I grew up in a small town in post-USSR Ukraine. As a teenager, I got my hands on a computer and an internet connection and spent my time outside of school between competitive gymnastics and exploring the online world. I taught myself Photoshop with Youtube tutorials and started freelancing in website design as a hobby.

However creative my inclinations, “product designer” wasn’t a professional path at the time and I was gifted in math so I studied math and engineering while continuously researching and tinkering with my creative skills on the side. After a short run following my Math classmates into consulting, my creative endeavors led me to realize I was much more interested in understanding the human mind and went on to study psychology. And by the time I graduated the field of product design had matured enough for role models such as Julie Zhuo and Luke Wroblewski to open my eyes to product design as a career.

It was a challenge to convince my parents to support me going into a design school after earning degrees in math and psychology. These three critical fields that intersect in product design gave me the perfect blend of skills to grow into the designer I am today. My psychology skills help me get into people’s minds, their context, motivations, and incentives. Applied math gave me the systematic thinking to align with software engineers’ rigor. Lastly, design school taught me to leverage these two to create products that solve people's problems.

My fascination for creative design started at an early age. As a child, I spent a lot of time drawing objects of everyday life. Growing up in a post-USSR community, many of these objects were designed for the needs of the government rather than individuals. It leaves the people using them to bend to the whims of the products rather than the other way around. Something felt odd, even though I am yet to have the language to intellectualize these feelings.

One day my friend brought a first generation iPod to school, and as I interacted with the device easily, I realized there did in fact exist a better class of products, carefully crafted for people's problems. This is when I pinpoint intuitively understanding my calling as a creative person.

Hily is a lifestyle app that re-centers dating around people. It helps singles spark quality conversations with each other while having fun around shared interests. In only a few years since its creation, Hily has been widely successful by any measure, reaching the top 5 dating apps in the US and Europe and regularly featured on the App Store and as a Snapchat partner app.

My design process starts with understanding the people I'm designing for, their desires, motivations, and problems. In other words, getting into the heads of these people, what it’s like to be them. Julie Zhuo has a wonderful framing of design as a way to make a change in the world “As designers we want people to behave, think or feel something different" and to change it, the first step is to understand how people behave, think, or feel at the moment. Getting to this understanding takes many forms - quantitative such as diving into analytics and surfacing What people are doing or failing to do; qualitative such as discovery interviews to uncover Why they’re doing it. After a detailed analysis of that data, I work with cross-functional partners in engineering and product to define our assumptions and articulate any hypotheses we want to test. This allows us to create a shared language on what success is and as a starting point before we think of the solutions.

It’s a big achievement that speaks for the good quality of the product. Recognition from the professional community means that we, as a team, are working in the right direction to provide our customers with all the tools they can use for starting meaningful conversations and finding people they like.