UX Design team of ONE!

My last post was about finding my footing in the field of UX (Link). Now, moving over to next phase of my UX career…

It was mid-2016… I had taken my baby steps in field of UX design and worked on my first pure-play UX project under the guidance of my mentor. It was a nice learning experience as a designer.

Then, suddenly within a week, my design mentor moved to another team and I became a design team of ONE. A new project came along. It was a AI-based search engine, an idea to be designed from scratch.

Here is the initial request made to me as part of the project:

“Please create mockups for search home page and search result page” (Additionally, it was mentioned that this is quite simple 2 pages to be made.. so you can have it ready in a day or two!)

Most of you readers, who belong to UX field, must have come across such requests. Like many of us, I asked the question, which the development team was not expecting.. “WHY?”!

A simple “why” led to expansion of the project scope to creation of a search engine, a feedback mechanism, its AI-training interface and an admin interface.

Working on this project as the sole UX designer in the initial phase allowed me to learn the other aspects related to project management which are critical to grow as a designer and leader. I learnt about project planning, design sprint and documentation (a lot of documentation).

Also, I was able to drive implementation of Design Thinking practices in the team made up of developers, managers and AI Researchers. This project was one of the key focus areas for the senior management of our division. Hence, the progress was tracked and presented to them on regular basis. This allowed me to learn to handle stakeholder expectation and improve my presentation skills.

I also made my share of mistakes and learnt more from that.

I took up too much “to-do”(s) in the earlier sprints. I realized it is quite important to be clear where to draw the line and say “NO”. As a young designer, we tend to over-stretch and over-commit on deliverables and it can easily backfire on us.

Another learn-by-mistake moment happened during user interviews. I realized how easy it is for you to lose control of an interview and allow user to digress into areas, which do not add value to your project. I learnt the value of conducting pilot tests on protocol is critical and should not be skipped.

Overall, the year on this project was my “trial by fire” and I came out on other side as a “bit more aware” designer. It also increased my confidence in my decision to move to UX and my skills.

Next: Re-entering the Job market (2018) — hope to type this one out sooner.