Meet Nano

Nano recently made a career change and enrolled in an 8-month UX Design program at Springboard. "The satisfaction of seeing what I've designed become real on a device is magical," Nano recounted. As she wraps up the bootcamp, she can't wait to put her design skills to use.

The challenge

Slowed by Coding

Nano dives straight into putting together her online portfolio to secure a full-time role, while starting design side gigs creating websites. She has lots of ideas, yet even with her coding experience, she feels like she's hitting a brick wall when trying to express and iterate.

“I found myself constantly being held back by coding.”

As she begins handing off one of her site projects, completed with coding, she finds that more headaches ensue.

“The client will have to contact me every time he wants to post a new update. Instead of designing, my time gets sunk into administrative work. Neither he nor I end up happy.”

This pushes Nano to look for more effective tools that will ease her workflow.

The journey

Unleashing creativity through a powerful yet easy tool

Nano kept an open-mind and explored different tools. She tried Webflow, which quickly turned out to be too overwhelming. She then turned to Framer, which still proved to have quite a learning curve.

Just when she was beginning to think there wasn't a tool suited for a visual-driven designer like herself, she stumbled upon STUDIO.

“From the beginning, I was greeted with a really simple UI. It felt approachable. It felt like it’s made for me.”

With STUDIO, Nano could finally create custom micro-interactions, something she had always wanted but found difficult with code. As part of her portfolio, she played around with presets and explored advanced customization by simply manipulating speed curves. She crafted her first appear and hover effects with just a couple clicks.

Nano also recounted her experience recreating, and making her side gig sites responsive on STUDIO. Before, verifying and modifying with plain code was one of her least favorite parts of creating sites. In STUDIO, with a visual canvas and live preview on device,

“It all turned from guesswork to confident iterations.”

The impact

Finding more joy in design

With STUDIO, her new sidekick, Nano is discovering more joy in design.

“It takes away the mundane parts of design, and I get to spend more time being creative - what I really enjoy.”

She has migrated her freelance projects to STUDIO, empowering her client to update content easily with the app's built-in content management system. No more tedious email exchanges just to update a block of text.

Her impressive portfolio has also helped her land her current full-time role. Now, she is using STUDIO to create marketing sites for her employer.

Check out Nano’s portfolio at https://nano-portfolio.studio.site/.