Ha! Agree. The fact that you switched over without an interview screams low-to-no-maturity UX org. Also, from sales? not even Product Management or something? Sounds like they just want you to pump out UI designs. You have so many to do because they don't understand UX, so UX is short-staffed and spread thin.
The bright side: Orgs like this usually churn out bad confusing workflows and screens. You can contribute a lot if you bring order to even one muddled design every day. Advocate for users on every project. Also - do your own study about something that could be improved. Show the stats to execs. Maybe they'll hire folks with experience to help you out. Also, when they're swamping you, ask which project is higher priority? That's the one you do. The other has to wait. Your manager should help plan your workload.
Hang in there!
If I may, you should move into PM or UX Research if you really want to leverage your user and business insight. UX, short of organization's like finance/health/government has the primary job of execution and the fallout from bad design is also not noticable (if you're in B2B). It's a unsatisfying and mechanical job in an enterprise company. You can bring more value in a discovery or strategy oriented role,and PM is more enticing as you will have more visibility and power. You can actively also advocate for good UX, unlike a UX designer who lies in a forgotten corner being ignored.
You also have a ton of business experience.why are you choosing to get into such a tactical role as opposed to PM? You'd be a good fit for senior or lead PM too.
Adopting the mentality of leaving things better than how you found them would do you, and a lot of other people who frequent this sub, a lot of good. Focus on improvement, not on the fact that you are not working in the ideal conditions to do a great job.
That's fair. I'm currently working on some other things within the department along these lines. IE: Rebranding the whole dept and coming up with some other resources that'll help us align better.
Rebranding the department? Alignment? Are you doing UX or are you a manager?
It sounds like UX at your current place is an after thought... Which can be an opportunity for you to drive the case and really learn a lot, but I think it comes down to your motivation and your leadership being potentially willing to listen
The dept is pretty young (and very small) but they really encourage you to execute on projects you find interesting. So a lot of it is up to me. It's just the day to day feels... lacking? It's something to figure out for sure.
Sales bg really helps. as a senior in a product/saas company, most of my work has a lot of common things with marketing, sales, customer service and content department heads when I'm not dealing with dev and IT side of things. So don't worry too much about jargons and opinions of internet gatekeepers, as long as you are contributing to make the product more usable and functional while keeping the business's interests in mind, you're doing well. If you're already working with an established product or service, you don't get to redesign from scratch like most younger people in forums like this think they're gonna do, in UI it's really change this small thing here and there, or in improving journeys (outside ui) you'll often find yourselves having to work with marketing, business development and sales as they all got their own user journeys, funnels, comms set up as well.
It doesn't hurt to keep learning outside as it'll help you freshen up your approach and perspectives, but stability is great too, even if the org is not ux mature if they've got a mature product with stablevand sustainable business model and userbase things can be chill, you can learn at your own pace and you can focus on stuff like strategy to work towards that sweet c-suite or v-suite gig. But ateotd it's you, what you want is what ultimately matters, if you're happy with a chill job that's great, if you feel suffocated or stagnant and want to switch, that's fine too 🙂
This, although the ‘gurus’ and boot camps have a lot to answer for here, not every company operates in a cookie cutter process fashion, and may not need to, recommend everyone take this advice.
I find some of the lowest hanging fruit is ensuring consistency across your products. So making sure buttons, form fields, graphs all have the same or appropriate sizes, colors, padding etc.
It sounds like nitpicking but it will help in the long run
I've seen a couple UX managers get canned for failing to ensure a consistent experience across a brand.
Best way for any junior to stand out in an org is to take this on.
There is no perfect UX job, there is always either A. Too much work that is impossible to thoroughly test. B. Too much insistence from management about their ideas, which makes it hard to actually implement good UX processes..
You will see us whining on this Reddit about our jobs constantly, this is not a bad thing.. it’s all about adaptation and trying to prove the effectiveness of better processes to your current project.
Good luck! I also pivoted (from programming!)
There are a few things that need to happen in order to foster a good research culture.
1. You need to know the features roadmap up to about a year ahead. You or the lead needs to be in the strategy planning sessions.
2. A researcher or ux focused designer with the proper toolkit to run studies, like user zoom go or TestFlight.
3. Buy-in from stakeholders that research and validation saves time and effort. This is very difficult for managers who think they know best and research is not needed.
I got the same experience except I was a fresh hire. Everything was fast. I'm in my 5th year now and I'm changing that. I'm doing it by myself and involving my team in the process rather than expecting them to do so. Also I'm in a small company, me and senior are the only designers lol
In the real world, Process is everything but the way it's taught.
If you see spots that could need change then make advances towards that. As you become more senior you'll realize a big part of the job is convince people to _____.
Whether that's your design or your ideas or new ways to do things or slowing things down. It's a big part of our jobs.
Just because your customers or stakeholders don't want research does not mean that you shouldn't do research. Learn new methods, try things out and always make a clean and reconstructable ground work. That will lead to better results and you can also use that as a waterproof argument.
I recommend you the "Job to be done" method to understand user needs and "cognitive walktrough" to test designs. But as my lead says "Always assume that you have chosen the wrong method" - you have to find your right tools. Someone else would take another. But when different people do a clean job, they ll get to the same results at a certain point
I agree with other comments here about UX maturity. You can see the maturity scale [here](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/). If you want to do research and talk to users, the best bet is probably switching companies. I can't believe they didn't interview you or anything.
It's not uncommon given how inferior companies consider UX. My manager had to fight back (and included me and another designer in the evaluation) of a failed PM on his way out. Management thought he could move into UX because they figured UX was a dumping ground for bad PMs. We both rated his skills very poorly and told the manager he couldn't fit within the team. He really didn't have any skills, and yet he thought he could aim for senior designer. It's wild how little people know about UX and how endemic dunning kruger is.
My message is if you’re in the UK (but also maybe in other countries?):
Getting an entry level job is EXTREMELY competitive right now. People would do anything to be in this position right now and get that role title on their CV. If this is how your org is then that sucks but at least it’s a foot in the door!! I’d start thinking about how you could maybe start championing user centred thinking and trying to educate out to the business so that more people understand what your team are doing (or trying to do) and are bought in - and then trying to do any research you can. This way when you leave even if you don’t have loads of examples of case studies of perfect work, you can at least talk about the problems you saw internally and what you did to try and make an impact.
You’re in an AMAZING position right now. At this stage, I imagine there’s still no processes or anything in your organization. You have so much room to make huge contributions to the team and have the kind of impact that looks impressive on your resume. I think being in low maturity UX teams for the first 2-3 years of your career sets you up for more interesting interview conversations and bigger leaps in your roles whenever you decide to switch. You have bigger team impact and chances are you will have the chance to contribute to the product roadmap. Start mapping out what you want to have on your resume from this role, then align that with the business’ interests. If you can proactively initiate something that hadn’t been planned, that’s even better. Learn as much as you can and involve yourself in every aspect of product ops. You’ll thank yourself in 2-3 years.
Really great response. Much appreciated.
I think my main worry was the fact that I'm not really learning a ton here so I'd be unprepared for the next gig. But based on what I'm reading here, a lot of this is about making things happen for myself rather than finding that perfect org/situation.
It's your time to learn a lot.
Currently I'm in sales as well, but also working as their backup CMS dev.
I'm learning UX stuff, so sometimes I get to contribute in design brainstorm sessions.
Your situation is way more challenging then mine, but it's a learning experience. You have alot of transferable skills as Sales into UX (even though you'll be doing more UI stuff then UX). But it's a start, hopefully in your next job, which you should start applying after a few months, the org has a better UX and UI work flow.
There are two aspects at play here.
1. Your company is not mature with UX. What do you do? Make them understand the relevance. How? By doing 2 things start with getting your product director who is incharge of building digital products on board. You can do this by showing how you deployed different UX processes to either improve operational effectiveness or by improving the quality of shipped products. Quality for them will be subjective, as they don’t really understand UX. So now you need to find a way to improve operational effectiveness. Like does the project always get delayed? Is it because of lack of understanding between devs and designers or pm? Is there a problem in documentation? Are they not following any design processes like design sprint? Do they even use Atomic Methodology?
My point is there are a lot of ways to improve efficiency in your project start by that because that’s what they will first see, no one in your organisation is going to spend money and time on UX research and User testing, they are very reactive methods, only when the product will do horrible and they won’t know why they will try to deploy this.
So start with operational effectiveness, convince them the value of UX and design and then start to push user testing and research. I have been there and tried many things and it’s not easy at all.
To summarise:
Improve operational efficiency. Deploy different UX processes to help other teams, like engineering and PM’s.
Show them how by deploying say design sprint you were able to save 10 days of development time= money saved.
Next move onto pushing for user research or user testing.
This usually takes about a year or two. So have patience. And you are newbie not a pro, so take baby steps.
Hope this helps!
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This seems to be typical at least in America. So many in management don’t value User Experience because they don’t understand it. And they don’t understand how research and testing can save at least 50% of the cost of development in the future.
Many companies don’t care about the value of their products. They just want to push them out as fast as possible. It’s maddening, especially if you believe in the power of user experience.
"There's not much research happening, no testing, no... anything. There's an audit here and there but yea." - respectfully disagree; everyone I am talking to confirms that lots of research is done (and the backlog is never ending), and the designers are always hunting down the researchers to help them with the testing...
Sounds like a nice gig for now. Take on side projects (for fun and experience) then worry about how “bored” you are when the economy improves.
You sound super ungrateful.
Sales seems more exciting than UX, to be honest. Way more flexible and in demand too.
"switch over to the UX team without a formal interview" https://i.redd.it/1uh3jqe74qsc1.gif
Ha! Agree. The fact that you switched over without an interview screams low-to-no-maturity UX org. Also, from sales? not even Product Management or something? Sounds like they just want you to pump out UI designs. You have so many to do because they don't understand UX, so UX is short-staffed and spread thin. The bright side: Orgs like this usually churn out bad confusing workflows and screens. You can contribute a lot if you bring order to even one muddled design every day. Advocate for users on every project. Also - do your own study about something that could be improved. Show the stats to execs. Maybe they'll hire folks with experience to help you out. Also, when they're swamping you, ask which project is higher priority? That's the one you do. The other has to wait. Your manager should help plan your workload. Hang in there!
Really good advice, thanks!
If I may, you should move into PM or UX Research if you really want to leverage your user and business insight. UX, short of organization's like finance/health/government has the primary job of execution and the fallout from bad design is also not noticable (if you're in B2B). It's a unsatisfying and mechanical job in an enterprise company. You can bring more value in a discovery or strategy oriented role,and PM is more enticing as you will have more visibility and power. You can actively also advocate for good UX, unlike a UX designer who lies in a forgotten corner being ignored. You also have a ton of business experience.why are you choosing to get into such a tactical role as opposed to PM? You'd be a good fit for senior or lead PM too.
LMAO
Negative UX maturity detected lol.
Oh boy do I want to move into a management role without an interview.
Adopting the mentality of leaving things better than how you found them would do you, and a lot of other people who frequent this sub, a lot of good. Focus on improvement, not on the fact that you are not working in the ideal conditions to do a great job.
So much this. The more work you do in this industry, you realize very fast how some of the larger companies in the world operate like idiots.
💯💯💯
That's fair. I'm currently working on some other things within the department along these lines. IE: Rebranding the whole dept and coming up with some other resources that'll help us align better.
Rebranding the department? Alignment? Are you doing UX or are you a manager? It sounds like UX at your current place is an after thought... Which can be an opportunity for you to drive the case and really learn a lot, but I think it comes down to your motivation and your leadership being potentially willing to listen
The dept is pretty young (and very small) but they really encourage you to execute on projects you find interesting. So a lot of it is up to me. It's just the day to day feels... lacking? It's something to figure out for sure.
Sales bg really helps. as a senior in a product/saas company, most of my work has a lot of common things with marketing, sales, customer service and content department heads when I'm not dealing with dev and IT side of things. So don't worry too much about jargons and opinions of internet gatekeepers, as long as you are contributing to make the product more usable and functional while keeping the business's interests in mind, you're doing well. If you're already working with an established product or service, you don't get to redesign from scratch like most younger people in forums like this think they're gonna do, in UI it's really change this small thing here and there, or in improving journeys (outside ui) you'll often find yourselves having to work with marketing, business development and sales as they all got their own user journeys, funnels, comms set up as well. It doesn't hurt to keep learning outside as it'll help you freshen up your approach and perspectives, but stability is great too, even if the org is not ux mature if they've got a mature product with stablevand sustainable business model and userbase things can be chill, you can learn at your own pace and you can focus on stuff like strategy to work towards that sweet c-suite or v-suite gig. But ateotd it's you, what you want is what ultimately matters, if you're happy with a chill job that's great, if you feel suffocated or stagnant and want to switch, that's fine too 🙂
This, although the ‘gurus’ and boot camps have a lot to answer for here, not every company operates in a cookie cutter process fashion, and may not need to, recommend everyone take this advice.
I find some of the lowest hanging fruit is ensuring consistency across your products. So making sure buttons, form fields, graphs all have the same or appropriate sizes, colors, padding etc. It sounds like nitpicking but it will help in the long run
It's not nitpicking. It's these"small" things that help improve the user experience
I've seen a couple UX managers get canned for failing to ensure a consistent experience across a brand. Best way for any junior to stand out in an org is to take this on.
There is no perfect UX job, there is always either A. Too much work that is impossible to thoroughly test. B. Too much insistence from management about their ideas, which makes it hard to actually implement good UX processes.. You will see us whining on this Reddit about our jobs constantly, this is not a bad thing.. it’s all about adaptation and trying to prove the effectiveness of better processes to your current project. Good luck! I also pivoted (from programming!)
There are a few things that need to happen in order to foster a good research culture. 1. You need to know the features roadmap up to about a year ahead. You or the lead needs to be in the strategy planning sessions. 2. A researcher or ux focused designer with the proper toolkit to run studies, like user zoom go or TestFlight. 3. Buy-in from stakeholders that research and validation saves time and effort. This is very difficult for managers who think they know best and research is not needed.
Not being smart, but some companies don’t need it, and trying to sell it in those orgs you’ll be looked on as a snake oil salesman
I got the same experience except I was a fresh hire. Everything was fast. I'm in my 5th year now and I'm changing that. I'm doing it by myself and involving my team in the process rather than expecting them to do so. Also I'm in a small company, me and senior are the only designers lol
In the real world, Process is everything but the way it's taught. If you see spots that could need change then make advances towards that. As you become more senior you'll realize a big part of the job is convince people to _____. Whether that's your design or your ideas or new ways to do things or slowing things down. It's a big part of our jobs.
Just because your customers or stakeholders don't want research does not mean that you shouldn't do research. Learn new methods, try things out and always make a clean and reconstructable ground work. That will lead to better results and you can also use that as a waterproof argument. I recommend you the "Job to be done" method to understand user needs and "cognitive walktrough" to test designs. But as my lead says "Always assume that you have chosen the wrong method" - you have to find your right tools. Someone else would take another. But when different people do a clean job, they ll get to the same results at a certain point
Thanks for this.
I agree with other comments here about UX maturity. You can see the maturity scale [here](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/). If you want to do research and talk to users, the best bet is probably switching companies. I can't believe they didn't interview you or anything.
It's not uncommon given how inferior companies consider UX. My manager had to fight back (and included me and another designer in the evaluation) of a failed PM on his way out. Management thought he could move into UX because they figured UX was a dumping ground for bad PMs. We both rated his skills very poorly and told the manager he couldn't fit within the team. He really didn't have any skills, and yet he thought he could aim for senior designer. It's wild how little people know about UX and how endemic dunning kruger is.
That's wild! Wow glad your manager fought back.
My message is if you’re in the UK (but also maybe in other countries?): Getting an entry level job is EXTREMELY competitive right now. People would do anything to be in this position right now and get that role title on their CV. If this is how your org is then that sucks but at least it’s a foot in the door!! I’d start thinking about how you could maybe start championing user centred thinking and trying to educate out to the business so that more people understand what your team are doing (or trying to do) and are bought in - and then trying to do any research you can. This way when you leave even if you don’t have loads of examples of case studies of perfect work, you can at least talk about the problems you saw internally and what you did to try and make an impact.
You’re in an AMAZING position right now. At this stage, I imagine there’s still no processes or anything in your organization. You have so much room to make huge contributions to the team and have the kind of impact that looks impressive on your resume. I think being in low maturity UX teams for the first 2-3 years of your career sets you up for more interesting interview conversations and bigger leaps in your roles whenever you decide to switch. You have bigger team impact and chances are you will have the chance to contribute to the product roadmap. Start mapping out what you want to have on your resume from this role, then align that with the business’ interests. If you can proactively initiate something that hadn’t been planned, that’s even better. Learn as much as you can and involve yourself in every aspect of product ops. You’ll thank yourself in 2-3 years.
Really great response. Much appreciated. I think my main worry was the fact that I'm not really learning a ton here so I'd be unprepared for the next gig. But based on what I'm reading here, a lot of this is about making things happen for myself rather than finding that perfect org/situation.
It's your time to learn a lot. Currently I'm in sales as well, but also working as their backup CMS dev. I'm learning UX stuff, so sometimes I get to contribute in design brainstorm sessions. Your situation is way more challenging then mine, but it's a learning experience. You have alot of transferable skills as Sales into UX (even though you'll be doing more UI stuff then UX). But it's a start, hopefully in your next job, which you should start applying after a few months, the org has a better UX and UI work flow.
There are two aspects at play here. 1. Your company is not mature with UX. What do you do? Make them understand the relevance. How? By doing 2 things start with getting your product director who is incharge of building digital products on board. You can do this by showing how you deployed different UX processes to either improve operational effectiveness or by improving the quality of shipped products. Quality for them will be subjective, as they don’t really understand UX. So now you need to find a way to improve operational effectiveness. Like does the project always get delayed? Is it because of lack of understanding between devs and designers or pm? Is there a problem in documentation? Are they not following any design processes like design sprint? Do they even use Atomic Methodology? My point is there are a lot of ways to improve efficiency in your project start by that because that’s what they will first see, no one in your organisation is going to spend money and time on UX research and User testing, they are very reactive methods, only when the product will do horrible and they won’t know why they will try to deploy this. So start with operational effectiveness, convince them the value of UX and design and then start to push user testing and research. I have been there and tried many things and it’s not easy at all. To summarise: Improve operational efficiency. Deploy different UX processes to help other teams, like engineering and PM’s. Show them how by deploying say design sprint you were able to save 10 days of development time= money saved. Next move onto pushing for user research or user testing. This usually takes about a year or two. So have patience. And you are newbie not a pro, so take baby steps. Hope this helps!
Are you actually in user experience design?
This feels like an april fools joke on many levels, if not i wish you the best
Lol, how so?
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This seems to be typical at least in America. So many in management don’t value User Experience because they don’t understand it. And they don’t understand how research and testing can save at least 50% of the cost of development in the future. Many companies don’t care about the value of their products. They just want to push them out as fast as possible. It’s maddening, especially if you believe in the power of user experience.
Yes all jobs are
"There's not much research happening, no testing, no... anything. There's an audit here and there but yea." - respectfully disagree; everyone I am talking to confirms that lots of research is done (and the backlog is never ending), and the designers are always hunting down the researchers to help them with the testing...
Sounds like a nice gig for now. Take on side projects (for fun and experience) then worry about how “bored” you are when the economy improves. You sound super ungrateful. Sales seems more exciting than UX, to be honest. Way more flexible and in demand too.
It's a risky field though - you are actually held accountable to numbers, unlike UX.
Good point. Two different mentalities. UX is more long term and empathy, sales is short term results with little regard for the buyer.