What is a typical day like for me as a UX designer?

Short answer: There isn’t one. Long answer: it depends on what you’re doing.

While everyone is different , I will say that most of your day will depend on the projects you’re involved in and the company you work at. The reality is that no two days will be alike. There will be times where you aren’t hands on designing but instead mostly focusing on the details of the project . There will also be times where you are spending most of your day conducting interviews, wireframing, writing annotations,making edits or sitting in meetings. So I’m going to walk you through what my day is like when a project kickoff is happening, when the project is in discovery phase, wireframing phase, and right before a project is handed off to a client. I’m going to try to keep it as short but detailed as I can.

Before I get started, I will note that I attend at least 2 standup meetings daily and about 10 meetings a week. It used to be more as I was on 9 pharmacy projects at once for most of this year. If you’re new to tech, these are status meetings where everyone on the project keeps each other informed about what they are working on. This is typically handled by a project manager. One project meeting is at 9:45 AM and the other is 10:30 AM. At least once a week I attend a 1PM standup meeting for a pharmacy project. The others are at 4PM and I have had a few meetings that were scheduled at 5PM due to having west coast clients. If you hate being in meetings, well…as a UX designer they just come with the territory.

Project Kickoff

Most of this day is spent in meetings, asking questions, planning and taking notes. Meetings with the client, leads, stakeholders, development team, project managers, content strategy, creative team and UX team ( depending on the company, the creative and UX team may be considered one team). Within these meetings I’m going over the scope of the project, what was agreed upon in the SOW (statement of work) and the brief. You’re laying out the strategic approach you will/ the team will be taking to complete the project. As far as UX is concerned, the director, lead and senior designers assign who is will be tasked with different aspects of the project, the deadlines for these tasks to be completed, and give assistance if needed. It’s not the most “exciting” aspect of a project if you prefer to be heads down and wireframing or focusing on UI. However, it is necessary because what you don’t want to do is be on a project where no one is on the same page and the details aren’t finalized before you get started working.

Discovery Phase

If you love research and data, these will probably be your favorite days. On the days I am involved in this phase, it takes up about 6-7 hours. I spend these days doing research in the form of comparative analysis to see what is currently on the market. I take notes about what is working, what isn’t working, what has already been done, and how that can be leveraged to make a better experience. The next few days, I spend prepping for user interviews. I schedule interview times ( esp if we are on the client’s site and the wan to join) , I draft questions to ask our user demographic to get their feedback about pain points or their thoughts on the current product, products they enjoy, why they enjoy them , how they use them, what their day to day is like and I record the interviews.

I like to think of the discovery phase as ongoing throughout a project. Therefore, if the project is ready to be tested so we can get user feedback, I make sure to set up time to watch the users interact with the prototype. At the end of my days doing this , I regroup with my team members and we go over what we learned that day, what assumptions were proven incorrect, where we can improve, and how we are going to present our findings to the stakeholders. Sometimes these findings will be presented in the form of personas, user journeys and life cycles. Other times, the stakeholders will watch the interviews to see how the users were interacting with the prototype, what they clicked on, and listen to how they asked questions etc. in order to understand why we are making certain design decisions.

Wireframing

The first 2-3 days when I’m doing a first pass through on wireframes is actually spent in a room whiteboarding. I’m brainstorming with team members and trying to find solutions to the problems we are solving for. At this stage, we’ve already laid out the site map and user flow. We are focusing more on how these solutions will work, how they affect the user and how are we going to design the screens. On one wall is a ton of sticky notes about the personas, on another whiteboard /window is the user flow and on another wall is the site map. Once, those rough sketches are made, I take pictures of them and get ready to digitize them. The days/weeks/months following this, I’m usually making the wireframes in Sketch or XD to pass to creative. I’m also making edits, writing annotations for the developers and the client , alongside working with the art director for the mockups.

Project Hand off

Honestly, these are my favorite days. I love the whole UX process but being able to see your hard work come to life drives me. These particular days are spent making final touches and edits in the morning. I make sure all the files are organized, the dates are correct, all assets are labeled correctly, fixed typos, and the layouts are in order of the table of contents. I email the finalized document containing the wireframes, mockups and links to the project manager and UX director. Later that afternoon, I present all of the UX work to the client. I walk them through our research, the user flow, the site map, our strategy, and the wireframes. I answer their questions, make design recommendations for future states and then the art directors present the mockups with the prototype and the development team presents the live product. I typically end the day making sure my billable work was tracked and relax.

I noticed that as designers, we don’t give as much insight about our day to day like we do about the projects we are working on. I hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me.

-Nita