Unveiling the Daily Life of a UX Designer: What I Do Day to Day

UX designer career is a very interesting and unique opportunity in the tech world. Day-to-day tasks are interesting and challenging and this is a very creative career.

But do you know exactly what every day’s designer looks like? Many junior designers I’ve been talking to have no idea about the things I was telling them from my personal experience.

When I was just starting my career I also had a different vision of my future tasks. Today I am already a senior UX/UI designer. But if I had a chance to explain my current tasks to my past level, I would definitely do it, and here is why.

Communication Is a Key

My friends frequently told me that my work is easy. Their understanding of UX design was that I just create a beautiful vision of the products they are using on their smartphones or laptops.

Even right now I’m going through my own education journey as a full-stack developer and I realize how it’s different from what I expected initially.

Also, if I compare my current tasks at a senior level to a junior level, it’s absolutely two different worlds.

But there is one thing that has never changed in my career. These are challenges.

Whenever I work with product creation, I face challenges every time.

For example, I start to gather information about my future product. I have an understanding of functionality, but the major challenge is how to design it.

There are so many ways to do one thing differently. From one side it’s fascinating because you can express your own vision.

On another hand, you need to create a user-centered design, which means you need to listen to your target audience.

This means that I need to talk with people to identify their expectations and start the design process only after that.

There is one interesting thing that could potentially happen. When you ask people about their product expectations, there is a chance they would expect absolutely different functionality than you were planning in the beginning.

This is the power of the research stage, and it decides every next step of your design process. It’s super important.

This is why today I communicate with a target audience or researchers a lot. If I compare myself today with my junior level, research was a big gap in my design process.

Of course, some companies might not do the research stage. But also many junior designers have way smaller responsibilities under someone with a more senior level.

This is why communication with people is a major factor for all UX designers. If you don’t talk to your target audience today, you will do that in your later career.

How this communication might look like? There are offline and online sessions for sure, but the major difference is controlled or uncontrolled sessions.

It means that you can communicate with your target audience by direct communication when you ask questions live and get responses.

Another way is to create surveys or prepare user testing scenario and just send it. In other words, you get results without direct communication with people.

And this is something I do every day.

Generating Future Vision

I really love my job and there are multiple reasons for that. The major reason why I love being a UX designer is that I am the person number one who sees the future product.

This is super exciting because it looks like I am the one who creates the product from scratch.

I love to see first design components and screens, where the first logic started to appear.

But is the generating product’s vision easy? Absolutely not.

It’s a very complex process and requires many steps. I love to use the MVP strategy where I go with small steps. I start with small features and finish with a complex flow.

For example, I work with a product similar to Airbnb. The major feature of this product is booking, so I will focus on this functionality and add all other features after.

By doing so I can confirm that the major product goal will be tested and confirmed by its end users.

Also, I am dependent on business restrictions, like deadlines and budgeting.

I’ve been working with different companies throughout my career, and I know exactly how deadlines or strict budgets can affect my design process.

I had a situation where I had enough time and was able to do 48 corrections for the same product, for the same page.

Also, I had a different situation with strict budgeting which affected the final product functionality set.

As you can see, everything is unique, and the UX designer needs to adapt to obstacles in order to get a final design product.

Generating ideas depends on how good you are with creativity and product understanding in general.

For example, I love to check platforms like Behance, Dribbble, or Awwwards. They have amazing ideas that can inspire my own vision.

Design contests are also a good practice to polish your ability to be creative. Creativity is super important for a UX designer.

It’s the term that means not only a traditional way to provide super graphical ideas but also provide solutions to the architecture of product vision, functionality, or features.

My daily tasks include all of these. While I am using a design system, which limits my creative solutions, I am fully free in terms of product functionality. This is where I use my logical thinking.

Never-Ending Learning

The most exciting part of my daily tasks is never-ending learning. Every day, I learn something new.

It can be the result of user testing that gives me unexpected solutions. It can be a new design tool, technology, or basically anything new.

For example, I went crazy last year and started to learn full-stack development which is absolutely different career, but I want to become a hybrid specialist.

Every designer decides individually what to learn next depending on career expectations, but also daily tasks. In comparison to non-tech jobs, it’s a unique opportunity to plan your career how you want.

A quick example that I can show you are design tools. In the early stage of my career, I used Photoshop for web and app design creation. To be honest, it was a nightmare, but I didn’t know about it.

Then I switched to Sketch, and it was the main reason why I moved to MacBook.

Finally, I learned Figma, and this is something super-duper cool that no other tool had previously.

This example showcases that everything is changing all the time, and you need to adapt to it.

Don’t worry, it won’t happen in just one month. The example above took me multiple years to learn and adapt, so it wasn’t as complex. Maybe the first couple of days and that’s it.

I also learn from my daily tasks. The very first learning is from my target audience who can give me unexpected solutions or point me where I need to concentrate.

While working with different clients or businesses I gained an understanding of the business insights, their processes, and what they expect from their long-term ideas.

Totally different but very exciting learning are startups. I’ve been working with many of them, and I can say that this is everyday learning.

They’re so innovative that you can also learn with them. It’s their nature to survive on the market. So if you’re open to super innovative spirit, try to work at startups and see how fast you’ll learn new things.

The last thing of a learning experience for UX designers is trends and product updates.

You need to stay up-to-date as a professional to compete with other designers on the market. As a result of this process, you need to read blogs, watch videos and go throw a self-education process to be in shape.

All the examples above might be looking very overwhelming, but this isn’t so if you’ll learn this part by part for many years.

Learning is absolutely normal thing for a UX designer, the same as mistakes and failures.

When you make mistakes or fail, you also learn from them. Many people are afraid to make a mistake, but I think that this is your best teacher. Your major task will be to avoid doing this mistake in the future, and it means that you learned your lesson.

So this is why I learn too much at my job and even learn extra by myself too.

Final Thoughts

UX design is a very creative job. While many people have one set of expectations, others might have absolutely different.

I have shown you what a UX designer does every day in a personal example that might confirm or change your own vision for this career. Depending on where you’re at with UX design, you can be more confident about the design tasks that expect you in the future.

Day to day tasks of a UX designer might be very challenging, but they are so interesting and unique that no other tech specialists have.

Innovation, creativity, but also logic are used in day to day tasks of every designer. Use these principles in your own tasks to design amazing products and let your daily tasks be productive.