Continuing our series of interviews with memoQ team members, we are heading over now to the design team, with help of our Design Team Lead, György Bokros!
Hello and thank you for taking the time to answer some of our questions. First, we would like to ask you to introduce yourself a little bit. Can you tell us where you are from and where you live right now?
Hello, my name is György Bokros. It’s a pleasure to be part of this interview series. I’m from a small village in Hungary called Szomód. I have lived in Budapest since 2008. It’s hard to enjoy what the city has to offer due to the Covid situation, but luckily my flat is on the hilly side of Budapest so I can take long walks in the forests.
How did you get to know memoQ, both the company and the product?
I read an article about memoQ that was part of a series about Hungarian companies. It was really inspiring to read how the company is growing. It seemed a very honest company to me, which is quite rare. I learned that memoQ as a product is an industry standard tool for translators much like Adobe Photoshop is for designers and photographers. It may not be easy to master all it has to offer, but it is extremely powerful when it comes to serious work.
After I joined memoQ, I realized that I had worked with one of the founders, Balázs Kis’ father, more than 20 years ago. It was my first paid job actually!
Tell us more about your current position.
I work as a UX team lead. My team contributes to several aspects of the product. As designers, we care how something works and looks, how our users will use it. The most important thing is to learn from our users by conducting usability tests and interviews. The community in this industry is a great help. We learn a lot from them about how they work with memoQ and what they struggle with.
A part of the modern product development process is to create prototypes that demonstrate how a feature will work and look. It saves a lot of time, because we can test and iterate our ideas quickly and easily before it goes live. Our designers think about user flows instead of static screens while designing a solution.
Tell us more about your team. How many members are there, what are their roles, and what do you like most about working with colleagues? What makes your team stand out? What is it that drives you all to succeed?
The team has four members and we are part of the Production department. We are all user experience and user interface designers but with different backgrounds. We all care about the psychology and aesthetics of how users interact with graphical interfaces and beyond. Andrea Tóth has a lot of experience in branding, even decorating physical objects! Orsolya Sas is amazing when it comes to create prototypes and thinking in design systems. Tamás Rell has a good sense of how users think and is a pro in designing desktop applications like the memoQ client. I am more familiar with classic web design and its principles and have some frontend development experience.
I like the openness of my team when it comes to a new challenge or trying out a new design tool to improve our workflow. But what I like most is everyone’s good sense of humor and their willingness to share their interests. We can chat about cats (sorry memoQ, cats are more important), recently watched TV shows, plants, recipes to cook or bake...or just random things.
We have common values. We believe in user-centered design, consistent and easy to learn design systems. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. One of the strengths of the team is its responsiveness. It is quick and easy to design something new to demonstrate a user interface, create a clickable prototype, or design a new page for our website.
What did you like about memoQ as a company when you first joined, and what do you enjoy most about your work now?
I really liked the culture of openness to new ideas and workflows a lot, and that hasn't changed since my first day. I also enjoy talking with our users and learning from them. I joined memoQ a bit more than a year ago and came from a different field, so I don’t have a lot of experience with CAT tools yet. It is great to have close colleagues in the Production team who have translator or project manager backgrounds—they know a lot about memoQ and the translation project management workflow.
What do you think are the strongest points of memoQ (both as a product and a company) that make us stand out in the industry?
The features that memoQ offers for every segment of the market are outstanding. It is flexible enough to cover the many different use cases and workflows our clients are facing. People are highly creative when it comes to saving time and money—I love to hear their stories about pushing the limits of memoQ from time to time. I also like the creative energy in my colleagues. We are committed to improving the product from one version to the next.
Let us turn to some questions specific to your position. Here goes: what do you enjoy most about your work?
I like to know that I’m going to make people’s lives easier by creating good user experiences for them. I also like that there is always something new to learn in UX; it never bores me. You can learn psychology or technology and try out new tools or methods.
How has the pandemic affected you and your team’s work? Have you seen any changes? Are there any differences in the types of requests you receive or types of new opportunities? How has it affected you personally?
Our daily job hadn't changed much. We work based on the roadmap. Fortunately, everyone in the team had experience working from home. It was interesting to see how everyone’s mindset changed and adapted to new challenges. We had to slow down, practice patience, and be more kind with ourselves and others. On personal level, I also went through the five stages of grief, as did many others. Finding new hobbies, hiking, cooking and baking more than ever helps me get through this period.
Last, but not least, we would really like to ask you, as UX Designer: what is the biggest inspiration in your career?
Inspiration can come from different directions, in many forms. Offline activities like cooking, reading, watching a good movie, playing video games (have you played with Hades? It’s a masterpiece!). The process of creation, learning something new, is what gives me energy. I’m trying to stay curious and open to new impressions.
