A Typical Day in the Life of a UX Designer

What does a designer do on any given day? Well, I go to work, work, work, work, work...

Thanks, Rhianna, that song will be stuck in my head forever, but seriously. The most important aspect of getting started in anything is showing up every day and doing the work. As the saying goes, "practice makes perfect." The question is what should you or will you be practicing every day?

A big disclaimer to this one. Not every designer works the same, has the same responsibilities or roles to fill. This can look different depending on who you are, where your focus lies, and what your company, team, or clients expect from you. Also, it has a lot to do with the individual designer, where their strengths are, where they tend to focus their attention and how their team divides responsibilities.

For this article, I'll focus on the role of a UX Designer that I'm most familiar with. Someone who is in charge of or has responsibility for the end-to-end UX/UI deliverables on a team. In this case, someone who is a sole contributor to an agile development team but inside an organization with many other designers working on many other products. I'll speak from this point of view as this is what my experience has typically looked like.

This article is mostly geared towards individuals who are looking to begin working in the UX field, but if you are someone looking for what a UX designer does all day in order to hire them. Here is a great article to consider.

A typical day starts off with a Stand-Up

Or check-in or whatever you call your team status meeting. A standup is a short meeting (and yes, you really should stand. Typically this meeting will be lead by a scrum master who will either be standing in front of a physical Kanban board with the team's goals or sharing a project management tool like Jira from their computer. Each individual of the team will state what they did the day before, what they're working on today, and what might be blocking their progress. This is a great time for the designer to connect with the development team and product owner to answer any questions that are blocking the team and let them know where you are at with your designs or research for coming features.

Most development teams today are working in some form of an Agile process. This means major goals, features, or product releases are split up into sprints. A sprint can last a week, two weeks, or any other agreed-upon time frame. On specific days of the sprint, designers will have to contribute to other meeting types like feature grooming, retrospectives, and sprint planning.

Within each sprint, the designer will have several tasks. These could include, UI design handoff to the developer, UX research for future features, usability testing, wire-framing, prototyping, and the list goes on. Asides from those deliverables. It will also be the job of the designer to help the business and product teams to think on a more strategic level and contribute to guiding the product roadmap.

So depending on the phase or maturity of a project, the daily stand-up is kind of where the whole "Typical Day" idea breaks down. I designer will split their days between a number of different activities depending on what's needed at the time. Let me explain.

Designing

Yes! A good portion of your day will be spent heads down in Sketch, InVision, XD, Figma, or any other prototyping tool you choose to use. This can be high fidelity designs or low, but you should be prototyping and learning almost every day.

You should be prototyping and learning almost every day

By prototyping, I mean creating mock-ups that are as close to an interactive experience as possible. This allows not only the designer but the rest of the team as well to interact with an experience like an app that's similar to what it would be like for a customer to use the actual product.

By learning, I mean using the prototype to test with the business team to ensure it meets requirements. Test with the development team to ensure the feasibility of building this design and test with the folks who in the end will be using the app to make sure it's actually something they'll want to use.

Now before you get to the stage of designing high fidelity prototypes, several other activities will hopefully have occurred. Let's dive into those.

Strategic Thinking

Designers need to help the business connect with users to gain insights into their needs and wants. This is an essential part of the designer's role. Also helping them develop the requirements of what you will be building is a good skill set to acquire. The designer's role in this phase is to really connect with the business team to build trust and establish goals, vision, and the desired outcome the team will be driving towards.

Actual day-to-day work may include crafting and participating in user or customer interviews. Analyzing customer pain points and highlighting opportunities. Crafting competitive research, creating user personas, collecting inspiration, journey map creation and again, the list goes on. The important part is that you and the team are forming a bond and a connection around who your customer is, what your strategy is to help them, plus how and on what time frame you'll do it in.

That sounds like a lot, but it isn't the sole responsibility of the designer. This is a team sport, so some of your time might be spent leading these project kickoff sessions, and some might be spent being led through them by another team member. It's a good opportunity for the designer to connect with the team and teach them anything they know that might help the team gather any needed information on their own.

Divergent Thinking

Ideating, iterating, and collaborating are key to this phase. Design, Test, Repeat! You'll be sketching, wire-framing, card-sorting, plotting the Information Architecture, prototyping, testing, etc..., etc...

So you've helped the team gather enough information to know who your customer is and roughly how you'll go about helping them. Now it's time for the pen to hit the paper. Or marker to hit whiteboard, or sharpie to hit post it, or mouse to click the screen. You get the point, now is the time to generate as many ideas as possible. Now could be a great time to walk the team through an idea-generating workshop.

This is the time for the designer to go wild, to not be held back by constraints of what's possible and ordinary. Now is the time to innovate, or simply try something new. Sketch an idea, then sketch it again, sketch it a hundred more times in a hundred different ways. Keep testing new ideas with the team until something seems like it may work. This is all fairly low fidelity at this point. Paper and pen, wireframes, and low fidelity click-throughs that can begin to be tested with and validated by customers.

Now that we have a rough outline of our design. It's time to refine it.

Convergent Thinking

Developers need your final typography, spacing, grids, icons, and artwork ready to go. Also, you'll need to work closely with the product team to design for almost every imaginable scenario a user may encounter while using your app. So a designer needs to be good and fast at whichever design tool they'll be using. It's incredible how much time can be spent designing error states and messages to help your user when things break down. Get faster so it doesn't break you down.

You've thought through every possible idea and have now you and the team have decided upon an approach. It's time to converge on that idea. Refine, design, and continue to test. This is where you'll start designing much more high-fidelity designs. The actual User Interface design the development team will build. Typography, mixed with imagery, color palettes, interactions and all will need to be figured out and communicated with the team.

If you are on a team with a design system, a lot of this will be already figured out for you and you can spend your time creating your design with that system in mind to ensure it matches up with the other products your company puts out. Also, communicate any changes, additions, or alterations you've had to make to the system to the rest of the design team or organization as a whole so those updates can be fed back into the design system for future use by other designers.

If you are on a team that does not have a design system. You'll be spending a lot more time in this phase crafting a beautiful design through defining typographic hierarchy, color theory, and easily navigable user flows for key interactions. A lot of time will be spent side by side with the development team, showing and documenting how your design should look, move, behave and adapt by doing visual quality assurance with them as they begin to and finalize your coded design.

Facilitating and participating in workshops

There are meetings, lots of meetings. Workshops are better, and if you can't get that. A meeting with a purpose and action will have to do. As a designer, you have to present your work a lot! Designers need to get comfortable facilitating activities and presentations that don't suck.

If the team is stuck, if something is not working. If nobody knows what to do next. If things have been going around in circles and we keep coming back to the same conversations. It's time for the designer to blow up the process with a workshop. Depending on the need. A designer could conduct an ideation session to try new ideas, conduct a collaborative sketching session or just help the team think through a problem at the whiteboard. The key is to get the team thinking creatively together to solve problems and get unstuck.

Some problems require more thought-out workshops like Design Sprints. Design Sprints are 3-5 day collaborative sessions with your team that will run through the whole designing thinking process and end with a prototype that you will test with real customers to see if your solution solves the problem. These types of workshops, both large and small are a designer's secret weapon to ensure the team is always thinking creatively to solve the problems of their business and customers.

Typical?

So as you can see. A typical day as a UX designer is not very typical at all. It is fun though 😉

What's your favorite part of the day?