3 routines that made me a better UX designer
In our job as UX Designers we’re honored to improve and enrich the lives of millions on a daily basis. We work where beautiful design and the users reality meet — and we balance these with business-inherit necessities.
- Design puts us under pressure from the outside: we need to keep up with the newest trends in tech and tools.
- We quickly loose the overall vision and strategy of our business, while we’re working on great solutions.
- Although we know that only user-centered design makes great products, users are easily forgotten in the daily struggle.
I’d like to share with you three routines to become a better UX Designer, you can start with apply today. These tips (or hacks if you like) helped me to become a better UX Designer for me, my team and the whole organization.
Design: the pressure to perform
To follow the newest trends in tech or design has become impossible. Even in a 25-hour day you couldn’t keep up with all the interesting articles, podcasts or talks on conferences around the world.
But UX Designers are often asked to envision the next big thing on a daily basis. So how can you stay on top of things but still get your job done?
The solution I found was a self-made tool, that helps to organize the mess. It works automatically, is highly customizable, does categorization and everything is fully searchable.
PLUS: Everybody on your team can contribute and use it as a knowledge base with minimum effort.
First, I started to use Evernote as a database to collect all information: from talks, screenshots to internal reportings and blog posts.
The handy tool IFTTT.com helped me to connect the Evernote and automatically create notes, whenever a defined event happens.
Let’s say you want to keep up with publications, blogs and news. Just add the RSS Feed to IFTTT and create a new note for every new item. This way you can also track reviews on the App Store or on a review platform like Trusted Shops.
Reporting tools like Google Analytics support automatic reports. I just forwarded them to my Gmail, connect it with IFTTT and automatically create a new note. Or your user research expose that comes as a PDF? It’s all searchable due to the built-in OCR that also searches images.
Now, I turn to this database of knowledge whenever I have a question. My boss asks me to redesign the Burger Menu? First thing I do is search the database for “Burger Menu” and I’ll get trends, reportings and all the contextual information I need to start designing.
Business: be visible, valuable and stay in touch
Not only with news and trends it’s easy to lose the overview. Companies with many employees make it just as easy.
This no sole problem for me as a designer, but also to other teams that work collaboratively.
Over the last years in design I learned that you need to explain UX Design a lot and advertise for it in your company.
As designers we shouldn’t be too shy about our profession. I believe that we contribute a lot to the entrepreneurial vision, so let’s talk about it.
For example you could establish a routine presentation of just 30 minutes for new employees. Especially in fast-growing companies you’ll get a lot of interested listeners.
On a 3-monthly routine I get the chance to answer questions like: “What the hack is UX?” and “How can we work together?”.
I can also recommend internal newsletters about your work, posters in the hallways or internal research to get more visibility.
What do I get from it? One important effect is, that this lets other teams know you’re there. No matter if they find usability bugs or are able to contribute buckets of data that inform our design decisions..
The other is that you connect with other teams and start to relate to the companies vision. For me that’s is crucial to good design.
Me for example found great colleagues that are curious about UX in many teams, mostly unexpected. Our social media team, buying department , customer service agents or the SEO-teammates now help me to build better products.
Users: what we tend to forget
It sounds so simple but I always tend to forget that I’m the designer — not the user. But our brains lets us identify so much with our work, that we start to believe our needs are the users needs.
So I turned to quantitative research and data analysis but that doesn’t help either. It actually makes my problem worse: I start to project myself and my prejudices into bare data.
It was a while until I realized that empathy with your users doesn’t start with personas. UX is design for humans, not idealized imaginations.
I needed to see the human behind the data, when it was almost invisible.
My solution was to put up photos of the people that I interviewed when doing qualitative research. Now in our UX office you’ll see friendly faces and names of real people and they get more and more.
Also we hung up important KPIs about engagement and devices. I need to understand what a users day would be like. Imagine stories, where your product is involved, that don’t reflect the streamlined, idealized vision.
Just never forget that there’s a human being on the other end of the interface.
Takeaways
I personally got a lot from establishing these routines. My job is to balance between design, business and user needs.
TL;DR
- Build your own tools to keep up with design trends, reportings and news. I helped myself by clicking together a tool with Evernote, eMail and IFTTT.
- Spread the word about UX in your company. For me, connecting with other teams helped a lot to understand our users and our vision more and more.
- Demystify the user whenever you can. Honestly I get humble when I look at the pictures of our real users, all with their own story.
Have fun at what you’re building. User experience is so much about making great products that make the world a better place.
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If you want to read more about design and the tools specifically, check out Sketch Wiki, the first comprehensive guide to Sketch in german.
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