Design prompts aren’t helping you
“Design a new Login flow for a Food app”
“Create an app for ride sharing”
“31 days of Interactions”
“Make icons for a shopping app”
Dear new or aspiring UX or Product Designer, these aren’t helping you get a job — at least not like they could.
Let me clarify a bit — it’s not that these types of things can’t help. It’s not that they are a waste of time. It’s not because the output isn’t correct, good enough, or something that can be added to a portfolio. It’s because these prompts aren’t what you’ll be doing once you get a job. They’re too idealistic, unconstrained, and aspirational.
The scenarios posit that you, as a designer, will be tasked with starting from absolute scratch, a blank canvas, a world where you are only limited by your own creativity.
Start from scratch!
Design an app!
Parallax!
Hover effects!
Colors!
Interactions!
MOAR COLORS!
Will some designers get the opportunity to start from a blank canvas?
Yes, of course.
But will new designers get the chance to start from a blank canvas, a novel product, a world without technical debt?
It’s unlikely.
The reality
The reality for a new designer is that you’ll likely be put on a product or feature that already exists, and be tasked with improving it.
Or that you’ll be thrown into an old feature that no one has touched in an eon and have to figure out what the heck is going on.
Or that you’ll be a part of something new, but need to understand why that thing needs to exist, what others are doing, and figure out if you need to do it differently or even at all.
The reality is far removed from a blank canvas. Yet these prompts make it seem like that’s what should be in your portfolio.
These prompts don’t give any constraints, they don’t help with working with engineers, or carefully laying plans for user insight, or reinforce the listening and questioning skills it takes to better understand business goals. These prompts tell you to make things look better and put a stamp of “design” on it. They make it seem like the way you become a UX or Product Designer is to show off how good at visual design you are.
But that ain’t it.
Does it help?
Sure, visual design is an amazing skill. Work on it. It takes years of practice and I’m not saying to not do them.
But.
And this is a HUGE but.
Visual design in a vacuum is NOT, I repeat NOT, the same as visual design that actually makes it into a production app or website.
Being able to make something look good in a design tool is not product design.
Being able to make something look good in a real product isn’t even product design.
Product design is making something that works well, scales across different screens, helps real people, is informed by research and insight, is possible within the means of your dev team, and meets business goals.
Oh, and it looks good.
But how
I hear the question already on your lips:
“But how can I get that experience without being on a real product team?”
It’s hard.
Not gonna lie.
Your problem, as a prospective employee, is that you have to demonstrate to employers how you think about a problem without ever having been part of a product team. Your portfolio needs to answer these question:
- “What skills would this person bring to the team?”
- “Do they have the skills for the team we need them for?”
- “What skills are they lacking but have promise in?”
- “How do they identify a problem?”
- “How do they identify and test solutions?”
UI design prompts don’t give you ways of answering those questions.
You need something else that can help hiring managers see inside your head.
Who are you
You need to show how you think about a problem, how you discover a problem, how you analyze a scenario to understand why a problem or previous solution exists, and you need prompts that don’t tell you to make something pretty.
You need prompts that are closer to what you might actually do when you join a team as a new Product Designer.
You need constrains, specificity, and most important of all…
You need prompts that have nothing to do with UI.
So I uh…
Made a new design prompt.
Design prompts are dead. Long live design prompts.
Check it out 👇
This isn’t the solution. It’s a solution, and one that I’ll be trying out on my own in my weekly Figtut office hours. Each week I’ll be picking a prompt from this list, and going through it with whoever joins, using Figma along the way.
Some of it will touch UI design, but I think there’s lots of good resources out there to help with the how, but not as many for the what and why of product design.
The
- “What should I work on and why does it need to exist?”
- “Why is this the way is is right now?”
- “How to I start thinking of solutions to this problem?”
questions.
So try it out, give me a shout if it’s terrible or if it’s marginally useful or if you think it could be improved. I’m game for all of it. I’ll be picking one each week in my Figtut Friday sessions and talking through the process.
Good luck in your job hunt. Hope this helps along the way.
If you want to try it out with a group of other people, join me for Figtut Fridays 👉 https://lu.ma/figtuts and or chat with me in the #figtuts channel in the Friends of Figma slack group (redirect) 👉 http://figtuts.com/
I design Basedash. Live in Nashville. Check out my work on my website. I occasionally tweet, but most of the time I spend time with my wife. This article is not affiliated with any design products.
