Don’t make these mistakes your first year as a product designer
I just celebrated my first year as a full-time ux designer at the first job I ever landed post grad. Woah, that is a lot. I can’t say, “it feels like it was yesterday”, because it doesn’t. I remember when I completed my interview for this role last year and this company was not on my immediate radar (upon the many places I was spamming my resume to) , but I was taken back when I interviewed with the team. They radiated talent, thoughtfulness, diversity, and passion for their job. I can now say those qualities were not for show, and they were absolutely authentic to the team.
As I rode out my 1 year, there were inevitable mistakes I made, corrected, and learned from or am still learning from. I am here to list them out so you can skip the part where you make them. Let’s begin! 👇
Not embracing being a junior designer!
Oh gosh, the way I wanted to embody the qualities of the senior designers on my team within the first few months of the job was quite unrealistic! I remember being very eager to know the secret recipe to how a senior designer operates so I could set myself up for success..but I wanted it almost instantaneously.
Being a junior designer is not something you or I should be ashamed of and want to shake off so quickly. It is actually a very empowering title to have given the circumstances (aka this was my first full-time job and there needed to be space for grace). Once I reveled in this space, I realized I should appreciate it! It allowed me to:
- Pace myself
- Try new things to carve my own path for learning and growth
- Ask questions without second guessing myself
- Not shy away from making mistakes, because I can iterate on my approach. *Show work in progress with your team!
Of course, one would find themselves in this place because they are an overachiever and like to put their best foot forward. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t admire your senior designers. This means you can admire them and know that it also took them years on the job to garner the experience and skills that shape them into the designer they are today!
Not building an honest relationship with your manager
Your manager should be your coach, your confidant, and your 2nd hype person (your main hype person should be yourself 😉). It is easy to want to only show your best self to your manager, but it would be unfair to how successful they can do their job to uplift you! And the only way to curate a mutually beneficial relationship is to be completely transparent about what is energizing you and what is causing you conflict. Start with small issues and see their managerial style to help alleviate the conflict. There should be an open dialogue to iterate on this working relationship.
Not practicing design documentation or organization
I get it. Decisions can happen fast and before you know it, you’ve iterated upon the same frame 3 times and you’re annotating it for dev handoff. I am still working on this.
I didn’t realize how important it is to have strong succinct documentation and organization in the design process. It is important to keep a record of decisions your team makes as you go through the process so relatively anyone can understand how you got from point A to B — at at least a high level. Doing this shows visibility to the detailed efforts you and your design partners went to deliver an intentional design solution. It is easy for people not directly familiar with the work of UX designers to dismiss these efforts when shown the final deliverable because good design is invisible. It is okay if users leave the product not recognizing the attention and care a designer put into their experience, but internal folks need to recognize the effort 💯
A bonus to practicing design documentation is also purely for yourself. This can come in handy when you need to whip up a presentation for a design you handed off months ago or when you need to update your portfolio. Additionally, your teammates can view, understand, and make connections through viewing your file asynchronously! *Very important for remote work.
Not doing adequate discovery on the problem space
Being that my prior experiences were internships, I did not have the time to prioritize quality research to zooming into the problem space before moving into ideating. The outcome of doing proper research , analysis, and critical thinking before solutioning is you deliver a design solution that caters to the unique business goals and users of the product. If you just scrape the surface in the discovery phase, the solution may not be evergreen or worse not be user-centered.
Not building a trusting relationship between your collaborators
Understanding your collaborators goals, strengths, what makes them unsure, and working style will make the process that much more efficient. A pitfall of not building this relationship could be tension during a debate of a design decision. It is important to have trust between your collaborators because you each understand that the intentions of each person come from wanting the best experience of the user and ultimately each of you are on the same team.
And that wraps it up…
I’ve grown so much as a person and as a designer in the past year. Its super cool to reflect on my self-taught UX journey and see how that background applies to my current job ⏳ I think its important to keep a beginner’s mindset because it will always keep anyone hungry and humble. Please share any learnings you made in your career below 🗯
