The design industry landscape is changing — we need to change with it to stay relevant and thrive.
2020 is now behind us. Good! It’s been a bad year on many levels, but it was also transformative. And looking beyond the bad, we can learn from this and improve both ourselves and our work in 2021.
Working from home matured from a trend of a couple of forward-thinking employers to a necessity and drastically changed the way we communicate and work on projects as a team.
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It’s mostly good, but not without some caveats.
Everyone is a remote-work advocate all of the sudden
This worldwide crisis can help remote workers, but can also have a very negative impact on working from home.
uxdesign.cc
How to grow in 2021
Based on both my personal experience, and asking around larger companies HR and CEOs (who run large design teams) I came to a conclusion that being a pyramid-shaped designer is not going to be enough anymore. The narrow-field designers who often don’t do any actual design, are definitely not in-demand right now, but it’s nothing new.
Micro-roles will start to blend into the main two more and more in 2021.
Companies are looking for unicorn-designers and design roles are merging towards the obvious two: designer and researcher. Each one, of course, having a small overlap on the other, so they can communicate well.
But if this is expected, then what should you focus on if you want to be a better (and better-paid) designer in 2021?
I think there are two main things you need to consider for a successful year.
Discipline
If you think there’s a way to “hack your way to the top” without hard work, then sadly it’s still not the case. Discipline is the most important thing for personal growth in any area.
This is how all the “fit-people” get there. It requires tons of hard work, dedication, and fighting yourself every step of the way. We naturally tend to procrastinate, seek comfort, and pick the easiest way out. Some choose pizza and Netflix, some choose kale and a workout.
This circle is how it always works. You need to wake up and fight your inner voice telling you that you can “skip today”. Don’t skip.
It works very similarly with honing your design skills. If you practice every day, design starts to become second-nature. You’ll be able to instinctively make the right decisions, see flaws in the project at first glance and possible solutions will “magically” appear right before your eyes.
But to get there you need to put in the work. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but think at least one hour every day (including the weekends) to do a little personal exploration in the design space.
Most companies push a narrow, focused niche onto you, so you end up working on the same or similar type of design for months or years. Going outside of that and putting in your own time towards learning and improving is essential.
Design skill is like muscle — you need to train it.
Start by adding a very minor (but daily) thing to your routine. It gets easier after a while to transition to harder tasks.
Start small
I started with doing daily breathing exercises before work — something that only takes a couple of minutes each day, but keeps me stronger and more motivated throughout. It wasn’t easy, but being focused and disciplined allowed me to do it daily throughout the entire 2020 without skipping or missing a day.
You can use non-design related mini-challenges to work on your discipline skills too. One example is doing 10 pushups or squats exactly in the middle of your workday — just stand up from your computer and do it (if you can) and then keep it up daily. Set a reminder if you have to.
At some point, you’ll be able to do harder and more demanding things consistently and that’s exactly the goal.
Skill compounds over time.
Daily challenges
Many people try to take part in daily design challenges (mostly UI-focused ones) and they are becoming increasingly popular. But the sad truth is that the majority of people quit around day 6. Keeping yourself motivated beyond that is what creates that compounding effect everyone in 2020 seemed to be talking about with praise.
Yes, time and effort does compound — it’s obvious. Getting good (or even exceptional) at something requires you to go through bad, average, good and all the other stages in between. It can be discouraging when you don’t see immediate results, it’s how our brains are wired. But we need to fight the temptation to ‘give ourselves a break’ this one time.
If you make an exception then it’s likely that the entire plan will come tumbling down like a house of cards.
Practice even if you don’t feel like it. Practice like your future depended on it, because you know what? It does.
Curiosity
Malcolm Gladwell famously said that it usually takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. And while it can be true in some cases, it all depends on how you spend that time.
I strongly believe, that once the PMF (Product Market Fit) for a product is found by a group of researchers, there’s likely enough already existing good practices that could cover most of the required information architecture.
Digital products are not that different from one another, even if we’d like to think that they are. And yet we need to somehow deliver the value proposition of the product to people who will be using it. And of course right next to the ease of use, we should have a plan to delight them.
When the users love a product, it means the designers did a great job on delivering the value. With almost no value, it doesn’t matter how good the UX is. But assuming the value is there, it’s really hard to delight people with another Material Design app. And this is especially true in the B2C sector.
This mobile app was done live on the event where I came up with the Neumorphism name, and while it’s not a viable design for a real product, it gave me many ideas for other products on how I can merge double shadows with more vivid colors.
Try new things!
So as an aspiring UX+UI designer (which we’ll simply rename to just ‘Designer’ from now on) you can’t limit yourself to just one approach.
Experiment with many different things to learn from each one, because that collective learning experience is what allows you to pick the best parts for your project. Starting from top-level things like exploring “no-password” registrations, all down to trying out some of the recent UI trends.
Yes, you can and should play around with Glassmorphism and even Neumorphism, because only then you’ll be able to say that a particular style makes no sense. Accessibility is low only when you allow it to be — in case of Neumorphism it was mostly because of overusing the style on every possible on-screen element.
But don’t stop there!
Explore other things. There are easy-to-use tool to learn 3D (Spline is a good example) and you can even consider adding voxel-based images or animated-transitions (Free tools like Magica Voxel are there for you to try).
Making your own iPhone 12 Pro Max mockup is a great way to quickly get into 3D a little bit and widen your perspectives.
Becoming great
Of course becoming a more versatile, faster and disciplined designer will help you excel at work. That usually leads to substantial financial gains, more rewarding projects and less stress at work.
But it does require you to work hard, explore and learn new skills around your main area of expertise. Only when you’ve worked on dozens of designs you’ll start “seeing” creative ways to mix and match solutions right in front of you.
You won’t even have to consciously start thinking about them. They’ll be there because that’s how we work. Once we get the experience in, it kicks off on autopilot.
And now imagine what happens when you replace dozens of designs with hundreds. Seems unreal?
Well, a year has 365 days, doesn’t it? Go for it!
