{"id":8246,"date":"2017-04-11T13:09:36","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T12:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marvel7077.wpengine.com\/?p=8246"},"modified":"2020-11-05T11:25:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-05T11:25:06","slug":"being-the-first-designer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marvelapp.com\/blog\/being-the-first-designer\/","title":{"rendered":"Being the First Designer."},"content":{"rendered":"

Design jobs are flooding the tech space with more rigor now than ever before. Companies are hiring designers specializing in interaction, UX, UI, and research to grow their established design teams. But for the majority this is not the case. You will probably at some point be one of the company\u2019s first designer.<\/p>\n

I received the first designer role as a new hire fresh out of college. I felt so excited to start designing better experiences in this untapped space, but I soon realized how naive I was.<\/p>\n

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\"There was a huge discrepancy between the way development teams work and the way I learned how to design.\"<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

When you ask designers about their process, they will probably map out something like this:<\/p>\n

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Stanford d. School Design Process<\/p><\/div>\n

However, a product lifecycle might look like this:<\/p>\n

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This form of Agile development was completely new to me. I had a difficult time understanding it, since I was taught that UX was embedded into the entire development cycle. When these two frameworks merge, problems start to arise.<\/p>\n

Designers become silo-ed into the space where they are only responsible for creating beautiful mockups. There is no validation stage to determine whether customers will actually want to use the product. Overall, the product is driven by the business needs, not the user needs.<\/p>\n

I found that in order for design and engineering to work happily, the following things had to be done:<\/p>\n