The curse of the UX design process

Everybody is doing UX, except you

As a junior/mid-UX Designer, you look around, and what you see? Visually perfect personas, rich journey maps, experience maps, goals, metrics, post-its (a lot of them), research methods, extensive case studies, and the list continues. Everybody is doing UX!

How does this make you feel? Impostor syndrome kicking in, right? You feel overwhelmed, you feel like everybody is doing cool stuff, and you are the only one that is missing out on all the fun!

And what you try to do to overcome this feeling? What I did was to start imitating what others did. Started doing stuff and design artifacts just because I saw others were doing. And I quickly reached a roadblock because on the projects I was working nobody wanted to do all the cool and shiny UX stuff. There was never time for them! This resulted in a lot of frustration from my side. I just couldn’t understand why, because UX does so much good, why would you, as a stakeholder, refuse to apply UX methods?

Of course, I could have started applying UX on fantasy projects, but they lack all the fun because they are not the real deal. You don’t feel motivated to do them, and since they don’t have any value for the real business scene, they are also ignored when you present them in an interview when you try to get hired.

Don’t get scared, there is hope 🙂

Understand the context

Unless you have your own business and you are the only one working for it, you will be working in a team, that collaborates with other teams and everybody under the same business has to follow some processes and ways of doing your job.

Let me tell you my story. I started working in 2017 for an outsourcing firm, and the project I was assigned was for a new client. We had to develop an MVP in three months and then the director from the client had to go to the C-level members and pitch that MVP to obtain the budget.

Did I understand this context? NO! Did I try to understand it at least? NO! I was so immature and so pissed off about the fact that we do design without taking into account the user (because this is what you see all over the internet, user-user-user), that we don’t follow…