• Erin Murphy: A UX designer at Jane Street who previously worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) building user interfaces for space missions and is also an illustrator with a quarterly journal.
• Background and Career: Went to school with no intention of working at JPL but was reached out to by someone interested in bringing human-centered design thinking. Worked on projects like consolidating Earth-based orbital data into a web portal for JPL researchers. Later joined Jane Street, initially skeptical but found it interesting to work in a quantitative trading firm and bring design culture.
• Projects at Jane Street: Working on tools like Blueprint for managing and provisioning applications, Appd for running apps and jobs, and observability work for distributed systems. Had challenges like making meeting tools more user-friendly and dealing with the trade-offs between command-line and web UIs.
• Design Approach: Focuses on human-centered design by talking to users, creating storyboards to visualize workflows, and using drawing as a communication tool. Adapts research methods to the firm's culture, which emphasizes free-flowing communication and light-weight information gathering.
• Looking for UX Designers: Seeks candidates with user experience design background and the ability to work in unfamiliar domains, collaborating with engineers and traders to build tools for experts.
• Challenges and Insights: Deals with limitations as a non-technical designer, such as adapting to the transition from tool-building on demand to holistic user experience. Considers composability in UI design and the importance of understanding both the domain and user needs.
• Thoughts on Beauty in Design: Views beauty in design as more about utility and clarity rather than just aesthetics. Believes that a beautiful design is one that is clear, useful, and transformative to the user's workflow, and that it requires understanding the mechanics and environment of the design.