The Biggest Mistakes from my Early UX Design Career
And how I learned from them!
As I’m slowly approaching 2 years as an “official” Product Designer, (coming from many other years of experience of graphic design, quality assurance software testing, and marketing), I‘ve been thinking about what I’ve learned in the past 1.5–2 years.
I made many mistakes when I first started (and still make many mistakes). I had not realized what a critical role a designer plays in a core agile team; that you literally are piecing together many pieces of the business puzzle to marry business objectives with beautiful interaction patterns and actual customer feedback. Here are some of my biggest mistakes that I’ve learned (and am still learning) from:
Mistake #1: Not planning enough discovery
My weakest portion of product design was my discovery, which ended up being what I began to pull all of my attention to. Sure, I could set up a file in Figma with auto layout — no problem. But I could I do it in a way that would be efficient for user testing and putting it in front of users, only to be changed countless more times?
Alas, no.
At Starbucks, we used to call the new baristas “green beans.” And I was absolutely such a green bean when it came to discovery.
