Say Hello to Andressa Bougleux, Senior Product Designer

What do you do?

I’m a product designer on the Shopper team at Instacart. Currently, I work on the flows and tools the teams at various stores use to fulfill pickup orders for our customers.

How did you get into design?

I did my BFA at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco with a focus on interaction design for mobile and web. During my program, I got the chance to start working as a freelance designer on websites and web apps. One project led to another and I started my career designing mobile and web apps for early-stage startups. As I gained experience and got inspired by my managers and peers, my skills developed from a visual/UI design focus to incorporate UX design. Since then I have helped shape products in a variety of industries — such as healthcare, social networking, transportation and, of course, groceries!

What makes everything worth it?

Being able to enjoy what I do day to day and seeing people achieve their goals in a better and clearer way using the products I design. Plus—being part of such a fantastic, inclusive community of creatives and problem solvers brings a lot of good energy into my life.

What’s the greatest piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Surprisingly, a high school math teacher was the one to inspire me. He encouraged my class to always aim to perform at more than 100%. In other words, to do more than what is simply being asked of you. This advice has stuck with me since and has guided the way I approach both my work and personal life. If you have a mindset that tells you there’s always room to push, you’ll constantly be on a growth path.

What advice would you give to a designer just starting out?

Join a team you can learn from that has at least two or three other designers you can collaborate with and receive feedback from. Also, invest in side projects outside of your day-to-day work to practice and enhance your skills in a more flexible and diverse way. It will help you develop your portfolio, meet more people, and grow as a designer.

Where do you find inspiration?

I like to browse Mobbin for the latest UI/interaction patterns and inspiration. The site is constantly updated with new app teardowns and great category breakdowns to search. I’m also following apps that I admire or that are leaders in their industry, such as Google Maps, Uber, Instagram, Yelp, and more!

What’s the most challenging or exciting project you’ve tackled here at Instacart?

Creating a new app experience to support the launch of our pickup service has been the most interesting and challenging project so far. Since all of our experience had been—up to that point—solely based on a delivery model, grocery pickup presented some unique challenges, like helping a store associate meet a customer at their car in the store parking lot, rather designing for delivery to a customer’s home. With these new challenges came the opportunity for our team to do field research by visiting several store locations to get a better understanding of the user’s context. This part of the process is really enjoyable for me because it usually brings in a lot of cross-functional team collaboration (Operations, Business Development, Research, and Product) and clears out so many assumptions in a short period of time. There are still a lot of challenges to solve for with grocery pickup and I’m excited to keep improving this experience.

Where did you grow up and what made it special?

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio’s geographic diversity, with its long stretches of sandy beaches, rocky mountains, and tropical forests, combined with a demographic diversity of many different races and cultures, made it a wonderful place to grow up. I believe Rio’s cosmopolitan nature shaped me into a more flexible and open-minded person.

What was the first thing you ever designed?

The first piece I ever designed was a denim bag I made using the fabric of an old skirt of mine. I used to enjoy playing fashion designer by recycling old pieces of clothing into new ones and playing with fabrics. In digital design, my first creation was a portfolio website I coded myself (terribly) for my illustration instructor to showcase his work, along with a series of print portfolio books.

What is something you’re most proud of in your life or career?

Becoming a designer is actually one of the biggest achievements of my life. I grew up doing a lot of craft stuff and had a huge crush on fashion design, then ended up taking some classes in architecture after high school and really liked it. But due to some financial and life circumstances at the time, I had to take a job opportunity in a completely unrelated field: Being a clerk at a criminal law court, assisting the judge with hearings. After a few years, and a lot of criminal cases, design called me again. This time, in digital and interaction design, and I completed my undergrad at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Now I work in a field I absolutely love every day.

What role does food play in your life?

Food represents nutrition and pleasure in my life. I see food as a key ingredient that supports my health and well-being, but also a fun experience when trying out new flavors or creating a new recipe. On weekends, I also enjoy spending time channeling all the good cooking shows by focusing on the decoration of the dishes over the weekend.

Come build with Andressa.

If you’re excited about defining the future of a one trillion dollar industry, building an ad-serving network for groceries, scaling the world’s most extensive grocery catalog, perfecting a real-time on-demand logistics chain, all while simultaneously designing the future of food for millions of people, you should take a look at the available opportunities or reach out to someone from the team.

Instacart

Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.