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Anna Filou
Product Designer at Shopflix.gr
"Design maturity isn’t just about knowing which branches to kill, and which to zoom in on. It’s about knowing when to zoom out."
Posted on 5 Mar, 2025
What apps do you use to help you design?
What books do you recommend?
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How did you get started in your role?
I actually started studying a bachelor in social and cultural analysis but didn’t really pursue that because I’ve always had and kept gaining interest in tech, this was around 1st gen of iPad Air and Chromecast f.e.
On the flip side, I’ve always been interested in humans from a anthropological perspective and was on the look for some kind of combination of those - especially human-computer interaction. That’s how I stumbled across interaction design and took a stab at applying and got in. I then landed my first job as an UX/UI designer at a big news company in Sweden.
What are the responsibilities of your role?
Identifying, communicating, visualizing and solving the right problems. Empower users to give them the right conditions and tools to solve what they want to achieve.
I focus on blending business & design strategy, research and simplicity. Having a strong passion for crafting intuitive, visually compelling, and accessible digital experiences, you need to strive to deliver seamless, user-centered solutions. This means also a lot of cross team collaboration and taking technical considerations into account as well as balancing business goals with user needs.
What difficulties do you encounter in your role?
To me it's been handling difficult stakeholders and decoding feedback. UI is a very subjective thing to feedback quickly on, it's important to frame and ask the right questions to get the most out of design crit sessions. Own your design and share your work early on.
How do you incorporate the apps in your design process?
- Pen & paper for rough concepts.
- Figma for all things design – lo-fi, hi-fi, specs and handovers.
- Illustrator for specific icon/illustration fixes
- Userpilot for data insights
- Ballpark to conduct user tests
- Glyphic get insights in potential customer meetings
What advice would you give to your younger self trying to get into the field of design?
Perfect is the enemy of good — don’t focus on details too much.
Do you have any regrets in your journey in becoming a designer?
I’d say I wish I would focus more on human behavior earlier on my career rather than getting good on a specific tool. Trends, tools and techniques come and go, but we’re still the same humans interacting.
As a designer how do you stay inspired?
Join forums, talk to people outside your industry. I recently got into Ambition Empower which is a subscription service where thought-leaders in UX, service design, and product design helps you and your team to grow. It is optimized for a busy schedule, allowing you to spend as little as one hour per week. It’s really good!
In general my creativity gets fueled by staying curios and playing around with concepts that aren't business critical or even connected to anything I necessarily need to finish, just to try things out and play around more.
