🎯 3 Tips to survive as a UX Team of one

Hi! It’s Aaron from Xseed Solutions 👨‍🏫👋 Is highly probable that, specially in your first UX job, you’ll be the only UX Designer of the company. And being the only UXer can be overwhelming sometimes, as you’ll have to manage a lot of things at the same time. I leave you 3 tips that have helped me a lot when being a UX Team of one.

1. Take time to learn ALL about the Business
This might sound obvious, but to be honest, it can take time to realize how important it is. Trust me, understand the industry, the north star metric of the business, how they get clients, the user types it has and how they purchase the product/service, etc. Will let you have a bigger vision of the business, and surely you’ll take better decisions knowing all of this.

Take time to talk with coworkers from other departments and learn about their experiences and how they collab to the company (this will help you to engage more with the team). One Team you must be talking to is the Success Team. This Team has much more valuable information than you think. They talk to our users, they know their pains, what makes feel them excited, etc. UXers and Success Team should be best friends 😀

Don’t underestimate this tip. Knowing as much as you can about the business, will let you take awesome design decisions.

2. Be the best friend of the Dev Team
All your incredible work will be developed by this Team so, communicating with them will be part of your everyday. Focus on facilitating everything for them; the assets, links to the files, documentation, etc.

Don’t wait till they need something, let them always know where are the assets, where are links, where are documents, what is the state of something you’re working on, etc. This will promote great communication and an awesome workflow for you and the Team.

Protip for this tip!
Take time to decide the nomenclatures for components in the Design Kit/System. That way, Dev and Design Team (you) will always speak the same ‘language’ when talking about the product.

3. Document as much as you can
Being a UX Team of one charge you with a lot of responsibilities at the same time, and maybe you won’t always have time to document everything you’d like to. What I always recommend is to:

- Give context in no more than two lines
- Be concise
- Have documentation in one easy-to-access folder
- Dedicate at least 1 hour of your week for documentation

Possibly 1 hour per week seems nothing, but if you are concise you’ll have great progress in your documents as time passes by, and is better a bit of documentation than having nothing.

Yes! It’s not easy. It’s a challenging journey being a UX Team of one. Hope this tips help you to have a better experience when working 💪🏼