My First 6 Months as a Product Designer

Today I turned 32. I have only worked in design for 6 months, but it’s obvious that I have years of professional work experience already under my belt outside of design. Here are some things I’ve noticed/learned in those 6 months.

A LOT of UX content aimed at people new to design targets people in a UX bootcamp, or recently completed a UX bootcamp. Where’s the content for people working in industry, but still new to the field? I don’t need help setting up a case study, I’ve done that. A lot of designers in industry don’t have a person they can go to with questions. We can each get a mentor, but would a plethora of readable/watchable content be great, too?

You start to “get it”. As someone with no design/graphics background I always thought I’d be disadvantaged because I just cant see what they can see. You really do start to see it. You start to ask questions about usability and you don’t know where they came from. You’ll be reviewing a design and ask, “But how does the user do ____?” and you’ll sit there thinking to yourself, How did I even notice that design gap?

This is also true for visual design. I see so many designs every week that I can now notice immediately small design issues, misaligned elements, poor line height/letter spacing, inconsistent margins/padding, etc. I never thought my eye would be as sharp as it is, but it’s getting there.

Responsiveness goes further than making your site easier to view on a phone. Responsive designs can help people with poor vision who need to zoom into the site collapse the browser so they don’t have to scroll left/right to read each line of text. This is also true for design patterns. If you are zoomed in really far and want to get back to the homepage, you go to the top left or center. A poorly designed site that breaks these rules makes a zoomed in page difficult to navigate — as they then need to go searching for your logo.

My favorite quote about accessibility came from an edX accessibility course: “Disability is caused by a mismatch between the design and the person.” Their example was a library full of books only in braille is the jackpot for the blind community, but can make people who can see feel, well, disabled strictly in that context.

There’s probably so much more to write about but honestly I just can’t think of anything else.