the products you design. There will also be follow up exercises that will allow you to experiment and test out different tools for creating hierarchy on a page. By understanding hierarchy as it applies to words, you’ll soon be able to apply the same thinking to designing more complex UI elements and features.

Note: We will have a 30m Q&A session with Sabrina after her talk!

Sabrina Majeed is currently a design manager at GitHub. Previously she managed product design teams at BuzzFeed, and designed native mobile apps for Venmo and Intuit. When she's not thinking about user experience for digital products, she enjoys thinking about hospitality design and how to create great experiences for people in the physical world - which she documents on her travel blog, The Innbox (

Hierarchy: the basic building block of design

What problems need solving? Why are those problems the right ones to work on? How do we break them down into solvable chunks? In this lecture, we'll discuss the problem space: a zone designers spend a lot of their time in. We'll dig into how to navigate this space, different ways of seeing problems, and when to know you're ready to move towards the solution space.

Jackson Mohsenin is a product designer based in SF. He recently spent six years at Quora where he managed designers, ran core parts of company strategy, and explored a lot of problem spaces along the way. Now he's working on personal projects and helping early-stage startups with design and strategy.

Exploring the Problem Space

Learning a Screen Reader is an excellent introduction to web accessibility and assistive technologies. It's also a requirement when building, designing, and testing accessible websites because current automated tooling can only catch around 30% of accessibility issues

. Plus, it's mind-expanding to experience something you think you understand, a website, in a completely novel way. (This session is interactive, please bring a Windows or OS X computer with Chrome or Safari installed.) 

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/24/what-we-found-when-we-tested-tools-on-the-worlds-least-accessible-webpage/

Ruben Niculcea is a Senior Software Engineer/Web Accessiblity Engineer at Webflow. There, he does a mix of advocacy, internal training and culture forming, and building accessibility tooling, attempting to fix the accessibility issues we have accumulated.

Interactive Screen Reader Introduction to Web Accessibility

By the end of this workshop you’ll have the spidey sense to know which user research should result in changes and which user research should be ignored. You’ll be a faster and more impactful designer.

Please note that this is a 2-part interactive workshop and by signing up, you are committing to attending both sessions! Register for the second session here: 

Ryan is a designer focused on play, learning, and technology. He is currently at Google ATAP where he does research and prototyping of spatial / nonverbal / ambient computing. He is also the creator of FlipTales, a roleplaying game which was funded on Kickstarter. Before that, he was a product designer at littleBits.

FrankenApp: Incorporating User Feedback without Losing Your Product’s Soul - Part 1 of 2

We’ll be discussing how to use systems thinking as a research method and how design can be seen as a practice of modifying systems and considering its ethical implications.

Rachel is a UX designer demystifying EVs at ChargePoint. Previously, she was delivering data science tools at Tulco Labs and studying communication design at Carnegie Mellon. In her practice, she aims to explore how value is defined, quantified, and understood through the designed artifacts we interact with.

Systems Thinking in Design

We tweet, we like, and we share— but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? As digital platforms increasingly become a lifeline to stay connected, Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization by exposing what’s hiding on the other side of your screen.

This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.

Movie Night: The Social Dilemma

Please note that this is a 2-part interactive workshop and by signing up, you are committing to attending both sessions!

FrankenApp: Incorporating User Feedback without Losing Your Product’s Soul - Part 2 of 2

We've all seen what happens when apps are designed for "impact" or "growth" and worry about how it impacts society later *cough* facebook *cough*. What happens when you start from social values as square one? And how do you actually do that? In this workshop you'll learn how to get started on the right foot towards values-aligned impact with your app.

This workshop will be completely interactive. We'll work through three worksheets together: Value refinement, hard-to-dos, and space jamming. I'll cover some concepts from Game Design that apply well to designing apps for social impact.

By the end of the workshop participants will have a handful of ideas for apps that will make social impact based on their values.

Prior to coming to this workshop, please come in with a couple social issues that you care about.

The Social Solution - Designing Apps with Social Values in Mind on Day One

The talk is about targeting problem areas, using research results to form your design ideas. The approach includes user journey mapping, pain point definition, ‘what-if’ brainstorming, and creation of multiple potential design directions. We will also cover the explicit design processes that you will need to open up your solutions and have a good foundation for your low-fidelity design directions.

May Sun is an award-winning designer raised in China and currently living in New York City. She is a senior product designer at Goldman Sachs.

Ideation: The Theory and Practice

As product designers, we're responsible for creating purposeful outcomes for our users, which in turn require product strategy: Identifying the goal you want to achieve, articulating how you plan to get there, and defining the role design plays in it all. In this session, we'll look at what makes up an effective product strategy and how to incorporate it into your design process.

Jenn Julian is a product designer currently designing for privacy at Instagram, where she helps people create the safest environment possible for themselves. Previously, she led design for Credit Karma's international businesses, including the UK and Canada. She grew up outside Philadelphia, began working in Berlin, and is now based in SF, where she enjoys spending time away from screens whenever possible.

Product Strategy Basics

Given how many students in the Product Classroom are new to design, we will talk fundamentals in this session. We will introduce some rules to organize interface elements, jump from low to high fidelity prototypes, and if there is time, some practical tips to work with type, color, and grids.

Marcelino Llano, Product Designer @ BeBanjo

Please note: This session will not be recorded!

Visual Design Foundations

No one wants to create a bad product. This case study explores the catastrophic launch of Gutenberg, a new content editing experience for WordPress. We'll be looking at the factors and systems that led to this failure, what makes a design "bad," and how to avoid your tragic design.

Nic Bertino is a 20 year veteran of digital design. Before becoming a Director of User Experience at AppFolio, Nic worked in a number of industries ranging from education to eCommerce. Nic is also an open source contributor, working with projects to improve accessibility and design. Outside of work, Nic writes about disco, makes robot noises on synthesizers, and loves long motorcycle trips.

Your Tragic Design

Products and services continuously collect information about us, from personal details like our name or birthday to our location or how frequently we log in. As consumers and citizens we have rights regarding what data is collected and how it's used. As designers, we have a responsibility to our users to uphold these rights and defend their privacy. We'll discuss what those rights are and how to prioritize privacy into your design work.