Roman Nurik from Firebase

Method Podcast from Google Design

In this episode, Design Advocate and host of the new Design Notes podcast Liam Spradlin speaks with Senior Interaction Designer Roman Nurik about Google’s Firebase mobile development platform, the unique challenges of designing for developers, and his approach to building design tools. Subscribe to the Method podcast on Google Play, iTunes, or RSS.

A few highlights:

On designing UX for developers, 18:00

“We really want to make sure that if you come into Firebase not having ever built a database, or not ever having done any sort of analytics, that you have a good experience.”

On the question of density in Firebase and Material, 21:30

“Density is one of those things that depends on what you're looking at, so we focus a bit more on the content… We make choices at almost an individual page level of what is the best way to present this information. Should it be dense? Should it be sparse?”

On building digital tools for designers, 29:15

“I love building tools that empower the designer to tell a computer how to do something rather than doing it themselves. Time is a very precious resource for everybody. Literally anything that can save time for designers, I try to do.”

Handy info and links for this episode:

• Firebase: Google's mobile platform for quickly developing high-quality apps.
• Android Asset Studio: A collection of tools to easily generate assets such as launcher icons for Android apps.
• Sketch: Digital design tool built for product designers.
• Figma: Collaborative interface design tool.