12 mistakes junior designers need to avoid for a better career in UX

Self-improvement

1. Exercise UX skills regularly

I know this sounds like a very generic tip, but trust me, it helps the most. You cannot master any skill without practice. You must have heard this from a lot of people and ignored it, but it makes a difference in the long term. Also, I am not telling you to practice all the skills in UX and keep getting better at it; rather, I am suggesting the opposite of it. UX is too big to practice all the skills, and it will take you forever to practice all the skills. So, take one skill and master all aspects of it. Also, take something broader that you enjoy.

Remember, work should be fun. You are not preparing for war. My favorite thing when I was a junior was to keep honing my visual design skills. I knew from the beginning that I enjoyed the visual designs more than the research side of UX. Although in the end, I wanted to become a complete UX designer and not only a UI designer, I set myself on a mission to conquer visual design skills first. One of my favorite routines, which I still suggest to a lot of junior designers who wants to improve their visual skills, is to go on Dribbble and try to recreate the exact design of the most trending and beautiful-looking shots. I know I am telling you to copy someone’s work, but trust me, you will learn a lot of small things when you work on it.

Once you master this level, you can dig deeper and improve in specific areas. For example, if you want to become better at the layout, then you can copy just the layout from one Dribbble shot and apply it to five other shots with their existing design style. This way, you will learn which elements work on which layout more. With only this exercise and combinations of it, you can learn all the different aspects of visual design and get better at it.

2. Always explain your design decisions

This again sounds like a no-brainer, but a lot of junior designers I have seen who, after finishing the design, have no idea about why they used certain elements in their design. Having explanations for all of your design decisions has two benefits: one, you will be less likely to use something that is there just because you like it and does not serve any purpose for better UX, and second, you will have a higher chance of designs getting approved. When you are presenting your designs to either stakeholders or managers, or presenting your case studies in an interview, your first priority is to make it easier for another person to say yes, and by always explaining your design decisions even before being asked, you are doing exactly the same.

3. Learn the psychology behind the design.

Psychology is basically decades of research done for you by experts with a proven track record. After learning the psychology behind designs, you can make wiser design decisions, and it will help you while you explain those decisions, since you now have years of research behind your design. There are quite a few books on it, and if you are like me, who always starts a book and never finishes it, then there are a few websites like growth.design and lawsofux.com which can help you with these psychologies in bite-size content.

4. Present your design nicely

Another thing that was obvious to me and the designers around me were not paying attention. A lot of designers think that their job is done once they complete their designs and now it is up to management to approve them. But, it is not done until it is done, which means your job is not done until your design is shipped and end users can use it. Thus, it is your job to make sure that the pathway to it is as clear as possible. If I wanted you to take one thing out of this article, then it would be this. You need to make sure you make it as easy as possible for your designs to get shipped. You need to handle everything smartly in between, from stakeholder management to engineering collaboration, and do everything you can to make this path as smooth as possible.

It won’t be easy in the first few rounds, but you need to adapt and improve. You will run into technical difficulties a few times, which will teach you to collaborate with engineers early next time. But, in the end, this one mindset will help you the most in your career. By presenting your designs nicely, you are making it easier for them to say yes, I am not saying this, but the psychologist is. According to research done by Hitachi Design Studio in 1995, users are strongly influenced by the aesthetics of any given interface. Thus, you are more likely to get your design approved if you present it nicely.

5. Keep improving your workflow

One major difference you will find between junior and senior designers is their workflow. Senior designers sees the bigger picture, and they spend less time on small things like drop shadows or font styles, which will have less effect on the final result or business metrics. That is not because they don’t care about the craft that much, but rather it is because they have a faster and more effective workflow set for these smaller things. Let me tell you a little secret about how to achieve that. Always keep a reference of what worked for you in the past. It can be elements, it can be processes. Always keep a note of what worked well in your previous project, and next time you can modify that rather than work from scratch.

For example, I used to spend a lot of time adjusting drop shadows, and after one point, they all used to look similar, and I used to give up. However, now I have a set of fixed drop shadows that worked previously for me, and every time I want to use them I can refer to one of them and then work my way up rather than starting from complete scratch. When something is completely new to you, you can always refer to someone else’s work. UX is a really big and open field. A lot of companies often share their resources, and if you dig deep enough, you will find something similar for your project as well.

6. Stay flexible with your process

As you work in the real world, you will realize that it is really hard to follow the process you learned in school. This is not the case with only the design process, but almost anything you learn. The biggest difference in anyone’s career is how they deal with situations that they have not learned to deal with in school. No matter how good your course or Bootcamp is, it is almost impossible to teach all the stuff you will face in the real world. Thus, having mentors is really effective.

What you learned in school is for an ideal situation, which is almost never going to happen, so you need to be flexible when applying what you learned in class.

I still remember when I first came across the Double Diamond design process. I instantly thought this is the process everyone should follow and I would definitely follow it in all of my projects. Soon after working in the real world, I realized that is not possible. Thus, I created my own process for reference, which I seem to follow most of the time and which suits a more agile environment. I am not saying that none of this process will work, but it might not work the way you learn. Also something to note is that each step of the process is important, but you might not get time to follow those steps in the right order and each step will have a different value depending on the project. So you need to be flexible about following the process you learn in class.

7. Write about UX

This is the most underrated advice, according to me. Rarely does somebody talk about it if anybody at all, but one thing I have observed in my time with good UX designers is that they almost always used to write or talk about UX even when they were at an early stage in their career. This has a few benefits. When you are writing something, you will end up doing a little extra research, in the hope of helping someone with the topic. This whole process will make you better at that topic.

Think of it this way, if you don’t write that article, then you will not put an extra effort into researching different aspects of it and your knowledge of that will be limited. Also, while researching that topic, you will read similar articles around that topic and you will unconsciously learn more about it. Also, writing is a very important skill in UX, and by writing about UX, you will start getting better at it.

One tip I will give about writing is that you should just write about whatever you are comfortable with and don’t spend too much time perfecting it. Your initial articles will be really bad, and it’s totally fine. That’s how things are, at the start of anything. Also, when you choose a topic to write about, don’t think too much about the scope of it. Just write while keeping in mind that if you had read this article earlier, it would have helped you. Write for yourself; that is the best way to write. You will be really surprised by the fact that something that seems obvious to you is actually helpful and valuable to others.

One of the major benefits of writing as a junior designer is that it makes you more mature about UX and it stands out in your application. When you write about UX, it shows that you do not only want to be a good designer, but you want to help others become good designers as well. By writing about it, you are teaching about it and also learning and advocating about it. This shows that it’s just not a job for you, but you breathe UX. When a design manager is looking at your portfolio and sees this, it indicates that you are a mature UXer. When they are hiring junior designers, 9 out of 10 managers will choose someone who can be a good senior designer one day. They are not hiring you only because of your current skills, but rather because of your potential. This brings us to the next category of this topic, job searching tricks.