Working as the UX designer in a team full of visual designers
How to navigate a new position with collaboration at its core.
UX Designer is still, unfortunately, a nebulous term. Depending on the company, your day-to-day tasks will be completely different (this is not breaking news). Are you a monolith working on every stage of the development process and handling everything — from user personas and empathy maps to interface design? Or, have you been inserted into various disparate parts of the design process, working your way around other established professionals with defined job titles?
Good news! Your career doesn’t have to the be the wild west. Townsfolk will not need to huddle indoors as the designer posse faces off with you, the lone UX ranger, to force you out of town. You can successfully work your way into a role, and even expand it, if you stick to a couple key principles and the reality of day-to-day design.
A UX position in the real world
Rarely will you be expected to be a one-stop-shop of design stack skills — or if the company you plan to join is recently building out their design department — will you have that much sway in how things are implemented. More realistically you are joining a company that is already fully staffed with designers, developers, and creative directors who already have established roles. Where then, does a UX designer, hired to design User Experience, fit into the org chart and creation process?
Your deadlines won’t allow you to do user personas or empathy maps. You can do competitor analysis, but only in your spare time before project kick-off. What you will nominally be doing is creating a lot of wireframes. Make sure they look great. You’ll be iterating on interfaces really quickly, because it’s quicker for you to create multiple layouts as a wireframe than for the designers to produce them with all the brand colors. User testing will only officially happen in large budget projects, and mostly you will be using your colleagues and QA team for this purpose.
Don’t sacrifice usability for the sake of aesthetics.
What you’ll have to fight for: Seeing and reviewing the pixel-perfect interface designs that the designers create. User Experience involves UI, interaction/ergonomics, UI colors, and sometimes the designers will have different solutions. Don’t sacrifice usability for the sake of aesthetics. Because you’re mainly prototyping, you need to assure everyone that you have thought about the placement of UI and the control scheme for the interfaces, and that any changes being proposed should be brought to you so that you can collaboratively solve for any issues.
Be a teacher
Demonstrate the value of things like competitive analysis and user research to your whole team. Make sure to present these ideas in an organized and coherent way. Make presentations! Spell concepts out simply and state each step of the process clearly — after all, adding new steps to a production process will take time and effort. The whole team, and possibly company, need to see the need for these new ideas.
Pleasing the user must be the goal above everyone else’s ego.
Keep encouraging people to collaborate. If someone proposes a new location to display a tutorial instruction, make everyone — designers, developers, experience owners — sit down a talk about the pros and cons. Make developers show you beta builds. After all, the best way to give feedback on UX for an experience is to go through it yourself. Giving designers and developers feedback is how you all educate each other and help facilitate best practices. Ego is the enemy of collaboration, and everyone should be on board placing the users’ happiness above their own concerns.
Educate, implement, and repeat as necessary.
You were hired so that designers and developers can focus on what they do best: creating great looking interfaces and implementing them, respectively. Don’t forget that you, as a UX designer, provide a lot of value. Use processes that work for your company, timeline, and users. Educate, implement, and repeat as necessary. No guns, just great experiences.
Thanks for reading!
