Being a junior UX designer at Silicon Valley is not easy. One interesting fact is, if you spend ten minutes browsing through new open positions for UX designers on the web, majority of the positions are titled with the word “senior”. If you dive deeper into position requirements, often times these positions require the UX designer to have at least five to seven years of UX experience. That makes me wonder, where do junior UX designers go? If the majority of the UX designer community at Silicon Valley is crowded with those “senior” designers, what is a potential growing path for a junior or middle-level UX designer? What are good practices that will inspire and empower these junior UX designers to grow faster, in both personal and professional lives?
As a junior UX designer myself, I try to be as flexible as possible to everything that can help me to learn and grow. With my one-year experience of being a junior UX designer at a enterprise software company in Silicon Valley, here is a few things I find super helpful. Hopefully this 5-minute read can inspire some designers from the other end of a screen.
1. Panda Is Your Friend
When I say Panda, I mean the Panda chrome extension. Have it installed, and spend a few minutes on it everyday when you open your laptop in the morning. Think of it as a version of Facebook for Work (not Facebook Workplace), go through the most up-to-date Dribbble shots, Medium posts, or TechCrunch news. These feeds keep you up with the most trendy designs, buzz words in the tech industry. The acknowledge of what is going on is more important than heading straight up into work itself.
2. Play with New Design Tools
Of course Adobe CC is still a must, but what is the last time that you launch your Photoshop? In comparison to Sketch? InVision? Zeplin? Principle? There are so many new tools up there that add up to an overwhelming confusion: what should I do if I want to learn one or two new design tools? There is no solid right answer to it. However, a lot of tech companies expect designers be quite flexible switching between these fresh and hot new tools, without any given time for training or workshops. One reason might be the whole Agile thing makes our collaboration too fast paced. What you can do might be going to Google school or watching tutorials as you are designing things for a new project. Or, just play around with the tools to get a sense of tooling itself. It may help you think faster, and come up with different solutions that leverage the benefits of the mix of design tools.
3. Be a Jira Pro
This sounds too technical because it seems to be a requirement for engineers, not designers. But the thing is, if you make good design sprints and deliver designs in a more manageable and organized way, it saves you tons of effort on the back-and-forth communication with engineers. They are result-driven, they may value your iterative design process but they care so much more about if the design deliverables include everything they need, from flow and high-fidelity comps to assets and specs. Do not make them think. They like working late in your sleep hours (even a lot of designers are night animals), and they do not like to Slack you on confirming every design detail. They will make their own decisions when they implement your designs. So the more detailed you can be, the better design it will show on the actual product.
4. Keep a Work Log
No matter you use Evernote, Asana, Google spreadsheet or just a system text editor, keep a weekly work log. It seems to be a tedious work, like astronaut Mark Watney from the Martian keeps a log of how he grows potatoes in the Hab, you need to keep a log as an outsourced piece of your brain too. We all forget things. The work you contributed three months ago may feel like one-year ago. If someone pings you for details from your early work, you do not want to rewind memories for too long before you can compose an answer. Stay persistently active with what you are working on, and what you have worked on is critical at any moment.
5. Go to Free UX Design Meetups
Design conferences are generally expensive. They make your wallet cry after purchasing a day-pass that costs a few hundred of dollars. Though many companies sponsor their designers to go to at least one design conference per year, considering the overall cost on time and money, it is still a much bigger commitment. When I first started looking out for cheaper design events, I found a lot of free and cheap meet-ups. The best part of these meet-ups is, you get to meet a lot of interesting designers or product managers. From their sharing sessions, you are exposed to many more interesting topics that may expand your knowledge of the existing work field. The way they think and approach problems may give you a lot of inspirations. They are refreshers to your linear work life.
I really appreciate if you read this article till the end. 😃
Sometimes we are too focused on picking up new design skills. Designs skills are definitely important and they add to your core values of being a top-leveled UX designer. However, creating your own learning framework is more important than what you learn, in my opinion. I hope the above tips could add some inspirations to your daily work life!🚀
