Things I learned while growing as a UX Designer

A little introduction to my job as UX design and things I learned over the last 10 years (and wish I new before) that helped me grow as a designer in tech.

Transcript

1. Things I learned while growing as a 
 UX Designer Stephanie Walter - 2020
2. User Researcher & Product Designer 
 Mobile expert. Pixel & CSS Lover stephaniewalter.design @WalterStephanie 🦊
3. Love for design, art, computer & languages Foreign Languages Bachelor (LEA) Webdesign and 
 Foreign Languages Master (CAWEB)
4. Working as an in-house Product and UI designer
5. Just because you are out of school doesn’t mean you stop learning. 1.
6. Start building a network as soon as possible. Attend conferences, meet-ups, etc. 2.
7. Working as UX & UI designer for a web agency
8. Ask why, 5 times helps dig further and closer to actual user and client needs 3.
9. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get to do a lot of user research right away. Maybe try collecting indirect data 4.
10. Literature review
11. Analytics (Google Analytics, Matomo, etc.)
12. Server logs, URL analysis, etc.
13. Session replay with Hotjar, Fullstory, etc.
14. Support and/ or training team has a lot of data
15. Marketing team runs surveys (be careful with biases)
16. Online reviews (stores, forums, etc.)
17. Teaching is amazing, it forces you to rethink everything about your own work and methods. 5.
18. Working for an HCI Research Group in a University
19. Many of the user research methods & tools we use can help us build services beyond digital UIs. 6.
20. Building collaborative learning spaces for students
21. As long as I have a solid plan, I know I can improvise and it’s going to be fine. 7.
22. Working in a design studio for a consulting company
23. Roles and responsibilities of UX design often need to be defined. 8.
24. UX design is not about making things pretty, yet this is hard to understand for other people, especially in super dev driven environments. UX design is not about making things pretty, yet this is hard to understand for other people, especially in super dev driven environments. 9.
25. Working as a “UX Researcher & Designer consultant”
26. Analysis, Interviews, Research, Flows, IA, Prototypes, Testing, etc.
27. Being an “external consultant” can be a double edge sword. 10.
28. There’s some sort of “magic wand myth” around UX design. 11.
29. Turning developers into design allies makes your life so much easier. 12.
30. Building a design system documentation
31. UX deliverables can also help dev teams Task flow Screen flow
32. Show don’t tell with interactive prototypes
33. This job can be mentally exhausting, be kind to yourself, take breaks, 
 self-care first! 13.
34. Q and A session!
35. User Researcher & Product Designer 
 Mobile expert. Pixel & CSS Lover stephaniewalter.design @WalterStephanie 🦊