#73 A day in the life of a UX designer
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So a day in the life of a designer will involve conversation and that's an act of design in itself, right? You're unpacking problems, you're asking questions, you're challenging things, you're having debates. That is design.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the next episode of Honest UX Talks. Today, we're going to talk about typical day in the life of a UX designer. Basically, our goal for today is trying to expand how your life could look like if you're just trying to understand this industry, if you're looking to maybe transition to this industry. So let's have some fun and figure out what the typical day could look like for you and how it looks like for us today. But before we jump into the beginning of this topic, let's talk about our last week. So how are you doing, Ioana?

Hey! So my last week was pretty intense. It was one of the most spectacular, busy or just interesting weeks I've had in a long time. So on Monday I signed my first exit. Yay! Some of you probably know I've left my bootcamp.

In 2020, I co-founded a bootcamp called Mental Design Academy, and I've been doing a lot of entrepreneurial work around it, like building it, promoting it, investing in marketing, doing all the marketing things, partnerships and so on. So I've been spending a lot of time as an entrepreneur for the past two years.

And then it suddenly hit me that this is taking me further away from design. And I love design and I want to invest more time in it and less time in entrepreneurial stuff. So after an existential crisis, I decided that I'm going to leave Mento. And it was very heartbreaking because we were 50-50 in it. We were full-hearted. Myself, my co-founder as well, we were there with our hearts. We wanted to make this biggest success story in UX education just impact people's lives. So everything was there live.

like the positive ingredients. But then I realized that I don't want to be an entrepreneur, at least not now. And I want to do more design. So I had to make a difficult choice. I think sometimes life, even in our personal life with relationships that we half enjoy, half don't enjoy and stuff like that. Sometimes we just have to make difficult choices. And this was the case. Now I feel in a way free. It's bittersweet, but I'm leaving Mento Design Academy behind me. I cannot imagine how heartbroken the mentees are. Yeah.

It's honestly, it's been a part of this podcast history as well because we started when you're about to launch it and now you're like at the exit. So it's literally the whole story that everybody have heard from you and...

I guess, even being inspired by. So yeah, I feel like many mentees probably would be very sad to hear that. It's interesting that my own mentees, they were very happy that they got the chance to work with me, that I was available when they joined. And then the other mentees that are currently in Mento, they have good mentors as well. And they're pretty happy with the relationship they're building. So I think nobody was excited when someone leaves from a community, but I think that they'll be fine.

So that was one thing. And then a lot of work in my design role. Yay. Thank God I'm doing design. I'm very happy about that. And I have a lot of things to share in today's episode because I'm doing a lot of design these days. And then on Friday, I did an educational effort. I traveled to Cluj in Romania and I went to the biggest bank in Romania called Banca Transilvania. And I went

there and I delivered a workshop on how to build a great UX experience on a website so that people are happy when they interact with it. And it was very fun and people were very excited and I felt many parts were compelling. And it was interesting that because it was in the marketing team, right? So the head of marketing said, I'm going to be here for 30 minutes and then I have some meetings. And then he ended up not leaving for five hours and he stayed till the end because it was really an exciting thing to do. And I haven't done it in a while, like a

corporate training. And I'm just happy I got this opportunity to speak and teach and share experiences and also learn from them a lot. So I was very happy and it felt very rewarding. And I'm happy and lucky that I get to experiment with so many activities with so many things to do. And I'm just learning so much. How about you? How was your past week?

Nice. That's very intensive. You say sometimes that, oh, I'm not doing much behind the camera. And I'm like, come on, you're doing so many things. What are you talking about? So, wow, it's a very intense period, I guess. For me, it was much less intense. I went for a little vacation. We were out for kind of six or seven days in Spain. We went to Andalusia with my husband and it was the worst idea ever, or I would say rather timing, because it was very like this typical

one worst week of the year in the country where it was very stormy, it was windy, couldn't go out, it's dark and gloomy and you sit most of the time at the apartment and then if you go out just there's nothing much to do.

So it wasn't super fun, but it was okay still. We need to take some time off because my partner didn't have a vacation for a very long time and we will not have a vacation for another long time. So basically we just need to force ourselves to have that vacation. Not the best one, but it's good that we had it.

Anyways, the worst was when I came back and in the middle of the week and I had to pick up the projects where I left them off. That was very intensive because right now I already talked about it a couple of times in this episode, but we have switched to a new working model in my company. And now we have smaller timelines and more intensive projects.

So I left basically when one of the projects was in the middle and the second project was starting. So I have to handle two projects at the same time. They're very time limited and you have no time whatsoever to do everything properly. And I kind of had to take a vacation. It was just a bad, bad timing.

where I return and everything. It's like hundreds of messages, hundreds of emails, hundreds of slacks or thread conversations in the Figma. And it's just so much to understand the context, kind of follow up to answer. I think I spent like two days just answering everyone and I was so drained and exhausted and I had to make resumes of everything that I understood and followed up and whatnot. So I just don't recommend to have vacations in the middle of the project. Yeah.

It was definitely not the best timing, but finally, I think I sorted that out. And now I have to really deliver a lot of stuff in the next couple of weeks. So I guess my full-time work is taking a lot of my energy. And that's something that goes in line with our today's episode.

But other than that, I think, yeah, the only thing that I'm still doing is working on my course. I'm trying to spend around 10 hours a week passively, sort of. I'm not doing anything like active recording or active testing or even research anymore. I did the research probably like in the beginning of the autumn. And then I was just like in a very passive state, collecting information, looking for inspiration, throwing information, not sorting it.

And only after New Year, I started sorting that information and kind of organizing it, clustering it into some sort of curriculum. And two weeks ago, I came up with the curriculum. Now I have like a lot of information. I'm trying to sort it out. And this is probably one of the most fun periods for instructional designer when you don't have to deliver just yet, right? You don't have to have everything perfectly ready and tested.

You are still in this exploration and flirting process when you're throwing information, shuffling it around, then add another idea, and that idea changed the structure, so you have to shuffle it all again. And it's like all this brainstorming creative process of information, forming, organization, influencing, adding, contributing, changing, etc., etc. It's kind of fun.

I still think that it's pretty intense to do it together with the full-time work, especially if you have an intensive period at your full-time work. I don't know how other people are doing it. I think it really needs to take a year and not, what, I have around two months to finish it. So yeah, timelines is always my weakest part that I don't really manage well, but it is what it is. I'm in this boat right now and so I have.

have to do it. Anyways, let's talk about the topic of today's episode, which is again to remind everybody day in the life of a UX designer. So my first question to you, Ioana, would be tell me a little bit how your day starts, goes and finishes typically in your company right now. We'll talk about the history as well, but right now, like what do your typical day look like?

Okay, so here it goes. You did a very good disclaimer right there that I'm going to just talk about like a snapshot of my design life right now. It wasn't always like this. It probably won't be forever like this. This is just how things operate in my life currently. Let me first give you some context on my current job and how things work for me right now. So I'm working as a full-time senior product designer with UiPath.

UiPath is a Romanian-born company, but currently headquartered in New York. And it has offices in Austin and has offices in Seattle. And most of the design team is based in Seattle, or I think it's half-half. A lot of people in Romania, but at least on the product I'm currently working on, which is a very exciting product. It's a tool that uses AI to help people in their daily workflows.

addressing business users and I'm very excited to understand to unpack the entire AI space understand how we can leverage the capabilities and just ride this wave of AI it's a very exciting product to work on I'm very happy and the challenges of design are very specific because a lot of things are completely unknown so you're basically building definitions building standards experimenting a lot and operating with uncertainty but anyhow so my current setup is that the PM I

I work with and the development team is based in Romania. But the rest of the design team working on this product is based in Seattle. And when I say the rest of the design team, I mean another senior product designer, very, very senior US researcher with over, I think, 30 years of experience or more.

The VP of design is also heavily involved in this project. And then there's another design manager very involved in this project. So we have five people doing design and I'm the only one based in Bucharest and then they're based in Seattle. Because of this, let's say geography, I'm spending a lot of time closer to the development team because they're here and we're in the same office. I go to the office, I spend the

date with them. We have a lot of conversations. I join their dailies. So now that you kind of understand the setup, let's go into like how my regular day looks like. So I wake up, of course, because I have a daughter. I have to take her to kindergarten. And then after kindergarten, I typically go to the office.

It's pretty quiet in the morning because most of our company in Bucharest is working with the US as well. So people tend to come later in the office. And the first thing I do, the first meeting I have is the daily stand up with the developers. And then I do a lot of design work. And then I have a couple of hours where it's for me pretty quiet. And I can like in the afternoon, I can focus on advancing the solutions I'm working on. And sometimes I run them by the PM directly.

immediately and we have conversations and debates and so on and then later in the evening the meetings start so i have a weekly design sync just between the designers and then we have a broader design sync where more people are invited and this happens every week and then i have other meetings where we like as needed or i meet with the vp of design who's also my direct manager and

And so I have a lot of meetings in the evening and then I do design in the daytime and then they do the same. They do design in the afternoon and then in the morning they meet with us. So that gives us some room to move faster in a way because we all get uninterrupted time because of the time zone difference. And then there's that time slot that overlaps where we can meet and discuss and then make progress as fast as possible. So it feels pretty efficient. It's also a bit draining because sometimes I finish my meetings at 10 p.m. It's a bit weird and a bit

incompatible with my family life right now because I have a toddler and sometimes she goes to bed and I don't get to spend time with her in the evening. But luckily, it's not every day. It's some days per week or sometimes just one day per week. So that's great. So yeah, I think that's my day in a nutshell. I think the split would be meetings like 20% of my time and then 40%

50% designing by my own. And then let's say I have another 30% is conversations with the developers, conversations with my PM and just doing a lot of talking and then designing and then meetings and then talking, designing. And so that's it in a nutshell. Plus all the other things I do, my side projects, but we can go into that later. How about you? How does a day in your job as a designer look like?

Nice. Actually, your context is very similar to the context I've been also in a previous company I've worked at, Citrix. I remember we had a discussion that even there, the industry was in a way similar productivity. And I also worked with US, so I had to work basically more in the morning while I'm actually more of the evening person by nature. But yeah, I had to like to do a lot of meetings afternoon after 2pm and actually switch to productivity in the morning. So

very familiar. Now I'm working more like in the European context. So for those of you who doesn't know, I'm working at the company called Muse and we are working in hospitality. And basically what Muse does, it's a PMS property management system for hotels. And they basically want to create remarkable hospitality experiences where we take care of the technology while hotels take care of the experiences, taking care of the guests.

And for that, we need to understand all of that. It's like we have a service designer who was working on the master service design journey mapping. And it's huge. It's so big that we even like went and tested it in one of the hotels. And we had to take, I think, like four or five tables long paper just to map out every single touch point that is happening in this industry.

So we are taking care of everything from like booking, the guest stay, to experiences, to checking out, to how hotels are managing reservations, finances, reporting, all that. It's just a lot. Anyways, that's like a long story short context. And I'm working on the B2C side of things. Right now we're calling it just guest experiences.

where instead of like talking to hoteliers and front office and people who are managing the hotels, we are really working on all the tools for the guest experience journey. So things like booking engine, how you book your stay, how you check in for your stay and adding the product during your stay services as well as checking out. And so that's the general context. And I'm working in a not so big design team right now. So we have two designers. We have one design director and we just recently started having a design lead.

Plus, of course, we have UX writer and other, we call it infrastructure team, solutions team, sort of service, let's say, within the company. And those are people like design system guys. Then we have researchers and then we have like solutions, basically guys who are coming up with like visual design, visual direction, UI and stuff like that.

So me as a product designer, I'm very embedded into the product context, understanding the client needs, working with developers, working with another product designer. We just split in the tasks or the projects as well as we're just trying to get some help or support sometimes from the research team, from design system team, etc., etc.,

My typical day would usually look more intense in the morning. That's where we are catching up or having all the meetings, having all the workshops. Again, mainly because it's a Europe-based startup or scale-up actually. So we have most of the people concentrated all around the Europe, like Netherlands, UK, Czech Republic and Spain. A lot of people in Spain for some reason.

And we usually meet in the morning. First, we have a stand-up. And right now, like I said, I have two projects. We try to have one big project, one small project per six-week period. I have one stand-up with a big project, then I have another stand-up with a small project. Then I would usually try to put together some sort of a workshop with my design team. Or sometimes, if it's a kickoff for the new project, of course, I'll do the whole team together.

including developers, PMs, maybe researchers, UX writers, et cetera, et cetera, for that new project. But typically it would be just me trying to work on the project. We would handle some sort of a challenge or question we need to answer. And I'll probably do some sort of a workshop, one hour or so, like an indecision jam of some sort, when we would try to ideate and then share our ideas and then decide on, let's say, this is the

potential solution we want to explore. So again, morning would be very heavy on communication, catching up, discussions or workshops. And then after the noon, usually it's like 12 to 1 p.m., going for lunch and then after that it's becoming this productivity slot, one big slot afternoon.

So I try to not book meetings in that period. It's not always possible, but I guess that's something I'm striving for. And I'm working from 1 p.m. to around 5 to 6 p.m. heavily on design. So it's again, I would say maybe similar ratio to yours. Let's say 40% meetings and then 50 to 60% design. And it's only recently like that.

as we started working on those intensive projects. Before that, it was very fragmented in terms of how our day works. So it was not as effective. But now having four or five sort of working hour slots for design, it's a piece of a cake, really, because I didn't have those uninterrupted periods in the past. So that really helps for productivity. And you do have more opportunities to achieve the goals

Of course, there is sometimes questions you need to answer, especially in the beginning of the project. So you often have to reach out to developers to understand the technical constraints or to ask for visibility feedback or whatever it is. Or I need to think with my director to understand if that's the direction I want to take or something like this. So there are definitely still catch-ups, but they're happening more like on a one-on-one level and not on like a high, big level of presentation. Yes, only closer to the end of the project or closer to the end of the project.

handoff of the design that's the time when I start having more presentations again and usually present to first like PMs then directors then to maybe sync again with the design team with the UX writer go through the copy and everything and it's one or two days in maybe three weeks and

when I actually do a lot of presentations about collecting feedback. But other than that, yeah, it's kind of more organized in a way that mornings for communication, evening for productivity, again, morning sync, asking for feedback, evening again, refining and iterating.

And I personally hate Figma comments, but at this point it's still a big part of our routine where in the evening some people will have free time, they will jump into Figma file and start leaving comments everywhere. And I hate it. And it's something that I prefer to do in the like feedback sessions rather than Figma, but it's still happening.

So, yeah, it sometimes distracts me from the productivity timing. Anyway, so that's it in a nutshell. I'm happy to hear we have a similar ratio for how we work and how much time we have for meetings. I feel like many, many people, especially during COVID, were complaining that meetings were more than half of the time. I think I was one of them because I worked in the past with other companies too.

And even in the beginning of my current company where I think meetings were like 60% of my time, really, but it's getting better and better right now. I want to add that speaking of ways of working and a day in the life of a designer, I also had a very hot debate recently around Figma comments. I'm also not a fan of Figma comments. I think it's

keeps the conversation all over the place. And if you want to structure it and have critique sessions where you apply some sort of structure, you give context, you set the boundaries to the conversation, that's a much better way. And then you can also answer to the

potential Figma comments if they're just shared live and you can unpack them and there can be a more productive and prolific conversation about that. So I'm also not a fan of Figma comments. The only good side is that it helps people kind of capture their thinking on the spot, right? So they look at the screen and then they're by themselves and then they can think about what they want to say and they add a note there.

But I think that the important conversations should happen outside Figma. That's my point. So I don't know if it has anything to do with the day in the life of a designer, but I think we all have to deal with Figma comments. So maybe that's the connection. I think it has a lot to do, especially if you work in a company. It's an inevitable part and it's a heated thing. I did recently like a poll on my Instagram stories and it was surprising to me to see that maybe like 70% of the people

preferred comments rather than meetings. It's interesting if it's more reflective of the personality and like extroversion versus introversion. I'm not so sure. I'm just like saying the fact here. But for me, it's the same like your point of view. I prefer having guerrilla testing and kind of feedback sessions.

Because this way I can unpack a bit better why people think this way, what was missing, what is not clear and what they were expecting and stuff like that. Whereas in Figma, we tend to be a little bit more directive, like I don't think it works or something like this, like, or this doesn't make sense. And you don't really want to go into that huge discussion, long reads.

in Figma because it's just not convenient to write all those huge letters around some specific point of view. So it's just becoming more directive rather than effective and conversation and digging and investigating what's not working. But I think that Figma is okay still for the comments in the very end of the project when you're refining details, when you're maybe refining copy and small things could be still handled there. But it's true that it

it has to be structured. Otherwise, it just goes out. And the bigger the team, the crazier it gets. Moving on to the next question. I think my comments came up unexpectedly, but I guess it's just a painful thing for me and Ioana. But the next question I have for you, Ioana, is if you try to compare how you worked in other contexts, and you can pick up any context. I think we can, for example, both talk about the freelancing context. Would you say that your day was looking different? Can you remember another project that is not

the project or a company you're working on right now and try to compare how it was there to see if we can find interesting process differences and nuances. Smart question and smart structure for this conversation. I love it. So I can do a brief comparison with my previous job, which was within ING Bank, which is the

coolest bank in Romania. And it's a global bank, of course. And there in ING, we were on the same time zone, we were in the same office. So we had a lot of conversations throughout the day, most of my day was spent just having unplanned conversations. So I think it was like 50% conversations, and then 10-20% meetings, many of them inefficient, for some reason, I don't know why I think if you work on different time zones, and if you meet only online, then

you have to be efficient, right? Nobody wants to spend useless time online like four hours. When you're in person, I think conversations and meetings can just go on and on and on. And there was also a cultural thing in banking where meetings were very long. So I spent 50% of my time having random conversations, then 20, 30%

in long meetings, sometimes useless meetings. You know, the famous meme, this meeting could have been a male. And then 10, 20% of the time I could have the mental space and like actual space to do design. So I think it's an interesting company culture things. In startups, there's like no time wasting policy, right? Everybody moves fast and conversations are kept at the

minimal, like just the minimum necessary and just let's move on and do the work and everybody's working and then we're sinking and work and sink. And then as you move on the like amplitude of you go on the biggest companies, the ones that have been around for the most time, I think then there's like this flavor of conversation that's more prominent, right? So people want to spend more time in meetings. It's just, and plus like industry, different flavors based on industries, different flavors based on company size. I've been through

I've also worked with startups many times and I can speak to the fact that I'm spending a lot more time designing in a startup and less discussing. And I think not in all the stages, sometimes the conversation is the design in a startup. So you just unpack a problem space as much as possible. You discuss what we're going to do and then it's just conversation for a long time. But then after that, it's just design for a long time. So it's interesting to see there are some difference in my experience. And then I've also...

in a way been a freelancer because I was in a maternity leave for two years. And so I was at home, but I couldn't not work. So I launched my own bootcamp, a UX education effort. And then I also collaborated and consulted multiple startups. And I think when you have your own schedule, like you're on your own as a freelancer, it's pretty hard. I mean, it depends on your personality type. Some people thrive in this

I have to organize myself mindset. I personally had to use structures, had to put everything in the calendar, like even thinking time had to be in the calendar. So it was really hard for me to keep myself organized if there wasn't this daytime job kind of structure that was organizing me. So yeah, these are the things that come up to my mind now. And I want to ask you the same thing. How were your past experiences?

honestly very similar to yours i feel like i'm also that kind of person that when i'm alone when i'm not in the company structure when nobody's like bossing me or whatever like when i don't have community let's say a product community around me and i'm on my own and i have to organize myself i was also in the same kind of mindset where i have to really use all the tools all the frameworks and stuff like that it was really helping me i think

When I was a freelancer, I was still like in the junior to middle designer mindset or career level, I guess. And I was a bit of a, you know, in this reserved mindset when I was...

sort of afraid even to work with like bigger companies with bigger I don't know design teams so I found myself working more like alone freelancing having clients having smaller teams and collaborating specifically with like stakeholders partners clients etc etc when I was doing that my day was really all around the tools rather than communication and

So again, me freelancing, it would be like toggling my time, like really recording every single working session. I use Toggle for that. And I would even have like specific activities already in the projects. So I would always like start the day, obviously, with like coffee and slack. Yeah.

catching up on how, I don't know, my client is doing or my team is doing, answering all the questions, going through some discussions, then immediately start working. And I was like a very messy freelancer who was not great at organizing myself, but very like, how do you say, excited.

So yes, I would like start without even brushing my teeth, opening the Slack already, checking the messages, couldn't stop doing that. Right after that, immediately jump into my working seat and start, I don't know, answering more questions and answering whatever, more discussions. And then right away opening more sketch back then and jumping on the design. And it was like me, I just...

went into that flow right away but I also like to track because I'm carried away by all the excitement of the project and I'm not exactly understanding where I am at the process so I had to organize myself and use those time tracking tools, frameworks I don't know, I like to use design sprints a lot so my day would always be around the tools and that was a big part of it and I also liked back then to record some videos so again I

I can keep track of what's happening. I was like a hamster in a wheel constantly doing a lot of things for me to understand and reflect on what's happening and how I'm kind of going through the project. I helped myself by just, again, recording the time, then recording the videos on YouTube and trying to explain what I did there. That was like my reflection exercises.

It was really so different because right now working in the product teams, in the product communities, your day becomes so much more about the communication and collaboration and sharing and getting feedback and understanding and, I don't know, trying to, I don't know, go through the unknowns together. Whereas back then it was just me being just excited and throwing myself into the project and

not always there was a space for creative energy, let's say. But that's more about like how I worked as a freelancer and a startup-er because I did my startup also for two and a half years and I was a founder of the startup. It was a very long time ago already, I guess. It's 2016 to 2018 and a half. I was the only designer. So we had...

an office in Kyiv, Ukraine. I was going to the office every morning and we would sit together in a very small cheap office, but it was in the center of the city. It was very nice. And we had nothing there. We had like a cheap coffee machine, but it was really fun because we would sit in the same little room and just scream through the room like, "Hey, do you have a minute for this? Do you have a minute for that?" So it was really nice and fun.

Not so much communication, but it was very easy going process. Whereas now it is so much more, the web is different. That's like, again, about freelancing plus how my day went when I was freelancing and working in startups. But the other context I worked at was the enterprise context. I've talked a lot about already in the corporations or in big, big companies.

And there it was even more about communication than now working in a scale-up. So now I'm working in a scale-up with 600 people. My team specifically is not more than 30, 40, I would say. But when I worked in enterprises, it was 12,000 people per company up to a couple of hundred of people per project per

And it was insane. So the level of communication was totally different. My day would start by communicating, communicating, communicating, documenting, documenting, documenting, presenting, presenting, presenting. And then somehow in the end of the day, I would throw one or two hours to design something that I can present tomorrow.

So a lot of presentation. That's very different dynamic, I would say, than I am having at the moment in the smaller company, in a smaller team. What I really liked was still going to the office before COVID. I was very much an offline person. I preferred being in a room with other people. And even though, like you said, you had to speak a little bit more, maybe even for 50% of your time,

For me, that was somehow more engaging than during the COVID and working with like a very remote US location where I felt very disengaged and not even sure what's going on. And sometimes I was overthinking everything.

Whereas now everybody's in Europe and a lot of people can go to the office. I once a week go to the office. It's a different story. And I kind of like it just, again, to connect, not to spend so much time or like talking. Still working from home is more productive. But I kind of really like it.

meeting with people, catching up, understanding the vibe, how are we doing, all that kind of stuff. And also, especially for whiteboarding, for brainstorming together, for workshopping, I think it's so much more fun and productive as for me doing it in the office or together in the same room. Anything else you would add? Any other thoughts that strike your mind?

Yeah, because this episode is called A Day in the Life of a Designer, I'm thinking that maybe it's interesting to touch on the non-design things that we do in our daily work. So for example, for me, I have a morning routine. I wake up at eight or whatever. I spend an hour with Mia, my daughter. I dress her up. Well, now it's just...

continuous war around putting our clothes on. It's just like constant battle. But yeah, I hope this will get better soon. Parents warn me that most probably no, it won't get better. Anyhow, so I take her to kindergarten and then after kindergarten, I drive myself to my favorite coffee place where I have a community of people that I'm, you know, very close

close relationship with and it feels like home and it feeds me and it kind of gives me that social kick right in the morning and that feeling of belonging like I have my tribe I found my tribe and and I'm with them I get my coffee I get socially charged and then after I do this ritual this morning routine let's say I go to the office or I go to a place where I work from sometimes I work from other places I there's this coffee shop in a museum there's a museum of recent art and viewers

And they have a beautiful coffee shop with big windows and amazing food. And you're in a museum. So it always inspires me to like just be more creative. And then I also put my favorite music on. And then it's just great. It's just like work becomes pleasant.

So I think that a day in the life of a worker is also the things that we do around that are valuable and that can make or break our processes. So I wanted to ask you if you have anything like that and if you want to talk about it. I was always very inspired by how you actually have the routine while still having a baby and so many projects. Honestly, a lot of people in the end are asking me how Ioana is doing it. I have no idea. I still don't think you're human.

I think sometimes it's just impossible. You do everything. You're managing great balanced life. You manage kid. You're working full time and you have so many projects. So it's pretty crazy how well balanced you are in your life. I don't think I'm very good at like routines. I'm very like excited and passionate as soon as I start working. And I'm like the kind of a flow person. So as soon as I start working, I'm in a flow and I can't get up from my chair for like, I don't know, 10 hours.

A slightly different story. And then when you're like in the flow, I don't have like this ritual of getting up and doing something else. I'm trying to do a little bit more exercises these days, but I'm not very good at managing my balanced lifestyle. And I should. I think you're always a great inspiration for me to do this and reminder to do it more. Just typically I wake up around also eight and I have to walk the dog.

I wouldn't say it's a fun period. I don't even enjoy it because I prefer to wake up a bit later because I'm more of an evening person. I find myself working more in the evenings rather than mornings. Yeah, like I would have to wake up at 8, walk the dog, get back home, have a coffee or breakfast. And then from 9 we start working. So it's immediately like this flow of non-stop communication and whatever work.

During lunch, there is this one exact hour when I can finally do some exercises. I would spend 30 minutes for whatever lunch preparation and then hopefully 30 minutes for like some quick exercises. And during that period, I like to either listen to the podcast or watch some YouTube videos from creators, designers. That's always like my favorite thing to do during lunch. Yeah, like after work, when I finish it, I have a dinner, but then I jump into my side projects.

So now these days I'm working more with like this new course. So again, it's like from maybe 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. I would often do like content creation. Not every day. Some other days I would either go out and meet my friends or just do some other whatever learning exercises. For example, I study Czech language at the moment or just having some, I don't know, courses, et cetera, et cetera. It's not as fun. And I would say like I'm missing that.

puzzle or piece of a life when you can enjoy the moment when you can go to the art gallery and stuff like that I somehow I don't have this lifestyle I don't know why it's never been a priority of mine but it is what it is I think I might try it at some point when I have a need

But that's not happening right now. Anyways, it was a very nice question, by the way. I think we do need to talk more about life. We don't usually do that. And sometimes you're a very good reminder to me to get abstract and think outside of our design bubbles, because I definitely tend to overthink everything in design world. But I think we can actually jump into the takeaways. I don't know if we have specifically takeaways. I was thinking the same, actually. We don't have takeaways.

it's so personal and it depends so much on the type of company industry team size everything you're in that there are no universal truths about a day in the life of a designer but i think that what i want our listeners to go home with is that a day in the life of a designer will probably involve a lot of conversation in one way or another so be through meetings be through informal just impromptu conversations you have in the office it's going to be a lot of socializing so

I will always remember that when I attended my first Jared Spool workshop a couple of years ago, he said something that really is still very strong for me, that the conversation is the design. So a day in the life of a designer will involve conversation and that's an act of design in itself.

Right. You're unpacking problems. You're asking questions. You're challenging things. You're having debates. That is design. Even for introverts. I mean, it's not a cautionary tale. Hey, introverts are going to be doing a lot of talking. It's OK. You will probably enjoy it if you like design. But just prepare. Like if you're in the early stages of your career and listening to this because you want to figure out what you'll be doing, you will be doing a lot of talking or listening.

better yet listening. And so this is one thing. And then the other thing is that if you want to be productive and just do design, you have to be very strict about how you organize your day and set boundaries and learn to...

operate with boundaries and just have focus time and reinforce that and reinforce that with others and really close notifications while you're doing it. So just doing design work will require you to be very serious about boundaries. And then also like the last thing I want to say is that some things will always be different, right? Some days you'll have a workshop, other days you'll have a

interesting meeting, maybe it's a design screen, maybe it's an ideation workshop, maybe you're doing research, maybe you're talking to users, maybe you're in a client call. So it's just every day something new happens that brings a flavor that kind of fights the monotony of doing the same thing, the same daily routine every day. So I think these are my last thoughts about that. And I'm just going to hand it over to you. You actually nailed it.

I love the first point about the design as a conversation. And honestly, right now, as I'm working on a new course, I still don't want to reveal the topic of it. But it's such a big silver lining around that course as well. Because when we as designers even show what we do, it's literally how we tackle the problem. It's how we discuss it. It's how we understand it. It's how we frame it and how we resolve it.

And it's just so much about the conversation. So you want it or not, beautiful pixel pushing, nobody's like say, I can't sell that, but to get to the right solution, to the solution that works and solves the problem and obviously delights the users, it has to be a discussion. It cannot be in the vacuum in a small room when you close yourself and then suddenly magically you hit with the muse and then you produce a beautiful UI and that's the experience. That's not.

And it's great that we have a similar kind of point of view on that. However, yeah, I think, I don't know if I have anything else much to add. I think the, I guess the only obvious takeaway here is that the days and how you break down the day would really depend on the context you're in, right? Sometimes you'll have more talking, sometimes you'll have less, sometimes it will be freelance projects. So you'll have to switch contexts a lot and you would have to work with very different challenges.

industries and communication hopefully will be smaller than in a bigger like enterprise companies if you only have I don't know one client and a couple of developers but at the same time it's still very often about the conversation and how you manage your stakeholders your time and in which the

sort of time slots you're breaking it. It's very different, always dependent on that context you're in. And I guess I think the only takeaway here is that it's important to be, like you said, managing your boundaries. So trying to get better and better with organization. I definitely can see the progress in myself in that from being this like messy designer, jumping from thing to thing without even having a coffee in the morning and immediately start designing to now having more routines,

to now being able to protect my time a bit better and then obviously managing the conversations a bit better. So it's a definitely work in progress and you could definitely notice how it evolves over time. Love this point with design is the conversation. Let's keep it on that.

And with that being said, let's wrap it up. And all I want to say yet is that thank you so much for listening this episode. If you have topics or questions or struggles in your design career, make sure to submit those questions under this episode. You'll find anonymous link

with the survey week you can submit it or just send us directly dms on our instagrams either on ux goodies or honest ux talks if you want or just send it to me to unvisign yeah another thing you can do is go to spotify and in mobile app you will notice stickers under the episodes at

that's when you can also submit the questions. And that's it. If you found this episode helpful or fun or anything, share them with your friends or rate us. It will help us to be motivated to produce more content and hopefully answer your questions. That's it. Thank you so much and have a good rest of the day. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.