My story of being the first and only UX designer in a data product company.

It has been 1 year and half since I started working at my current company, Southport, a business intelligence company providing customized BI products. When I joined here, I was the first designer in the team. And now, I am still the only designer. Because all the people here, from managers to engineers, had never worked with a designer before, I really had a hard time to fit myself into the company. But during the 18 month collaboration, I gradually pass on the UX design knowledge to my teammates. Now we are working very closely, and what’s more important is, they become to trust the power of design.

I believe there are also designers like me, struggling to fit into the team as the only designer, working with people who not familiar with design. So I would like to share my story of how I passed that hard time, and wish this story can inspire you about how to work with your team.

The awkward situations of being a first UX designer

People do not know how to work with me

The first awkward situation is, managers and other teammates did not know how a designer can collaborate with them. So I was only involved in the last period of project: making the interface looks appearing. The product managers would like to send me rough sketches of each screen and want me to put nice looking graphic interface on them. I had pointed out the usability issues on their sketches and tried to design them better. But they would respond like “that is a good point, but we already had this built out yet”, or “our clients want this way, so just do what they asked for”.

That leads to the second awkward situation. The team was so used to the old development process at that time, and did not know how to adopt design process into it. Especially when the products were still selling well, managers did not want to take the risk to restructure the product development process.

But instead of being impatient or complaining, or even quit that job, I decided to change those awkward situations. Here are three steps I went through.

1 — Earn Trust

Let people trust I am a good designer, a good teammate.

Instead of complaining or trying to correct their understanding about designers, I did another way. Firstly, I let them trust that I am a qualified designer, and a nice teammate. In order to earn trust, I did my best to finish all the tasks they assigned to me. Not only big tasks like a whole set of UI mockups but also small tasks like just to remove the logo, I finished them very well, and showed them that I can handle those tasks with confidence. After a while, managers and teammates trusted me more and more, and sent all design tasks without hesitation. What’s more important, they started to listen to my suggestions.

2 — Provide Suggestions

Provide people more than they expected

After passing the first period, I was still in the awkward situation that the product managers would “design” the product by their own and left the graphic work to me. I tried to figure out how I could change that. So when they asked me to create the design (based on exactly what they had sketched, most of time), I provided them an appearing set of UI first. Meanwhile, I would check the product requirements and use cases to re-design the same screens with the consideration of better user experience, better usability. Then I sent this as a suggested solution. When the PMs received the two sets of mockups, they could see which one is better. Also, they started to realize that clients would always pick my design and became much happier with our products. Because of this result, they did not do the sketches by their own anymore and started come to me for suggestions. The more better-designed products they saw, the more curious they became about user experience design. So, as a well educated designer, I began to educate them those design principles.

3 — Educate Design

Start with the design topics people are interested in

I was about to pass those awkward situations. The next step is to bring the UX design thinking into the team, and start to restructure the product development process. A good starting point is to know what topics they are interested in user experience. I looked back to the frequent questions my teammates asked, and did “user interviews” with some PMs and engineers to know what they want to learn. Then I set up a “lunch and learn” session to start my lessons. What’s more, I finally had chance to sit down with one of my managers to discuss about the first draft of design process plan. Now, everything is moving on a right track! :)

Other thoughts of my story

Looking back to those days, I really glad that I made the decision to change the awkward situations instead of quit the job. Some designer friends I know they couldn’t stand a designer-unfriendly environment and leave the company after several months work. I think if a company wants to hire designers, they are looking for the improvement of design we can bring. They are not experts, but we are. We have the knowledge and responsibility to educate them how to do the right design things. So designers, please be confident and trust ourselves.