Designers, picture this!
You get to work on a new project.
You’re collaborating with your PM on defining requirements from a design perspective.
You’re working with UX researchers on their user interviews. You have data at your fingertips to validate qualitative problems.
You’re conducting a design-led ideation workshop with stakeholders to come up with solutions to the problems.
You have a perfect component UI library to create your mocks in no time.
You iterate continuously on your low and high-fidelity prototypes, thanks to a constant feedback loop.
You hand your mocks over to engineering and QA on Zeplin easily, thanks to a fixed…
“Be curious. Ask as many questions as you can. Explore. That enhances creativity and makes you a better designer.”
This was one of the many quotes I heard at a recent design talk and it’s definitely not a new idea —we designers tend to flood the room with questions at professional design critiques as well as informal chats about UX (meet ups, design events, interviews etc).
While the underlying principle behind the quote is solid, I didn’t necessarily agree with one part: ‘Ask as many questions as you can’.
Say whaaat!? That seems like a contradiction to being a designer…
Raise your hands if this has happened to you — You decide to brighten up your UX portfolio for one of many reasons, usually before you start job searching. You spend weeks (sometimes, months) revamping and redesigning your work until voila! The day comes when you’re happy with what you have done and you start showcasing your hard work in your brand new portfolio!
But, uh oh! You’re not getting the responses that you expected — What happened, you wonder? My portfolio should work on paper: It has the projects I’m most proud of, it talks about my process in…
Tips for running research sessions right out of grad school
Congratulations, you new college grad — You’ve just landed your first swanky job or internship at a fantastic company as a UX Researcher/Specialist! It’s a feeling of relief, happiness and excitement. You walk through the door on that first day, starry-eyed and hopeful. You get your first project and the nerves start to kick in.
You start thinking, “What do I do now? I’ve only done UX at school — This isn’t school!”. Well, fear not. …
Ah, job searching. The supposed baby step that’s actually a giant leap into the world of adulthood. All of us have opinions about it, none of them are neutral. A while ago, I noticed that most of my fellow junior designers don’t exactly find this process very user-friendly. In fact, to quote Coldplay, their most frequent complaint was ‘No one ever said it would be this hard’.
That’s when I realized that my experiences interviewing for (and getting rejected) by 100 companies could actually be useful for my fellow peers. I’ve interviewed for almost every possible junior UX position at…
