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Elpida Boulasiki
UX/UI Designer at Essiq
"Design is more than just mockups"
Posted on 29 Oct, 2025
What apps do you use to help you design?
What books do you recommend?
Career clarity for designers in 5 minutes
See how real designers actually get started and the challenges they face, distilled from 47 experienced designers and counting.
How did you get started in your role?
Freelance projects in New York right out of college but what really propelled me was designing my entire wedding (website, stationary, event, decor, etc) which led me to going back to design school since my original major was in Theater and Art.
What are the responsibilities of your role?
I believe designers are facilitators of thoughtful and proactive decision making that supports the users and the business. This means I help guide product development teams through workshops, ux research, ideation, prototyping, and testing experiences.
What difficulties do you encounter in your role?
Communication is always the most challenging part of design but design is also the best way to improve communication to help people find alignment sooner but making things visual. By visual, I dont just mean mockups, I mean the whole product development process, when there is an opportunity to help people see what we are talking about to help guide us in discussion, it falls onto the designer to help make this happen.
How do you incorporate the apps in your design process?
Digital whiteboards and google docs is typically where it starts, then shifting into research tools and AI to help expand our opinions and identify blind-spots, this evolves into eventual workflows, user journeys, service blueprints to map the experience we are building before shifting into the actual wireframes of a feature, sometimes we skip to a vibe coded prototype depending on the problem we are solving for, we go through iterations of this based on stakeholder and user feedback then start to get the design ready for implementation and flushing out any details (localization, accessibility, fine-tuning) that engineering will need to build the design effectively. We do a fit & finish review of the implemented solution and work closely with the team to see how we can measure if the product launched is successful.
What advice would you give to your younger self trying to get into the field of design?
Your dyslexia, ADHD and theater background are a super power in design.
Do you have any regrets in your journey in becoming a designer?
I wish I found more time to work on consumer products. The past 7 years have been in the B2B space and though I enjoy it, I also want to continue to build products direct to consumer.
As a designer how do you stay inspired?
I'm constantly learning new things, trying new creative hobbies, I also attend meetups, conferences, and workshops to keep me growing and meeting other inspiring designers.
