Survival tips after 3.5 years into the design industry
What to look out for when you’re no longer a fresher…
This post was originally published in the Bootcamp:
The last time I wrote, I had just completed about a year and a little more. Between my first and my third and halfth year, a lot has happened. I moved between Startups (from logistics to fintech) & cities (from Delhi to Bengaluru & back), grew from a Product Designer to a Senior Designer, helped build a platform and an app from scratch in a very niche neo banking industry. Apart from learning to design better solutions, I’ve grown in stakeholder management, and contribute towards cultural aspects of my design team like hiring, branding, etc. Personally, I’ve never been more confident, my firefighting skills have sharpened and I’ve learned to humbly embrace human flaws. Sharing some of my learnings with you all and myself, so that I can get over my anxiety of forgetting, and make space for something new.
I’ve divided this article into two parts, the first part covering aspects particularly learned from working with Startups and making products from scratch. The second part talks more about growing as a Designer.
Building 0 ➡️ 1
Pan the breadth and then breakdown tasks.
A mismanaged timeline can be the biggest cause of stress and takes your focus away from the solution to focusing on the delivery.
Young designers often look at the problem statement from the surface and jump to give an estimated timeline. Once you actually start solving, you realize all the auxiliary flows, and the little nooks start to come in (You forgot about the notifications, didn’t you?). Almost always, product development cycles last longer than expected. Design needs to help the whole team measure the breadth of the product, in terms of user experience. This will not only achieve better timelines for design, but also for engineering efficiency, making the first cut of the product of a much higher quality.
Once tasks are broken down it’s much easier to prioritize and phase out. This becomes even more crucial when working in a hyper-accelerated startup environment, where designers and engineers may not get to be a Sprint apart, but almost parallel. In such scenarios, designers often don’t get to do a grand reveal of their envisioned Product Experience and handover with fewer feedback rounds. This only means to break down your tasks into smaller and smaller flows, thinking one API at a time.
You can’t always chase the best version of everything
When bootstrapped on time and resources, you’re going to cut corners somewhere. Sometimes, those creative juices just don’t flow! But if you’re going to cut corners, do it at a place where it’s least likely to be noticed. Look at the data on the frequency of a user experiencing a flow, fix everything with high-occurance and high impact first, and then shift focus towards areas where effort vs. impact debate starts to arrive.
At times, as designers we look at our work in isolation, with a Halo-effect, forgetting that breakthrough interaction (validation forthcoming) may not really be necessary at the MVP stage (when you’re still figuring if the idea), and it’s probably okay to follow a pattern which users are familiar with and is working well somewhere.
Framing is Everything! EVERYTHING!
While presenting as Designers, it’s important to make the audience empathize with the user. However, Framing is not just for the users, it’s also for us as storytellers to highlight the conditions and the limitations.
Walking through the process is as important as looking at the final outcome: the research method, the decision framework, the educated guesses, the resources available which helped you achieved the final result matters.
Why? From a product perspective, it helps evaluate the conditions under which one decision was made, and how close they are to the real world; it helps understand if our biases played any role, and most importantly it helps tech and product empathize with your design process. In addition to that, it also helps to understand & highlight what is required to get better data to make more informed decisions. More importantly, when working under a constraint, it helps build the path for negotiating resources, and look at design as not just a place for ‘making screens’.
Framing the narrative can make the same solution from looking crude to mindful.
Pro-Tip: When narrating, use the first names of your stakeholders in second person to build empathy with the doer: Chetty Arun
Everyone loves consistency. But…
Building a product is being for the first time, there is a lot of responsibility to get the defaults right. The defaults tend to stay much longer than anyone expects and can guide first-time user behavior, and the first impression of the application of users.
Now, as your product grows, you’re going to be adding newer flows. Existing interaction patterns can add as an anchor to what you want to build and is sometimes the easier thing to do when you’re working for speed.
But then again, sometimes we’re so busy fitting things in a box that we forget to ask ourselves if this was really the design solution, this problem needed; ask yourself because at times you’re the best person in the team to answer this Q.
Ask yourself the following questions on the approach you take while solving questions:
• Did I really explore alternatives? Or did I pick something that was the first thing to come into my mind?
• Am I building this under a recency bias?
• Is this really how users are want to use the new feature?What are the tradeoffs of curving away from it?
• Am I building the obvious? And if so at what cost?
And if you realize that there could be another better solution to the problem, go fight for it.
Getting better with Experience 🐣
Do NOT guilt-trip on feedback.
Feedback is the breakfast of the Champions! But Feedback can stir a lot of emotions. Sometimes, it brings a very new perspective towards looking at a problem, sometimes it can bring to your notice things that weren’t visible in first glance, and make you feel a bit silly for not having thought through things enough. Let’s face it, there is always this nervousness about showing your work to others; before explaining your thoughts to the audience, the tiny voice may roll its eyes and tell you “you’re stating the obvious” or “what you’re headed towards the opposite direction than intended”. I’m happy to report, that this voice only grows tiny as you keep going. As a young designer, I used to feel extremely self-critical of my work after every round of error-pointing, but I’ve been mindfully replacing ‘criticism’ with ‘improvisation’.
Some feedback may be harsh and lead to a lot of rework & longer estimates, making design a blocker. It’s easy enough to undervalue your worth with all this self-bashing and imposter syndrome. But Design is the place for healthy debate and brings to light, a lot of difficult discussion on viewing the design. It’s a point where the company can put down their vision to a product and question what they are doing. Feedback and course correction at a low-fi level is better than having to correct the product path after release.
Feedback is a perspective gained by the luxury of experience & the clarity at the end of the tunnel.
To summarise, don’t let feedback hamper your self-confidence if at all, you should take pride in the risk-mitigation that comes with the product debate, as they eventually help form the tenets of the product.
Just keep swimming.
Every time I come across a good designer or look at those who have achieved Mastery in this field, it always reminds me of so many things I‘m yet to learn; this feeling of inadequacy can be overwhelming. I know this advice almost always sounds preachy, but you must remember that every day you spend with your craft makes you better at it. From being iterative while solutioning, product thinking, and trying to not falling into thought traps, from planning and estimating to handling stakeholders. Everything gets better with persistence & experience!
I still remember my first attempts at UI. The first time, I was like oh, this is easy and I can do it. But then, when I showed my work to my seasoned batchmates, they were like “ugh….it could be better”, I didn’t agree. A few months later, when I looked at the same piece again, I was too embarrassed to have put up the attempt in my portfolio. And now, when I look back at the work from that time when I looked back at my work, I feel the same about my work from 6 months back. And that’s the thing about the experience, even without actively focusing, you tend to improve if you just keep swimming.
Leaving this video about the Design Process of Lisa Hanawalt, Creator of Bojack, at this very interesting pointer about “How it shouldn’t matter if you’re feeling good or bad about your art, the art will be good if you put the work to it”
Be realistic about deadlines and respect work-life balances
Whether you’re fresh in the industry or working in a startup where the stakes are high, you’ll want to over-commit your weekends & post-office hours to work. There may be some war-rooms worth the sacrifice, but I plead caution when walking down this territory. We sometimes may consider being successful means long and exhausting hours of toil, and it may also mean so for brief periods but, this cannot be a way of life. A successful career should mean efficiency and balance in equal proportions. If careers only reward dogged long hours, it’s not inclusive towards so many people: the Career Moms whose Nanny leaves at 8, the folks whose parents need medical attention and care, young fathers who will always miss out on their children’s young years, the people who need to give dedicated time to their sensitive health and just normal people with normal social lives and hobbies.
When one person starts committing the weekends, it becomes an unsaid rule to commit in the team. And this may lead to short-term success, but in the long run, leads to a fatigued workplace. So every time you pick your laptop on the weekend, think twice before pinging someone on slack.
Be Vocal about Culture
Till March 2020, we had only 3 women in our 20+ member team. It was a depressing number, but as uncomfortable as it was, I wrote a document about why we need to hire more women in the team, and how to do it. With this point being raised, I thought I was going to come across some awkward conversation, but the acknowledgement was most welcoming and appreciative. Since then we have 9 women in the 30 member team, which may not be a perfect ratio but definitely better than where we were previously. I want to highlight this point for two reasons:
- Important things happen when we can have meaningful conversations. In this case, the conversation started because I was vocal about representation (despite my apprehension).
- Great teams also empower and enable their team members. None of my courage would’ve seen the light of the day without the nudge and encouragement from my team, every step of the way. And none of this conversation would’ve turned to action if my team wasn’t a receptive and agile audience.
My current workplace Team Razorpay takes its culture very seriously, and this one example is just privy to that. Eventually, all of us make the workplace we want to work in, and hence it’s important to light our concerns.
So if you’re stressed about bad cultural practice, I urge you to talk about it. Talk to your manager, talk to your team, and talk about actionable!
With this I hope I have provided some valuable learning to you, that may make your journey in design a little bit easier. closing this long article with the most important point:
Don’t forget to have Fun!
Always happy to have the best colleagues at work Razorpay.Design, but a special mention to Saurabh Soni, Chetty Arun, Pingal Kakati & Nishant Chauhan for making work fun.
Recommend reading Keep Going by Austin Kleon, the one who made me come out of my Medium slumber and write this article.
Read my previous article on learnings from my first year in Design:
Also read about the powerful interaction design of Instagram:
