The REALITY of Being a UX Designer in 2022

I am a UX designer working in e-commerce in the corporate space and I wanted to take you along my day today. So today's going to be a little bit different because I usually work from home but today I just felt like I wanted to work outside or work at a different location. So I'm going to be meeting up with one of my friends who's also a UX designer and we're going to work at a coffee shop here in Brooklyn. It's going to be nice to change my scenery to be honest. I've been a little bit tired of working from home and working from my room because I do everything in my room like eat, sleep. The weather is warming up and we love that for me. When I work from coffee shops I always bring this this huge tote. She's a big boy and I bring my obviously my work computer. Got my mask. I always bring my Hobonichi planner. I love this. If you know me, then you know. If you know, you know. Yeah, I've also been interested in trying out digital planning like Notion. I know there's a huge hype. Always got to bring my headphones. Gotta bring my check for rent. Yes, I always bring my markers or pens. The ones that I use are the Micron Pigma Micron pens. These are amazing and I love them with the Hobonichi planner. Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's pretty much it. I'm ready for my iced cafecito. That's all that is motivating me this morning. Let's go. I'm awkwardly putting my mask down but I finished at the coffee shop. Honestly, it was just a lot of me just stressing out. It is bright. It was just a lot of me stressing out and being like I don't know where to start but it helps to just make like a master to-do list which is what I did. But I'm just gonna head home now and eat some lunch. So I'm home now. As you can see, I had my lunch. I made this amazing chickpea coconut curry. So I didn't really get to talk to you about what exactly I had going on today. So I'm gonna pull up my calendar and I'll just talk about basically everything that happened today. The first thing I had in the morning was a stand-up meeting. This is usually every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I usually have stand-up with just my specific squad on Mondays and Fridays. On Wednesdays, we actually have a combined stand-up with another squad that works really like adjacent to our team. We all kind of work in the same area of just providing customers with the ability to manage their orders themselves. Features like being able to cancel their order, being able to return their orders, and that's with our product managers, the developers or software engineers, front-end and back-end developers, and then the UX designers like me. That lasted about 30 minutes. I just gave my updates on what I did yesterday and what I'm gonna do today. It's like an update slash progress meeting and you just talk about what you did the day before and what are you gonna get done today and if you have any like blockers. Blockers are just anything that is preventing you from finishing your work. So let's say you're waiting on someone to respond to a message that you have or you're waiting on some kind of deliverable from someone and then after that, oh today was the last day of the config conference. So the design software that I use is Figma. Figma, the company, they have a virtual conference that's called config and it lasted for about 24 hours between yesterday and today. The virtual conference includes just a lot of speakers that are leaders in the design space of different companies. So yesterday I heard from a designer at Hinge talk about the fact that they introduced voice on the app, which if you are on TikTok, you've definitely seen those TikToks where people are just like laughing at people's like voice prompts that they have on their profiles. I heard from some designers, lead designers at HBO Max, and I kind of had the rest of the morning to myself. I actually was watching a couple of YouTube videos about how to organize your files on Figma. After that, I had a UX sync with a bunch of designers that are in my specific squad and also adjacent squads. We did have just a sync up meeting where we talked about different projects that we're working on. It was almost like a second stand-up but just for designers and for us to ask any questions. Our managers were there so that was really nice to kind of let them know what we're working on. I shared some of my designs that I was working on and just got a little bit of feedback and then after that I came home. I ran home because I had a two o'clock meeting with the, this was like a larger org meeting, so this included a lot of product managers, business analysts, some data scientists were on the call. That was my last meeting that I had for the day, which is awesome. Sometimes when I have a lot of back-to-back meetings, it gets a little overwhelming and I have notes like in my Hobonichi planner or I'll have it in my notes app. So I'd like to take the time after I finish all my meetings to just consolidate those notes and put them all in the project logs that I have for every single project. They're just a document where I put any notes that I have from meetings concerning a specific project. That way whenever I need to look back at it, I have it all in one place. So I finished updating my project logs like I mentioned and by the end of the day I just like to check my emails, make sure that I'm not missing anything that is like time sensitive that I want to answer as soon as possible. Usually if it's sent, if someone sends something at the very end of the day, usually it's not time sensitive. It's not like they're going to be like expecting a reply immediately. And something else that I'm actually working on right now is my resume. I actually haven't updated my resume, which is like not the best thing to do. I haven't updated my resume with my latest work experience, so I've been wanting to set aside time to update my resume. So like two days ago I started doing that. I actually have been doing it on Figma. It's really easy to make a resume on Figma and I find it's even easier to do it on Figma than something like Microsoft Word. My goal is to add obviously my current work experience and revisit like my skills and things that I had added before because obviously I feel like I've become a little bit more specialized. So I might want to adjust those skills, adjust any tools that I've started using. But a sis is tired with a T at the end. Okay, estoy cansada, but I just want to move my body. I want to do some Pilates or something. And if you haven't moved today, this is your reminder to at least stretch or go for a walk or something. I also like to work out before I get too hungry. Does anyone else like that? I had dinner. I watched another episode of Euphoria, which is like... It's actually pretty late, but I am just writing a script for a video that I want to hopefully film tomorrow. I'm gonna see if I have time. So usually for most of my sit-down videos, not like for vlog style like this, but for more like sit-down videos where I have a specific topic I want to talk about, I will write a script about it just so that I obviously have talking points and the video has some sense of direction and I'm not just going on tangents the entire time. I am gonna finish this up and then just literally go to sleep even though I'm so full. Thank you so much for hanging out with me, for spending the day with me. I hope you learned a little bit about me and a little bit about what UX designers do on a daily basis and got to see a little bit of my life in New York City. And I will see you somewhere else on the internet very soon. Bye! Adios!