What are the things that bug you about UX Design that no one talks about?
This question was posed to me through a survey I put out recently. Which I'd love for you to take if you have the time. You can find it at thomasmorrel.com/survey and it's focused on what I can do to improve the User Flows podcast and content creation overall to make it better for you.
There is one section where I ask what else you would like to hear discussed on the show and I got this great question from an anonymous subscriber.
Q: What are some of the things that are a pain in the UX field but are rarely talked about?
Here is my answer: Yeah, so we can talk about all the happy-go-lucky stuff about switching to a career in UX design. It’s a fulfilling career, you can make some good money, affect some great products, etc… but there are also some pains as this listener put it. It is WORK after all and “work” is a four-letter word. So here is a shortlist of some of the PITA's you'll encounter as a UX designer.
One: You'll spend most of your time not designing.
True, you’ll spend a whole lot more time collaborating with others, talking, strategizing, and aligning than you will in front of your computer on Sketch, Figma, XD or even Balsamiq. Which leads to number two.
Two: There will be a lot of meetings. A LOT. Un ungodly amount.
I can not stress this enough. you will spend probably 50% of every day in some type of meeting, possibly more if you don’t curtail the meeting frenzy that is the corporate world. Learn quickly how to turn meetings into doings by facilitating meetings that have actions tied to them. Focus on figuring things out in the moment instead of planning on figuring things out later.
Three: Everyone has a different idea about what it is that you should be doing in your role as a UX designer.
You'll need to define your role and educate a lot of people on what it is that you do and do NOT do. If everyone has a different idea of what you should be doing, you’ll let everyone down. Clearly define your role, goals, and purpose from the outset or it will be defined for you.
Four: It doesn't matter which design software you use, just get really good and fast with one.
If you know Figma, you know Sketch, if you Know XD, you know Figma. They are all so ridiculously the same. It doesn’t matter which one you use. If you go from one job to another, you may be forced to use a new tool. If you know one well, you’ll be able to figure out the other with a few YouTube videos. The idea is to find a tool that you like that helps you think visually the fastest with the least amount of friction.
Five: You should probably know at least HTML, CSS, and javascript.
A lot of designers hate hearing this, but it will save you and those you work with a lot of time. Also, it gives you the ability to prove someone wrong when they say what you designed can’t be done, by simply prototyping it in code on your own.
Six: A lot of the work you do will never see the light of day.
I would say that 95% of the work I’ve done in the corporate world has never seen the light of day. Either due to iteration making something obsolete, the sheer amount of options you’ll need to provide for a single design, budgets changing, missions changing, whatever it may be. Get used to a majority of your work falling into the waste basket.
Seven: You'll work with a lot of different disciplines.
You won’t always be working with other designers. In fact, a lot of UX roles will be you the designer, a team of developers, business analysts, and more disciplines other than design. Again, define your role clearly and learn how to communicate and work with all disciplines to bring out the best in everyone. It’s also actually a good thing. Diversity in thought of varied disciplines can lead to some great ideas.
Eight: The process is never perfect.
You’ll almost never have enough time to conduct the full scope of UX exercises you’ll want to in a given project. Learn how to make the biggest impact where you are at. A lot of projects will have begun before you joined the team and many more will be underfunded and poorly managed. Do the best with what you have.
Nine: You're not always going to be working on cutting-edge products or technology.
A lot of it is going to be very boring business applications using extremely dated tech stacks. Even at big tech organizations, you’ll sometimes be working on desktop applications meant to run on Internet Explorer. Make the best of it. Every project is a learning experience.
Ten: There is no perfect. Only good. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
You’ll never put out a perfect product, it will have flaws you either didn’t see or saw but were helpless to fix before release. Ship the project and then learn so you can iterate again. Waiting for perfection is a fool’s errand as it doesn’t exist.
Eleven: IMO. The only thing that matters, in the end, is what gets shown to the user when they call up your app.
All your time spent making something pixel perfect in Sketch or any other application other than code is a waste of time. Spend the time making the front-end code amazing and bullet-proof, otherwise your pixel-perfect sketch file will turn into a giant turd when some back-end developer who hates doing front-end work has one hour left in a sprint to poop out a UI that will pass testing but look horrendous. Seen it happen a hundred times. A perfect sketch file but a flawed interface is still a flawed interface. More Sketch isn’t going to fix that.
Thanks,
TM
