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How to survive suddenly becoming a UX team of one
Written communication is critical to managing expectations
“It’s just me now.” I said, after wishing my colleague the best. She just accepted a new job offer, meaning I was back to being a UX team of one.
This wasn’t my first time as a sole Designer, but it was still unexpected. Due to layoffs (and people leaving), I, like many of you, went from a team of UX professionals to just me.
In these cases, it’s not just a matter of doing more work: it requires shifting your and your team’s mindset. You must set clear boundaries to avoid trouble when you’re the sole designer on a project.
In this case, it starts with defining your workload in writing.
Define your workload in writing to manage your limited resources
When you’re a UX team of one, you might feel incredibly pressured by the rest of the team to “Hand over deliverables.”
It wasn’t until Debbie Levitt pointed this out that I remembered being gaslit about this.
I remember one such project manager always rushing me through my design process to hand stuff over because we didn’t want to have the Engineers sitting around doing nothing.
Listen to that statement again, and tell me what’s wrong. It’s simple: I was the sole UX Designer on a team of a dozen Front-End/Back-End Engineers. Of course, I will be the bottleneck—I’m only one person.
This is one of those ways that Levitt says organizations gaslit you: in any other case, asking a person to match the output of a dozen different people would be considered ridiculous.
When organizations say this, it’s usually for one of two reasons:
- They think design is easy, and I can quickly mock up a complete prototype in an afternoon
- They don’t understand the (largely invisible) work behind creating a full-fledged prototype
So one of the first things you need to do is define your workload through written communication to cover your ass. When you are the sole designer, having a ‘checklist’ of tasks, stories, and things to tackle can help people…
