Junior designers need your help
Let’s face it, design school leaves budding designers unprepared for the world. The real learning begins in your first years, and it is up to design leaders to set new designers up for success.
My experience
I studied graphic design, as back then, in little old isolated New Zealand, studying UX wasn’t an option. I am sure that many of you reading this didn’t study it either, and had to gravitate yourselves towards UX on your own. Today’s world, however, is very different. There are thousands of options worldwide for studying UX, both within conventional universities, technical institutes, and even the newer, less conventional, online courses.
I was fortunate enough to have a great mentor in the industry, who was willing to show me the ropes, introduce me to people in the industry, and get me working. I worked with some very talented, senior designers who broadened my horizons and instilled in me pride for my work and attention to quality. Without their guidance, I would have been left flying by the seat of my pants.
Since then, I have worked in a range of places that have all taken a range of approaches when it comes to onboarding junior designers who are fresh from school. When I was working at a bank, the hiring manager who was not a designer, would take in interns. He would let them shadow others for a month or so, then hire them and place them in their own cross functional team without any mentorship whatsoever. The developers and product managers, all so happy that they had finally gotten a UX designer, believed that all their problems were about to go away. By leaving these designers alone in a role with such high expectations, they were set up to fail. Not that they knew that.
Practice makes perfect
Designers are increasingly becoming tasked with complex and large-impact tasks. For some reason, the industry has developed in a way where you usually go to a learning institution to become qualified, yet designers are left heavily underprepared for the real world. Other practical skills, like trades, rely on several year-long apprenticeships to gain their knowledge. They have the opportunity to learn in a controlled environment, yet being constantly exposed to real-world challenges. It is these challenges that become experience. Imagine if instead of going to design school and doing a degree, a budding designer could do a three-year apprenticeship. I hands down bet that they would be way more prepared for life as a designer than those that went through a traditional design school.
It is this unpreparedness that has left us in this pickle now. We have to basically teach them how to be a designer from scratch anyway.
Lost opportunities
Many of the people I studied with did not continue into careers with design. The ones who were passionate and driven to pursue design, of course, did. But what about all those budding designers who are unsure of themselves? Unsure if they have what it takes? Is it this way on purpose that we only want the top few to progress into UX? Or is it merely that the industry is so decentralised, that it presents itself as an unwelcoming and exclusive club? It is one thing for people to get accepted into a design school, it has a very clear process, but where is the industry standard for getting your first job, and how you should be treated in your first year? Perhaps this does exist. Perhaps in some ‘tech hubs’ around the world, this is a clearer thing, but I think for the majority of designers around the world, this is still very unclear. I would love to see some industry standards for hiring managers to adhere to, when it comes to helping junior designers in their first year.
A systemic organisational issue
The reality is that UX design is a skill utilised by businesses who are on a mission to make money. The way we organise our companies and even our private lives reflects a capitalist economic model. We are forever striving to cut costs and increase revenue, we want more for less. It is this pattern that replicates itself onto the hiring and onboarding of new designers. Large corporations all around the world are contorting themselves through digital transformations in order to remain relevant and hold onto their powerful market positions. This usually results in them taking their already built up analogue organisations, with people who have been trained in analogue processes, and magically transforming them into digital experts. But are they really digital experts? This debt of real digital knowledge has left them seeking out UX designers left, right and centre. The only thing here is that they can’t tell the difference between a senior designer and a junior one, they just know that they need a UX designer and anyone will do. This enormous bottom up pressure from the teams is in stark contrast to the perspectives of the fiscally responsible management. Those with the money tend to be well versed in quantitative metrics, something that always seems to reduce matters to either essential or non-essential.
So they ask themselves, do we need developers to develop our product? Yes.
Do we need designers? No, they are a nice-to-have.
This tension between the top down and the bottom up usually ends in a compromise; let’s just get some junior designers; they’re cheap! Well, all I can say is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and you will end up paying for it in one way or another.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a strong advocate for hiring junior designers, and I am not trying to say that we are all evil and giving them the short end of the stick on purpose. This is a systemic issue that is largely beyond our control, but as design leaders, we can actively try to give these designers the right conditions for success.
So what do junior designers need in order to succeed?
This is the million-dollar question. Of course, no two people are exactly the same and nor are the organisations we work in. So you will need some flexibility here to tailor to your unique situation. Below, you will find a few of the methods I have employed. I recognise that the terms for coaching and mentoring can mean a lot of different specific things for different people, so here is my take on it from the direct perspective of helping junior designers in their first year or two out of school.
Coaching
A coach is a lead designer who can help a junior designer plan and strategise their work. What should they aim to get done over the next week or month? What UX methods are the most appropriate for what they are trying to achieve? How should they prioritise what to work on and in what order? The purpose of the coach is to facilitate the junior designers professional advancement, whilst helping them do the right things within a commercial environment. Hence they should take a pedagogical approach, helping the junior designer come to their own conclusions, and allowing them to fail in order to learn. Design process is a complex and abstract beast. It requires thinking many steps ahead and knowing how to deal with emergent information. Without having experienced the full process firsthand, in all its variations, it can be hard for someone to understand the consequences of why they should tailor a particular process to their needs. As a coach, I have often found it challenging to explain the value of following certain processes or doing certain design activities. Even the simple things like writing out user stories fully. They can’t comprehend the importance without having experienced the consequences firsthand. This is why we need to make space in our planning for junior designers to make mistakes.
Depending on the designer and how they are placed within the organisation, this coaching work could be done one on one, or it could be more so, coaching the entire cross-functional team, with a close relationship to the PM as well.
Mentorship
A Mentor is a mid to senior designer who helps junior designers improve their technical, operational skills. For example how to get things done in Figma according to best practice; or how to improve their moderated interview techniques. The junior designer may have learnt some of these skills in school, however, my experience is that these are usually quite superficial understandings which reflect their tutor’s perspectives. Usually no two companies work the same either, so this is the perfect opportunity to teach them your own standards. For example, how to use your common project file template in Figma; or how you document your insights and share them with the rest of the team. This pairing should consist of two designers in the same team. Usually non-designer hiring managers think two designers to a team is a waste money, but in the long term, the investment will pay off.
Varied work
When I started in UX, I did everything. From facilitating kick off workshops, all the way through to user testing. This gave me a solid foundation for understanding the entire process. Today’s industry however looks quite different. Now you get specialist roles who just focus on certain parts of the process, for example UX researcher, UI designer, UX writer and so on. I believe that no junior designer should be placed into a specific role and they should be given the opportunity to learn everything. If your organisations is split up in a way that doesn’t allow one person to follow a particular project all the way through the process then you should rotate that person between the different sub-departments so that they get to experience each area in depth.
Summary
The industry is growing faster than ever, and if we leave our junior designers isolated and on their own, then we will be setting both them and our organisations up for failure. As design leaders, it is our responsibility to ensure the term UX designer is met with respect and value, both within our companies and within the tech industry as a whole. To do this, we need to proactively give our junior designers everything they need in order to fast track them up the design ladder. This isn’t easy, it takes time and a lot of planning, but if done right, you will make your junior designers, great designers, in just a few years.
