6 Lessons I’ve Learned (or Confirmed) in my First 6 Months as a Designer
Last week marked one year since I officially embarked on my UX journey by taking a UX Design immersive course. Another milestone I recently reached was the six-month point in my first design job.
In the past six months, I’ve jumped head first into designing in Adobe Illustrator, participated in my first hackathon, and seen a healthy amount of turnover and growth that claimed my #workhusband but also introduced me to some amazing new coworkers.
I’ve worked on all different kinds of design projects, and because demand for my team’s services has been particularly high this year, I’ve had to get up to speed quickly. Still, there were some lessons that took a while to sink in, and it required some reflection for me recognize them.
As I tend to do with unfamiliar design software, let’s dive right in.
1. You don’t need to have expert knowledge about your industry to design for it.
I work for a bank, and aside from your standard checking and savings accounts, I haven’t had much exposure to banking services and products as a customer. While it’s easy to hide behind the excuse that I don’t yet possess the institutional knowledge I need to contribute to the work fully, I’ve found that an outsider’s perspective is, in fact, quite valuable in the design process.
So far, I’ve been involved in one large field research project, and my team and I took a broad approach to it, asking people about their daily behavior, rather than the intricate details of how they bank. This was all part of an effort to improve the way that the bank communicates with its customers. By looking at how customers receive communications from all service providers — not just financial service providers — we were able to get a more comprehensive glimpse into the customers’ lives.
The research was very insightful, and through this experience, I learned the value of being loosely tied to the bank’s customer-facing processes and not being caught up in the details. Coming from this standpoint, I could take a relatively unbiased and open-minded approach to the research.
2. Not everyone knows what Design Thinking is.
After being immersed in an environment filled with tech-focused students, including other UX designers, web developers, and data analysts, I became accustomed to working with people who have a strong awareness of human-centered design. Going back out into the real world, however, I learned that this knowledge was less common among most other populations.
A large portion of my team’s work involves hosting Design Thinking workshops and facilitating ideation and design sessions for our internal business partners. We serve as design consultants and Design Thinking ambassadors as our company works to increase its design maturity.
I’ve found myself explaining the function of a usability test or the importance of asking non-leading questions in user interviews to our business partners, and one of my largest projects has been creating a Design Thinking 101 online training course for other employees at the bank. These experiences have helped me to understand the value of my team within our organization, and it gives me a great sense of purpose in my work.
3. Collaboration is key.
I mentioned this one in a post from last year, but I had to learn it again in a work context. For a while, when I was the new girl on the team, I faced that nagging question of, “Is everyone hanging out without me?” As I became more involved on projects, however, that all changed, as I was included in more opportunities for collaboration.
My coworkers often put time on my calendar for “work sessions” that last for hours at a time. In these sessions, we sit in a workspace together and alternate between working individually and consulting with each other on our ideas. Outside of work sessions, we frequently seek informal feedback from each other to make sure that our ideas are on the right track and make sense to others.
I sometimes need to remind myself to check in with my coworkers for feedback. Sometimes I get into a state of heads-down work and I wait to present my work until I consider it a finished product. In this way, I create more work for myself, as I often receive suggestions for how to iterate on my work once I’ve already set a standard for the entire report or graphic. Clearly, this one is a recurring lesson for me.
4. Designers really do require an endless supply of post-its.
It’s true — my team could single-handedly keep 3M in business. Because our work is so collaborative, we need to share information visually and in a way that can be easily manipulated.
I’ve found this to be particularly true in user research synthesis. We use affinity diagrams to ensure that each research team shares their findings accurately, after going out into the field and conducting interviews separately. This means that we all have the responsibility of transferring our interview notes to post-its, writing one idea on each post-it. It’s a tedious process and leaves each of us with stacks and stacks of post-it notes that we then spend weeks reviewing, organizing, discussing, and reorganizing as a group. Still, it’s the best way for us to organize the information as a group, and it’s proven to me that teamwork in user research is possible.
Affinity mapping is possibly the most effective method for facilitating collaboration among teams that are looking to identify findings from a large amount of data, and it ensures that my team stays on the same page. Or the same sticky note, for that matter.
5. You need to hold yourself accountable on project-based work.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by this one, but I came into design from a Human Resources background. My previous tasks were very reactive, and my work often required approval from higher up, due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.
In my design job, I receive less guidance, and I am expected to come to meetings having completed work between touch-points. I’ve had to adjust to not being given specific steps for how to move forward with my projects and not having a rigid distribution of responsibilities with my colleagues.
Perhaps this is because the structure of our team is relatively flat or because, as Design Thinking generalists, we’re all expected to be capable of owning any piece of the design process. Primarily, I think it’s that, when innovation is a large part of your work, no one can have all the answers, and we’re just trying to navigate through it together. I’ve heard countless times that design is ambiguous, and now I understand that that means it’s ambiguous for both designers and team leaders alike.
6. The work won’t always look the way you imagined it would.
As a UX Design student, my view of “traditional UX” was that it was very digital-heavy. When I took this job, I knew that my team did not fall within the digital space at the bank, but I really struggled to grasp what the work looked like.
In my first six months, although my work has had implications for digital design, most of it has not touched digital solutions directly. In fact, one of my favorite projects was primarily analog: it was a usability test focused on the furniture arrangement in a retail branch.
When I was making a decision on my job offer, I had conversations with other designers who worked in the kind of roles that appealed to me. I asked them candidly if they had the same realization as they began their design careers. One designer said, “I remember thinking that the work didn’t look the way I imagined it would at all. Initially, I thought I would be making wireframes all day.”
Although I came into my design role having a preference for visual design, I’ve learned that I enjoy conducting user research and usability tests and extracting insights from these engagements to provide recommendations to internal business partners. These pieces of the process certainly make the work much more fulfilling than just making wireframes all day.
As I progress in my design career, I am certain that I have much more to learn. So far, the most rewarding aspects of my job have been realizing the value that my organization places on Design Thinking and feeling that my work is appreciated. And that’s been a refreshing change from my experience in HR.
