<aside> 💡 David Kendall is a UX Design Principal at AT&T. Being passionate in education, he is also an adjunct instructor at University of Washington and teaches a certificate course for UX design.
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How did you enter the UX design industry?
I have been involved in creative field starting from high school. My high school had a lot of industrial art, so we had a lot of technical art experiences, like photography, printing processes, typography, etc., and I really enjoyed them and realized that design was for me. I knew what I want to do at an early age, so I went into it and studied design for undergraduate and graduate.
However, as for getting into UX design specifically—I don’t think I moved to UX but design trend in general moved to UX as the industry is needing it.
What is your passion in the UX design industry?
I like that we are always trying to focus on users and customers. I like to be more humanistic in our approaches. In my early stages of design career, we made things that we liked and hope that others also like and understand. However, I like it more that we are bringing users closer into our design.
I also love “cleaning up messes.” I enjoy the process of aligning and optimizing design experiences, like more logical presentation or more structured flows. I just like to make things better. UX designers are inherently optimistic—we have the abilities to see the future and a better experience, and we employ our expertise to make it a better experience.
Could you briefly introduce your responsibilities?
I lead a team of designers that focuses on designing enterprise design system for customer-facing websites of AT&T. Just to be clear, the users of my designs are teams at AT&T who build different kinds of web-apps and websites using our design system, and the end-users of my designs are customers who use these web-apps and visit these websites. I work with developers, engineers, and content implementers to collectively construct design framework, UI, and toolkits.
As the UX Design Principal, I’m responsible for providing design insights and guiding the strategic design activities.
What is a UX Design “Principal?”
In larger companies, usually we have two segments of senior leaders for UX—principal and manager. Managers focus on more managing their teams, whereas principals focus more on managing a program or project. You can think of my role now as a program manager specifically for UX design, and my colleagues at manager level as a product manager for UX design. (Not sure about what a program manager does? Take a look at our previous issue where we talked with a CMU student Valeria who interned as a program manager!)
How is the team dynamics in your team like?
For this year, I have introduced a principle to my team that is “progress over perfection.” I started it because our team has been spending so much time on perfecting our design system deliverable that we couldn’t deliver.
So I started saying to our team that it is impossible for us to understand everything about a certain component need or application need. Although this product might not account for everything, we can always fix it later.