Takko

Creators come first 🌮

Background

Takko is a social media startup founded by Youtuber David Choi where creators can make short-form content, build communities, and get paid.

I worked at Takko as a contract UI/UX Designer from March-June 2020. Unfortunately, due to NDA I’m unable to share my specific designs, but I’d love to talk about my experience at the company!

My Experience at Takko

When I first heard of Takko, I loved how the company wanted to focus on building communities similar to the early days of Youtube.

Working at Takko was my first experience working at a startup. I was the sole designer, but I received a lot of help from Charles, the team’s product manager. I had the opportunity to design the product from scratch, so I was able to apply my design process from personal projects to a real product, and actually see it built out right after.

The company had under 10 employees, so I worked very closely with everyone. We had hackathons, company lunches/dinners, and I really felt like I became friends with everyone (and their dogs) at the company.

Challenges

As the sole designer, I learned how important it is to be organized and constantly communicating. I worked with engineers closely to rapidly build and iterate on designs. I also made sure that the designs were inline with the founder's vision and easy and delightful for users.

I had to make sure that the designs I made were not only visually nice, but always accessible and legible as well. Just because I could read something clearly did not guarantee that all our users would be able to as well, so I researched a lot about accessibility guidelines regarding font and color and applied them to all my designs.

In addition to making wireframes and prototypes, I learned how to make Figma component libraries and began creating a design system for Takko, so if there were ever more designers to join, they could build upon this foundation.

What I Learned

The most valuable experience I had at Takko was learning about every role at the company and how each one fits together in the end product. We had biweekly standups where everyone went over their progress, goals, and blockers, and I really felt a sense of community at the company. In particular, I learned more about the engineering side of the design process. How do engineers think, and what their priorities are when they see a design, and how that differs from what I see. This allowed me to see things from their perspective when designing, and streamlined our communication.

I ended up leaving Takko because I had already committed to a summer internship before I came on the team, but Takko will be launching soon and I can’t wait to try out the app as a user!