4 things I hate about UX design & warning to new designers

so imagine my friends you've been looking for a yoga's job for a while you applied to tens of positions you have gone through rounds of unreasonable and sometimes disrespectful interviews but finally one day you open your inbox and you see that magical offer email from a company that you've been wanting to work for or haven't really because sometimes beginner designers can't be choosers you feel so happy you accept the offer you work there for a month or two a honeymoon period it feels awesome but then you gradually start noticing some things you finally see that reality started to seep in through the cracks of the honeymoon period and gradually day by day it just fully sets in so here in this video I want you to talk about those things that I found quite unpleasant about working in ux design some of the things that I'm gonna talk about might come off as a little bit Shady but first of all I'm not going to use any identifying information second this is the reality this is what happens to me or people I know and I just feel like some of this needs to be out there because I I don't hear many people talking about it and one of these things is especially dangerous well not dangerous tricky for a beginner ux designers who might not know how to navigate the interview process and how to actually like ask the questions that are going to let them know what's going to happen next when they actually accept the offer and start working there so without further Ado let's just go into the things that I don't like about working in ux design so as I mentioned in one of my other videos ux design is a very broad field it means that under this very wide umbrella you can be doing many things like research UI ux writing not exactly what we usually understand as ux design like arrangement of component placement logic behind some interactions like this kind of thing you can be doing many things such as UI Motion Graphics just Graphics ux writing research many things and this is where the tricky part comes in imagine you're applying for a big company that definitely has a big ux design team that has different kind of specialists in it but you're a new designer you still don't know that so you go into the interview you get the offer and the offer is for the position of the ux designer but since you're new you kind of maybe forgot and didn't ask the question about what exactly you will be doing in that big team I'm not saying that anything that is a part of ux design itself is not import important or it's uninteresting it's just we all have our own preferences and we all have things that we specialize in but imagine this you're going into the job thinking that you're gonna do ux design and it turns out that what you are asked to do is to do exclusively ux copy or research or Graphics like UI this can be a little bit disheartening because what you were told in the interview what you were promised even what the offer says it's different from what you are asked to do it's good that you can just quit the job on the spot if this is not working out for you but for some of us it doesn't work like this or maybe you're just too tired of those endless rounds of interviews and of course you can make it work for yourself in the long run but it still kind of leaves a sort of a negative impression about the company and their treatment of you when you are basically promised that you will be doing one thing and then you are asked to do something completely different this is not going to be good for your portfolio as well because you're going to be creating a portfolio for something completely different something that you might not even be interested in or good at this happened to someone I know so I know it's kind of the reality and I know that sometimes during the interview you might not actually think that it's even necessary to be prying and like asking the person interviewing user like what what's exactly the plan for me what is this position actually for what will I be doing there in the team it might not be exclusive to ux but it's kind of how it works within the context of ux it also raises some question about ethical hiring practices but this is like not my field not my fields to comment on I hope someone else will make another video on it or maybe I will do it later but I just wanted to put it out there that this is the thing that I don't really like about some hiring managers that they don't really tell you what you're going to be doing and um I think they kind of should but yeah this is something that I feel like aspiring designers should know and be aware of so this one is a little bit personal and I think I might get a lot of criticism for this but this is just my opinion don't you just love how my hair is all over the place anyway so the thing number two that I don't like about uh ux design Community about like working in ux is how dramatized and glamorized it is well let me tell you what I actually mean by that you might have noticed that a lot of people talk in um cliches about it like about how we should advocate for the user do everything for the user fight for our user respect our user which is understandable this is what we are supposed to do but we also live in the real world where we are employees of businesses that have certain business goals and we are there to of course make the experience more pleasant for user but eventually we're doing what we're doing so that business that we're working for can attract and retain more users more clients more paying custom members and he has of course this experience should be probably more straightforward and easy for the user because this is how they get attracted to the service and sometimes the best decision for the user does not necessarily align with the best decision for the company and talking so much about how we are fighting for our users to me it's kind of hypocritical because we all know that sometimes the product manager is just not gonna go for it I'm not sure if we as a community of ux designers are saying this to kind of make ourselves feel better but this is kind of the case of misplaced guilt because sometimes no matter how hard we try to do what's best for the user there are too many factors that might prevent us from doing so and that's okay because in many cases especially if you are in a junior position where you literally don't have any say in how the decision is going to come out in what your manager is going to decide to do like what to do with the product and I feel like this wouldn't be such a pet peeve of mine if we weren't talking about it oh my God so often like literally every conversation with the fellow ux designers has this where designers we're designing for good we're designing for the users I feel like since we all work in this sphere we know what's going on look we don't have to talk about it so much we could actually use this time to talk about something more useful like pay transparency hiring practices transparency and something that can actually help your fellow designer out but maybe it's just me because I don't like small talk or filler conversation I like when conversations actually have some sort of value in them so maybe maybe that's just me the second part of it is how people glamorize not actually glamorize but more dramatize the experience of getting into ux I feel like when you're located in your own country um you don't have the Visa issue like some of my fellow designers do it's not really that hard to get into ux you know there's no need to use such loud words as breaking into and dramatize the whole experience like yes sure it might have been a long journey you might have had a lot of stupid interview experiences which is I mean probably it's the same for any field um interview stage is really awkward but what I think is entry requirements for ux are not like really that high unless of course we are talking about some really big companies like Google or Amazon or some companies that actually uh produce so many things that they need the best of the best okay this might actually sound shady as if I'm saying every small company produces just whatever but this is not what I'm trying to say what I'm trying to say is that in general for smaller companies where competition is not that high and iteration speed is not that high it's not really that difficult to get a job in ux sometimes what you need is just adequate portfolio adequate people skills to appear adequate during the interview and of course some luck some maybe some little networking and it's not oh my God I hate this phrase but it's literally not rocket science you do not need knowledge of any complicated equipment it's also not Psychiatry where you have to be very careful working with the delegate human mind if you think about it really what you need is good knowledge of ux tools and many of them are similar so it's not hard to learn another one if you already know how to use one you need to have good people skills which is true for any job but in ux especially and you need to have a decent portfolio that doesn't look like you spent five minutes on it and with all the help available online nowadays I just don't think the process is that complicated and dramatic and this is where my pet peeve or my head thing number three comes out of so the longer I work in ux the more I notice that sometimes people really fail to be like professional at minimum level let me illustrate what I mean with the story once some time ago I was working with a designer who was asking for my advice on ux copy and she basically used commas instead of periods in the end of the sentence and when she noticed that she just said something like oh well this is why I'm a designer this is why I'm not a writer why this is bad well first of all the obvious one when you're writing a work email you obviously use proper punctuation because this is just the bare minimum when you write something for workplace Communications you are not going to make typos of course I don't mean like some you know typos are inevitable that's true but you're not gonna make such obvious ones and of course you're probably gonna reread your email just to make sure that you didn't make some really egregious ones but then there's people just justifying Putin literally no effort in what they do of course in a good organization uh some of those types and mistakes they're going to be caught before production but sometimes they will not and this is where I think it's important that everyone stays as professional as they can because again our job it's not rocket science this is the minimum you can do let me just clarify a little I don't think anyone's perfect I don't think that mistakes are 100 avoidable some things are just inevitable sometimes mistakes typos everything it can happen but it wouldn't hurt to actually be more aware of what we're doing as a designers just so the work would be easy for everyone because we are a big team of people working on very often one thing and when things are designed not according to a certain standard where things are very out of place of course not all the time but sometimes then the work gets kind of hard for everyone after listening to this uh think if maybe the reason that you can't get a job in ux is not because the market is so bad and competitive maybe it's because you spend five minutes on your portfolio finally number four I think is going to be something that's actually related to ux only so it's pretty specific it's when imagine you work in a big company we have established guidelines and design system and there would be people who are actively going against those guidelines and I'm not talking about situations where we as a company are reviewing some guidelines or some design system aspects it's about the situations where we are literally supposed to be doing something within this already flexible guideline and people are making their jobs even more flexible by literally ignoring what the guidelines say and I'm not sure why it happens maybe they just don't know we have this specific certain guideline and there is no person who actually confirms the design before it ships to the developers so everything looks consistent but on the other hand my friend once told me that her colleague once said that she doesn't really care about like aligning everything and like just like you know making a very detailed like proper design just because someone else is going to review it later anyway but what if that person who's supposed to review it also gonna think this way this is where things get really weird this is how we get really like low quality products and again I think our job is not brain surgery like we can do basic monitoring of what we do and whether it aligns with the guidelines or it's like somewhere somewhere over there like really far from it so this is it for this video I hope you found it somewhat useful and if you think it was shady I'm not sure I care because once you start working in ux design field you're gonna witness or experience some of these things and you experience this first and then we're gonna talk about how Shady it is

Channel: Dasha From The Moon

Views: 6,786

Keywords: Uxdesign

Id: sYwEnkPpj4Q

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023