Boring parts of UX design
The work of UX design is not all colorful & creative solutions on cutting edge innovations. No one talks about the boring hard work that goes into designing a product.
When we hear about UX designers, images of colorful post-its, user journeys, brand stories, fun animated prototypes, about cool future technologies, making cool apps and a lot of creative work is probably what popped into your head. But the reality is a little bit different.
I want to know: What you think is the most boring things about UX work?
Do you think of UX Design as this cool job that is always creative and we all sip on lattes all day?
Although that sounds fun, that’s not all there is to be a UX Designer and actually doing the work. Many things in UX Design are quite boring, repetitive, and not all colorful. (Grey boxes anyone?)
But these things I’m about to tell you arevery important parts of being a designer, and I want you to know about the, if you’re thinking about going into (UX or other) Design as a career.
Structure & Organising Files
There comes a time when you can’t have all the ideas up in your head or scattered around on various design documents. That is usually part of the creative process where you make quick changes and test out ideas.
But there comes a time when you need to sit down, set a structure, and write down specifics and technical details on how the screen flow is connected, what user-feedback data you used (to show clients & stakeholders), how the interaction will work, when to use pop-up notifications, confirmation screens, and copy tests that will tell the user what is happening. These are the design work that is needed to make the product functional, but it’s doesn’t give you praise very often.
The more organized you are in the beginning, the easier your work will be later.
Understand Technical Limitations & Restrains
You can have the biggest and best ideas for amazing products, but this is not the reality you need to design for. That’s when you need to sit down and understand how the backend servers work, why the limitations are in place and why the teams ideas just won’t work. It kinda s*cks and it will constantly feel like your best creative ideas get shot down.
But there is one way of making the technical restrains fun, or at least creatively interesting. It is when you use the restrains as your box you can be creative within. Twist and turn the problem around until you can find a creative way to make a great experience for users in a very simple way.
Sometimes we need to use a bit of creative trickery around limitations to create magic.
Read Through Boring User Feedback
Read through pages and pages of mediocre feedback just to fing something that stands out and you can use to improve the product: It’s not always fun. Everyone has an opinion, but not everything is worth acting on. Sifting through (sometimes) 100s of people’s feedback on surveys and tests, and it can get quite repetitive to find the right feedback to follow up on. If the product or prototype isn’t unique enough when sending out for testing, you will get a lot of feedback that just says “this is ok”. But that feedback isn’t very interesting or easy to act upon.
It takes time and effort to find gold; so get comfortable and start digging.
Legal pages, settings, error cases & log-in flows
These are often the pages that are the most boring to create, but at the same time important to get done. It’s a reason why we wait to do them until after we have the main design and UI Art done. I don’t think any designer comes into work singing; “Yay I’m going to design legal pages all day!”
It’s not very fun, but it needs to get done and you’re the designer to do it!
When no one likes your idea
You might think that your design is great, users will love it, it’s smart, simple, and innovative for the product. But your team or client just doesn’t get it and just wants to work on a more standard solution they know is good enough.
Your job has now turned into arguing for your design, coming up with evidence for your case, make new design iterations, talking to code to see if it’s really that difficult to implement or not, and update your design to the feedback you got. This takes time, energy and it’s not what you thought when you first started working.
Why can’t everyone just see how great your design is and test it out?
Killing your ideas
If you didn’t manage to convince your team or the client of your great design, you might need to kill it. It’s not fun and you might even think “what am I even doing here” But the thing is, your idea might not have been good, or it was simply not good for this project to do right now. Whatever the reason, as designers we need to be able to kill our ideas and refocus on something else. Over and over and over.
At some point you got to ask yourself: “Is this design idea really that important right now?” Then you drop it and move on.
The faster you do the turnaround, the better of a designer you will be.
Write Descriptions and Details for Programmers
You don’t only need to write pitches, user flows, and details to convince your client or boss, you also need to write up the details for the programmers so they can understand your design and make it actually into a product. This is where the rift is between Art and Code. The artists care about visuals, interaction, and for the user to like the product. Coder on the other.
You as the designer need to be the bridge between the two, the translator.
Too Many Voices & Opinions
When a group of people is involved in a project, everyone has their own opinion, vision, and ideas on what is best to do. It can quickly derail a project in too many directions if you’re not careful. People’s feelings can get hurt if they never feel listened to, and it’s not fun to be a part of a frustrated team.
So it’s part of your job to sort out whom to listen to and when. You can’t put in all the 50+ features that a team easily can come up.
How do you decide what and who is worth listening to?
The designers? Everyone in the team? The client? All the users?
☕ Thank you for reading!
These are the design works that you probably need a lot of coffee to get through. Being a designs is not as high energy or creative as many people think it is. But it’s the work that still needs to get done and takes a lot of focus from your as the Designer.
Read more about UX here
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