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If you are a young designer, what it takes to build UX maturity in their company or in the team, what it takes is actually having experience and confidence and understanding of the process and maybe having experience building the value even within the company or organization. And so if you don't have much exposure to UX process, then it's kind of really hard to be convincing, to know what you're doing and to build that culture confidently.
Hi everyone and welcome on a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa and today we're going to be tackling a very, very interesting topic that was requested by our wonderful listeners, the design team of one.
Probably many of us have been in this situation in our career, or if you're just starting out, you're probably pretty scared at the perspective of working by yourself on design projects and everything. So we will try to unpack what it means to be a design team of one, what it means when you hear this construction in design conversations, what are some good parts, some bad parts, and some tips for surviving. With that, I just want to
remind everyone that this is the third episode which is sponsored by fine design tool which is a 3d design tool that i'm absolutely in love with i am no 3d master yet but i'm becoming better at it day by day by by playing around with spline it's basically a tool that from my perspective
democratizes 3D design. So the entry bar was very high and you had to be seemingly very technical and you had to have a lot of visual knowledge and everything. Now it's basically accessible to everyone, which is great. And myself included.
I'm trying to start creating my first 3D elements and I plan to use the first one in a LinkedIn post next week. I'm very excited that I get to already have more Sailor Maze or more creative posts because I feel that after three years doing UX goodies, I'm in a creative rut.
So it's really fun to see myself exploring new fields. And thanks, Lain, for giving me this opportunity and also for sponsoring our conversations. Yay. And with this wonderful intro, I want to ask Anfisa, like always, how was her past week? Hello, everybody. How were the last week?
It's kind of the same question as last week. Nothing really changed, I'll be honest. I'm still living the world-life balance, trying to be productive at my company because I started a new job recently and there is a lot to wrap your head around and still, you know, trying to balance life, understanding that every day is a risk and my parents are still in Kyiv and every day we're risking because they don't want to leave and we have to like make sure they're in touch, everything's fine, we can provide them with whatever needed, etc, etc.
And every day in general, just following the news, hectic, feeling guilty for being in a safe place and reading the news and thinking about the strategy of how the heck this war could potentially end. And you know, it's just like a lot of a lot of things at the same time, just like the last, what it is four weeks already, we're living a more stable life, we eat, we sleep, we feel better, but
it is a very unstable time, overly. Yeah, what else we can say? I'm not productive. I cannot have like side projects at the moment. I started posting again on Instagram, but I feel a horrible guilt. It's kind of bittersweet feeling. Like I want to keep doing things. I want to leave. I don't want to regret, you know, losing time. I want to stay in touch with the reality, but at the same time, it feels all surreal. But okay, enough about me. How about you, Ioana?
Well, at a different scale, I'm experiencing something similar to you. So there's this guilt that I don't know if it's just experienced in Eastern Europe and because we're neighboring Ukraine and we're so close to the conflict, or maybe it's something that all democratic countries tend to experience and relate to.
at the moment, but I do experience that guilt as well. My day is also split between working and then after I finish working, it's wartime. And now I read all the updates and I look at what the Pentagon is saying about how the war is progressing. And it's a strange moment in our lives. I even feel guilty talking about how I feel
under this circumstance, because I feel like I have no right to feel anything, because I'm not the one that's actually suffering. And it's not about me. So. So yeah, so apart from that, I've been doing the regular work with mental, we are starting a new UX bootcamp cohort on April 1, it's very exciting. We had the competition for the UX scholarship
just closed. We were giving away a UX scholarship plus a three-month internship within their agency, which is called Fearless. And so I've been having interviews with some of the applicants for the past week. And it's bittersweet. It's really wonderful to meet people from different parts of the world. And I've talked to people in Nigeria. And it's the first time I'm talking to someone from that part of the world, like considering working together and so on. So it's really exciting, but it's also a bit
difficult for me. It's emotionally draining because it's really hard to say I'm going to help this person and I can't help this person. So hopefully we will draw in companies that could support us in helping more people. So scaling this kind of scholarship. So if you, dear listener, know any company that might want to sponsor a scholarship for someone in a disadvantaged background, please point them over to me. We are looking for partners that could support this scholarship.
We will announce the winner next week, which means in the week of 28th March. It's on one hand very exciting. On the other hand, it's heartbreaking. But definitely for all the applicants, we will integrate them in the community. We will try to pair them with mentors. We will try to support them in some way. So it's in a way we want everyone to be a winner. That's that's what we're going for. Apart from that, I've been doing my PhD.
consultancy work and all the things, small projects, UX projects that I'm doing. And also I'm working on a course that I will be going to shoot in Madrid in Spain on the week of April 2nd. It's very exciting. I can't say much more yet, but stay tuned for very interesting plans coming from my side. So that's me in a nutshell. And yes, let's move into the topic for today.
So my dear Anfisa, we always try to talk from our personal experience and explore our own take on the topics that we are discussing. So the question that I want to start with today is, have you ever been a design team of one? Yes.
Yes, definitely. I've been in that position for a pretty long period of my history, mainly because I was doing the freelance work for around like six years. When I was working as a freelancer, most of the time I was dealing with either like a startup companies where they didn't have pretty much anything and they just wanted to build this new brilliant idea. And my goal was to kind of collaborate with them, help them to identify if that's the valid idea, help them to build the minimum viable product, help them to build the vision of the product.
And apparently, not gonna lie, most of the times, especially if it was like, I don't know, 2012, 2013, 14, even 16 actually, most of the times the clients were like, "Hey, we just need this beautiful design. We have an idea. We have all the sketches. Just make it pretty basically." It was very, very common case for
a little wild until I started realizing that that's not sustainable. The projects I'm building are not reaching the goals that the clients were hoping for. If they're launched, they're not performing or there is no user or for some reason nobody's downloading that app and stuff like that. And that's when I realized that making just pretty products that the
client asked me for is not enough. And that's when I started realizing that, well, you know what, I will have to do some work on explaining that the value of design, of research, of collaboration, of involving the people with expertise and stuff like that. But coming back to particular
Particularly your question, I experienced working in a design team of one, mainly working with startups, as well as there were a couple of e-commerce projects where again, they would just reach out to me and they would say, well, we have this online booking service or it's Ecomore's project.
and we don't meet the conversion rate we want to, or we want to increase something, or people complain about the usability, which would be already a little bit better because in that context, you can definitely leverage the value of user research and understanding the numbers and analytics and kind of make sure it helps to communicate the process. So it's a bit better context. I would even actually categorize
the companies that have a very unequal proportion of designers to developers under the same category. Because if let's say you have a hundred developers and two designers, that's very not equal. That's very hard to sustain and kind of educate the team. It's basically designers are minority. So that also happened to me and
The work you were supposed to be doing to build the UX maturity level at the company or organization you are working in would have to be very similar to what you were doing if you're a freelancer trying to educate your client on how to build the product sustainably, or at least to build it so it actually meets some goals of the client.
So that's the context I worked at in the past. What were your experience working as a design team of one? Yeah, so I think our experiences are fairly similar. I think that in a way everyone's experience of being a design team of one is similar in a way. So there's a lot of common ground and the things we need to deal with and the problems we're facing and the struggles and the good parts as well that we'll be going into more detail later in this conversation.
Even now I am working on a project where I'm the only designer and in most of my side projects that I worked on throughout my career, I've been the sole designer because it's very often the case with early stage startups tend to have just one designer from the
budget limitations or just because they don't yet perceive the depth, the width, the volume of design work that needs to be done. And so they start with one designer and then they keep scaling as they understand and they see that there's value in design and that they
need more designers and there's a lot of design work to be done and so on. And many companies don't start out understanding that, oh, we're going to need a UX researcher and a UX writer and a visual designer and a UX designer and a UX strategist. So you don't start with so much granularity into your
design roles and design tasks. So most of the startups, especially early stage have one designers, those were the situations in which I found myself and currently find myself in this role of being a design team of one. But also, it happened to
to me. So when I was transitioning, bear in mind that I was four months into my UX career, if you want, I was just coming out of an apprentice program. So I was very, very, very, very fresh as a UX designer. And it just so happened that all the designers in my company, it's a very big company, it's ING banks, thousands of employees, huge development teams,
very hard to imagine the scale of the IT team for a junior UX designer. So in that context, there weren't so many designers, there were like three or four people in the design team, but somehow all of them found new opportunities at the same time. So I was left being the only designer in ING Romania at that moment in time, and one that was very, very new to the job. I was a design team of one for a couple of months until a new designer joined.
So it was a very, very intense experience, but I learned a lot along the way, obviously, and I will be talking about that later on. But what I'm trying to say is that unless there's a very strong maturity level in the company you are working with, it can't happen that you're in a big company, but you're still the only designer.
So that's not impossible either. It's not limited to just small startups. It can happen with big companies as well that they have just one designer or maybe for a brief moment in time, this design team is understaffed and it just so happens that it's one person. So I've been in this situation in different angles, if you want. So I hope that I can speak to it from various perspectives.
Anfisa, so with this context in mind, let's see from our perspectives, from our experience, what were the worst parts about being a design team of one? And conversely, on the flip side, were there any good parts to being a design team of one?
What is your experience? Oh, yes. I would say that let's start from the worst part because it's kind of more significant, I would say, in my experience. I would say that it's kind of hard if you are a young designer because what it takes to build UX maturity in their company or organization or in the team, what it takes is actually having experience.
and confidence and understanding of the process and maybe having experience building the value even within the company or organization. And so if you don't have much experience, not much exposure to UX process, then it's kind of really hard to be convincing, to know what you're doing
and to build that culture confidently. That's what I personally experienced. If you are not, let's say, experiencing your designer working with the small, not very UX mature organization just yet, then you might suffer from all those syndromes like how do I get a buy in for user research? How do I educate my team, the stakeholders? How do we communicate that we need to build this mini mobile product rather than this huge machine with all those features at the same time and launch it and see that
Nobody's buying it. How do you make an argument when they are saying we have another brilliant idea and you feel not powerful enough to say that, well, you know what? I don't know if that's idea is a good one for our objective. And you know, there is a lot of small things that come into the process.
I guess high level theme here is how do you learn to argument with them? How do you push back? How do you start from the bottom up? How do you communicate the value of the research, the user centered design? Even like, you know, small things like usability or accessibility, like they would say, you know what? We don't have time for this. We're a small company. We just need to build something that works.
And when you're not feeling confident as a designer just yet, it can become a very big struggle to get any sort of buy-in. I wouldn't break it down into small things. Actually, maybe you could talk about it, but I would just focus on this big theme of not being enough confident. Whereas right now,
I would say if I would be working in a smaller company, in a startup or in a design team of one, actually right now I'm sort of working in design team of one, but luckily we have the team that is pretty UX mature. At least they sort of know what is UX design doing. They have been working with designers in the past, so it's not the same problem. But if I were working with team from
I'd say stage one, like not exactly understanding the value of design, then it would be much easier because I have an experience in it and now I would understand how to make a buy-in, how to build a case, how to prioritize things, how to speak their language. Rolling back six,
seven, eight years back, I couldn't justify it very well. I couldn't articulate the value of design. That would be the worst thing of it. But on the flip side, the good part of working in a design team is, I would say, the flexibility because you'll figure it out together if you do your homework and help your team to build UX design maturity level within your organization. It's easier to work together if it's a smaller team. It's like you're more flexible. You can switch things. You can try things. You can
build and break things, you can test things faster. In terms of dynamics, it's just easier. Maybe you can add something I didn't think of when it comes to working as a single designer in a team or organization. It's pretty hard to find very, very strong points and happy points about that, but definitely there I will try to unpack some from my own experience. But starting with the bad parts or the struggles, the difficult parts about working as a solo designer, I think you've touched on
the biggest of them. So for me, what felt most difficult was to advocate design by myself. So to continuously try to convince others by myself that design is important, the value of design is real and so on. So it's really hard when you're by yourself because
it's obviously not the only thing you have to do. You have to do a lot of work as the only designer on a team. So evangelizing design, advocating for design is a job in itself. If you want, you need time for that. And when you're the only designer in that team, you probably don't have much time for conversations and selling, getting buy-in for
design activities and so on so it's pretty difficult to do everything and this was the part that i felt always like it's it's draining a lot of my energy that i have to use very carefully because there are many things to be done which leads me to the second point of the the hard parts about or the
bad parts about being the only designer is that you have a lot of things to do. You have to do everything by yourself. So it's really hard to keep up with everything that needs to be done and deliver on different pillars at the same time and make sure that things are moving both on the research front and also on the building a style guide or something, uh,
in the in the UI side, you have to advance on different levels. And it's really hard to keep them all in check and to be able to to be in different places at the same time, even from a mental perspective. So switching contexts all the time and trying to balance everything to make the product happen. So we all know that design process is not linear, as it's presented in the pretty design frameworks that you see online in the pretty images of
the ideal design process that goes from one stage to another. In my experience, I've had to do a lot of back and forth, move between doing UI design, going back to research, back to UX design, and then back to research, and then back to stakeholder interviews and so on. Very messy. So for me, that was a very, very hard part, balancing different stages, different parts of the design process by myself.
When I was working in experienced and more mature design teams, we sometimes had research capabilities. So UX researchers on the team that were handling that part, I was just saying, we need to find out this. We need to unpack, explore, to discover with our users. This is what I want to find out. And then that was just being handled. But when you're by yourself, you also have to
make the research happen, make the UI happen, make everything happen. So it's a lot of pressure and it's a lot of different things going on sometimes at the same time. And another part that I've experienced is that it's more on the emotional side. If you want, it can feel very lonely.
to be the only designer in a company. So you feel like you're doing all the work, maybe unappreciated 'cause there's no one to cheer for you like you would feel in a design team where you're all in that together and pushing towards the same goal. Sometimes people tend to value or you feel that they value engineering
or marketing or whatever other department that they're more important than the design is something like secondary and you're all alone trying to show them that it shouldn't be like that. Maybe that's another thing. And a very important part of feeling lonely for me was that
I didn't have anyone to learn from. So that's what I think is the worst part from my perspective and in my own experience. It's in a way you're growing because you're doing a lot of experimenting. You're doing a lot of mistakes. You're doing a lot of just work independently, autonomously, you're free. That's good. But at the same time,
There's no one there to bounce ideas off with. There's no one there that's doing things differently and that you can learn from, that you can talk to and that can challenge you or that you can challenge. And you're by yourself. And that's very difficult, especially if you're a very...
extroverted person or someone who thrives in having design conversations and working with others and learning from others. So for me, that felt like a constant feeling of loss. And those are the worst parts. And now for the good parts, I think that there are some good parts. I became very quickly very confident somehow. So even though I kept doubting if I'm doing the right thing, sometimes just the results
of how people were using the product reassured me that I made some good decisions, some decisions that needed to be revisited or amended. But overall, I grew my self-esteem because I was able to handle a lot of complexity, a lot of pressure, of course, with the regular iterations that needed to be done and mistakes that just slipped in. Pretty much, I was doing a good job handling everything and that's an important
It's like I have a similar feeling now that I have a daughter and I'm balancing a lot of things or raising a baby. It feels sometimes when you're the design team of one and you're achieving your goals and you're hitting some milestones, it feels like you're a superhero.
It feels like there's a lot of hard work that goes into it, but there's a reward. There's an immense reward there. So that's a good part. And the other part is that you get very, very well organized and very resourceful very quickly because otherwise you can't survive. So you become very good at documenting, organizing your day, organizing design tasks, organizing collaboration with the other roles in the team. So you become very good at that, at running complex tasks.
operations at the same time. I'm a very messy personality, so my things, my everything is sort of all the time, all over the place. But in these very vicious circumstances of being the only designer, I can't afford that to happen. So it forces me to be very organized and very structured and very disciplined about everything that I do. Those are some good parts.
So we're going to move into the next question now. So Anvisa, what are your tips for someone in this position to survive? Oh, well, this is probably the biggest part of our conversation because there's so many tips. I'll try to roll back to our problems and from them refrain to the opportunity, so to say, or our tips.
And I guess the biggest thing we all discussed here is being able to advocate for the design and being able to communicate the value of design. And actually I've heard somewhere, I don't remember who said that, but there is this quote that 90% of the work of being a designer is actually evangelism.
It's actually true. Like, to be honest, we're still in the stage where not many IT teams know what's the value of design. And yes, there are companies, there are teams, there are organizations that are on a different level that are at least in the level two, three, four, five stage of UX maturity. But if I would bluntly estimate how many teams are not...
There yet, I would say it's maybe 50% at least. So there is still lots and lots of companies or even teams or even like initiatives. If you're talking about startups that are not UX mature and don't truly understand the value of design. So that means that I would start from the tip that it's our job to actually learn to argument and advocate
for the design, meaning that we need to master our arguments. We need to learn to speak to our stakeholders in a human language. We need to understand first of all, for ourselves, what's the value of design? Why do we need to do the research? If somebody asks you, yeah, okay, cool. All those smart words, but why? You need to be able to answer it briefly. You need to be able to make it sweet and short, give a case, give an example, focus on the benefits that user experience design
project can provide rather than, you know, just building this beautiful, fancy triple shots. And also being able to adjust to the person language you're talking to. Be it the, you know, business person, be it the developer, they all have different priorities on top of their mind. And you kind of need to address those priorities when you try to educate or I guess advocate for the design. So again, like mastering your arguments, meaning that speaking sweet and short, focusing on the benefits and also being able to adjust your like, so to say, pitch
depending on who you're talking to. Obviously the arguments itself, it's a different story. I think we captured it a little bit in one of the previous episodes when we were talking about having a buy-in for UX design project. How do you kind of argument having the user search? But
Most of the common arguments could sound something like, you know, running UX research costs much less than developing it. So we can save time and money and it's cheaper to fix things faster and earlier on than later when, well, we're publishing it and suddenly nobody buys it and stuff like this. Also, it's important to understand the common objectives
to run in the user search and that's something we also discussed in the previous research because out of objections you can actually reframe it and have like arguments obviously that's the most common objections would be something like you know let's just test it with someone we don't need to run the perfect
research is too expensive, it takes too much time. And obviously you do need to have an argument prepared for that kind of objections. You maybe can use the money language saying that, you know what? Five user tasks can cost us less than three design meetings because time of the designer is much more expensive than talking to like five users because the incentive is cheaper. And so
stuff like this, rather than arguing over this meeting and spending countless hours imagining what users would like. Let's just talk to them, you know? So having all those arguments prepared is one of the first tips I would be using. Second tip would be also all about the collaboration and working with the people.
Especially when it comes to smaller teams, communication is literally the key. That means that I would start by saying that you need to understand who are your allies early on. You need to understand who are the people who can sort of support you in this initiative, who might have like ideas around user experience design, who care about user experience design, who might want to learn more about it.
You need to identify those people because they're asking questions in the meetings or because they're giving you the critique and you can see that they actually care. And that means also you can ask people for contact. Who would you recommend me to talk to? Let's say if you're just in the beginning of the project.
So identifying allies and maybe identifying the influencers here would be another tip because in every project, and of course, depending on how many people are in that project, because if it's a small startup with like three people, obviously you don't need to identify influencers. Every single person is an influence. But if we are talking about the bigger companies, when you have a hundred people, it's very hard to like navigate through this huge team dynamics. You do need to ask for names and ask
for influencers and kind of ask while you're doing interviews in the initial stages of the project, you can actually ask for like, who would you say is the critical member of your team? Who should I else talk to? And stuff like this. So you can realize who are the stakeholders, who will most likely have an opinion and who you most likely have to
make a buy-in with, sort of. And when it comes to actually understanding who you work with, so I mentioned things like, you know, understanding your allies, who you can bring on the next meeting, and understanding the key influencers, who you should master your speech to, I guess. The next part, it comes to already like involving them, make sure they care.
And for me personally, the best techniques that worked out were like involving them early on and communicating as much as possible. So there is no enough communication ever. And that means that every time you're doing any activities, one, you have to document and communicate it pretty much every single day. Like when I was working as a freelancer, I would set up the Slack channel and every, almost every day or depends on the stage. Sometimes I would have to like start
shoot a video before it was just like recording my screen. But later it was like through the loom when I could like talk through progress I've done, the insights I've collected and kind of like in a bite size length, share it with the stakeholders, with the, either it is the developers or BMS or like a business owners who want to see the progress and always like frame it from the user perspective.
always communicating it, but what works even best or even more is involving them. Those allies I mentioned before, if you can see they can join you,
And that means that given them sort of to try the process in a bite-sized way, that could be, yeah, the worship activities or design sprint or whatever of that sort that could help people to make their voice heard, try it out, see it in action, see it working and kind of building an empathy also for what we are doing and for who we are doing. That's like a big, big part of the success, at least in my experience. If you cannot involve them in the design workshops, et cetera, you can at least practice
small meeting activities such as like lunch and learn when you share a walkthrough and you kind of expose the issues that you are having and so people understand a bit better the picture of the user experience and understanding the pains that user experience or you can maybe invite them to the user interviews so that they can actually see it in action
Or you can even like play UX trivia where you ask them questions. What do you think people will do here? And they guess and so they get more engaged and realize, oh, actually true, it's pretty painful. So there are many, many like tips and tricks on how to involve them.
and make them actually care about the pains you're solving. Still, workshops work the best in my opinion. Okay, so there's a lot of tips obviously already, but there are so many more I want to share and try to make it concise. But you also need to make the whole language of the user experience much more relatable. So every time you're talking to your team or stakeholders, make sure you're using plain language. You're not talking smart design terms such as, I don't know, contextually inquiry.
and semi-structured interview and qualitative data showed us, et cetera, et cetera. Make sure you're actually speaking a very simple language because whenever you're talking smart, it doesn't help. It doesn't build an understanding. Slowly, slowly, slowly, you can add your smart words and the process, and maybe they can kind of get up to speed with you, but make it later. So
So start by saying something like, you know, there is a difference between what people say and what they do. You don't have to say that a contextual inquiry helped us to identify blah, blah, blah. You know, just make it simple. That's another tip I would definitely give here. Design critiques also help me a little bit. For example, if I would share the progress of the design and if it would be a meeting and not like a video, like,
Loom sending over Slack. I could also try to involve my stakeholders and again, remind them about the stage we're at. So again, in the beginning, I would have to set up the process and explain the stages we are going through. And then as we started going through the process, I would start like
involving them in a design critique and saying like, so I did X, Y, Z. Here is where I am at. Here's what I need the feedback about. So here is the stage. Here are the insights. Here's my progress. And now I'm looking for the feedback around X, Y, Z. So for example, I remember this problem. Remember this objective. We need to focus on this part. Like design critiques also helped me because it makes people more engaged in your process. Thus making people care more about what you're doing.
Few more tips, and I know it's already, I've been talking for a while now, but few more tips could be also setting up a more flexible process. So it's not like we must go through the X, Y, Z steps, but sometimes adjusting to the timeline that actually needs and startups, they always need to run quickly. And so you kind of have to always adjust and play around that dynamics. You might also want to protect your time and say that from one to three, you're always working on
focus time so you're not able to stay engaged. Protecting your time because like Ioana mentioned, there will be a lot of activities you have to work on and just communicating will make it harder for you to actually do some work. And also delegating. I think that's a hard part. I think this is something that you will have to get into if you're working with your team.
for a while already, but at some point you will realize that there is so much work that is on your plate that you physically cannot do it all, that it's better for you to focus on the high level picture, on understanding the roadmap, on understanding the stages, on understanding the key priorities. And then maybe when it comes to like interactions, you can delegate it to some designers or
Or, you know, like again with the startups, we know that it's all about doing everything like, you know, videos and marketing and banners. And so it's something where you need to understand that you need to delegate work. And again, while building the strong communication within your team, you can start educating them about the cost of you working on small things that are not super priority for us, but still needs to be done. Maybe it's easier and cheaper for you to delegate it and buy the service from somebody else. Anything you would like to add here?
You've covered a lot of things, probably more things that I could have ever think of. But I just want to add one last point here in terms of how to survive as the only designer and how to thrive and how to not feel like you're not learning. My tip on this is relating to the feeling of
feeling lonely in your role and to feeling that you're not learning from a design team, you're not learning from experienced designers that are already in the team from the mature context. And I think you can like counterbalance that with finding an outside mentor or finding outside communities and designers that you get to share your story with
and get feedback and get advice and kind of replace learning that doesn't happen inside the company with learning from outside the company, if that makes sense. I think it's extremely important because there are many bad parts or things that are very difficult
about being the only designer, but not having someone to learn from for me is the most dangerous one. So I would do all that's in my power to try to fix that or find a workaround for that by looking for outside mentors and people that can guide me into the work I'm doing within solo role. So that's my last piece of advice. And I think that we can jump in the top three findings for today. Anfisa, if you want to go first.
Yeah, so well, we've covered so many things today, it's kind of hard to identify the top three things. But I would say it's very important to learn to advocate for the process and the design and become this evangelist, even if it's a small context in your team. So that means are like mastering your arguments, understanding who you should talk to, understanding how you should talk to plain language, all of those things I have mentioned previously.
That's the first takeaway. Second takeaway is also making sure you're involving your team in whatever way possible, be it just like a quick communication over the Slack every day or every other day, or actually being able to involve them in more small, fun UX activities, UX trivia, lunch and learn, or even farther if it's possible to involve them in workshops.
where they got to talk, where you ask them for an opinion, when you ask them to contribute, when you ask them to prioritize, helping you prioritize, or even design critiques when you can lead them by context, etc.
explaining what you're focusing on and why and how it helps their objectives, yet giving them a space to add their five cents. So the second takeaway is definitely to involve your team because if you're working in the vacuum, absolutely, I can guarantee you there will be no success for you building that UX maturity level. It will be a struggle. The last takeaway here would be to learn to prioritize and seeing the bigger picture, meaning that
understanding the key priorities and where you should put your energy into because there will be a lot of things you have to focus on there will be so many activities so many research stuff there will be so many things to prioritize and build and communicate and you know details and all of that
So at some point, A, you have to learn to understand the priorities. You have to make sure people are aligned with those priorities. And then at some point you have to communicate why it is important for us to delegate certain parts of projects. Because A, you might not have expertise in that part of projects.
B, it might be cheaper. And C, standing in the bigger picture, you might focus on those key priorities rather than small things that are not as impactful for the project at this stage. So honestly, prioritizing means growing a lot as a designer and becoming a more
a mature designer more senior designer but that's something that you will most likely learn to do if you're working alone as a team and that definitely will help you to progress in your career so yeah that would be my third takeaway what about your key insights for today so i think
thing that I'm going to start with the one that I finished off with fighting the loneliness of being a solo UX designer with finding outside mentors and outside people reaching out to other design teams to understand how they run their processes, how they do the work, understanding how you can do your own work better. My second takeaway would be that you have to try as much as possible to set boundaries and educate if you want, but not from a superior position, but from a well intended
protecting yourself kind of position set boundaries and educate a team as to what the UX role is, what UX processes, what kind of support you need, what what are the important things, and so on. So you will be doing that constantly and you need to be very consistent about it.
And my last takeaway would be more of a conclusion if you want. So I would say that being a design team of one, let's say you're faced with this decision. I have a job offer for a design team of one in a small company, in an early stage startup or whatever other kind of company, or I want to be a freelancer.
should I make this decision? My conclusion would be that if you're in the very early stages of your own career, don't do it. Ideally, I think that if you're a junior designer and you're going to be thrown in the craziness of a design team of one and in the hectic and complexity and difficulty and it
If you're going to be just put in there as a junior designer, it's going to be very difficult for you. It's even going to be more difficult for the team. And I think it's just a tough experience that will toughen you, but I'm not sure it's the best way to learn as a junior designer. I would say that if you're a junior designer, maybe go for an established design team for a mature design context.
Go for learning from others as much as possible and leave the design team of one experiment for later down in your career. But for other people that have a couple of years of experience under their belt, definitely being a design team of one is going to teach you
a lot. And it's an interesting experiment. And it's something that some people thrive in, and they build careers around being a solo designers. And that's great. So definitely, I would say it's an experience that we all need to have in our career at some point. But maybe the stage at which we do that should be what we should be mindful of if you want.
So with this conclusion, I just want to thank everyone for listening to this episode and invite you all to leave a review, send us an idea for a future episode, like share and subscribe. If you have an idea, you can find either if you're listening on Spotify under the episode, you can find those cards where you can submit your idea and we will make sure to prioritize it.
You can also find in the show notes, the little anonymous survey where you can suggest another episode or even give us a feedback if we need to improve something. You can also reach out to us directly on Instagram under Honest UX Talks or in my or Ioana's profile. Yeah, you can find all the links literally under the show notes. All right. Thank you so much for listening and have a good rest of the day. Bye-bye.