Things I didn’t learn in Design School

INTRODUCTION
When it comes to be a User Experience Designer, here’s what you should know. After completing my 4-year graduation programme from a design school, I started working as a User Experience Designer in The Banana Design Company. Honestly, I was unrevealed from the complication of working in the real world with real companies. While design schools may give you an exposure to the divergent practices people use all around the world to design systems/services, on the other hand it keeps you obscure from the most common muddles which the designers have to face in the real world.Going forward in this article I will explain you the minute details and learnings which I assimilated after execution of design in the real world.

I feel the design schools should give their students a chance to apply those practices in a real life project, rather than administering it on some hypothetical solution.

Self Promotion
You can be an awesome User Experience Designer if you have the skills, but if you don’t know how to sell it to the world it’s nothing but a fool’s errand. You must know how to establish your skill set in the industry and have an understanding of how you can sell your ideas and skills to the clients of the real world. I was unknown of the fact that having a skill set is just not enough, but I found the reality to be quite different from what I imagined. You need to be conversant in bartering your ideas to the clients.

You can be an awesome User Experience Designer if you have the skills, but if you don’t know how to sell it to the world it’s nothing but a fool’s errand.

Managing Client Expectations
To help set the expectations of the client’s right, you need to keep them informed and involved at every stage of the project. Always stick to your deadlines which in turn will help you establish trust and credibility for the clients towards you or your firm. Give your clients daily updates of the project so that they don’t blame you for the timelines being outmatched. Often clients may ask you to incorporate some additional things to your design which initially are not the part of your scope. In that case you should have the knack of making them understand without being boorish, that it cannot be incorporated.

Working With Developers
Your design files should be clean and organised the developers can discern with little or no explanation. Give accurate and most suited nomenclature for all the elements you used in your design system. This gives a clear understanding of all the components used in your design system in detail to the developer and other co workers of your team. Working with layers and managing all the layers help you achieve this goal effortlessly.

Usability Testing
Usability Testing is a way to see how easy to use something is by testing it with real users. After my college I had an overall knowledge of the different types of methods and practices people used to do Usability testing but never actually got a chance to implement those methods in the real world. I feel the design schools should give their students a chance to apply those practices in a real life project, rather than administering it on some hypothetical solution.

Originally published at thebananadesign.co on November 23, 2017.