Interview with the designer: Mikhail Ozornin

This is a pilot issue of a series of interviews with interface designers. Not super-stars, but ordinary guys who work on commercial and mass products and services. Today, the main character is Mikhail Ozornin. He designs interfaces for dismal men in suits and ties. And Mikhail - a graduate of the first set of school Gorbunova.

Tell us briefly about yourself: what are you doing, where and what are you working at, what are your hobbies besides work?

I was a developer, a system analyst, a project manager, and then I came to design and design. Now - interface designer at Positive Technologies. I bet you haven't heard of her? Usually, no one outside the information security market knows it, and information security specialists know everything.

I make interfaces for these IB specialists. These are the people who force you to invent complex passwords, and then also change them every 43 days. They usually cannot choose the programs they use at work (corporate software is the same), but they also want convenient and understandable interfaces. I design various scanners, behavior analysis systems, event collection and analysis.

He grew up in Yekaterinburg, moved to Moscow. I love bicycles (in cities) and travel, I prefer Amsterdam or Peter instead of Phuket or Bali.

What is the most interesting thing for you in design? Why do you love this profession?

I like the idea that I am at least a little making the world more orderly, simpler and more aesthetic. A sort of struggle with the second law of thermodynamics. I am glad when I bring the decision and the reaction “oh, was it possible?”. This, however, is very, very rare.

You write on the site that you design interfaces for complex products. Tell us about the coolest project.

This is difficult. The market for corporate software products is often far from good design. (Here Artem Loki writes a little about it ). Get together and write a post for those who are not familiar with what corporate software is.

We have to deal not only with design, but also to educate our colleagues so that they move from the tasks “insert a checkbox” to “think up a solution for such a task”. Not fast, but it turns out. Designers already have authority in teams, they are listened to, they are not slaughtered for them.

Here is what you have to use:

• sell the idea to the product manager,
• sell to a customer so that he can order a feature from a manager,
• agree with testers to get a bug, often their bugs are considered better than just wishes,
• agree with the manager to follow the development to unload it, some agree,
• sometimes agree to bypass all directly with the developers. When done, everyone immediately understands that this is how it should have been.

Many companies do not show screenshots of products, ours, as a rule, too. Publicly my products did not seem to be. But believe me, there is not much interesting.

What do you advise novice designers how best to pump in the profession?

1. Go through the Gorbunov school bureau, see the next question.
2. Work with a good art director or lead designer. I didn’t have this way in my life, but my studies showed that it helps me a lot.
3. It helps to organize marathons. Do something every day: draw 300 icons in a week, roll out 100 price tags, or invent and draw on a mobile application a day. There is even such a Daily UI marathon, I signed up, but immediately quit - I realized that I could not keep up the pace.
4. Stop reading the article "23 rules of building sites" and read the originals in the books.
5. Learn English, almost everything good is published either in English only, or first in English. In Russian, or not translated, or translated badly.
6. Learning how to typeset and program a little: it will be easier to find a common language with the developers, and just in life it will help you not to do every routine manually.

You graduated from the school bureau Gorbunova. What do you say about her?

A month after graduation, I wrote a post “ 9 months at the Bureau Internship School ” in which I described the results and the opinion. I re-read it now and in the general assessment I still agree. The only thing for the "product designer" there is not enough about the product: research, hypotheses, prototypes, EMViPi. I a little in vain then used this term. There was not enough typography at the macro level, but at the font level.

In general, these were the most useful 9 months for me as a designer. I do not regret, and if I returned at that time, I would go again and this time I tried to get more from school.

What tools do you use in your work? Which ones do you think are flawless?

I have everything like everyone else: a sketch, a paper notebook, an atom , Alfred, mail.app, screenshot and skype. Impeccable among them.

Sketch: not because Photoshop is bad, I just do not know how to use it. I have long enjoyed fireworks, but then it became clear that there was no future in it. Sketch is a normally made fireworks.

I can not imagine a sketch without Compo , Kraft and a couple of plug-ins.

Alfred tried out only about a month and a half ago (he did not go before), now he is uncomfortable without him. The number of my snippets and workflow is slowly growing.

For the past few months, I have not been forced to use Mail.app, he has stopped working normally with Ekschendzhem. Waiting for the release of Sierra - it was repaired.

Show a screenshot of your smartphone screen

I do not have a smartphone. There is a phone Philips Xenium X130 , he knows how to call and write sms.

Which books do you recommend most to colleagues?

I agree with the Internship School entrance list:

Once again I looked at my grades on Livelib, everything is so. All these books are worth reading. Some are better, some are worse, but all are needed.
Start with Norman and Ruskin (skip the end about Canon Cat), then Taffy. By layout: Müller-Brockmann is more academic, for life is more useful Harrover.

What I would add:

• "The Basics of Style in Typography " by Bringhurst,
• " Sample Fonts " by Chikhold,
• " Remout " from 37 Signals,
• " About the interface " Cooper,
• " 100 facts you need to know about people" Susan Weinshenk (translation of the name into Russian is a disaster).

What professional communities are you in? What conference attend?

It turned out that I am not a member of any communities: I have subscribed to UX Russia , but there has been no life there for a long time, I have been registered in the “ Useful Club ”, but there is not much going on there either.

From conferences I sometimes go to the WUD or Dribble Meetup when I am in the city. I am skeptical of UX Russia: the last two, on which I was, were very frankly bad.

I appreciate it when conferences spread videos, I watch reports at double speed.

What upsets you most in the industry and in your colleagues?

It’s hard for me to work with people who have very different principles . The absence of 1-2 of the principles complicates the joint work, the absence of several makes the joint work unlikely.

Grieve constant articles "10 best ways to make a good design." Even more depressing, if it is a bad translation of English articles. I do not believe that without English you can now somehow exist in the world.

Anything you want to say to designer colleagues? Advice or farewell?

Do well and do not do bad :–)

Michael on Habré: mikeozornin