6 Lessons I Learned on My Path to Becoming an UX ninja #IXDMA
What did I learn this semester? A lot. My philosophy has always been fake it until you make it, and that’s worked for the most part, until now. UX isn’t really something that you can fake. If you have a shitty experience there really isn’t anything you can hide behind. Maybe you completed all the steps, but in the end no one’s going to care if they don’t enjoy using the experience you created.
When I first started the program I would notice how all of our professors seemed to work so much faster than I did. They could design logos and think of solutions in what I thought was a split second right before my eyes. I would spend hours just to have some mediocre design.
What I didn’t realize was all the work that my professors had put in to lead them to that moment. The hours of research and practice repeated over and over again, trying and failing hundreds of times. Realizing was reassuring, it made me understand that UX is not an innate gift, but a set of specific skills repeated over and over again.
- Sometimes the second time is the hardest
This semester everything was new, I learned new programs and all sorts of new skills. What I found was when I tried something for the first time it was easy because I had no expectation for myself. I just did something and told myself it was good enough because it was my first try. And this actually helped me get some cool stuff out. The weird thing was when I tried to do it again on another project I couldn’t settle on an idea. My mind just kept racing and would start to freak out in frustration. Getting over that hump and starting is hard for me and it’s something I know I need to work on over break.
2. Failing is part of the job
If I wanted to be a real UX specialist, I needed to fail a hundred more times. But how could I possibly fail that many times in such a short period of time? Prototyping was my answered and not for the reason I had expected. At first I thought prototyping was valuable not because you save time by testing out an idea, but because you learn how to fail and you do it a lot while prototyping. It might sound cheesy, but failure isn’t a waste of time if you learn from it, and I quickly had to adopt that perspective if I want to be a great UX/UI designer.
3. Working in a team is sometimes harder than working alone
Even though I’m now in graduate school getting along with everyone isn’t always easy. We all have different expectations for ourselves and for the work we put out into the world. We can’t just expect someone to know what our standards are and I learned if I got upset when someone didn’t show up I couldn’t hold it against them. I learned to set agreements at the start of a project so everyone would be clear on each other’s expectations. But not without a few moments where I felt like flipping the table.
4. Look at lots of work
Keeping up with great work gave me something to aspire to. But looking at bad work taught me even more. I learned what to avoid and how not to make the same critical mistakes others had made. I still can’t say if I know what truly great work is, but there is something about truly bad UI that feels true to me. If you look you can find almost any idea out there. Now when I find a site that might be doing my idea, I get excited.
Because it means that someone else thought the idea was good enough to invest time in. I almost always find sometime bad about their UI, something to make better. And if their UI is truly perfect, I know not to waste my time trying to compete. Looking at work also taught me that I didn’t need to revolutionize design, if an app had really great design elements implemented I could pull from that. For example, when I created my own music streaming app I found myself trying to think up a completely new music player. I was stuck for a long time and finally gave in and pulled elements from other apps. It didn’t feel completely original, but functionally I was easier to use because it used universally recognized symbols.
5. Break your designs
If you haven’t broken you design at least once it isn’t ready to show to anyone. Sometimes it felt like grunt work, but I paid the price for not trying to break my designs. In class we created our own Amazon echo skills, which was a whole lot of fun. We created an excuse generator that asked you series of questions and give you an excuse for the occasion. When we presented in front of the class our excuses sometimes didn’t make sense. It felt awkward and the jokes didn’t come across the way we had heard them. It felt like a huge let down for such a cool opportunity. One we could have avoided if we would have spent more time trying to break our design.
6. If you say yes to everyone you’ll leave yourself confused and frustrated
For a few of our bigger projects there were multiple teachers telling us different things. This was the most apparent when we were trying to get our portfolio’s together in this final week. Some of us started feeling crazed, we’d put in hours get just the right hero images for our projects, only to have one teacher say they need to be videos and the other say the videos are distracting. In the end we all pulled something cool together for our portfolios. But I learned the hard was being a yes man will start to drive you crazy in this industry. If you don’t stop and ask why, you’ll end up like me, switching you project layout for hours on end, only to wake up to change it back to the way it was before.
