Hear from an actual UX designer about their work and see if you'd like it as a career!
Think you might want to work in UX design? Get a feel for the field through our in-depth interview with a senior UX designer who's worked for companies like Johnson & Johnson and AT&T.
ใ๐ผ What junior UX designers do day-to-day
ใ๐ How happy are UX designers with the job?
ใ๐ What type of people thrive?
ใ๐ Pros
ใ๐ Cons
ใ๐ Impact
ใโ๏ธ Work-life balance
ใ๐คธโโ๏ธ Flexibility
ใ๐งญ Values alignment
ใโ Job stability
ใ๐ฑ Learning & development
ใ๐ Job outlook
ใ๐ต Pay
ใ๐ Career progression
4. Where can I find internships?
Note:
As a junior UX designer, a company won't give you a project and tell you to propose a user experience. Usually, the projects have already started and you help out here and there.
When I was a UX design intern at a creative agency:
- I would assist the lead designer with some smaller stuff, like cleaning up web page designs and finding photos to put in the design.
- I'd also help design some of the pitch decks. In agencies, there's a lot of pitch decks since you need to propose ideas to your clients. A lot of the time, the layout was already created and I'd help out with minor stuff.
After becoming a senior designer, here's some tasks I've assigned to my junior designers:
- Playing around with colors, fonts, and photos
- Cleaning up some files I had been creating: If we take Figma as an example, Figma lets you create pages within a file. If I have a Sandbox file where I'm playing with different things and there's lots of random elements scattered all over the place, it's helpful to have junior designers go in and clean that up, maybe archiving those elements. Maybe there's a page where I have low, mid, and high-fidelity elements, and a junior might go in and organizing elements onto separate pages, so that anyone can go into that file and know where everything is at.
- Componentizing some of the elements: Componentizing is when you have different UI elements (think an icon or dropdown field) and you want to use it across a bunch of pages across Figma, so you take that element and turn it into a "master element" that you can duplicate that across any page.
The type of tasks I get junior designers to do also depends on their skill level.
- One of my juniors was very comfortable with Figma, so I could give him a lot of work.
- Whereas a lot of junior designers aren't super technical yet (they've only been using the programs for 1-2 years), so I give them tasks that let them get familiar with the programs. These are the sorts of tasks that I don't have time to do when I'm creating new designs from scratch but they're great for juniors to work on since they let them play around with the programs a lot.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
I would say mostly happy, but it depends on the type of project.
When there are projects where a designer can just dive into the project, think critically, apply UI/UX strategies to solve a problem, I think that's when designers are most happy.
Also, I'm big on sports, so if I get to work on a sports-related project, I'm going to be happy even if the process is not ideal. I can still be excited because I know I'm designing for sports. So for me, it's industry-based as well.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
You have to be curious, considerate and empathetic to the user. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the users and target audience.
A lot of clients assume they are like the main user and that's not the right way to go about UX design. You have to have the discipline to always think about the target user and different edge cases โ like what are special use cases that you need to be considerate of?
Consideration, empathy, and curiosity will also help you uncover things that are good for the product. If you're curious and you ask a lot of questions and you're always thinking about what's best for the user, that's going to put you in a place of success for your work and your stakeholders (who you're selling your designs to).
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
I love:
- being able to solve problems with UX strategies
- creating a bridge between business requirements and creative design.
When I'm in this process (I have the info from the business and get to apply UX concepts to them), that's always when I'm most excited.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
The main cons are:
- Projects that aren't set up in an ideal way. For instance, maybe the project managers or stakeholders don't have the information that you need, which slows down the design process. Maybe you need to do user-testing, which can be a problem if you have a limited time frame.
- Processes and tools that may not be ideal. This is a more of an issue at large companies, which tend to have established product teams with very defined ways of doing things. For instance, a company may decide to only use Adobe XD, which isn't very accommodating to design. I know for sure that they'd be much better off using Figma, but I don't really have time to campaign for Figma, since I'm just trying to get my job done.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
I think there's two kinds of impact.
- "Humanitarian" impact: Being African-American from an underserved background and seeing products that are coming out that help serve those communities, I feel like I'm making an impact and helping to bring these underserved communities to a better place through technology.
- "Capitalistic" impact: Being able to help a business solve a problem that they've identified as lucrative for them also feels impactful. It may not have a broader impact on the world, but I'm glad to have helped a company. Also, the more you help you help supervisors and executives make money, the more money you can make too.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
My work-life balance was best at medium or large companies, where I worked 9-5. Fortune 500 companies are where I really locked in work-life balance.
Agencies and start-ups have been more fast-paced. At agencies, you might be on projects where the clients ask for something and you need to work later or on a weekend. That's just a part of it. Those are times when it can be hard to maintain good work-life balance.
Now that I manage my own agency, work-life balance is even harder since I can't just do the work. I need to network with clients before 9am or after 5pm. When you're on the self-employed side or full-time freelance side, it's harder. But something I try to do is allocate time throughout the week to make sure I have time for myself and make sure I stick to that, even if it's 1 or 2 days.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
Flexibility really depends on the company. For instance, if a company is set up to do 100% remote work, then designers are remote too. I haven't seen it being the case where designers get to work remote when other teams aren't.
I did notice that at Johnson & Johnson, a lot of the interns and junior designers would come into the office a lot more than more senior designers. I'm guessing that's because they're doing everything they can to convert full-time roles.
It also depends on the manager. If the manager is someone who likes coming into the office, they're going to want their team to come into the office as well.
Now, I work for myself, and all my clients are remote.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
Ideally, I'd work on products that haven't been done before and are helpful for society and underserved communities. Sometimes that happens less, because I usually run into companies that aren't targeting underserved communities, especially with larger companies which are serving a much larger group of people. That's a value that I want to see more, but I have to be serendipitously lucky to run into clients like that. At this point, I just take on work when someone reaches out to me and it's a good match. But that's a value I'd like to connect with more.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
It really depends on the market. 2015-2019 was stable, but after 2020 there were lots of ups and downs.
Recently, it's been tough with all the layoffs. You'll see someone with 10+ years of experience who should be a design lead or director or principal designer taking on a senior or mid-level position.
I'm seeing that now as a contractor and seeing recruiters reaching out and offering pay rates that are more appropriate for mid-level designers. I wouldn't be surprised to see mid-level designers possibly applying for junior level roles just so they can get something.
Personally, I've taken on clients in different countries and that's helped me with my own job stability.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
As a junior, I learned a lot from my managers or senior designers. The gap in knowledge was so large. Senior designers would show me something I didn't know how to do or showed me a faster way to do something.
In product, you're always learning since there's new UX strategies coming out and new products coming out, so you'll be learning as a senior too. But as a junior, you'll be learning the most from your colleagues.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
Whenever something new hits the field, there's an uptick in jobs. For instance:
- The rise of AI took the tech field by storm and gave rise to a lot of different start-ups, which creates a need for more product designers.
- We're in Web 3.0 and maybe moving into Web 4.0, so there's lots of companies in that space as well.
Basically, when a lot of businesses want to be the first to do something, they'll want to build a team and hire designers. But the jobs might disapper if the trend fizzes out very quickly, for instance, if venture capital funds stop investing. It really depends.
I think, after the massive layouts start to dissipate, things will pick up and businesses will start hiring designers again.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
Is design work at risk of being outsourced?
I don't see UX designers getting outsourced to other countries. In fact, I see the reverse: a lot of companies in other countries that are looking for American designers, sometimes because they're building a product where the userbase is American.
Most outsourcing I see is in developer for front-end and back-end developers. It's just a lot more costly to pay for a US-based developer than one in Tel Aviv or Kuwait.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
From what I see from the market:
- Job postings for senior-level designers tend to pay $60-70/hour, maybe even $72-75 (before the massive layoffs)
- Mid-level postings tend to pay $45-55/hour
- FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) can pay $10-15 more than the top range.
I haven't seen many junior-level positions, but I'd guess they pay less than $40/hour.
Your pay can depend on the industry you work in. Healthcare companies (other than Johnson & Johnson) tend to not have a budget and will hire at lower than the market rate. On the other hand, the finance sector will pay top dollar for senior designers.
In general, companies want to get the best designers for as little money as possible. Sometimes, they want to go for mid-level or senior-level designers who'll get them the best product, but can only afford an intern.
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
- Design intern
- Junior designer (1-3 years)
- Once you do about a year or two in product design, you can call yourself a mid-level designer because you're no longer brand new to it and you understand enough about products and the programs (like Figma and Sketch) to work at a mid-level role.
- Mid-level designer (3-5 years)
- Sometimes you jump from junior to senior depending on how you move to different companies.
- Senior designer (7-10 years to get here)
- Then you can branch off and become:
- Design lead
- Principal Designer
- Design manager (where you'd be more involved with managerial work like hiring).
If you want to keep moving up the ladder, you have the chance of becoming:
- Director of UX or Director of Product
- VP of the entire Product team
โ UX designer formerly @ Johnson & Johnson
You can find plenty of internships on Prosple. We have a vast selection of internships curated for students like you. Just filter 'til you find the right fit!