Sydney Anh Mai

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Headshot of Product Designer Sydney Anh Mai

Sydney Anh Mai

Product Designer (Kickstarter)
Technology, Software
Brooklyn, NY, USA

Listen to Sydney’s Podcast!

Sydney Anh Mai is a Product Designer at Block. Previously as a product designer at Kickstarter.

Born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam, she spent her adolescence growing up in the United States. Her passion for purposeful interactions and optimized human workflows has taken her across various products, namely IBM, TD Ameritrade, and Emburse.

In 2020, she received two Indigo Design Awards and a dotComm award in user experience design. She most recently appeared as a guest-writer on Design Week, the UK’s leading online design magazine, and as a guest-writer on Design Week, Tech Crunch, and Core77.

Her manta is helping small businesses improve their workflow and subsequently cashflow 8 pixels at a time (or once, 11, that was strange).

  • Interested in: productivity tools. Love a clever calendar, not-so-scary budget planner, well-designed map, thoughtful widgets that show up while messaging.
  • Uninterested in: marketing and advertising, social media, pretty much any ad-supported streaming/browsing experiences.
  • Not interested: in being a founding product designer, but could be in being a co-founder.

What scares her: The “Dribbblization” of product design. These product “glam shots,” while offering quick hits of visual inspiration, also encourages a surface level of understanding of what product designers do. Many prioritize pretty UIs over accessibility, visual trends over system thinking, and fancy animations over helpful interactions. As a product designer, my biggest concern is having the extent of my work reduced to its veneer.

Sydney Anh Mai is also featured on our Features Page.

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