A Coffee a Day, for 5 days — Day 1 with Teunis Vorsteveld
By: Dakarai Turner
Tags: Freelancing, UX, Agency, Bootcamp, Informational Interview

Coffee cup illustration taken from: Vecteezy.com

“A Coffee a Day, for 5 days” will feature a new discussion each day with a different UX professional. The goal is to understand their story and journey into the field, receive any advice and gems they can share for recent grads and junior designers such as myself, and receive feedback on my killer portfolio which can be found here: https://www.callmedak.com

Today, I’m sitting down with Teunis Vorsteveld, a friend of mine and former co-worker from when I worked as an account executive. You can read my first Medium article here detailing why I made the career pivot into design.

Teunis describes himself as a functional thinker that tries to connect people through technology. He is a UX designer, who has almost 10 years of experience working in an agency environment and will soon be transitioning into a freelancer role.

Let’s jump right in. I started by asking questions to learn more about Teunis as a designer and his journey.

D: Can you describe your journey towards the UX field? How did it start and what’s next for you?

T: I started as a production designer when I left school. I did a few creative services for a bunch of years and settled as a production designer. It really played into my attention to detail, and allowed me to focus on a project from beginning to end… to make it perfect. I did that for so long, I started to feel like I needed something else.

I was fortunate that some of the people coming into john st (advertising agency), through the studio department were creative developers and UX thinkers that were starting to make me aware of what UX was. I took a one-week intro-course to UX at Akendi. We did a UI class, a psychology class and others. A lot of the teachers were actually psychologists, so my first understanding of what UX was, was understanding people’s behaviour. I then brought that knowledge back to john st. Within the studio we were building iPad apps for sales reps within healthcare who would talk to doctors. What I didn’t realize was while I was working on those I was already thinking about the experience and doing some UI design. I was putting together the actual flow and figuring out how people were going to use this app on the iPad. I didn’t realize I was doing it until I found out what it was.

I got lucky when john st started a new team called the Digital ignition Unit (DIU). I reached out to the right people and they took me on. I jumped on their team and it was my first foray into what UX design could be.

What’s next for me is a lifestyle change and getting back into freelance. I’ll remain in UX at some capacity because I love it. However, going freelance allows me to spend time at home because I have a young son. After the summer when my son goes back to school I’ll look at my options and consider going back into full time within the tech industry, but not necessarily advertising. I want to build products that we can iterate and work on and make better overtime. I want to keep building!

D: What led you towards agency side vs being an in-house UX designer?

T: I never knew about going in-house until some time after my first course. I started going to a lot of presentations, conferences, and a lot of talks. And that’s when I learned the different dynamic between the two. Now that I can make a decision, I’m leaning towards the in-house side.

One thing for me would be that you’re working on one client. You can focus all your attention on that one client. Even if it’s different projects within the one client, you’re still working on one whole experience. Also, it’s easier to get sign-off with a client, you can move onto things quicker, and timelines are more efficient as well.

D: Were there any challenges you faced early in your UX career? How did you overcome them?

T: There’s a lot of challenges. UX is huge! There’s a lot to do within the space. Understanding what the role is and trying to define it was very difficult. So when I learned about what my role could be, it felt large. The agency need was kind of defining the “unicorn”. The person that does everything from the UX research through visual design and up to dev, with testing after that.

Getting over that challenge was learning more about the methodologies. Not every project requires every single step. You can focus on which methodology to use and focus on what you’re strong at, and gain the right insights from there.

D: What led you to choose going to a “UX bootcamp” at this stage of your career?

T: I was in the field for two years on the agency side and there was never a digital process established for how we do work from beginning to end. Learning about the process was important to me. The way the course at Miami Ad School was structured was going through the UX methodology from beginning to end in a structural and linear way. That was the thinking I wanted to take back.

Having done that course I could go back and start doing work. Based on the briefs that I had and the timelines, I could start figuring out which methodologies would apply and what approach I should first with, if any, and then just get work done. It was more, how do I work in an environment that doesn’t have a process that I can run with on my own until something was established.

Taking what I learned back to the agency was a challenge. We were starting to define what our UX process would be and it wasn’t necessarily the same as what I had learned in school. I had to adapt quickly because the process is being defined but I still had to get work done.