Director of Product Design; hiring position for +10 yrs.

The problem we are facing is that we don't have the time or patience to spin up a junior to a place they can be effective. Or at least that's the rationale we tell our selves. School programs, certificates, online courses are not keeping pace or too shallow to properly prepare a designer for the real world. The other side of that is fresh designers are delusional about the value they provide at the start of their career.

In my experience, a Junior is more of a burden than a benefit for the first year or two depending on the individual. As teams are trending to leaner and meaner there isn't room for someone learning the ropes.

I've had a relatively successful career up to this point and hope it continues, but if I had to do it all over again...

1. skip getting a degree in design
2. hustle my own work on real projects (free and paid - point is to get experience)
3. take whatever work I could get to produce more work
4. when I have a solid deck I can show online with case studies to back them up (not many even 1 solid case study is sufficient)
5. Then go after the mid role. The solid "Designer" role nothing junior or entry.

It comes down to this. You learn on the job or you learn before the job on your own. What we are looking for are designers who can provide value.

I am currently looking for a Senior UX'er myself and having one hell of a time trying to fill the role.

Good luck to you and I hope this was somewhat helpful.

sent

How do you distinguish worst when most posts don't contain a downvote? Do you just show none?

I don't think it's a matter of UX fitting inside of agile or not, it's a matter of your design process. Not working for you doesn't mean it's dense. It comes down to how you approach the design requirements and gather the information you need.

Also, consider the same concepts as Agile/XP development practices. They rely on pair development with 2 devs. Try pair design with a designer and a dev, throw in a pm if it suits you.

If you separate they subjective from the structure you can move faster. Deliver ugly gray wireframes, not polished hifi mocks. Once you have a design system in place you shouldn't need to waste time on hifi for every feature. I've even delivered pictures of whiteboards quite often. Push for stories to create your design structure, then use it.

This won't work for everyone, but we need to stop looking at UX as a special above the fray part of process. Get down in the trenches and work openly.

My team has been in it fully for 2 weeks now. Things are going very well. 30+ projects, 20+ files in each project, 40+ frames/artboards in each file, 50+ components in each file with no worries.

We are a large scale app on 3 platforms and I would gather are pushing Figma, but we haven't seen any issues. Even when all 5 of us are in the same file reviewing the work.

Oh also check this out. It solved it for us. https://blog.prototypr.io/using-figma-for-presentations-26491c6ea0e7

Yep, it's not for everyone. We freaking love the collaboration in Google Docs and now Figma. Be sure to give it a try on a real project before you cast too much judgment. I felt the same way until I jumped in.

Re: CMD+Tab, Figma has a wrapped app like Slack originally was, so you can CMD+Tab all day long with that one.

Invision prototypes are only a portion of what they offer. For example, we used it more for the InvisionSync to export imgs and assets, commenting across teams for review, and Live image embeds.

You honestly should.

+1 for the community giving some very valuable feedback. I really love to see all the comments. Only a few a spam.

Concerning your work, it looks great. You are obviously a product of big brand design. This means you work is beautiful but lack a usability. I would believe this is where the scrolling, and personal branding copy have been mislead.

I would also think that another larger firm would snatch you up quickly. "Looks good, doesn't care about usability = get him!"

If you are positioning as a specialty UI designer, well done. If you are trying to move anywhere further out or up, pause and consider aspects of the site that will deter the actual experience of visiting your site.

1. Will the scrolling issues make users miss information? yes.
2. Will the stuffy copy mislead users to believe I am stuffy? sure.
3. Will the dramatic portrait appearing first subtly say I am cooler than my work? for some.
4. Is your last nave item too close to the arrow when the nav is expanded? absolutely ;)

It's pretty. Making is for user friendly will make it great. Well done.