Working in UX: expectations vs. reality

Julia Iuga
Bootcamp
Published in
5 min readMar 18, 2023
UX designer’s desk

I’ll soon celebrate a year of working a full time job in the user experience field, so I felt that the time was just about right to run an audit on my experience so far. Even though before starting my full time employment, I took on a few volunteering and freelance projects, I won’t be referring to those experiences in this post, but I’ll focus strictly on analyzing my experience working as an in-house UX/UI designer at a medium sized telecommunications company.

First, what exactly is my role?

I am currently one of two members on the design team supporting several product and software development teams. The initiatives I participate in are varied, but interconnected. The technologies provided by my company rely on each other and some of the team members wear a few hats, depending on the different projects they are part of. For instance, for some some of our projects I handle marketing related materials and support with the implementation of cohesive user interfaces, while in other projects I play a role closer to product design. For the latter, I am more involved in the planning of the roadmap, writing user stories, and collaborating on a closer basis with the developers writing the code.

Where was I coming from?

Like many other students and fresh graduates starting a career in the UX design field, I had been highly focused on mastering the application of the design cycle. I must admit, I had taken things a bit too literally in my training and was finding it hard to deviate from my methods already, before even properly starting my career. With a background in mathematics, I full heartedly believed that the 1 + 1 = 2; in other words, I was convinced that there’s only one way to design, following a well-established framework.

Having had worked in education for many years before switching careers, I was also quite used to having rigid rules and methodologies in the workplace. I hadn’t even considered that things may be different in other work areas!

Having said that, I’ll follow by listing a few aspects in which my job has surprised me with.

Results over method

Although it’s essential for a designer to have a set of principles they guide themselves by, in the actual day-to-day work, few other people will care about the whole design process they went through (besides themselves). It’s important to have justifications for one’s decisions, but the instances when one needs to detail how they reached a particular design solution are quite limited. Most stakeholders will be happy enough to see your final design (or part of it) to make a decision whether it’s something they resonate with or not.

More skills before over-specialization

With the exception of a few mature companies that invest in a design department where every member plays a different part (researcher, writer, UI designer, product designer, etc.), most other companies will have a small group of designers who can do more than one job. I’m not saying that all designers have to do everything, there probably will be someone on the team who’s more into design systems, while another team member may be a master of competitive analysis. But it is important to be able to do more than one thing: being a well-rounded employee brings more value to your company than being super-specialized in one area, simply because companies often don’t have enough resources to hire that many people. I personally like this aspect of the job because it gives me the opportunity to do face a variety of challenges, it keeps my brain active, and I never get a chance to get bored.

Research has many faces

It is really great to be able to run user interviews or surveys and collect date first-hand. But this is not always possible, so a UX designer has to learn to collect their information in a variety of other ways. Partners and sales people are a great resource, because they know what the end user wants. Any team member who has been working with a set of products for an extended period of time can give a lot of insight into the user needs. Specialty reports and releases from the specific industry one is a part of are valuable resources. Competitive analysis doesn’t have to restrict itself to testing the competing software: analyzing all their marketing materials, webinars or other training materials they provide can be pure gold in the designer’s research stage.

Developers are your best friends

If you play your cards right, developers are the most important relationship you can develop as a designer. If they see your vision and are motivated by it, chances are the product you’re working on will turn out great. Helping them understand your reasoning will help the team deliver great results, since the developers are the ones who are actually bringing things to life.

Coding skills are more than a nice-to-have

When working on complex projects, possibly even a variety of different products under the same umbrella, your team’s design systems will get increasingly larger. A great way to reduce repetitive work across teams and help mainstream the development process is to have your design components pre-coded and easy to incorporate. Another great benefit of having some coding skills is that you’ll share a common language with the developers, which will make everyone’s life a bit easier.

Don’t get attached to your designs

Design can be the foundation of great software, but there’s a lot of trial and error in this line of work. Invest yourself fully in all your endeavors, but be ready to shift gears and go in a completely different direction at any time. This can happen for different reasons: the company has decided to drop a product, there has been an acquisition recently, the team structure is changing as resources are redistributed, and so on. Take things one day at a time as much as possible and don’t get emotionally involved if you can; this way you will save yourself from the heartbreak of parting ways with your beloved designs.

Beware of company politics

Try to be up to date with what’s going on in your company. This may be especially challenging for people working in multinational corporations, and they’re not physically sharing the same office with all their coworkers. Communicate with key team members who can keep you in the loop. Find out who the main decision makers are and what their position is in regards to the projects you’re involved in. This will help you know where everyone is coming from, why they may be resistant to your proposition, or on the contrary, why they may be overly-enthusiastic.

And the lessons proceed, as I keep growing into my role as a UX designer. Keeping an open mind is obviously essential, not only as a designer, but for any employee in our day and age. This has been a great way to summarize my first year working in the design field, reflection is also an important aspect of the job.

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Bootcamp
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Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Julia Iuga
Julia Iuga

Written by Julia Iuga

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UX Designer & Educator

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