2 Things I Wish I Did Differently While Learning UX— A Note to Aspiring Designers
Introduction
If you clicked on this, I assume that you too are an aspiring designer looking to break into the UX industry. You might be a student or a mid-career transitioner, but nonetheless, I hope this article serves its purpose of sharing what I have learnt in the past year. After pursuing UX for almost 1 year since discovery, I’ve come across many spot-on articles that detail the foundations one should take note of when learning UX. However, I just thought of writing this article to add certain insights I wish I came across earlier that could have made my pursuit in the past year much smoother.
With that let’s get started! :)
1. Learning more about Design Systems
During the start of my UX journey, I mostly overlooked design systems since I could not comprehend their benefits yet. Oh, boy was I wrong for doing that. When I first started my internship, my proposals would occasionally be rejected as I was not familiar with following style guides and how to work with them.
During my 6 month internship, I’ve come to learn that when we are working with a team of designers, we will most likely work with a design system. These design systems are important, not only as a source of truth for designers but also to facilitate collaboration between designers and developers. Proper design systems mean that developers can recycle the same components, leading to more efficient development workflows. It is also an important point of consideration when making design choices, as straying from style guides can lead to inconsistent UI patterns that hinder the users’ experience.
In my experience, the importance of knowing about Design Systems has not been highlighted enough because when we work on personal projects, we might be working individually or in a small team where the value of a design system may not be as apparent. However, it plays a vital role in product development workflows and growing product teams, hence I recommend aspiring designers to learn more about them.
A good way to learn about them is to explore and use open-source design systems in your personal projects. In addition, using design systems also immensely cuts the time spent on creating components from scratch repeatedly, making it less time-consuming to finish your personal projects.
2. Adapting the Design Process Accordingly Like a Chameleon
“Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Implement” is a process most of us are familiar with to some extent. However, to grow as designers we need to know how to contextualise the design process. This goes hand-in-hand with understanding the problem you are trying to solve, as well as empathising with other stakeholders of the project.
Most projects work with tight deadlines and a limited budget and our role as designers is to maximise the usability of a product within these constraints. Neither will a forced user persona necessarily help you empathise with the user. Nor will an unnecessarily large number of user interviews help if your current sample already reflects your user’s behaviour. Religiously following the design process from “Step 1: Empathise” to “Step 6: Implement” without considering context will often result in more cost than benefit.
By no means am I debunking the Design Process. In fact, I am highlighting its iterative nature, meaning it was intended to be a flexible tool to be adapted to the constraints and limitations of each project.
Hence, I challenge you to think critically about the purpose of your design artefacts and how they contribute to solving or understanding the problem. Also, don’t be afraid to tailor the design process specifically to the needs of your project. :)
With that, I hope you have gained some insights from this article. Thank you and good luck!
