Onehub’s new product designer wants to be invisible
We recently brought on Karsten Rowe to join our product design team here at Onehub, and honestly, he’s hoping you won’t even notice his work.
Rowe designs, wireframes and storyboards experiences across all of Onehub’s products, including our data security tool, Marshal. “My goal,” said Rowe, “is to remove friction and make the product more seamless.”
His design philosophy is “less is better.” Distill an experience down to the bare goal by moving everything else out of the way. If you want the user to click a button, Rowe believes that you “don’t need to color the button red and make it bigger. You just simply remove lesser important elements from the screen.”
Ironically, Rowe’s less is better approach and hard work means that he doesn’t really want you to notice his efforts. He wants his design to be invisible to you so that it just works. The result is that you can do what you want quickly and easily and spend less time using our product.
Perhaps this dedication to clean efficiency is due in part to his European upbringing. Rowe went to university in England, where he studied design and worked for a stint in Germany before returning to London. Rowe made the leap to our Seattle offices after working for a startup in Michigan.
He joined Onehub because he had always aspired to work in tech on the West Coast, and also because he liked the team here. “They were friendly and approachable,” said Rowe. Additionally, he was impressed with the design leadership here at Onehub and with the design-led team process.
When he’s not at work Rowe says you can find him running around lakes or boxing in the gym (which allows him to more enjoy his time at the pub). He’s in the midst of training for the Seattle marathon, and unlike his design philosophy, he’s very much still visible to his mom, whom he calls every Sunday.
You can see more of Rowe’s work on Dribbble.