I recently spoke with a UX designer who was struggling. The circumstances were personal, but the underlying difficulty was familiar. UX is hard.
Both sides of the brain, please
We are asked for logic and creativity. Innovation and consistency. Personal expression and empathetic service. Wild exploration and meticulous detail. Often all before lunch.
Layer in the ordinary pressures of deadlines, organizations, and life outside work, and it becomes a lot to carry.
The bar for doing UX well is high. Misses aren’t an anomaly; they’re part of the work.
A high bar produces misses
I’m not offering a magic process to make the job easy. I mostly want practitioners and their collaborators to acknowledge the scope of what we ask designers to do.
The bar for doing it well is high. Misses are common. Failure, within reasonable bounds, is part of learning. That doesn’t excuse careless work; it gives us a reason to build environments where people can recover and improve.
Keep going
If you’re doing this work thoughtfully, give yourself a little credit. Dust yourself off, watch the replay, and try again. You got this.