Saba Singh, UX
A designer with a deep understanding of the music industry and software that resonates with fans.
Hello, could you please introduce yourself ☺️
Yes! I studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. A really great program called Interaction Design. That's where I learned everything that I needed to before I started working in the field. My design career started at Amazon. I interned with Amazon Music and got to understand what the design world in a large company with so many different products could be like. And so that's where my context of design comes from. Outside of work, I live in Berlin. I've been here for a little over a year and I used to live in San Francisco. Before that, I used to live in New York City, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and before that, a few cities in India. So I kind of moved around for a long time. This is my latest stop. One that I'm really warming up to.
A couple of follow-up questions. How do you describe Amazon Music? What is Amazon Music?
Amazon Music is a music streaming app where you can listen to... Well, let me take that back. Amazon Music is now no longer just a music streaming app. It's a full audio entertainment app where you have podcasts and music, and all that you can listen to. And I think one thing that's really interesting about the way that they approach the product, both in terms of design and in terms of strategy, is bringing in culture from the industry. Whether it's culture from music, or trying to bring in culture from podcasts into the product experience itself. And you see that in things like live conversations. You see it in the app’s socials and even real world experiences that they curate at music festivals and things like that. So it's a really fun product.
Great design team as well. I’m interested in your move from the Amazon Music experience to AMP. In your own definition, what is AMP?
Yeah. AMP is essentially a platform where you can host your own radio shows live with music. And so it's pretty much as simple as anyone who wants to be able to host a show can get on their phone, go live and broadcast an entire radio show live with full access to music rights. It's really an entertainment platform for people who want to talk in real time with creators, get close to these hosts, and discover some really incredible music that is not algorithmic. And so it's very different. It's a human curating music for you. That's what AMP is.
And between AMP and Amazon Music, you have been in this music industry for a while. What motivates you to stay in this space?
Music and audio entertainment is a very energetic, fan-based industry. And so just being able to do design for products where the end user is a superfan of an artist is really fun. There's a lot of culture that comes with it. Pop culture is developed from music. At the end of the day, I'm still working on an app. The end of the day, my team and I are still doing UX design on a product. But the fact that we get to bring in the emotion from a joyful and exciting industry into that product, I think is a unique opportunity. It keeps me here.
“The end of the day, my team and I are still doing UX design on a product. But the fact that we get to bring in the emotion from a joyful and exciting industry into that product, I think is a unique opportunity. It keeps me here.”
Have you worked on a “principal project” before getting promoted? If yes, mind sharing your story?
Sure! Let me provide you with two examples—one from Amazon Music and another from AMP.
I was a senior designer at Amazon Music when I discovered the unique nature of the principal level project. A few years ago, my design team and I faced a challenge—to find a way to consolidate multiple media types into a single app. I collaborated with a principal designer who helped frame the problems, identify trade-offs, and communicate with leadership effectively. We presented three approaches, highlighting the strategic pros and cons of each rather than focusing solely on UX considerations. The principal level project involved iterating on designs, creating a comprehensive prototype, and conveying our rationale and design perspective effectively.
About AMP, I got promoted to the principal level. Go back to the beginning, the product was merely an idea documented, enough to initiate a conversation but insufficient for product design development. In this case, I was the sole designer responsible for AMP, and the typical designer job description seemed to vanish. I found myself confronted with numerous tasks and unanswered questions. To tackle this, I embarked on extensive research, aiming to uncover the answers and address all the uncertainties. The research phase involved delving into various questions and formulating a comprehensive understanding of what needed to be accomplished. It entailed planning design sprints, where every two weeks, we would focus on a new feature and explore alternative experiences. We pondered how the user experience could be enhanced and iterated on low-fidelity wireframes to fuel discussions. The primary goal of design at that stage was to stimulate conversation and facilitate exploration. For me, these examples illustrate that the process was not as straightforward as taking on a feature, conducting research, and progressing through a predetermined set of tasks. Instead, it involved shaping people's perspectives and assisting them in forming opinions about the direction we should pursue.
What does “strategy” mean to you as a designer?
At the end of the day, a lot of strategy is helping stakeholders understand the pros and cons of the experience and putting forward your own point of view from your unique designer perspective. So for example, your leadership might say, “Hey, we want to put this pretty large feature into the app. Can you help us figure it out?” You might have multiple points of view on where this could go.
The feature might be too complicated for the app.
The feature might be the perfect thing for the app but it needs to be changed in some way.
The feature might serve the customers in a way that fundamentally changes their behavior.
And so, to be able to articulate that, my preference is to always use a tool you’re familiar with. For a designer, that’s often a prototype. Draw it! Show it to leadership and explain, “now that you’ve seen these three drawings that I made, here’s the implication of each one of them. Each approach might encourage certain behaviors, but here are the trade-offs.” It’s very easy to read a document and form an opinion, but that opinion can fundamentally change when you see the experience. As the person who has the tool set to make that drawing, a designer can help leadership to clearly understand the different strategies.
How do you find a mentor to support your career growth?
It is always through someone that I already know. Either reach out to a previous manager or current manager. Since being promoted to the principal role, I have noticed a significant increase in ambiguity and uncertainty. It is my desire to find someone who can be a valuable addition to my support network as I continue to grow in my position. I think I need a mentor who's navigated the design world for longer than I have. I'd like to talk to someone who can help me see past what I already see, because, you know, there's only so much you can see. And then there's all the things you don't even know you could do or approaches you could take. I am hoping to have someone who can be my sounding board and inspire me to do better.
What excites you about being a designer in the next few years?
Can we talk about Midjourney?! I don’t mean as much from a UI or interface perspective, but a visual design perspective. It's something that I've been following and also a bunch of artists who use Midjourney. I think the impact that it makes is really strong. There's some incredible animation work coming out of it, and I've seen a lot of artists mix their human work with the AI work to create super impressive work.
“I’ve seen a lot of artists mix their human work with the AI work to create super impressive work. ”
I've just built an account and I'm going to dive in at some point and see what I can do. I'm incredibly excited about the fusion of AI and human creativity, particularly in the realm of visual design. Although I've just recently created my account, I'm eager to explore this exciting field. Currently, I'm watching a few tutorials to familiarize myself with the process and understand what we can achieve and manipulate. This fascination stems from the abundance of remarkable artwork emerging from photographers who have transitioned from traditional photography to captivating mixed AI creations. I follow them on Instagram, and witnessing their transition has been truly inspiring.
