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Lessons learned in 14 months and how we currently work
“Experience required: 4+ years of User Experience Design” — everything else sounded like the perfect job, almost too good to be true, until I reached this line. And I — I had only a few months of actual experience in this field, after I had recently transitioned from software development to UX design and doing a UI / UX design bootcamp; a friend had seen this job post on Facebook and forwarded it to me.
The role was for an audiobooks & ebooks streaming app with Romanian & English content, called Voxa (the initial name was Storis) — and both the product and the companies’s values as presented in the job description appealed to me instantly:
We love books. We love failure and we have a “fail fast & learn” philosophy.
To put it simply, we’re a bunch of book and tech nerds doing cool things to make listening to books — and podcasts — better.
“I will not even bother applying” — I thought to myself. But then a few days later I stumbled upon a post for the same job, this time on LinkedIn; and decided to give it a try. Long story short, I got the job…
The office was located at Mindspace Pipera — one of the many reasons that attracted me, because of their cool design and because it’s so close to home :) I entered the office and was immediately charmed by my new colleagues, each of them with completely different backgrounds then their current role. I was already so excited to be there, it felt like a fresh start and much needed change from my previous long career as a software developer.
The excitement didn’t last for too long, as it soon gave way to challenges and doubts, including self-doubts, making me wonder whether I was in the right place and whether I made the right career shift. And yes, I wanted to quit countless times; what kept me going was the fact that I truly loved working on this product, and also the realisation that in any undesired or painful situation, there was something I could improve on my part as well, so that next time it would be a little less painful.
Then, 8 months later, we had our public release. And with it, a lot of changes started rolling out, from changing the development company we were working with to changing the way we work; and how I was perceived changed a lot as well, which dramatically improved everything, including my motivation — as nothing motivates me more than having a sense of usefulness, which didn’t come until very recently.
I read somewhere that the biggest challenge as a product designer (or UI / UX designer) is working with other people — and I thought it was an exaggeration. Well, after working in this field for more than one year, I realise it’s not.
I think working remotely most of the time doesn’t help either. I didn’t experience this at all as a software developer, but that was before the pandemic and back then we were all working from the office. It gets easier to manage contradicting points of views and misunderstandings when being face to face; and a relaxing conversation with a colleague at your desk is very different than an online call, which feels more cold and impersonal.
I found that being a better UX designer helps you improve as a person and become a better human being. And, as with personal development, it’s still work in progress. I still struggle with some of the points below, but I’m slowly getting better :)
- People are mirrors, but it’s important to know which of these mirrors are trustworthy and which reflect back a distorted image — regardless of their role and position in the company’s hierarchy! Whenever I receive negative feedback, which happened a lot in the beginning, I ponder upon it, and try to concentrate only on the issues I find valid and can improve on. Also, people are different and react differently to the same triggers. Being a sensitive type, I used to feel extremely disappointed and disengaged when receiving feedback that was ill delivered. I think that was also because in my previous role as a software developer, everyone in the team was extremely considerate about other people’s feelings, so the change felt even more dramatic.
- Knowing how to offer good feedback is an art: you need to know how much to include, what it’s best to be left out, what is the best way to communicate it. I used to refrain from saying anything at all, for fear it could sound offending, until I realised I was choosing the easy way.
- Instead of pointing out what goes wrong, I learned to come up with solutions and invite people to discuss them. This was one of the main points I learned from Radu Vucea, while he was on a collaboration contract to manage the design team. Thank you, Radu :)
- From Radu I also learned to choose my battles wisely — whether it’s a controversial issue that is internal to the design team, or whether I want to make a case when having a discussion with the stakeholders; it makes a lot of difference to know when to insist and when to let go.
- I think you can discover yourself more in a small company versus a larger company. In a start-up everyone needs to wear different hats, so you get to try new things and it’s easier to find stuff you had no idea you are good at or help others with. For example, I am well organised by nature, but never thought it could be an asset for others; also, working in bigger companies with well adjusted processes helped me internalise them, so that they became second nature to me and enabled me to shape here a similar way of working, adapted to the team’s needs.
- Everyone has their own special skill(s), that may not be necessarily related to their main role; making use of it is a huge reason for having a diverse team. Rationally I knew this to be true, but I never really felt it until now.
- Sometimes you realise you are good at things you are not particularly fond of, and that’s ok; for me that was for instance usability testing and desk research.
- My mom uses to say “Don’t turn people away, instead be well aware of what you can expect from each of them.”. I would now add that it’s best to lower the expectations, especially when they are regarding people whom you barely know. Learning to be more assertive and getting better in communicating my limits also helped.
- And lastly, finding work you love doing just for the sake of it (not because you are supposed to, or for your boss, or for the money or status etc.) helps greatly in overcoming difficult times.
As you probably noticed, nothing from what I noted above is related to working in Figma or UX processes. That’s not to say that I didn’t improve in that direction as well, it’s just I find soft skills much harder to learn and get better at.
Now it’s already been about 14 months since I joined the company (and 6 months since the public release); throughout this time, we constantly and slowly changed our way of working, adapting it to our needs.
The design team has 2 people, each of us working primarily as a product designer, but having secondary skills that enable us to complement each other; this also enables us to be of use in other areas as well, as we get to wear different hats: e.g. graphic designer, product owner, customer support specialist etc.
As designers, our main tools are Figma and Notion. In Figma we keep our draft designs, final designs, design system and flows (FigJam). In Notion we keep everything else, including the specs for each functionality.
Notion is also our project management tool; since both the design team and the development team work with Agile and Scrum, we needed a place to store our tasks and decided to use Notion for that. Having a very long experience in IT with Agile and Scrum, this was second nature to me and enabled me to create the process and the Notion structure for that. This is now helping us easily follow a backlog item from initial idea to production delivery; the design team and development team can work on the same item at the same time, if needed, and the status on each team’s work is available at a glance.
Apart from the Scrum-based tasks flow, we also have a customer support flow that prevents us from having unaddressed messages from users, and also enables us to collect feedback and turn it into actionable items if applicable (adding them to the backlog); this is another area I was directly involved in — building the flow and acting as a customer support specialist when needed.
After building the above flows, I slowly got more and more involved into managing the backlog, while also trying to align people and constantly adapting our processes as needed — so I started wearing a product owner’s hat whenever was needed, since we don’t have an official one.
While before the release we decided what features we want to include primarily based on studying our competitors, after the release we started to consider users’ feedback as well, while also measuring metrics and realising what area we need to address based on that and our business goals.
Being a UX-first company, we used to “fine tune” those features by doing a lot of usability testing in the beginning, long before the product implementation started; I think I did pretty well in conducting the testing sessions with our potential users, even though it wasn’t my cup of tea. Due to lack of time we stopped doing them after a while, but will probably resume them at some point.
A new thing that we recently started is doing internal workshops to address our main challenges. Being a facilitator isn’t easy, but I find it very interesting and it helps in becoming a better communicator as well.
Even though from my perspective things are much better now, they are still far from perfect. There is still a lot to improve — for instance right now what I feel generates a lot of frustration in the team is regarding how we communicate; we are very different as individuals and have different communication styles and we are still to find a way to suit everybody.
Still, the initial doubts that I had regarding the career shift slowly melted away. Also, working in the field of education brings a lot of meaning to me. And even though I must admit that sometimes I think that maybe I could have been as fulfilled working at Voxa as a software developer than I am as a product designer, I doubt the experience would have been as rich; and most importantly, I regained the motivation that in my previous role I used to struggle so much with…
Thanks for reading!
P.S. In case you’re curious to try out the app — you can take a look here; Voxa in currently available in Romanian only.
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