Ana Feréns, an established designer based in Stockholm, Sweden considers herself fortunate to have discovered her calling in UX + UI Design. Her insatiable curiosity helped her build a credible UX/UI portfolio.
She has since worked with notable companies like Ogilvy and Ubisoft. She credits her achievements to her own curiosity to explore the unknown with the outstanding teams and people she was working with.
“In my view, the more I’m passionate about something, the more I want to explore. The key to develop your passion in this field is to understand that there are so many things you don’t know but don’t feel frightened to face them.”
She also has a background in architecture and her experience helped her in furthering her profession as a designer. She explained that architecture emphasises the value of accepting responsibility for one’s own decisions and the importance of modifying user interaction patterns to create great UX experience (one example is space zoning).
“In architecture, you will understand that everything you did has consequences.”
So when she started off as a visual designer and taking on the role of product design, she understands that improving the overall user experience is paramount to a successful product design. This can be achieved through testing, listening, talking and constantly gathering user feedback. They provide the insights that allow designers to better understand why and how a product is used.
“Testing your decisions and getting feedback could be stressful, hurt your confidence but it’s far more useful for you as a designer and could bring far more value to the whole product at all.”
Ana believes that collaborating with a great team will help produce great product design and that this should be the first rule of design. Her most recent collaborative works highlight the value and importance of collaboration and teamwork.
CACTUS STORE E-commerce
CACTUS STORE is not a typical retail store. We’d like to define it as Experience Store. This project is dedicated to Travis Scott, his sense of fashion, incredible and recognizable visual and music styles. The owners of this store gathered all available rare items related to Travis Scott’s art and style.
All of the items presented in the store are available for buying: vinyl music, fashion items etc. Also, the owners are huge fans of Travis, so for their clients, they provided an extra option named – TOUR. By ordering the TOUR for one of the current Travis Scott’s shows fans are getting the tour fan package: tickets for the show, flight tickets and hotel booking organized by Cactus Store.
REBULK App
REBULK is a renaming application. This app allows you to easily rename/remove the scope of files/folders in a few clicks. Add date/time stamps, replace numbers, insert text, convert case, add auto-numbers, process folders and sub-folders.
Extremely useful for professional photographers, photography lovers or for someone who simply struggles from a regular files mess and wants to deal with chaos in a system. In this case, we try to face all of the design stages: starting from user values, research analysis, user needs from the interviews, lo-fi wireframes, animation behaviour, etc.
The main solution that we provided for this app is the filtered category structure. So that’s why our regular user has the ability to rename the scope of files, literally, in 3-5 clicks.
GUMP Application
“COVID-19 is changing the way we live and work. Consumers are relying more on digital products and services. User experience behaviors are also evolving especially in the online shopping, gaming and new social media platforms (for example one of the most hyped app of the recent months is Clubhouse).”
Future designers and the future of digital product design
If you’re thinking about a career in UX + UI design, Ana suggests investing your time in reading and enrolling into a design college to gain the knowledge needed to be a successful designer.
According to Ana, you will be taught by industry experts in college. Hence, be able to apply the know-how of your knowledge in this field much faster than learning and experimenting by yourself. You will also have the opportunity to work in teams and be able to examine UX/UI challenges more specifically and from different angles as a result from the exposure.
To learn more about Ana’s work and more of her portfolio, connect with her at anaferens.com and her Behance page.