Member-only story
Handling design work while working on many tasks
Nowadays, it is very rare to see a one-to-one ratio of designers to developers in any software company. From what I’ve seen, the number of developers working on a product tends to be significantly higher than the number of designers. I am aware that by the nature of both roles, most of the time, this makes sense. However, this brings an additional challenge for the designers: handling multiple tasks/projects at the same time.
Development teams almost always work on multiple features at a time. On paper, this shouldn’t really affect the work of the designer as most of the time those features would already be designed, user tested and verified. Yet, in reality, things don’t always work that way. Sometimes when the development starts, previously unknown technical limitations might emerge, or you might realize something that seemed perfectly reasonable in the flow actually needs to change for some reason. Whatever the case, you might need to spend some time and effort into making these changes or clarifying things for developers.
On top of these, you also need to be designing for the upcoming sprint, which should ideally take the majority of your time to make sure you create well thought, high quality design work.
It isn’t uncommon that one designer works on multiple projects either. In that case you basically multiply the work per the project you are working on. Yes, it makes a ton of work! Most of the time the actual effort to complete a task is not too much, yet simply the sheer quantity of tasks and the number of times you need to switch context makes this way more trickier.
In this article, I wanted to share couple of things I do to deal with this issue in my daily work. But another big reason for writing this article is to hear how you deal with it. I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments!
The context switch is real
Context switching (or task switching) is one of the biggest productivity killers. There are a ton of different research papers written about this topic and they all agree that it takes a certain amount of time for our brains to quit from the state of mind we had for the previous task and refocus to the new task at hand. This time changes based on many factors such as the…
