Interview with Danial Siddiki from United States

I started creating apps as an iOS software engineer. Soon, I realized that my favorite part of app creation is design so I started to focus on designing interfaces in Adobe Photoshop. I later found my first job at a design agency, Cuberto, and then worked as a product designer in a B2C education company.

I'm a founding product designer at Truv, a B2B fintech startup. Since joining I've been working on making income and employment verifications easier for consumers via payroll providers. This experience helped me to design in new fields working closely with customers. Also, I made a design system that helps Truv designers create consistent designs across all products!

Creativity for me is the skill of going beyond the limits by creating innovative things that will be used by people and keeping in mind of technical limitations.

I consider design to be truly creative when the creator introduces a novel and unique creation that diverges from anything seen or experienced before.

I use the double diamond principle to make the design process more rigorous. The process starts with understanding the current state of the problem by conducting user interviews, surveys, and researching competitors. Then, I accumulate the information gathered to define personas and build a customer journey map to align with stakeholders.

Once the main scope was defined, I began wire-framing, iterating, and designing the final solution. The final design includes the ecosystem design system, syncing with engineers and stakeholders.

My favorite part of the creative process is designing the final visuals as this is what people will see: simple and elegant design with a lot of work behind the scene.

My creative approach is characterized by a blend of minimalism, data-driven decision-making, and the art of capturing emotions.

Certainly, I believe the standard of visual design in my country is notably high. Many software products were developed after models from other countries, enabling entrepreneurs to learn from those experiences and avoid repeating similar mistakes.

Winning the 2023 MUSE Creative Awards is highly significant to me because it validates the quality of my work, as determined by the MUSE jurors!

I chose to pursue the design of a Weather Health startup with the goal of revolutionizing the weather industry through personalized weather forecasts. My strong belief in this approach motivated me to dedicate my best efforts to translating this idea into design.

The biggest challenge is to design an experience that people would love and prefer more than tons of other weather apps. To achieve good UX and UI, I did a lot of research across health, wellness, and weather apps to determine the best solution.

Winning awards always has a positive impact on my career by providing recognition, validation, motivation, and opportunities for growth and advancement.

- There are innovations happening in the technology industry each year.

- High level of creativity in the technology industry makes it more interesting to work.

- The technology industry is still a pretty fresh industry where a lot of things won't made yet. More to come.

The design standards within my country's fintech industry are impressively high, setting a noteworthy example that inspires entrepreneurs and designers worldwide.

I believe that in the next 10 years, more designers will focus on designing in AI and AR fields.

Be creative and precise in the details!

Creativity gives you more dopamine than anything else.

I'd say Steve Jobs and John Ive as they showed that complex things should not be that complex.

Work hard, play hard.