Inkling and Bridge Team Up to Find Talented Designers

Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with Bridge, a professional development program for experienced designers, hosted by Designer Fund. Bridge pairs talented designers with startups that have a great design culture. Designers work full-time at their startup and, once a week, come together with their Bridge cohort to share skills and learn from inspirational speakers. Inkling is proud to be participating in the Bridge program this year. We’re looking for well-rounded, talented product designers to join us in our mission to make the world a smarter place through knowledge that matters.

I want to share my story, which I hope will illuminate why Inkling is such an incredible place for designers to work. I joined Inkling just last December after five great years working at LinkedIn. But I first learned of Inkling back in 2009, when the Inkling eBook reader was one of the first apps to be launched on the new iPad. I was amazed by the obsession with design quality and the delightful experiences I encountered in every detail of the reader app. It’s so rare for any startup to get the user experience of its first product right. It demonstrates how much our founder, Matt Maclnnis, and the whole Inkling team believe in the power of design. We focus on great design because we know it differentiates us from our competitors.

At Inkling, we’re inventors. We designed the first version of our iPad app by building mocks on a jury-rigged, weighted, cardboard model of the first iPad. In recent years, we began solving for an even tougher problem: how do we empower businesses to train skillful workers? We have taken the best lessons from our experience building consumer ebooks and applied them to learning and development at large corporations, such as Gap, KPMG, and more. Our powerful cloud-based content creation and distribution platform helps employees get the information they need, exactly when they need it.

Fast forward to 2015, when our design ethos continues to get stronger with every customer interview, every prototype, and every product we build. Whether it’s visual or architectural, design has always been an integral part of who we are. You see it in our brand, our products, and the quality of everything we do as we work to build engaging and delightful products.

The members of our product design team come from a diverse set of backgrounds. This gives us the opportunity to learn from each other’s different areas of expertise: interaction design, visual design (check out our dribbble page!), interactive prototyping, and user research. At Inkling, we also believe that product designers need to own the full product experience and participate in the entire development process. We start early with wide exploration, working closely with product managers and user researchers to define our market position and identify customer needs. This is followed by rapid iterations around potential solutions to help us arrive at the best one. Then we add final polish to the visual and motion design to make sure our software is delightful. But our role doesn’t end there as we continue to work closely with engineers in an agile process. As a designer, I can’t find anything more satisfying than taking a product that I know will impact the world around me from idea to reality.
Interested in learning more about the Inkling Product Design team and Bridge? Please visit our team page on the Bridge website. Applications for Bridge 5 close on October 20th. Feel free to contact me at albert@inkling.com with any questions. Come join us, and together we can set the standard for how knowledge that matters is built, read, and shared. We look forward to hearing from you!