Simeon Fadahunsi, Summer Intern Product Designer

I studied computer science in school and while I have experience developing, I chose to be a designer because it allows me to experiment and keep on iterating. The whole concept of being a designer is to learn from your environment and users and incorporate such learnings into the work you do and this is what appealed to me the most about the career choice

Nothing is perfect at first, so we make constant improvements, this is the goal of design and also a major part of the design process here at Spotify.

As an Intern within my tribe, I helped the people that constantly find creative and easy ways for other people to upload their content into Spotify and the internal teams that manage the catalogue.

1. My work laptop.

2. Monitor: My first purchase after my house rent. Lifesaver.

3. Window/sticky note board: For to-dos and things I want to be reminded of daily.

4. PS4 and controller pad above: I play mostly first-shooter games, I like to think it keeps me sharp and bright.

5. My personal laptop and another notebook.

6. Water bottle: I think I drink too much water but, yeah, staying hydrated is good.

7. Sony WH-1000XM4: Music is important even while working.

8. Notebook: For taking notes during meetings and my thoughts/plans.

I guess the most recent challenge I have encountered as a designer would be my intern project, which was to create/standardize a component that already exists in internal products and then document what the usage rules of it would be moving forward.

First challenge was the fact that different variants already existed in several products, some of which are live. I beat this by first looking at our several product touchpoints to record what version existed there and then I continued by having meetings with the designers that created them to know what a standard version could be like in their opinion.

I went further by leading a craft session with my team to get feedback from everyone. In the session they replicated what existed in their product but this time with my component. After the session, I noticed that what I created wasn’t robust enough as they had to break it and rebuild to fully accommodate what they had.

This was progress to me, I incorporated some more changes and we now have version one of the component, which will be the foundation to more updates in the future.

As a designer that codes, I also wanted to do this during my internship, so I learned Typescript to get my components ready. The first 2 days were confusing but, yeah, I got the hang of it and developed it in 2 weeks.

Marvel Studios: Not one person but I get inspired watching a lot of movies because the world is just as real as our imaginations.

Visualize Value: Not a person either but I love how simply they visualize complex quotes to make you understand easily.

Tayo Aina: A Nigerian Lifestyle YouTuber that continues to show the world that Africa is indeed great. You should definitely check out some of his videos on Youtube.

First appreciation goes to everyone in my design team especially my Manager Lena who pushed me to be better and do what I love.

To my family and friends, I love you all and the sky is there for our taking. 💫💫

If you are interested in my work with African Designers, do check out DearDesigner as we document the strides of more African designers. Twitter here too.

Finally, treat everyone the way you would like to be treated.

I’m available online on Twitter where I rant and Instagram where I pass time.