My name is Priya. I recently completed a UX design boot camp and started my first job at a hi-tech software company. I’m here to share what tips I learned during my first few weeks that might help you get off to a smooth start in your first design role, including my initial mistakes, misconceptions and how I worked through them.
I was hired by an SF-based enterprise software company for a 3-month internship. On my first day of work, I was completely stoked. After getting my Macbook and access information from IT, I sat down at my desk and looked to my mentor, a senior designer named Michael, for instruction. During a 1:1 meeting later that day, he talked to me in great detail about their security monitoring products and highlighted a few areas of interest that I could eventually work on. It all sounded so exciting and for the next few days, I waited at my desk for a list of tasks that I could get started with. As days went by (days that I spent exploring the company’s website and clicking around in trial versions of Illustrator and XD), I realized that I was perhaps not going to get this task-list. I started shadowing other senior designers, partly to fill up my day and partly to find out what the hell they were working on and who told them to do it. After several shadowing sessions, it seemed (to my absolute consternation) that every designer was working on whatever they thought would help take the product to the next level. It all seemed very… ambiguous. And frankly, it scared me. I started checking in with Michael all the time. In fact, I reported in to him every time I stepped away from my desk. After the third day of doing this, Michael told me, “You don’t need to keep telling me what you’re up to. I trust you. And here, you’re the captain of your own destiny.”
A little history about me: Prior to entering design school, I worked as a technical recruiter at a staffing agency. My every day was mapped out and micro-managed to a T. Every hour was scheduled, every phone call was counted. There was no room for creative decisions or deviation from the set schedule. I had been trained to follow precise instructions, so in the nebulously vague environment of design, I was flummoxed. What should I do? How do I stay busy? How do I decide what would be valuable to the team to work on? It didn’t seem like anyone was going to tell me what to do. I needed to figure out how to add my own value.
Imagine I present you with a car. I tell you, “Check this car out. Tell me what you think and how to make it better.” What would you do? Well, you’d hop in and take it for a drive. You’d test out the AC, the seat-warmers, the aux connection, the windshield wipers, the steering, the braking, the seat controls and everything else you could think of. You’d compare the features to features you’d seen in other, similar cars. And you’d come back to me with a list of improvements, adjustments and additions that would make the car better, right? Apply that same principle to your UX design gig. Your company has a product, so check it out. I used Jakob Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design” as I evaluated my company’s product. This will not only get you familiarized with your company’s product, it’ll also get you thinking about it from a designer standpoint. Share your observations during the appropriate opportunities to do so. Make simple, conceptual mock-ups based on your observations of the existing product. It may be a while before you get started a project, but these are helpful things you can do during those critical first days on the job as a new UX designer. Be curious. Be thorough. Your discoveries will light up your path. After all, you are the captain of your own destiny.