A Detailed Day in the Life of a UX Designer: my team, meetings, workflow, tools, etc.

Buenos dias, good morning. It is currently 9 45 in the morning. If you have never seen my face before, my name is Greta. I am a user experience designer, UX designer. I live in New York City and I work in corporate e-commerce. Welcome! It is Wednesday morning. This morning I went to physical therapy. I did something to my back. If you have like followed me for some time, you know that my back likes to play tricks on me. So yeah, my doctor was like, you know what girl, let's just put you in physical therapy and it actually was a great experience. It's such a beautiful day. Oh my god, spring has sprung. Also excuse if I have a lisp I'm doing Invisalign and literally I'm halfway through my treatment and I'm still not a hundred percent used to talking with them but I'm trying to be a good person and wear them every day. Anyways, so I yes I'm a UX designer and I get a lot of questions like can you be specific? Greta, like I love your days in my life as a UX designer but can you get a little bit like more nitty-gritty in the details exactly what you're doing? And I will caveat this video with the fact that because I work in corporate, a lot of the information, a lot of the things that I work on are confidential, right? So I can't just like talk to you and be like this is what I'm doing. I can't literally show you the project before it's live. Oh wait, I just like, do you ever just get like a sudden feeling like you feel like you're missing a meeting? Okay, we're all good. So what was I saying? I've been a UX designer for about a year and six months. No, that's such a lie. September, October, November, December. A year and eight months! Oh my god! Okay, never mind. And I've honestly come to love ecommerce and customer facing work because I feel like more purpose in the work that I'm doing because it's really cool to see customers or actual people using something that you created in just like everyday life. This is gonna be my very specific day in my life as a UX designer. The very first thing that I do when I am like, okay, I am ready. I'm prepped and ready. I have my breakfast. I've had my coffee. When I'm ready to get started with work, I will literally go on to my phone. I don't know why I always do this on my phone, but I will go to Slack and I will set myself as active. My team, we use Slack and that's basically where we can communicate with everyone. It's like a hub so that you don't have to just be sending emails all day long. You can literally just send someone a message on Slack and it's super easy and we have different groups so we'll have a group for my specific team. So I will just set myself as active so the little circular, the little circle next to my name will turn green letting people know that I am logged in and they can send me messages and I will respond and all the things. And then the next thing that I do is my Hobonichi planner. My last video, I show you exactly how I set up my Hobonichi planner. So I will go to today. So if you watched my last video, you know exactly what I do in my Hobonichi planner. But to give you an idea, I will start with a highlight. So my highlight tasks. These are the things that non-negotiable I have to get done by the end of the day. So the first highlight task is actually to film this video. I was gonna film it yesterday, but today seemed like a little bit more of an exciting day like meeting wise. So I decided to film today for you. And then my other highlight task is to finish up some desktop designs and then after that I will write the other tasks that I may get done today, but I'm not 100% sure that I won't be able to get to these other tasks. So I will break those other maybe I'll get those done today tasks into different categories. So first we have the work category. So that is exactly what it sounds like. It's everything UX related for work. So I do need to update my work log, the document that I use to write down everything that I did throughout the week. So yeah, I'll essentially write down every major meeting that I attended, anything that I presented to other designers or product managers or anyone, any leadership things that I did. So like if I initiated a conversation with someone or collaborated with another person on a different team. And this just helps me to like make a case for myself when I want a raise or when I want a promotion. I also need to transfer some notes sometimes during meetings. I'll write notes in my Hobonichi planner and that can get a little dangerous because if you just kind of leave your notes in random places when you need them later, you're just like where did I write that down? If I do take notes in my Hobonichi planner, I will type them up to a separate document that's dedicated to that project that I'm working on. Transfer notes to WordDoc. That way I have all my notes for that project. Any meeting that I have related to a specific project, I have all those notes in one place. I have other areas like life stuff. I need to find a cute dress for Puerto Rico. And then my last section is my side hustle and this is literally YouTube and anything related to that. I actually have to make a voiceover for a TikTok. I always feel like the days that I don't spend the morning working on my to-do list, I just feel like more scatterbrained. I feel just, I just feel disorganized. Not like the best vibras, you know what I mean? So to give you an idea of kind of like the people that I work with day to day, I am of course the UX designer. I have within my team, I have a product manager. The product manager is kind of like the liaison between the UX team and the developers or the engineering team. Those are the coders, the people who code. I am in charge of things like the design, of course, but also the logic. So thinking about the customer journey, does it make sense for when the customer clicks on this button for them to land on this page or for this action to happen? And I work with both desktop platforms and mobile web platforms. I actually kind of prefer working on like mobile web platforms. Mobile web is essentially what it sounds like. It's like when you literally go to a website on your phone. And a lot of designers actually work mobile first and that basically just means that when we're actually designing, we focus on mobile web first. We think about the way that mobile web is gonna look and then I'll move on to desktop. Just because mobile is just so important these days. That's kind of how I work and this first meeting that I have is a stand-up. So stand-up, we have it every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It's like, it's kind of a funny name. So basically just like the way that I imagine stand-up is like when you're in a meeting and like it's your turn to speak and you like stand up. I think that's kind of where it comes from that where the name comes from. But basically a stand-up is a meeting between the UX designer, myself, my product manager, and then our team of developers, the front-end and the back-end developers. So the product manager will share her screen or his screen and they'll go to the website or the platform that we use to house all of our projects that are in progress. She'll say, okay, so task number one, Greta, this project that you're working on, how is that going? And I'll say, yeah, okay, so I did this yesterday. Yesterday I worked on XYZ, I met with this person, I reviewed my designs with this other person, got great feedback, and now today this is what I'm gonna do for this project. I'm going to update those designs. So it's kind of just like an update of what you did yesterday, what you did today, and kind of the overall status of that task that was assigned to you. And then she'll move on to another person and she'll be like, okay, Bad Bunny, like how did you, did you finish this task? How is this project going? Any updates, any blockers, anything that I can do to help you, etc. My second meeting of the day is a grooming. So this again is with my internal team, my specific team. This is kind of what it also sounds like. Grooming is like when you're kind of cleaning up, cleaning up all of the new tasks and it just makes sure that when a developer is ready to pick up this work or to take on the task that it is clear and they don't have any questions and there's no missing information that they would need. That way it's just a lot smoother when we start assigning the different tasks to different people. That is that. That is my morning. It's literally back-to-back. So I have stand up and then I'm gonna have grooming and then after that it's basically lunch. So cheers! I moved my cafecito to a mason jar just because it feels a little bit more luxurious and let's join stand up. I don't have any meetings during lunch which is great. The next thing that I have is actually right at one o'clock. It is an internal UX design review session. So basically this means that no one is invited but the UX designer. It's really good to have your designs as a designer reviewed by other designers before you show it to other people that are not designers like developers, product managers, business people, etc. So that's what we're doing today at one. I'm gonna be sharing some of my work and the way that these UX design critique sessions usually work is that I'll spend like the first couple of minutes giving them background information. I'll tell them like what's the customer problem and then I'll go into my solution which are my new designs and I'll talk about like specific changes that I made, why I made them, that's super important and then after that I usually say okay great that is my first pass designs or this is what I have so far. I'd love to get your feedback. I actually really like design critiques. I used to be terrified of them because I was always feeling like oh my god my designs aren't perfect, people are gonna judge me, my figma file is really disorganized or whatever. The earlier in the process you can get feedback the better. I need to make a couple of changes before I present my mocks to my team in like five minutes so that's what I'm gonna do that usually happens like right before you're gonna present your designs you look at your designs and you're like oh wait I realized that this font is slightly off or this color is slightly off so I'm gonna make a couple of changes just so that when I present it, it is as good as it's gonna get you know. I have a break at 1.30 to 2 o'clock so that's when I will eat lunch. I actually threw my salmon in the air fryer so that I'll be ready by the time that I finish my meeting. Efficiency at its best. So I also wanted to update you on the UX design review that happened before lunch. It went really really well. I was actually the only one to present my work today which was interesting but it was also cool because I got like the entire time and I got a lot of really good feedback. It's really important as a UX designer, product designer, basically anyone in tech when it comes to working on an experience, it's really important that the design decisions that you make are supported and are intentional so you can't just like decide to do something because it looks nicer or I mean sometimes it can be just like purely aesthetic but a lot of it has to do with like is it supported by research? Is it supported by users saying that this experience needs to be improved? That kind of stuff and it's important to bring that up during design reviews so that people really understand like why did you do this in the first place? Like why did you make this change on the old experience? Why did you decide to move this text here or make this text a button or whatever it may be? Another thing that often happens working as a UX designer is that you'll get random requests. They're not random necessarily but just kind of like last-minute ish requests. So one of the business strategists actually reached out to me and asked me to create a slide that will be a part of a larger presentation that's basically going to be presenting all of the current ongoing projects within a specific like group of teams. For this slide I need to create like a quick snapshot design showing a summary of what I'm working on for a specific project. So I'm going to work on that probably just now because it's only 4.15. So I am looking through things that I've gotten done so far. So I am filming this video that is my first highlight. I did update my desktop designs for the project that I'm working on. That's what I presented to the team but now that I got even more feedback I need to continue updating the designs. That's the thing about UX and product design. It's just like you're constantly iterating and updating your designs. Like you'll have one version of your design, you'll present it and then people will be like, eh, I think you should do this and this and this and this and then you have to go back in and iterate your designs. And it's a good thing because that means like each time you like update your designs they get better and better and better. But anyways, I wanted like a little fun thing that actually came in the mail. I am going to Puerto Rico next week. I am so excited! But I got this really bright button-down shirt that I'm gonna pair with some jean shorts and maybe like a crop top underneath and I'm just so excited. And also let me show you this boss girl purse that I got. Oh my goodness this is so cute! I also got this in the mail. Look at how stunning! She is so cute. I think this would be like perfect if I'm like going to a coffee shop and I want to bring like my book. So as you can see it is now nighttime. It's late. I finished up that slide that the business analyst or business strategist needed. There was a lot of back-and-forth between me and the product managers just to make sure that it was like good to go. So I'm gonna send that over tomorrow morning. But I am done! That is my day in my life as a UX designer living in New York City. If you want to see more of my face then you can hit me up on Instagram. I'm always on there. Always on stories. Always in my DMs. So feel free to chat with me on there. That's all I got for today. I will see you in my next video. Bye!