A Day in the Life of a UX Designer: Why Mentors Matter?

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What most people fail to understand is that a UX Designer’s day does not begin or end with the office clock. User experience design is more a way of life. We all know that User Interviews are the best way to capture what a user expects and needs from a good digital application. But UX designers are themselves as many users as they are creators of experiences.

UX as a way of life

Human experiences are a sum of the interactions they have with objects, products, and machines. A good designer will stop to think about how he interacts with his door, his chair, his table, or his computer. He will constantly think about the design gaps that could have made his experiences better. For example, a designer will transfer money from his bank thinking about what could have made his banking transactions safer? Can the keypad characters that he types into his smartphone be made invisible to the keypad sub-component? Can data shared with his banking app be deleted after a session, and so on.

A Vast Field

User interviews, of course, help to put one’s own biases into perspective. Because the product that the UX designer is working on is meant for people in general, he will need to have a good understanding of psychology and sociology. A little understanding of behavioral economics will also help in establishing probable motives to behaviour and desired manipulations. When many user interviews have been conducted from a representative sample, this data will have to be statistically analyzed to gain reasoned insights. As you can imagine, user experience design is as vast a field as the differences between people.

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Mentors as Career Advisors

As a fledgling UX designer, you will be often called to aid in product design. You will often feel the lack of advantage when mingling with other designers with years of experience, and/or different academic backgrounds under their belt. And that is why you will need help from people who have learned to find the right mix of intuition and data-backed expertise necessary to make a popular application.

Learn and grow your UX/UI skills

Getting a mentor in UX Design is all the more important because no one can claim to know everything in this field. One human brain simply does not have the capacity to master all the different areas of knowledge one would require to make the perfect mobile app. A really popular app will take care of:

  • User Motivations
  • User Intent
  • User Triggers
  • User Behavior in response to those triggers
  • The user’s current social environment

Choosing the Right Mentor

Nor should you settle for just any person who purports to be a UX designer to be your mentor. You should be asking the person who offers to be a mentor what his achievements are. Clients are usually the best judge of a designer’s capabilities.

Mentorship is about finding a person who can help you learn and grow. A good mentor will point out your mistakes honestly, but constructively. He/she would be able to understand your own prejudices objectively. One of the most important characteristics of a successful designer would be that he is able to minimize his/her prejudices in understanding others.

Learning all the skills required to be a good designer takes considerable passion, dedication and time. The same motivations that made you take up and learn UX/UI design should be applied in choosing a mentor. Start with your instructors. Talk to them and find out how easy it is to interact with them. If you found your teacher helpful and friendly, it is likely he/she will also be a great mentor.

DesignBoat UX/UI School is a leading instructional institute in the field of design mentorship. It has proven industry experts for instructors and teachers. It also provides hands-on simulated projects to work on and lifelong mentorship programs to help you with your career throughout. Check out their UX/UI courses today!

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