An (Honest) Day in the Life of a UX Designer

I cannot believe I’ve never written a blog about this, because as an aspiring designer I scoured the internet for information about the real day-to-day realities of working in tech. But here it is, my honest and comprehensive documentation of one, random day in my life as a designer.

I’m almost nervous to publish this, as this was not my most productive day. And I did not sit at my desk a full 8 hours. (That reminds me, I need to order that standing desk…)

For context, my title is Senior Product Designer at a Fintech start-up, and I work fully remote from Arizona for a company based on San Jose, California.

Arizona does not observe day light savings, so in the summer I am on Pacific time. However, in the winter, I am on Mountain Time. Which means my meetings start after 10am local time, which is 9am Pacific. I am writing this in February.

Also, when I say “my team” I mean the Trading team, which is kind of like a pod, wherein we have several front and back-end engineers, one product manager (PM) and one designer dedicated to the transacting within the platform. The other team is Growth, which focuses on new customer acquisition.

This day is a Monday.

9:30AM Local (8:30AM PT)

I’m on my second cup of coffee, and after cleaning up cat puke in my office, I’ve settled in to my desk to check my messages. (Side note: when you work from home, having a cat is great for mental well-being — despite the surprises they may leave for you.)

Many of my colleagues are on Central and Eastern time, so messages have been coming in for a couple hours now, though most are in group chats and are not waiting for my response specifically.

This morning, I see my team’s product manager is working with our engineers to release a new feature, so that we can begin testing with a small group of users.

For the feature, the PM owns the post-release research (while I’ve conducted some design research pre-development), but I review the PMs Product Requirements Document (PRD)and research plan to see if anything has changed. Looks like we don’t plan to begin testing for a few more days.

I also should note that I start my day with a hand-written to-do list. I add to it throughout the day, and usually by the end of the day the page is so full of notes and scribbles that I end up re-writing it for the next day.

I know that a lot of people, in tech especially, prefer a digital to-do list. The issue for me is that I work with multiple progress-tracking tools, and work within so many different software programs, that when I have a couple dozen browser windows open, the easiest way for me to stay focused and not forget something is a hand-written list.

10:05 am Local (9:05am PT)

I eat a bowl of cereal at my desk. High-fiber cereal, topped with freeze-dried blueberries and almond milk, feels like the healthiest thing I could lazily throw into a bowl, as I rarely feel like cooking or heating anything for breakfast on a weekday.

10:15am Local Time (9:15am PT)

My team meets for a 15–minute stand-up, which is meant to be a quick huddle to check in on the progress of tickets and to address any blockers. The PM for the Growth team has joined the meeting, and I roast him for being an interloper.

In all seriousness, our teams do share resources (employees), and often folks from the other team will join our team’s meetings to stay informed, and vice versa.

This morning, my boss, the Director of Product Design, has also joined my team’s stand-up.

Last week, I spotted some design bugs in an upcoming feature release. The team wants to know if the fixes they made meet my approval. For one story, the fix in the product looks better than what I had in Figma, so I suggest we keep what was developed, and I make a note to update the design.

As our team is nearing the end of the sprint (Wednesday), and we are preparing for an early release of most of that work, most work has been done and this meeting ends a few minutes early.

10:45am Local Time (9:45 am PT)

My boss messages the design team our meeting agenda for later today.

The VP of Engineering messages me to ask if he can share some positive feedback I had given — about one of the engineers who has been a rock star this month — with the rest of his team.

Outside my window, a contractor is humming to himself while he fixes my window frame. One of the upsides to working from home is always being available if a worker needs to come fix something, and one of the downsides of working from home is always being home when the work is being done.

Beyond the contractor humming is the incessant humming of a lawnmower, as Monday is the day the landscapers work around my condo complex.

11am Local Time (10am PT)

The Product Team meets for our weekly sync. The Product team includes all of the designers and product managers. Since we’re still a pretty small company, our Chief Operating Officer, formerly our Chief Product Officer, also joins the meeting.

The meeting opens with everyone discussing the highlights of their weekend-end round-robin style, and then moves into the PMs reviewing their updated roadmaps for the quarter.

At this time, I make note of any design work I can be doing now to prepare for future engineering sprints.

During this meeting I learn that our plan for early testing of the new feature being released by the Trade team has changed, and I ask a few clarifying questions.

The meeting is closed with our COO offering some updates from leadership, and a few thoughts and questions related to prerogatives of the company.

12pm Local Time (1pm PT)

I review some of a tutorial that was recorded Friday about a software integration that could help us better understand usability and pain points in our product. I had been out half of Friday, so I’m grateful the session had been recorded. Unfortunately, the session is an hour long, so I just watch the first bit of it now.

12:30pm Local time (1:30pm PT)

Time for lunch. I meal prepped yesterday, so I’m eating chicken and peppers with rice and lentils.

I decide to eat at my desk so I can prepare for our Design Team meeting.

I review the input fields and icons my colleague has published to our design system and Figma component library. He’s recorded a walk-thru using Loom to show how to use the components. I send him a message thanking him for his work on this, because it will make my job so much easier as I’ll now be able to quickly grab these elements when doing design production.

1pm Local Time (12pm PT)

I get a message from my boss asking me a few questions that I feel would be better explained over a call, so I video call her in Microsoft Teams for an impromptu 1:1 meeting.

I review my progress on a couple small stories.

1:30pm Local Time (12:30pm PT)

I’m starting to lose focus, so I grab an energy drink from the refrigerator. I come back to my desk and send a message to my PM regarding my proposed agenda for our 1:1 tomorrow, wherein I hope to share a user journey for a feature update and review proposed copy I drafted for a new modal.

After that, I decide to take a few minutes to look at my phone while I get the energy drink flowing through my veins.

2pm Local Time (1pm PT)

I meet with the rest of the Design Team to plan our design sprint (which lasts two weeks, beginning on a Monday and ending on a Friday, and does not run concurrent with engineering sprints which begin on a Thursday and end every two-weeks on a Wednesday).

I reviewe the work I completed last sprint, and the work I have planned for next sprint. For the most part, my workload is based on tickets I have created for myself based on the work my Trading Team has planned, but my boss has added one or two tickets for me, as well.

We closed the meeting by discussing how some of the company was transitioning to using Slack, at least as a trial. So we all set up our work Slack accounts.

After this meeting, I send an updated list of possible agenda items for our next 1:1 to my team’s PM.

3pm Local Time (2pm Pacific Time).

I decide to sign off my desktop for the day.

At this point I have worked a solid 5.5 hours without any length of a break — which is not something I would espouse for any office worker. As a result, my brain is noticeably starting to turn to mush.

Another factor is I don’t really have a long stretch of time available to really “get in the zone” creatively. It’s kinda too late to start a new project.

And any work that is needed from me in the very near future, requires further conversation with my team to move forward. And that conversation won’t happen until tomorrow’s meetings.

Typically, if I sign off my laptop early, I check my phone periodically in case of messages. This is likely most days because my team’s engineers work in Pacific and Mountain time zones, and so they’re usually online 5pm PT (6pm my time). However, as I said earlier, most of this engineering sprint’s work as been completed, and any defects or design bugs have been resolved, so that a feature can be pushed to production early (before Wednesday). So, it’s unlikely to get a message this afternoon from any of the engineers with questions.

Moreover, my boss is on Central time and all of our product managers are on Eastern time, so I expect they’ll be peeling off soon, as well. (It’s currently 5pm Eastern time).

The other great thing about my organization is that we generally have a culture of trust. In our last all-hands meeting, our CEO even explicitly emphasized that we are not an organization that expects anyone to punch a timecard, regaling us of his own experience serving multiple companies at once as a contractor without his clients needing to know how much time he was working.

That said, I may come back to my work if I remember something to add to my to-do list…

4pm Local Time (3pm PT)

I remember that my design, product and engineering teams have moved to Slack, so I download Slack on my phone.

I responded to a question addressed to the group in a group chat.

4:49pm Local Time (3:49pm PT)

I’m still at my desk because I had a zoom call with my condo’s HOA board. After that meeting ends, I remember that Slack has a Figma integration, so I decide to set that up now.

Ok, now I’m really signing off.