About Tina Chen
For millennia, humankind has been using gestures, objects, drawings and symbols to communicate. As our world grows ever more connected digitally, representing ideas, concepts, and actions through visual symbols grows in complexity. Designers must create work that conveys meaning for people in all parts of the globe, and at a scale that grows in proportion every day. We live in an era where products are always on, and can have user bases that extend into the millions and even billions. The challenges modern designers face is staggering.
But for Tina Chen, a design lead at Slack, contemplating and solving these problems is just another day at the office. She studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford, a program that focuses on cutting edge areas including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. After Stanford, Tina went on to design for some of the top companies in tech including Blogger, Google, Medium, and now Silicon Valley’s latest darling, Slack.
Part of what has caused the tech world, and us here at ZURB, to fall in love with Slack is its deceptively simple design. While most parts of the app are pretty straightforward, it is rich with subtle animations, visual cues, textures and more. After two decades of product design work, we realize and appreciate just how much thought and iteration goes into these details. They’ve enjoyed meteoric growth and have a lofty vision for how communication within organizations will continue to evolve into the future. We're interested to see how they are tackling the challenges of designing for an ever growing, international group of users as well how they can keep the UI streamlined by well thought out visual metaphors.
On August 12th, 2016 at 12:00 PM (PST), we’ll sit down with Tina to talk about how user feedback affects Slack’s design, how to build platforms, what their design team does to foster collaboration, and where they see design heading.
