You might be working as an UI/UX designer in any of Madurai's homegrown IT companies such as Hitasoft in Chinna Chokkikulam or Dotcom infoway in Anna Nagar or Pixel Web Solutions in Kochadai or any where else in Tamilnadu or outside of Tamilnadu, and if you are worried about how to grow up as an UI/UX designer beyond your current job then this article is exactly for you.
Growth scope for UI/UX designers
Growing as an UI/UX designer does not means just getting an hike year after year, it means how you are becoming into a better professional day in and day out. Only if you are leaving your office eveyday as a better UI/UX designer than how you entered your office you are growing. The growth might be slow but when accumalated over a period of time you will see an enormous change in you which will later propel your career in trems of both designation and salary.
Challenges faced an UI/UX designer
Following is the list of most common challenges that an UI/UX designer needs to face in their day to day professional life.
- Creative Burnout
- Stereotypical Projects
- Client is the king mentality
- Exhausting deadlines
- Tiring iterations
- Fear of AI
- Conflict with developer
Creative Burnout
You would have entered the UI/UX design field with so much of expectations that you have finally got to the place where you wanted to be and you have got the chance to stun the world with your immense creativty, but by the end of your 1st year or so you might start feeling like all your creativity is drained out and all your designs start looking the same after a certain period, or you might even not know what different layout you can use, or what new value can i add to this app or website. You are not alone all UI/UX designers go through this path of fire at early stages of their and have learnt to come out of it successfully. So we are going to let you know the cheat code to get out of creative burnout which we learnt the hard way and by experience.
- Inspiration is everywhere: If you are searching for inspiration in behance, pinterest, dribbble or any other favorite website of yours repeatedly then you are doing something fundamentally wrong. Inspiration is not only on the internet, it is spread out everywhere. It might be in a bus stop billboard, barricade ad, cloth bag of a clothes shop, carton box of a kitchen appliance, vehicular design on a logistics truck, like this design inspiration is spread out everywhere in our environment. All you have to do is to develop an eye to catch those inspirations and relate it to the current projects you are working now.
- Always a fresher: Just because you have got a job as an UI/UX designer that never means that you should stop developing your portfolio nor you should stop practicing UI/UX design like how you were doing while you were a student. No matter what, never settle, never be satisfied. Everyday after returning from office spend atleast half an hour trying to create something new or redesign existing pages or screens of your old projects. This will keep your creative brain fresh and some layout that did not work for your personal project might work for your office project and so on. Remember getting a job as an UI/UX designer is not a destination it is the start of a beautiful journey.
- Relax on weekends: Weekends are for you to relax and to rest your brain. Just do that during your weekends, do not be greedy and take up some freelance works and strain and stress your brain for that too. As you grow in your career you will know how to handle freelance work with bare minimum effort and that time you can take up these freelance projects. Corporate life will teach you the easy way to handle freelance projects, be patient until then. Do not bite more than what you can chew and do not choke yourself out.
- Practice sketching: Though sketching skills are not mandatory for an UI/UX designer, still practicing sketching will boost your creativity level. To practice sketching you need not be good at sketching, even if you just have an idea and scribble it on paper, that's enough. You can scribble it any number of times but make sure each time you get better at it and at some point you will reap the cumulative compound interest of your consistent efforts.
- Extra curriculur activities: Besides sketching you can practice any other extra curriculur activities like DIY crafts, gift wrapping, calligraphy or any other healthy hobby kind of stuff that would break the monotony of your brain and its thought process. This is like having a cheat meal for fitness professionals. Whenever you finish doing these activities definitely you can feel your thought process refreshed and reset. The next day at your office you will start noticing the positive impact of these activities in your designs.
Stereotypical Projects
This is the deadliest vortex in which an UI/UX designer does not wants to get stuck. Once stuck it will become a never ending loop and will make lots of UI/UX designers not just rage quit the job but the entire field or career itself. This happens in both large corporations as well as in small companies. In large companies once you have done a good project once and that project is a hit, then similar type of projects will flood your desk because you are stamped as the best for that category. When it happens in smaller companies it is probably because your entire company is rubber stamped for that domain of projects.
How to get out of this? To kill the building frustration of working in the same kind of projects start creating different domain projects in your leisure time for your portfolio. But that isn't enough, it is just a temporary relief. The permanent solution would be to talk to your team leader/manager/boss about how you would like to work in projects from different domains and not just the same e-commerce or real estate or dental clinic. Do not make it sound like a complain or a grievance but as how you can add value to that product. Make them understand that you moving to another project would benefit the company because managers cannot care for how you feel but all they need to care is about the best resources for the projects, so prove convince them that you shifting to another project is the best decision for the project and the company.
Client is the king mentality
Obviouslt clients are the kings in all projects because they are the ones who know in and out of their business and the customers of their business. Yet at times some clients might come to us as headaches who blindly wants us to follow a design style or replicate a website just because it looks cool no matter if it matches their product and brand values. Even we try to give them the best solution yet they will stick on to the sub standard, half baked solution they wanted. Dealing with these types of clients is really energy draining.
Now how to deal with these types of clients? I too was getting frustrated with these types of clients at the start of my career until i saw one of my colleagues facebook post (we are that old veterans when we working inproduction whatsapp or instagram were not there). The facebook post said "Design for love. Work for money." This opened my eyes, i am in that office to work and earn my bread and butter, to provide for my family not to worry about things are not under my control. Since then my peace returned. I will try telling the client why this wouldn't work, yet if the client is adamant about what they want then i will do whatever they wanted. Why should i even worry about it, its not my business, i am not a partner in that business, i am getting paid for what i am asked to do. If the client wants to use my expertise and knowledge to their own benefit its okay or else if they are such ego-centric and wants me to follow what they tell even if i know its not going to work, no issues, end of the day is my work done, is my cheque getting cleared, thats all matters. But one thing every time they ask for a change i will make sure it is well documented along with my response of suggesting my idea and how they refused it, so that when my manager or boss questions me i will have a trail of evidence that the client did not listen to me and forced me to do it. If client wants apples in a bottle without making it into juice well i will build a bottle around the apple and give it to them. Taking out the apple is up to them.
Exhausting Deadlines
Sales people and clients will come running to us telling that they want the designs by tonight or within this week so that they can get the client or investor, whereas it will take atleast a week for us to understand the project and to do the necessary ground work for it. Not only this towards the end of the project or during the developmental phase or testing phase so many iterations will pop-up out of nowhere while we are fully into the next design project. These are some of the complaints that UI/UX designers tell about their tight deadlines in their work.
But the truth is there is no such tight deadlines at all. All sales people and clients will understand that building a digital product is not an overnight magic and will take several months of efforts and so they will give ample time for us to complete our projects. But honestly speaking what we do is that we waste our free time in office and push all works to the end of the day or end of the project till the knife reaches our neck and then cry about tight deadlines. Whenever you are free complete the pending works. Start with the works that would take the least amount of time like changing all the button colors (we would have created components so changing in master component will change in all instances), adding a stroke or applying opacity. Once you complete these small pending works you will have lots of time reserved for these types of last minute changes. Also organizing your work and assets in proper folders also will help you do these last minute changes faster.
Tiring iterations
I saw a meme a few years ago featuring Thanos from Avengers: Endgame movie where he tells the avengers that they couldn't live with their own failures and all their effort to overcome that defeat has brought them back to him and instead of Thanos it was the UI/UX designer and instead of avangers it was the client. I found it very relatable because so many clients ask for so many iterations and finally they will say they are happy with the first option we gave them. After wasting so much of time and effort when they say they want the initial design back again it will really boil our blood and also the amount of undos it takes to get back to the initial design is really tiresome. So for situations like this i have got a solution.
As most of us will be using Figma, so download the first design as a figma file and keep it in your hard drive. When the client jumps back wanting the initial design just it whipped it out of your hard drive and thus problem solved.
Fear of AI
When you hear the newreader saying that tens of thousands of tech employees were fired due to AI am pretty much sure it would have given you nightmares that you too might get fired anytime and you would be replaced by some AI tool.
But fellow UI/UX designers i have a good news for you all. Out of the few thousands of jobs that cannot be replaced by AI UI/UX designing is also one of them. Because AI can design faster and better user interfaces than you, but when it needs to think, it will only search the web for a solution rather than thinking about a solution because it does not has a brain it only has an algorithm that follows a logic. So no worries, be confident UI/UX designers cannot lose their jobs to AI. Also instead of fearing AI, better learn how to use it, embrace it and use AI to propel your career.
Conflict with developer
This is one of the most common hurdles faced as an UI/UX designer. We would create something but developer would do something completely opposite and later this will create contradiction within the team.
To avoid all these issues we have professional guidelines provided by our design forefathers and lets follow them.
- Document everything: From mails sent by clients asking for iterations or change of feature, internal communications by manager/team leader and developers everything needs to saved in well named folders so that whenever a conflict arises you could show them evidence that you exactly did what they asked you to do without spoiling your peace of mind.
- Consistent Styles: From H1 to H6, paragraphs, captions, accordions, radio buttons, check boxes, icons, arrows, dropdowns, lists, toggle buttons, breadcrumbs, basically every UI element used in that project needs to be created as a component and saved in style guide. Which makes change easier for you as well as makes coding easier for developer thus increasing the overall speed of production. Most importantly do not keep creating multiple buttons depending upon the layout of the section you are designing, which is a very common mistake done by freshers until and unless pinpointed by some senior developer or project manager. So, make sure you are not in a position to be guided for these small things by your seniors and keep these things in self evaluating checklist.
- Prototype everything: Prototyping large scale projects which involves multiple stakeholders and each stakeholder having hundreds of screens is really a tedious and tiresome work, but please do not feel lazy or lethargic and avoid or postpone doing it. Do it at any cost when you have time itself or else that work will catch up to you again after a few weeks or months when you are involved in some other project and you have lost touch of the older project. This will avoid a lot of assumptions and consquential conflicts in future.
- Clear file management: Whenever you are giving them assets, just like that don't give them a folder named assets which has all images and icons put together. For each screen/web page create a separate folder. Inside each folder create a two subfolders called icons and images. Inside images categorise images as jpegs, pngs, webp and have each respective file formats inside those. Similarly inside icons folder have two more subfolders named pngs and svgs and put the respective assets inside them. For mobile apps put them further into subfolders as 1x, 2x and 3x folders for iOS and sdpi, mdpi, ldpi, xldpi, xxldpi and xxxldpi. By doing this it makes easier for you to remember as well as easier for developer to understand the filepath. Do not name your assets randomly as untitled-1 or group-2, instead give them proper meaningful names such as hero-banner-01, cta-image-01, loan-icon, robot-icon, chat-icon and so on.
- Learn basics of development: You need not become a proper full fledged web developer, but knowing the basics of HTML, vanilla CSS, tailwind CSS, bootstrap, javascript, angular js, react js, node js and know how they work, you can create better developer friendly, device adapting designs which will increase the speed of production and obviously your managers and bosses will start noticing that projects you are involved are getting over faster and it will start paying you dividends.
Quick Tip: Whenever you finish your task for the day immediately do not report it to your manager or boss, instead report it to them after 30 minutes. Use these 30 minutes for relaxing yourself, searching references on the web, bookmark interesting references, recheck your work or show a demo of your design to the developer, get their feedbacks, or complete any pending tasks and a lot more you can accomplish in those 30 minutes, because there is always some pending work in hindsight, fnd them and finish them. These 30 minutes will have an compuding effect on your career like long-term investments.
