8
The job of
a designer
What does the day of a designer look like? What are we expected to do and deliver when we get to work?
Hint: mockups and prototypes are only one small part of our job.
Goal
Understand some of the designer’s responsibilities beyond designing.
Illustrations by Michela Picchi
As a designer, you’ll be assigned to projects. Depending on the company you work for, one of those projects might be to add a new feature to their existing mobile app, or to map their customer’s journey of shopping online so that you can improve it. In some cases, you might be working on a larger website overhaul, building an interactive screen experience for a fashion retailer, designing the experience of having a conversation with a chatbot, or creating a landing page for an up and coming startup.
In certain companies, you might be working on a single product for a long time. Launching a product is just the beginning of the journey. Once the product is live, there’s still a lot of work to be done: optimizing flows for better conversion, iterating on the design to solve for pain points users are having, adding more features, accommodating for evolving use cases and business needs—the list is long. One skill that is very particular to digital product designers is perseverance—it takes time to make a product successful, and in some cases you might spend a whole year solving the same design challenge.
“It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good. You have to try a lot of things and fail in order to make the next discovery.”
You are not designing anything alone. You will be collaborating not only with other designers, but with a multidisciplinary team of product managers, developers, business specialists, marketers, and analytics experts. There are a lot of moving pieces needed to make a product successful, and design is only one part of it.
Design is not the protagonist in the product development process. In fact, there aren’t any protagonists. It takes a village to make a product work seamlessly for the users and the business, and being open to collaboration, feedback, and many rounds of iteration is one of the best qualities a designer can have. When everyone is working toward the same goal—without ego—the process flows much more naturally and people feel a sense of ownership over the final product.
Creativity, optimism and great collaboration skills will become essential as you start to work side by side with other disciplines to build digital products and services. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the designer’s process and get a better sense of what’s expected from the role of a designer in the team.
Reading list
1.
The Shape
of Design
The mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. By Frank Chimero.
Borrow this book from local public libraries or buy it from local bookstores.
2.
Are you a good fit for UX?
Meghan Wenzel (4 min)
3.
Five ingredients for happy, motivated and successful teams
Lillian Ayla Ersoy (6 min)
4.
Delivering your work in layers
Fabricio Teixeira (3 min)
5.
10 tips on how to have a workshop that people won’t hate
Erik Johnson (5 min)
6.
How to get good at product design?
Diana Malewicz (6 min)
7.
5 principles for better designer-developer collaboration
Fabricio Teixeira (8 min)
8.
A guide for getting a job in design
Caio Braga (7 min)
1.
Design is in the details
(Paul Bennett)
2.
Happiness by design
(Stefan Sagmeister)
3.
Design and the elastic mind
(Paola Antonelli)
Watchlist
Reflection
Now that you’re further along in this guide, what do you expect your day to be like as a designer? How is it different from your initial perception? What excites you the most about it?
You might have heard "everyone is a designer". How do you see cross-functional colleagues being part of your design process?
What do you expect from your first job as a digital product designer? What do you want to learn and develop?
See it in practice
Companies like Figma, Webflow, Zendesk, Intercom, and many others have been doing a great job at writing about their team structure, process, and career paths. While these articles are mostly focused on the positive side of their teams, they are still a valuable resource to understand where you want to focus on as a designer and what your job might look like.
After carefully looking at these examples, what has changed from your initial perception about the job of a designer? What did you miss from these articles? What do you expect your day-to-day as a designer to be?
![Illustration of a person upside down](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-a0d02122-bba5-445c-a6ae-b6d4b7fc8217.jpg?w=1006&e=webp)
![Illustration of a colorful banana](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-37e10434-88e1-4821-b4e8-03710191ce29.jpg?w=959&e=webp)
![Book: the shape of design](https://i-p.rmcdn.net/5ecbe27f82f5b3005df02f46/1937030/upload-c916b576-a502-4010-ad2b-69258dd0599d.png?w=196&e=webp&nll=true)