Episode #53: Building Trust as a Founding Designer with Rochel Polter

Rochel Polter describes herself as a lifelong dabbler. Reading, writing, drawing, psychology, finance, business, and other interests all held her attention, which made choosing one career difficult. She wanted creative and strategic work, collaboration, visible impact, and enough variety to keep learning. An accounts payable and payroll job provided challenges at first, but once its processes became predictable, she began looking for something else.

During the period of remote work around COVID, a relative mentioned UX design. Rochel researched the field, found that its mix of skills closely matched what she wanted, and enrolled in Designlab. Mentorship and project practice helped her reach the point where she could speak and work as a designer without relying on a certificate for confidence.

What you'll learn

• How precision learned in finance transfers to UX design

• Why a founding designer should treat the organization as an important user

• How small informal tests can establish trust for deeper research later

• Why every interface detail should have an intentional reason

• How to separate the signal in feedback from the solution someone proposes

Transfer precision and range into design

Rochel sees a clear connection between finance and UX. Accounts must balance, and a missing zero or decimal point can change the result. Interface details create a similar ripple effect. A missed decision near the beginning can cause confusion throughout the experience.

Her broader curiosity also became useful. UX gave her a place to combine creative work, strategy, business thinking, collaboration, and hands-on execution. She had originally been less interested in moving pixels than in high-level thinking, but came to value UX and UI together. A useful product needs both intellectual problem solving and careful execution.

This range does not remove the need for depth. It gives Rochel more sources to draw from when a problem crosses disciplines. The designer can use curiosity to enter an unfamiliar subject, precision to understand its details, and collaboration to fill gaps with other people's knowledge.

Earn permission to deepen the process

Rochel joined Chabad.org as its first UX designer. She initially worked on a new section of the website that would reuse some existing content but create a distinct experience intended to evolve over time. Coming directly from a bootcamp, she had learned a formal sequence of research and design activities. The workplace required a more contextual approach.

She identifies the organization itself as an important user for a founding designer. A team with developers but no previous design function is learning a new way of working. If the designer tries to impose every textbook step immediately, colleagues may see research as delay rather than a path to better decisions.

Rochel began with what the team could support: best practices, questions for people nearby, friends-and-family feedback, and informal testing. The first project established that her process was focused on getting useful work done, not research for its own sake. Once that trust existed, she could introduce longer usability tests, formal user interviews, and planning for quantitative measures and A/B testing.

The sequence is a practical lesson for founding designers. Process maturity can grow with organizational confidence. A limited early method is not the final standard, but it can be the step that makes a stronger standard possible.

Make every choice intentional

Rochel values thoughtfulness in every part of an interface. A component should exist because it helps, not because the designer wanted to fill empty space. The reason does not have to be philosophical. A spacing choice might simply follow an eight-pixel grid. What matters is that the team can explain why the choice supports consistency, usefulness, or the intended experience.

That principle also applies to historical product decisions. Existing work usually reflects constraints, context, and prior reasoning that a new designer may not yet know. Understanding that history shows respect for colleagues and prevents the designer from treating an apparently simple change as isolated from the rest of the system.

Intentionality gives feedback a foundation. A designer can reconsider a decision without becoming defensive because there is a reason to examine, test, retain, or revise.

Pause before acting on feedback

Rochel says one of her biggest lessons was learning not to react immediately when someone dislikes a design or asks for a change. Her first impulse might once have been to replace the work at once. Now she pauses, returns to the design away from the noise of the moment, and asks where the feedback came from.

Sometimes the original rationale still holds and can be explained. Sometimes the comment exposes a real problem and the design should change. At other times, several complaints about one element point to a broader issue elsewhere in the experience. Feedback is informative, but not always in the way the person offering it expects.

This practice requires persistence when Rochel is the only person advocating for a decision, plus humility when the evidence points elsewhere. It also reflects the strength she found in being a generalist. Her many interests help her read between the lines, combine signals, and look for the system around an isolated comment.

Listen to Episode #53 for Rochel Polter's account of building a design practice through trust, intentional choices, research, and thoughtful feedback.