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Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

vanschneider.com

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Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#41

Post by daveslash »

vladstudio wrote: post #9

The article left a bitter taste. It's probably intentionally all black and white, but it does sound almost passive-aggressive to me. I can safely consider myself senior designer (doing UX design for more than 20 years). I always ask about deadlines. I believe not doing so is highly unprofessional. I have other tasks in parallel, clients have other tasks in parallel. Deadlines = priorities. Discussing priorities is cr…

I'm an software engineer, not a designer, but I also was left with a bitter taste.

Re >> The other does as many drafts and explorations as possible within the time allotted, then shares their favorite options.

It's good to ideate, but I've found that it's common for junior designers to ideate too much. For example, I had a designer come back with some designs that they felt really excited about, but they all were tied into a new company logo concept and I was like "No, we're not changing our logo. Your logo looks great, and if you/this logo had been included when we first picked something we might have gone with it, but we're asking you to design these XYZ pages, not re-do our startup branding".

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#42

Post by micromacrofoot »

vladstudio wrote: post #9

The article left a bitter taste. It's probably intentionally all black and white, but it does sound almost passive-aggressive to me. I can safely consider myself senior designer (doing UX design for more than 20 years). I always ask about deadlines. I believe not doing so is highly unprofessional. I have other tasks in parallel, clients have other tasks in parallel. Deadlines = priorities. Discussing priorities is cr…

Yes, "senior designers are jaded" should be added to the list — probably a differentiator between "senior" and "principal" to get over that sort of passive-aggression.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#43

Post by 3pt14159 »

I actually liked the list. I see past the literal meaning of each sentence into situations I've seen managing designers in the past.

On deadlines: Sometimes there is pressure from the top that is completely unrealistic. I think it is ok to ask for a deadline, but I think it's better to propose a timeline as a way of getting to the stakeholder's real deadline in a manner that gets them amenable to reduce scope. It's an exercise in educating the stakeholder about the sheer weight of the ask. Time, money, output. Pick the one you care about the least.

On multiple designs: Of course for this one it depends. A simple button or form on a secondary page does not need several rounds of polish and iteration. Star feature on an upcoming flagship product, though, does.

On explaining decisions: This is mostly about getting buy-in from multiple stakeholders. I may be CTO and love the new design, but there are three other chairs in the room looking at the work and its more efficient if you prime the meeting with the constraints you were dealing with. A strong secondary benefit is that it makes you easier to recommend to others, since a big part of a strong referral is trusting that the referred party can properly portray themselves and their work to others.

On waiting for directions: If you've never managed juniors this may come as a shock, but a large number of juniors will sit and wait until they're told what to do. It is partially explained by cultural background at times, but its present everywhere I've worked. If one thing juniors took away from the article was this, then I would count that as a major win.

I could go on, but my overall point here is that many commenters are looking at this as designers that are focussed on specific skills of the craft, instead of seeing it as a stakeholders point-of-view on junior versus senior designers.

There is one thing I would add to the list that transcends the junior-senior distinction: Nothing beats an honest, enthusiastic designer.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#44

Post by duxup »

3pt14159 wrote: post #43

I actually liked the list. I see past the literal meaning of each sentence into situations I've seen managing designers in the past. On deadlines: Sometimes there is pressure from the top that is completely unrealistic. I think it is ok to ask for a deadline, but I think it's better to propose a timeline as a way of getting to the stakeholder's real deadline in a manner that gets them amenable to reduce scope. It's a…

I wonder about this stakeholders pov idea. One thing I've seen at big companies are situations where "junior" folks are tasked with a laundry list of bullet points and that's all that they're given.

So then the senior folks are free to do much of what is in that article... because that's their job.

It's not a senior person chooses to do these things and jr do not. It's straight up the roles they're given.

That's not a situation where someone's skills / enthusiasm / intuition means they do these things, they're just afforded / expected to.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#45

Post by karaterobot »

dirkc wrote: post #37

About the only point I agree with is the "Lorem Ipsum" point. To put it in another way, try to design with realistic data. Eg designing a grid layout with lorem ipsum filler content can easily lead to not addressing issues when presented with real data. What do you do when a title wraps to the next line? How do you handle different length descriptions. Is some of the data optional?

Oh, that's the one that bothered me most. If you can guess how long the copy in each section is in order to write it, you can just fill in that same space with lorem ipsum, and now you haven't wasted time working on something that's going to be thrown away.

Testing with multiple lines and strings of different length is a different matter — you should do that anyway. But writing paragraphs of marketing copy and headlines? Not a good use of my time.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#46

Post by duxup »

davidivadavid wrote: post #34
meerita wrote: post #21

+20 designer here: > "One asks when the deadline is. // The other knows the answer is "ASAP,” so they propose their own timeline." There's nothing wrong asking what the deadline is. Most projects can be strategic, meaning that the force of will is focused on a bigger picture/opportunity than planning the design beforehand. Also, an experience designer WILL ask because he can propose a realistic outcome based on the d…

The second point is that most people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Designing what you're told only works with people who have done the exploration themselves, which tends to be a tiny minority (because it essentially requires the design skills that they're expecting from the designer themselves).

My very first application that was all mine was demoed to the customer. They hated it, had tons of changes demanded.

I told them I would update it in a week. I didn't get to it. I go to the next meeting and before I can apologize for not making the changes.

"We love the changes! Keep it like it is now!"

I think they just needed to see it twice...

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#47

Post by meerita »

davidivadavid wrote: post #34
meerita wrote: post #21

+20 designer here: > "One asks when the deadline is. // The other knows the answer is "ASAP,” so they propose their own timeline." There's nothing wrong asking what the deadline is. Most projects can be strategic, meaning that the force of will is focused on a bigger picture/opportunity than planning the design beforehand. Also, an experience designer WILL ask because he can propose a realistic outcome based on the d…

The second point is that most people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Designing what you're told only works with people who have done the exploration themselves, which tends to be a tiny minority (because it essentially requires the design skills that they're expecting from the designer themselves).

Well, one of the traits of a designer is being able to master draft anything in couple of hours, max. Also, PMs should help on teorizing what would a product be like. That helps to create expectations, but also, helps the designer to see what's the idea they want. The designer in the end will make all the needed changes in order to deliver a performant design.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#48

Post by phkahler »

vladstudio wrote: post #9

The article left a bitter taste. It's probably intentionally all black and white, but it does sound almost passive-aggressive to me. I can safely consider myself senior designer (doing UX design for more than 20 years). I always ask about deadlines. I believe not doing so is highly unprofessional. I have other tasks in parallel, clients have other tasks in parallel. Deadlines = priorities. Discussing priorities is cr…

I suspect this could apply to UI design (ok UX...) but I read it with product design / industrial design in mind. I worked on a project with a really good design team (2 or 3 people) and a bunch of engineers. We used a large conference room to go over the product objectives, and then we all paired up with designers to generate concept art. We all did this for like an hour or two. At the end they pinned up about 50 concept drawings at the front of the room and we talked about a lot of the ideas that had been generated. The thing turned out pretty spectacular. The lead designer moved on, last I knew he had gone to Rivian to work on their first truck under the direction of some famous design guy whose name escapes me just now.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#49

Post by phkahler »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #40

I'd just be happy if I came across more "senior" "web" designers that actually understand UX. All of the ones I've come across wouldn't know how a checkout workflow works in practice and will happily remove necessary fields, information, or steps because it doesn't look pretty. Like... we do need a way where the user can see a summary of their purchases (and adjust quantities) before paying for them. Also, limiting q…

>> I'd just be happy if I came across more "senior" "web" designers that actually understand UX.

Not sure if you were around the web in the 1990's. HTML was really cool, you just wrote it and the browser reflowed everything to the users screen. Then the web went commercial and a bunch of people from the print industry came along and wanted to specify the exact page layout of everything. Things changed rapidly. I mean now they even want to not only specify fonts, but have custom ones made. Ugh.

Re: Junior Designers vs. Senior Designers

#50

Post by davidivadavid »

meerita wrote: post #47
davidivadavid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second point is that most people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Designing what you're told only works with people who have done the exploration themselves, which tends to be a tiny minority (because it essentially requires the design skills that they're expecting from the designer themselves).

Well, one of the traits of a designer is being able to master draft anything in couple of hours, max. Also, PMs should help on teorizing what would a product be like. That helps to create expectations, but also, helps the designer to see what's the idea they want. The designer in the end will make all the needed changes in order to deliver a performant design.

You're coming at it from a different context than the original article, which is more about what an agency would do, where there won't be PMs and designers have to figure out requirements themselves (often precisely by challenging what the client is asking for).
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