The pros and cons of working from home as a UX Designer
My name is Jordy Joël Muller and I am a Visual & UX Designer working for Randstad. I wrote this article with the aim of explaining how working from home improved my work-life balance and how I believe it can improve yours as well.
I started working at Randstad 1,5 year ago in an international team while we were still in a lockdown COVID period. When I started, I only got to know my colleagues through video calls and had never met them in person. Due to the lockdown, companies were forced to let employees work from home, but at Randstad this had already been implemented for various teams because a lot of teams from abroad were working together. Remote working was therefore already established at the office before the COVID period. In this article I want to share some pros and cons in the field of working from home and remote collaboration.
The benefits from working from home
Flexibility
One of the most important things that employees who (partly) work from home experience is the freedom and flexibility. It’s a lot easier to plan your work from home, instead of working from an office with a fixed block of available hours. It is also easier to schedule your time when you have children or when you are responsible for your household. If I personally look at my own situation regarding flexible working, I agree with this. I really enjoy filling in my own working day so that I am more flexible for personal time.
No travel time
A major advantage of working from home is that people have no travel time. People often lose a lot of time traveling to work. Because people work from home, they often save between 2–3 hours a day. By saving these hours you are able to balance your personal live & work life a lot easier. I used this time to go to the gym or spend more time with family.
Saving money
Both the employer and the employee can save money if employees work from home. It saves travel costs and office space that can be cut back. Not every company fully reimburses the travel costs for their employees, which means that employees have to pay for their own reimburses. At Randstad, employees are fully reimbursed for the travel costs they make to go to the office. I am pleased that Randstad pays full compensation for people who travel to the office.
No more adjusting daily to a new environment
Today, many offices have flexible workspaces that do not always meet the current equipment that a UX Designer or UX researcher needs to do their job properly. For example, at an office the screens are often less pleasant to use or are not matching the right color palette. That means that designers cannot do their work properly or lose time to adjust the screen color palette at the office. Therefore, it is better for productivity to work from home where you have the right equipment. I’m also happy to be able to work from home because I also have better equipment at home to work with. Like a good external screen and mouse that I work with.
More time for loved ones
What I appreciate from working from home is that I can see my family and friends more. Sometimes if someone is sick, I can help them out in the middle of the day. I can also be more at home for my cat, which is very nice. This makes me feel like I’m more there for my loved ones.
The disadvantage from working from home
Isolated
The difference between working in the office or working from home is a change you notice from a social perspective. Many people became a bit isolated from the outside world. Especially during the COVID period when all public areas and facilities were closed, it was sometimes difficult to always be in the same place. During this period, many more people went for a walk or exercise outside to find the relaxation that was almost impossible because everything was closed. Although meeting with friends and family is easier, I have learned during this time that the social aspect of meeting colleagues and keeping in touch with them is also important.
Creative sessions
As a UX Designer, we need to facilitate or join creative sessions where you have to collaborate with other people to create flows and ideas. In these sessions, we often create solutions via a sketch board to draw our ideas. While there are some good tools like Miro where you can sketch digitally together, it is often easier to work together in a live session on paper or on a whiteboard in a room to co-create together.
Tools that will help you as a UX designer when
working from home & office
Miro
Miro is an online tool where you can collaborate with several people at the same time. Miro is a large canvas board on which you can place various things such as post-its, images, drawings and work out flows. The creative sessions can be performed simultaneously by different people. Everyone can see exactly what someone is doing on the digital board. I think Miro is a great program to work with because you can actually do everything you need for a creative session or brainstorming session. The program is also very fast and works well from the browser.
Figma
Figma is a design tool mainly used for designing websites and apps. In this program you can work together and see what your colleagues are designing at the same time. The program works in the cloud, which also makes it easier for employees to collaborate from any location where the internet is available.
The strengths of Figma:
1: Figma works on any operating system with a web browser. It works on the operating systems like Macs, Windows PCs and Linux computers.
2: Figma supports building prototypes. You can create incredibly complex clickable prototypes.
3: Figma is free to use. If you work in large teams, Figma also offers paid licenses, which gives you extra options.
4: Figma supports plugins. There is a large library of plugins to use.
