Designing for BeAddy

In this post, we will introduce one of our team members. In our first post in which we introduce our team members, we'll start off with Koen. Koen is our user interface and user experience designer.

Hello hello!

Let me introduce myself, my name is Koen van der Bliek and I'm BeAddy's user interface and experience designer. I studied graphic design at the art academy in Den Bosch, where I live now. In my spare time, I like to be as active as I can be, I love snowboarding, kickboxing, calligraphy, and cycling, but when I can't do any of those, you can also find me on my couch playing a game or having a drink with friends.

When I started working at BeAddy I was hired to design a dashboard for a marketing tool. After a talk with our founder, Anton, I saw a lot of potential in this project and wanted to be a part of it. I used to work in a marketing team for an online webshop. So I had a little experience with online marketing and what was needed for it. But I didn't know the ins and outs of online marketing. Jumping into this job I got into the deep end real soon. Anton gave me a quick tour of the marketing world and away I went. Time to design the ultimate media planning dashboard! With my background in graphic design and typography, this was not an easy task, luckily I got plenty of space to learn all about UI and UX design. This really is a different sport from regular graphic design. All of a sudden you have a lot more specifications to adhere to. You have to create everything on multiple screen sizes and think about every possible outcome for an input field or button. I got to work with some great developers who had the task of creating live environments in our dashboard from my designs. It was not always the easiest task to communicate with the developers, not only because they spoke a different language, but also because they asked a lot of specific questions to which I had to find all the answers. A few years later I still like the challenge to create a design that is 'easy' to create for the developers and has the best designs for the user!

Nowadays a third player entered the chat and I started to get direct contact with our customers as well. This is a very important part for me as they are the end users of my designs and I want them to be happy with what I create. Hearing directly from them if something was not working or how or if they could do a certain action in our dashboard is very important because it relates directly to the designs. But it's also really rewarding to hear when they like a design I've created or note that something is really easy to work with.

What I like the most about working at BeAddy is the different types of work I have to do. One day I'm up to my waist in online marketing terms for creating a good dashboard where you can easily see all your KPIs on the media plan and the next day I'm filming a video explaining how to work with our dashboard. And the day after I'm creating a new marketing email to send to our contacts.

I think the fact that I only have basic knowledge of online marketing makes the dashboard understandable for everyone, even if you are a seasoned expert or just coming into the marketing space. This makes BeAddy a really intuitive dashboard to use and will make everything easy to use.

For my graphic designs, I like to look at old snowboard/skateboard magazines and get inspiration from those scenes. Unfortunately, for designing an online dashboard it's advised to keep the designs on the side of the necessities as low as possible as they could only be a distraction. Because of this, the designs will be a lot cleaner than I'm used to designing. Usually, I really like the use of textures in my work, to give it a real handmade look and feel.

I hope to see you soon in our network!

Bye!