MythBusters: Is it possible to be a Designer & an Efficient one?
By: Valentina Berois
Tags: Productivity, Efficiency, Efficacy, Design, UX

MythBusters: Is it possible to be a Designer & an Efficient one?

It’s a known myth, or an unfair generalized judgment, that designers and all creatives out there are just free souls with no schedules or work ethic, when the actual truth is (at most cases) pretty far from that reality. Our daily work usually demands juggling tons of different topics and issues, facing constant challenges, handling clients and meeting tight deadlines with the right deliverables, among a huge list of other tasks that help keep the boat afloat.

Over the last decade the importance of user experience has significantly increased and suddently became our main responsability. This is also why we had to adapt and improve the efficiency in our workflows and methods.

But little is possible without learning real discipline and adding productivity habits to your routine, so here are a few tips for you to break your own records and turn into a super disciplined, highly productive -and creative- UX &/or UI designer.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

1. Set up the right environment to cover your needs

The first thing before sitting down to get some work done is to arrange and prepare your environment, like a spaceship heating motors before launching, you’ll need to avoid as many distractions as possible.

Start preparing your physical surroundings to make yourself comfortable, get a good chair, a wide desk where you can organize your stuff with enough space to move freely, and set it up in a way that you can easily reach different materials that you know you’ll need often.

Adapt and customize workspaces on your main used digital tools to serve your needs best. Create shortcuts according to your most frequently used features. Record, save and automate repetitive tasks. Download and install external Plug-ins or even better, create custom ones just for you.

Editing these tools preferences is another useful step that could save you tons of time eventually, on Photoshop you can for example set the number of history states, interface display, or unit measures.

On Sketch App you can choose to enable existent files as libraries so you are able to use symbols that are not necessarily located on your current file symbols page, this is a top feature when it comes to designing with Style Guide-Driven Design Systems.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

2. Find your personal motivation & muse

Every human being differs in personality. Our tastes, what we enjoy, how we spend our free time, our hobbies; it’s our DNA and personal life history that all combined makes us, US. That’s why we all have different inspiration sources, as we are each driven by specific motivators that push our boundaries to reach desired goals in life.

So… what’s yours? Do you know what’s driving your career besides the passion for your profession itself? Are you only relying your motivation on monetary compensation? If so, how do you like to spend that money? The answer to that question is what’s actually driving and fueling your motivation, which is the reason behind why you aspire to that amount of money and why you are willing to work so hard (or not) to get it.

This might all sound like a minor thing but it’s actually one of the key points for us to maintain our efficiency and be constant with our performance level. If you know what’s driving you towards your goals besides the passion you have for the profession itself, keeping this motivator in mind will help you to get up and keep going at the hardest times.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

3. Make plans

A plan is a guide that will serve you organize and simplify the tasks needed to get a certain action or task done, without the risk of forgetting something in the way. Regardless of the field you are working on, here are some basic steps to follow during a project plan phase:

Identify the problem you want to solve. Define goals, outcomes, objectives, and rough deadlines. Create the specific tasks needed to reach each goal. Define parameters that will be dictating and helping to monitor the success of your project. Analyze risks of each activity and a budget estimation. Learn from your mistakes and refine your plan continuously.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

4. Create, maintain and update a Backlog of Tasks.

Create a list of tasks with description, acceptance criteria and materials you need based on your plan needs.

Organize your backlog with tags based on main epics or single issues.

Prioritize tasks to serve your plan in the best way and keep it updated.

Track the progress of your tasks on a Board in JIRA (you can also choose less complex platforms as Trello or inVision workflow for the same purposes).

Clean and update your backlog, remove tasks completed and if applicable, include the postponed ones with the highest priority.

Try to establish time slots or rough deadlines for each task.

Plan and add breaks if working slots or deadlines are too tight.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

5. Be Proactive…

…. complying to your own quality standards, not your customer’s (and yours should be higher):

If you work for a client, perhaps they don’t explicitly demand that you work or deliver in certain manners driven by best practices, or they don’t even know any better, but you can be pro-active and make it happen. Providing something better than the minimal requirements will take you far. Don’t let the customer’s expectations define your standards as a designer, you should always aim to improve without the need of being triggered or demanded to do so. Establish your own expectations, the bottom line is your customer’s, but remember, yours should be a lot higher.

….proposing improvements and pitching them on your own:

Do you have ideas that would improve your customer’s product? Be proactive and pitch them! It’s not enough with telling the story behind your proposal here, the best way to go is to show a little of everything. Make some rough designs of your proposals, create a story that triggers the emotions you are looking to awake on your client side, let them grasp the concept and get a better understanding of all the benefits that this improvement could bring into the project. Words alone can do very little, but when they are accompanied by visuals and motion, they can achieve great things.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

6. Reach interdependence

This is a success key for Teams to perform on their highest efficiency level possible, by taking advantage and making usage of each others knowledge and experience, and of course vice versa, offering your expertise to serve your team’s performance and outputs when it’s needed.

“Nothing in the world exists in isolation.

Very often, systems rely on other systems in order to operate. Your refrigerator requires electricity to operate. When your local power plant fails, your refrigerator fails as well. That’s Interdependence.” ― Josh Kaufman

According to studies, for teams that are highly interdependent, high coherence and good communication predict both team and company performance.

Each team member with their own expertise, can perform like a Rock Star if we enable and promote an interdependence collaboration whenever it’s possible.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

7. Simplify things

The magic behind mastering complexity is the ability to simplify it.

“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” ― Albert Einstein

Simplifying things means breaking them apart and bringing them to ground and common understanding. This is a great capability to learn and it would help you solve the biggest challenges not only at work but also in your personal life.

Every time you get a task that might look too complex for you to tackle, it’s probably because you are not being able to break these tasks apart in smaller tasks and think about all the possible paths to get to that desired outcome. There is never one way of doing things. Be resourceful. Never say no before exploring all your options, digging as deep as you can into the detailed needs of your task and searching for alternative methods to solve it.

There is always an alternative path, you just need to explore your creativity and find new ways of doing things, aim for innovation and you will be surprised of what you can achieve.

Check these tips from @KevinJDaum on how to simplify anything and stop letting complexity block your real potential.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

8. Achieve a good life-work balance

We all have our particular private lives and demands from it, but if there is one good advice about this is to try to keep it separated from your work. This means that you should look to squeeze every minute of your free time in the same way your boss would demand from you at work.

There is only one difference between both sides, at work you are giving away your time and skills against monetized compensation. In your private life you have the gift of time, the freedom to do whatever you want with it; and the money from work to afford this, so go for it!

If you actually used and took advantage of this freedom with total appreciation, you wouldn’t even attempt or desire to do these things at work, because you know that it’ll come soon enough as long as you keep it separated, organized and in sync. Both routines should coexist in perfect harmony not overlapping each other, and if it happens on exceptional cases, make sure to compensate the losses later on.

So chances are, if you achieve this mindset of appreciating your freedom out of work and taking advantage of it, you’ll be able to have a better focus and outcomes at work overall. If one thing is sure, both sides of your life demand time of it, and this is the ONE thing that no one is capable of buying or extending voluntarily.

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

9. Avoid unnecessary overtime

Working longer hours don’t necessarily mean more production; and on top of this, doing 55 weekly hours or more, are associated to early dementia symptoms, early loss of creation thinking, vocabulary, and high risk of depression.

When a human reaches 45 hours of work per week, it hits its highest productivity peek, but if it gets to 55 hours it literally falls down a cliff (you’ll start making mistakes, your productivity level comes down and you need time to re-charge your inner batteries).

In conclusion, with a top max. of 45 weekly hours of work, your brain will always be on its best state to function. The capacity of thinking is a physical act, so you have to understand that at some point, it gets dried out. We need to take care of the machinery that is our brain and you can’t make it work in ways in which it was not designed to work.

A good night sleep is extremely important. Every day. Your brain needs time to process things. Taking a walk outside is fantastic to trigger more creativity (increases it by 66%), let your mind wander (just sit and think of what you did today), reorganize your thoughts (it’s where the best ideas come from).

Illustrations from http://www.streamlineicons.com/ux/

10. Practice <and experiences> makes the master

Efficiency levels of your workflow depend a lot on the amount of practice you have acquired on each aspect of your work.

Every designer, and professional no matter their expertise field, improves and grows through different experiences and repeating once and again the same actions, increasing our expectations of quality and refining the ways to do it as time goes by.

Going through a certain experience or process over and over, will lead your mind to eventually automate it. I love to compare this iterative process with AI Machine learning technologies. We all have a brain -our inner Natural Intelligence Human Machine Learning- and this organ is definitely ahead of today’s technology in every way, you just need to pay enough attention on how it works, and try to make the most of it.

Hope these tips help you boost your efficiency levels at work and increase the joy you get from it, as well as from your private life ☺

If you have other strategies to suggest that were not listed here, please drop me a comment, I would love to hear about it!