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Abstract

h, discover, invent, improve, interaction design, or solve. I was a pair of hands making wireframes mostly for documentation purposes.</li><li>At a more famous Bay Area agency, I was brought on to a project that told me they really needed my skill, expertise, domain knowledge, and fresh eyes to solve their problems. Great! The UX lead on the project wouldn’t let me do anything other than make wireframes of other people’s ideas.</li></ul><p id="d8a3">I would call both of these <i>production design</i>. They’re both work that needed to be done, but were guilty of the Lean sin of under-utilized talent since I can do way more than recreate someone else’s wireframes. I wanted to do work that was a better match to me, and I didn’t stay long at either company.</p><h2 id="743e">UX Juniors Expect to Do UX Work</h2><p id="2834">If you are a UX junior and you are getting a job, do you want to do User-Centered Design, HCD, and all of the tasks and approaches you’ve been learning about? Or were you hoping to just wireframe someone else’s idea or prepare some files for the next step of the assembly line?</p><p id="bd56"><b>The year is not 1958. We don’t start UX workers as secretaries or assistants, asking them to just file papers until they can someday work their way up to real work.</b></p><p id="73ec">When you feel desperate to get a job, any job can sound like a good one. But hiring junior UX practitioners to do production design work creates the following problems:</p><ul><li>What will juniors put in their portfolio from this job?</li><li>Will juniors get to do any real UX work, or are they secretaries and assistants to senior UX designers?</li><li>How can juniors learn and level up if they are just doing production design? Juniors need to do real CX or UX projects that require depth and quality so they can get feedback and coaching.</li><li>Will this be a rewarding job that junior UXers want to stay at? Or will they be counting the days until they’ve stayed “long enough” and can go find a job where they do what they’re passionate about?</li><li>What will others at your company learn about UX? Will you help UX look like a specialty for those with talent? Will you teach others that junior UX practitioners do important, respected work? Or will you make it look like “junior UX jobs” are just grunt work you give to newbies?</li><li>Why are we taking senior production design jobs away from senior production designers? How about we hire <b>senior production design

Options

ers</b> to support senior UX practitioners? Those people need jobs too, and would love to put this work in their portfolios.</li></ul><h2 id="8971">Why Is There So Much Production Design?</h2><p id="4e62">In Spool’s story, the seniors appear to be drowning in work a production designer could or should have been doing. We don’t totally know what that is, but we can’t help but ask if someone should be looking at this company’s processes, teams, and strategies.</p><p id="0640">The answer to everything isn’t, “Throw more people at it.” An answer here could be, “Investigate what’s going on and see how efficiency, communication, or collaboration could be improved.” Where can wasteful meetings or documentation be reduced or eliminated? Would a design system eliminate a lot of this work? Would more realistic prototypes help here (versus a mountain of static wireframes)?</p><h2 id="d45d">Yes, Hire Junior UX Talent</h2><p id="c421">We know that there is a lack of junior UX jobs out there. But turning production designer jobs into “junior UX” jobs creates more problems than it solves. If you have seniors or higher-level people who are bogged down by work you feel not worthy of their time, get them production designers. Those people are specially ready to do that kind of work, and often feel rewarded by getting it done.</p><p id="ecda">If it’s not worth senior UX time, it might not be worth (or fair to) junior UX time. You cheered for Spool’s article because he said to hire UX juniors, but are you sure this is the job you hope UX juniors get? Is this what they want for themselves?</p><p id="d939">Keep thinking critically about everything you read. Imagine the outcomes of advice. If it doesn’t empower UX, use the UX powers running through your veins and say something. Disagree with it. Speak up against anything that doesn’t empower UX. Some are afraid to poke at speakers, authors, and pseudo-gurus. Just like you advocate for customers, turn your desire for UX evangelism into advocacy, and speak up. If you see me or anybody say or write something that doesn’t empower UX, say something. Let nothing be too sacred to question.</p><p id="6e49">If you enjoy the articles, please subscribe to my <a href="https://youtube.com/c/DeltaCX">YouTube Channel</a>, where I do live streams multiple times a week (and take live questions). Podcasts with interviews, Office Hours / Ask Me Anything, and other fun broadcasts. Always free, not monetized, no sponsors.</p></article></body>

No, We Don’t Want to Make UX Juniors Be Production Designers

I tend to disagree with Jared Spool. Daily. I find that on the surface, his ideas can come across as good sound bytes we want to repeat or share. But I challenge you to think critically about what he’s saying, and imagine the real business, career, industry, and customer outcomes of what he suggests.

In today’s episode, Spool recently wrote an article telling a story where a company’s highly-talented seniors had no time to tackle some challenges because they had production work to do. Spool’s solution: hire junior UX workers to do production work.

My solution: hire production designers to do production work. Hire CX & UX juniors because they have talent and skill, and would be great additions to the team. They would be ready to learn from fantastic seniors, and would have way more to offer than taking grunt work off senior’s plates. We hire Low Ego Action Heroes at all levels, we support them, and we play to their strengths. Junior UX Low Ego Action Heroes. And why not find some Production Designer Low Ego Action Heroes?

Talented juniors (of all ages) don’t want to be stuck doing grunt work. Photo from DepositPhotos.com.

What’s the difference between these two solutions and why don’t we want to have junior UX workers do production work?

What Is Production Design?

While I’ve seen a few different definitions of this over the years, we can tell from Spool’s story that production design appears to be grunt work that is taking talented seniors away from more important work. It’s work that isn’t the “challenges” these people should have been devoting time and effort towards.

Production design is often taking finalized UX work and preparing images, files, specs, and other elements so that it can move to Engineering. Some examples of when I ran into it by accident in my own career:

I was once hired by a well-known Bay Area, California digital agency. They ended up giving me a UX designer’s tablet wireframes in portrait and asked me to create the same wireframes in tablet landscape. There was nothing for me to research, discover, invent, improve, interaction design, or solve. I was a pair of hands making wireframes mostly for documentation purposes.
At a more famous Bay Area agency, I was brought on to a project that told me they really needed my skill, expertise, domain knowledge, and fresh eyes to solve their problems. Great! The UX lead on the project wouldn’t let me do anything other than make wireframes of other people’s ideas.

I would call both of these production design. They’re both work that needed to be done, but were guilty of the Lean sin of under-utilized talent since I can do way more than recreate someone else’s wireframes. I wanted to do work that was a better match to me, and I didn’t stay long at either company.

UX Juniors Expect to Do UX Work

If you are a UX junior and you are getting a job, do you want to do User-Centered Design, HCD, and all of the tasks and approaches you’ve been learning about? Or were you hoping to just wireframe someone else’s idea or prepare some files for the next step of the assembly line?

The year is not 1958. We don’t start UX workers as secretaries or assistants, asking them to just file papers until they can someday work their way up to real work.

When you feel desperate to get a job, any job can sound like a good one. But hiring junior UX practitioners to do production design work creates the following problems:

What will juniors put in their portfolio from this job?
Will juniors get to do any real UX work, or are they secretaries and assistants to senior UX designers?
How can juniors learn and level up if they are just doing production design? Juniors need to do real CX or UX projects that require depth and quality so they can get feedback and coaching.
Will this be a rewarding job that junior UXers want to stay at? Or will they be counting the days until they’ve stayed “long enough” and can go find a job where they do what they’re passionate about?
What will others at your company learn about UX? Will you help UX look like a specialty for those with talent? Will you teach others that junior UX practitioners do important, respected work? Or will you make it look like “junior UX jobs” are just grunt work you give to newbies?
Why are we taking senior production design jobs away from senior production designers? How about we hire senior production designers to support senior UX practitioners? Those people need jobs too, and would love to put this work in their portfolios.

Why Is There So Much Production Design?

In Spool’s story, the seniors appear to be drowning in work a production designer could or should have been doing. We don’t totally know what that is, but we can’t help but ask if someone should be looking at this company’s processes, teams, and strategies.

The answer to everything isn’t, “Throw more people at it.” An answer here could be, “Investigate what’s going on and see how efficiency, communication, or collaboration could be improved.” Where can wasteful meetings or documentation be reduced or eliminated? Would a design system eliminate a lot of this work? Would more realistic prototypes help here (versus a mountain of static wireframes)?

Yes, Hire Junior UX Talent

We know that there is a lack of junior UX jobs out there. But turning production designer jobs into “junior UX” jobs creates more problems than it solves. If you have seniors or higher-level people who are bogged down by work you feel not worthy of their time, get them production designers. Those people are specially ready to do that kind of work, and often feel rewarded by getting it done.

If it’s not worth senior UX time, it might not be worth (or fair to) junior UX time. You cheered for Spool’s article because he said to hire UX juniors, but are you sure this is the job you hope UX juniors get? Is this what they want for themselves?

Keep thinking critically about everything you read. Imagine the outcomes of advice. If it doesn’t empower UX, use the UX powers running through your veins and say something. Disagree with it. Speak up against anything that doesn’t empower UX. Some are afraid to poke at speakers, authors, and pseudo-gurus. Just like you advocate for customers, turn your desire for UX evangelism into advocacy, and speak up. If you see me or anybody say or write something that doesn’t empower UX, say something. Let nothing be too sacred to question.

If you enjoy the articles, please subscribe to my YouTube Channel, where I do live streams multiple times a week (and take live questions). Podcasts with interviews, Office Hours / Ask Me Anything, and other fun broadcasts. Always free, not monetized, no sponsors.