KEV Group
North America’s leading school activity fund management software
I was introduced to KEV Group through a head hunter for a Marketing Manager role. I received positive feedback through all the interview rounds and had my final interview scheduled with the CEO, Bram Belzberg. Unfortunately, when I met Bram, he said I wasn't the right fit for the role because I had a gap in my resume. I explained to him that I had recently moved back from Australia, and had been looking for new work opportunities. I also mentioned that I had been building a wine tour app with a friend while I was working part-time at H&M. Curious, he asked to see the app.
I took my phone out and started going through the app with him. I explained how I came up with idea and how my friend and I would continuously iterate as we received feedback or experienced something ourselves that we didn't like. Understandably, he seemed a bit suspicious. He asked how I knew how to design apps considering I didn't go to school for computer science or software design. I explained that I had been building websites over the years and didn't think building apps would be that much more difficult. I explained I simply looked at what other apps were doing and copied patterns that I felt solved the problem I was working on.
As we were talking, Bram mentioned he has different role for me in mind, but that they hadn't posted the job yet. He said he wants to bring in some of the technical members of the team to interview me. This ended up being Mark Chaikelson and Mario Espinosa. I chatted with them both and answered all the questions they had. Of course, they were also a bit confused about my ability to design apps without any professional experience or education. Nonetheless, Mark said he'll send me a test to complete. Depending on how I perform, they were open to hiring me as a UX designer.
I had no idea you could get paid to design software, but here I was. Accidentally falling into the tech industry because of a personal project.
UX Designer
Mar 2013–Oct 2014
KEV Group had been in operation for 16 years and had developed a number of products over the years. Each time they built a new product, they would hire a graphic designer on a contract basis to help them with the design. As you can imagine, this led to each product having its own distinct look and feel.
My responsibility was to understand the use case of each product and build a seamless user experience across the suite. This also included rethinking how financial reports were generated. For example, some bookkeepers wanted detailed cash reports that only showed specific accounts. So rather than enabling each user to create their own reports and save them as templates for their account, KEV Group would create that report and make it available for anyone using their software. Let’s just say there were a lot of reports.
