Takeaways After One Year of UX/UI Design
It was Saturday morning and my daily routine for the past few weeks had been grueling. Each morning I’d open up my laptop, check my email, and prepare myself to see the rejection letters waiting for me in my inbox.
“Thank you for taking the time to consider us for the position of user experience designer. As you know, many candidates have applied to this position. Unfortunately at this point we are looking for a candidate with more experience.”
Despite such rejection, I kept moving forward. I continuously iterated my portfolio, sought out projects to work on, and focused on making the most of the UX/UI bootcamp that I was attending.
Finally, a week before I completed the bootcamp, an end-to-end design studio called Intrepid, took a leap of faith and offered me a position as a UX/UI designer. The rest is history.
During the past year I’ve worked on a variety of different projects, all of which have enriched my understanding and skill set in UX/UI design. Here are a few of my biggest takeaways over the past year.
A big ego is the enemy of good design
Ego is essentially what we consider our “self.” It’s an evolutionary adaptation that has driven us to create, to explore, to philosophize; an evolutionary tool that can help us make, understand and defend our decisions.
The problem is that as designers, our egos often become inflated. When this happens we have a tendency to stop listening to:
- users we are designing for
- design critique from our teammates
- feedback from our client and stakeholders
- engineers who are developing our designs
When we are egocentric, we tend to focus on defending our own point of view, designs, and decisions, rather than remaining open to the ideas of others.
This is just one of the many challenges designers face. It’s our job to keep the ideas of these groups in our periphery. And while most people have a hard time maintaining two perspectives at any given time, we must keep four.
Keep your work organized
File systems get crazy, and they get crazy, fast.
I take pride in the way that I choose to define the information architecture of my folders and files. And I enjoy the process of packaging up my Sketch files’ pages, artboards and layers in the most logical and user friendly way as possible. Ultimately, this makes the work my teammates and I do more efficient as it allows us make changes or to access what we need, when we need it.
This is often something design schools neglect to teach, yet it’s a foundational skill that we need to develop to be effective designers. We build products and services for our users all the time, but we often forget to build processes, systems, and structures to help us as designers do our jobs better.
If we are in charge of designing how we work, why not design it in a way to make our work both more efficient and pleasurable? One of the ways to do this is to create an information architecture of project folders and files that is useful, usable and if possible, delightful! After all, there is nothing worse than spending 20 minutes digging through a convoluted folder structure or Sketch file just to make a 5 minute change.
Research is a powerful tool
When it comes down to it, research provides the evidence needed to make sound design decisions and is a tool that can help guide a service or product to best meet the needs of its users.
Without research you end up making decisions based on assumptions. This can be an okay place to start, but you end up guessing and hoping that the decisions you make, are solving real problems that users have.
Realistically, we can’t research everything. We often must make our best guess based on the data that we have. It helps when research is conducted and synthesized in a way that helps us understand big thematic principles and use them as a guiding light as we design.
Here are just a few forms of research that I’ve had the opportunity to participate in and have found valuable: secondary research; stakeholder interviews; subject matter expert interviews; user interviews; contextual inquiries; diary studies; surveys; guerrilla interviews, etc.
Each research method has its pros and cons. The big idea, however, is that you can create better solutions if you first take the time to understand the context of the how and the why a user interacts with a given product or service.
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These are just a few of the things I’ve learned over the past year. If you’re interested in checking out what I do and how I do it, you can go to julesdylan.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
