12 Mistakes Junior UX Designers Make

[Music] hey what is up design squad welcome back and in this video again i'm gonna share tips for junior designers and people getting into UX over years i coach and mentor and worked with a lot of junior level people who come let's see from different backgrounds all of them almost have to get in the rut and understand let's say intercommunications and how to be more productive and how to manage your time how to work in a team how to follow you know how to let's say follow instructions and give instructions how to manage up there's just so many different bits which you need to learn over the years as you develop so today I decided to share 12 different mistakes which we see a lot of junior designers making if you can just add it by subtracting that's gonna be the best way because if you know things what not to do then you can do the opposite and you can do better and so number one is spreading themselves too thin it does matter what level you are it could be a director chief experience officer if you do too many things and you can't focus too much or you cannot dedicate hours or days on something you're never gonna arrive at a good outcome quality definitely takes time so the sooner you can understand how to prioritize things the sooner you're gonna do better than your previous self now second one is about 95 if you join the design industry and UX design for a very long time and you just want to take your time to develop your skills 9 to 5 is definitely gonna be enough however for every designer I suggest to spend extra time to spend at least a few hours on a weekend to working on their own projects practicing those skills we learned as a junior you take those new methods you learned in let's say a bootcamp book maybe a senior may be a lead like myself usually what you the problems you have in your workplace are very specific it allows you to grow in very linear approach however you always must practice it outside war I always recommend to find passion project side projects do more spend extra time in your own development practicing the skills consulting for a startup maybe giving advice to your friends maybe solving someone else's problem let's say your family members and then applying those skills and coming up with a new case study for your portfolio something along those lines now number three is confusing UX and UI or confusing things which are driven by user research and very visual means which is the UI work because you know a lot of people are gonna come to you and ask for UI design because we don't understand the UX however you need to be a UX designer you need to advocate for user research and I see a lot of junior designers who jump immediately into UI or advocate UI design advocate pixel pushing but that's not what we do that's not our strength is just a deliverable and so the sooner you realize that you why is not UX and UX is not uy the better you're gonna do and the next one is the opposite of 95 it's focusing on progressing way too fast some juniors tend to focus on let's say stepping up becoming mid weight senior lead head off and realities is gonna take you years to develop it's not gonna be immediate for example from junior to senior I would say it's at least I don't know a handful of years couple of years maybe five years depends where you are at with problems you solve who you work with you know who's your senior if we allow you to grow but still it takes so much time to step up and so I would be patient I would spend extra time I would put all the effort in I would focus so much but I also know in the back of my head that it's gonna take time to step up a lot of junior designers tend to be not sure what we should be doing or let's say we wait for more senior person to tell them what to do or what's the right thing to do I would take more risk I would recommend you to propose new things I would recommend you to initiate things and even let's see tell let's do this and then listen what let's say more senior person would tell you to do differently and then adjust based off of that the worst you can do is just wait for someone to tell you what to do because in that case you're gonna have gaps you're gonna have communication issues you're gonna have mixed expectations which are not good for anyone if we jump to the next thing which is a perfect segue is doing exactly what's being told so let's say if stakeholders who have no idea what UX is about telling you that you should talk only to two people instead of talking to five or you know a handful people in a specific user group not pushing back as a junior you are a professional you're a professional for UX you're professional for design you're an advocate you know how to do different things and so you should advocate you should gracefully push back be political don't be brash now a lot of people who are junior okis a lot on the craft on technical skills which is great you have to do it but the next step up or a thing you need to keep of a back of a head with articulation selling getting buying from stakeholders is as important as the technical skills and sometimes I would say it's the most important that the communication is underrated when it comes to production so you must do that next one is not reading enough or reading too much it could go both way if you like to consume books or if you hate books you're gonna end up on both spectrum the ideal space is really in the middle you want to be reading just enough to apply it I think the best way to learn for anyone is to find a problem and then find a solution and so if you don't know how to do things or let's say your lead or senior decides to make an action and go one way ask why and if they don't tell you the answer you want to hear go to Google find something about UX why they decided to do something like that find more about it dig deeper you know go on that trail of knowledge until you are getting tired I wouldn't recommend to read books for a sake of reading and so the best way to learn is to find that medium where you read just enough and you apply as much as you can of it juniors tend to over glorify UX you tend to forget what UX is really just one discipline out of many while it's very glamorous it's very polished it gives very awesome results because you imagine you talk to business people to get their problems you talk to users you get their needs and pain points you come up with great ideas you innovate you produce outcomes maybe it's wireframe maybe it's flow maybe it's even product design mock-ups things of that nature you make prototypes you know it's amazing stuff you're in the right place especially if you're watching this video but the point is that it's just one aspect of it you still need development you still need product people it's only business people you're just one aspect of a team and so you need to be considerate of all of it the only thing what makes you a hero is that your user champion you're not Steve Jobs and you shouldn't aim to be one and that's one of the things what they tell every junior designer not to get drunk on their own supply better spend that energy to communicate to further people next one is a bit more technical it's really about juniors sometimes tend to forget to engage with your users enough simply jump from very basic assumptions or hypotheses straight into ideation to production prototyping ended up with something which is sort of answers user needs but not entirely and so you must engage your users as much as you can I have so many videos on wire let's see should prototype if users why you should run workshops if the users why users should be part of your workflow and our next one is very related which is working in isolation again if you can involve more people let's see in your UX ideations in your sketching involved developers involve business people showcase how you come up with those different bits it's definitely gonna makes more sense to let's say your stakeholders your product manager how do you come up with different bits if you're a researcher playback the themes make sessions schedule your own meeting schedule your own workshop never ever work with isolation you need other people's input you need to voice your assumptions because sometimes you do user research you talk to people you come up with something and then in the end it's not something anyone else thought about or before about it but we came up with different conclusions and so it's your responsibility to get to the people and come up with something else which you can work on together again if we go back to the number one prioritization is key keeping time is key keeping deadlines is heat one of the examples could be let's say what I see juniors do the affair let's say given a deadline from business or myself that it has to be done by tomorrow they're gonna spend all that time up until tomorrow up until the last minute and then showcase it very last minute what we did all the deadlines you were given normally account for contingency meaning various percentile which ever senior I can guarantee your boss your you know your more senior designer is gonna give you a deadline which has at least extra hour or at least a few minutes which you could spend on tweaking things we're going to account for changes all the time and if they don't we shouldn't manage but the point is what majority will do so and so what you need to do is to account for that to work backwards see if you have a deadline of eight hours or five days try to add on a third or fourth day to engage if your other UX people more senior people your team your core product team or service team whether you work with to validate a bit say hey am I on the right track do you think I should improve anything how does that look like showcase to be users try to engage with a person who should be involved in that process as early as don't wait till the last minute that's the worst thing you could do just in such a field like UX product design service design it's an iterative approach so you're gonna learn as you go you're gonna make mistakes you're gonna adapt you're gonna do better as you go and so these are the twelve bits the twelve mistakes any junior designer is gonna make at some point or even any experienced designer let's say sometimes I make these mistakes but at least I know what I should be doing instead and so I hope it's useful if so give a like subscribe to this channel and until next time [Music]

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Keywords: user experience design, user experience, user research, product design, product designer, ux for beginners, learn ux design, ux design, ux, ux designer, ux/ui, ux design process, ux job, ux career, ux designer career, ux ui, ui ux, ux beginner, become a ux designer, beginners ux, ui/ux, interaction design, hci, nng, ux career path, design career, lean ux, ux researcher, ux school, ux industry, career advice, junior ux designer, tech, job advice, ux jobs, uxd, uxui, ux tips

Id: aVs6EZP0inQ

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020