A Typical Day in My Life as a UI/UX Designer, WFH Edition..🦠🏡
UI designer and UX designer are generally two different roles and have different set of responsibilities. Looking at the bigger picture, UI design is one of the part UX, in-fact they go hand in hand. UI and UX designers mix math with design to find that perfect balance for each application. They get inspired by everyday items and regularly observe how people interact to influence their decisions.
If I have to explain what a typical day of a UI/UX designer looks like, I’d say that there is no such thing as a “typical” day. It highly depends on the project and which phase we are in. Currently, I’m working on a Project that follows the Agile Methodology, which involves visual storytelling by creating websites that support the organisation’s sales strategy. Along with that I’m also working in the same project’s styleguide redesign team and building a Design System with UI Components and templates that can be reused, currently we are in the research phase of the same.
So, here’s how my workday pretty much looks like during this WFH situation.Let me walk you through it😊
9 am ☕️
I usually get to the home office (a cosy corner in my house) around 9 with a big cup of coffee, post a little exercise as and when possible (mostly I am lazy) Before I log into to my office account, I give a quick check on the amazing design inspirations on Muzli, Behance, Dribble, till I finish my coffee. Once I login into office account, I catch up on email and check my outlook calendar to note down the important to-dos on post-it notes according to the priority of the tasks that I need to finish during the day.
If wondering what these tasks are my tasks really depends on the phase of the sprint we are in. Since our team follows Agile (scaled) Scrum system, the duration of the sprint is around 30 days.
A sprint starts with a Sprint planning session where the target dates for content requirement, design, development, UAT testing, bug fixing and regression testing is planned with the strict cut-off date for handover form the previous stage. And the sprint ends with Sprint Review where the Scrum team and all the stakeholders get together and discuss what has been accomplished during the sprint and whether the sprint goal has been met, Sprint Demo where a demo of the delivered functionality is given to the product owner and finally the Sprint Retrospective where the aim is to look back at the sprint to learn, develop and improve, by discussing what went well and what changes are required in the upcoming sprints.
9.45 am 📞
I have a 3 daily stand up calls from 9.45 to 11.30 since I am currently working across 3 teams where we discuss the work we are doing the day to keep the entire team well aware of the targets and responsibilities.
11.30 am 👩🏻💻
Time for the actual work. I received some feedback form stakeholders on the designs which I had finished yesterday. I incorporate all applicable received feedback and handover the design to the development team before I start on the new set of designs for a different onboarding of the same sprint, we use a tool — Zeplin for dev handover.
I try to finish all of it before it is lunch time. In between and during the entire day I have frequent connects with the development teams to make sure the design and development is on track and if there is any asset requirement from the engineers.
1.30 pm 🍱
Its Lunch time.
The perk of working from home is that I can watch an episode of my currently watching series while I grab my lunch, but I still miss having lunch with friends in office cafeteria and a long walk in campus post lunch.
2.30 pm 🙅🏻♀️
Back to my office. This is the time I try to focus completely on my work and avoid as much distractions as possible by going on DND mode and keeping my mobile far off from my work desk. But I still try to be available to the developers for the urgent asset requirement.
Thanks to Figma now that we are slowly moving towards using this tool for designing, the developers can collaborate on the same file to generate assets from the designs by themselves and hence there are much less distractions.
During this DND time I would be mostly doing one of the 4 main tasks of a UI/UX designer.
Researching- to really understand a user’s needs, motivations and empathize with them in terms of enhancing the product. End users in my current project are stakeholders themselves.
Ideating — brainstorming on how the user needs can be fixed into currently existing design standards followed.
Designing- creating hi-fi design prototypes and use tools like Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD for the same. There is generally not enough time to create wireframes for all the content since there are multiple onboarding taken in 1 sprint hence we take up enhancements to the designs in the next sprints in case anything does not fit the needs.
Communicating — present prototypes to key stakeholders demonstrating how a new site will work, and justifying the changes. My current project stakeholders are generally US based so this calls are generally in the late evenings. We will discuss the same in the later part.
Communicating isn’t just about finished designs, though. It’s a constant feature of this job. There’s a lot of communication with developers to make sure that my ideas can be implemented in their timeframe since they have a whole set of priorities at their end.
4.00 pm 🙋🏻♀️
Today we had a farewell connect for all the people who are moving to new projects as a part of their career growth with new challenges. We tried to make it a virtual celebration by playing some games, listening to music and some farewell speeches.
We generally have team connects during this time on 2–3 days of the week so that we do not miss the office tea breaks that we used to have before covid. We try to conduct some fun-Friday sessions by playing online games like Pictionary or a knowledge sharing session in terms of case study presentation or sometimes just connect on video and randomly chat for an hour. This is a good break from all the work stress.
For the days when this sessions are absent, I add this hour to my DND work mode.
5.00 pm 🎨
We have a special team of designers — Design studio. Even though all the designers in the studio are working on different projects we have some internal projects for growth and learning where we all work together like UX ops, design audits, newsletter deigning etc. I use this time to complete these tasks or maybe just continue with my ongoing course on Interaction Design Foundation.
6.00 pm 🏸
I leave my work desk and rest for a while or try to-do some household chores or just play badminton with my younger brother.
But that is still not the end of the day.
7 pm — 8pm 🌻
I generally have design showcase demo calls with the stakeholders during this time. The stakeholder/client will either say “Hey, I don’t like it” or “Oh, I love this!” Then they’ll most likely ask if we can change this or that — the design is never final! So we continuously iterate based on client and user feedback. Keeping a user centric mindset while designing here is key.
But today since there was no call due to client unavailability I volunteered for being an observer in the Usability testing of filters on the portal which one of my colleague was conducting. This was a good learning experience for me.
And yes I can call it a day now.
8 pm 👨👩👧👦
Dinner time. Since we are working from home I get to have dinner with the family.
10 pm 📖
I try to read before I go to sleep. I either read novels or just pick a UX related book. My last read was “The bell jar” a novel I wanted to read since very long finally quarantine helped me dedicate special time to it. Currently I am reading “Don’t Make me think” by Steve Krug. It is a book about web usability.
Some work days are short while some are really long and exhausting that is why I said in the very beginning that there is no typical day. But, the best thing about my day is that the time goes by so fast, it’s incredible! I don’t find myself looking at the clock. I’m looking at my to-do list, learning new tools, discovering new ways of developing products. I’m always learning. I’m given responsibility to deliver and to communicate this gives me a chance to grow, Everyday.🌻
