Ramp up fast for your new design role
When you start a new role as a designer, you start getting a lot of surface level, generic advice about how to ramp up.
People will vaguely tell you to understand the business or the tech stack, but you’re looking for something concrete and tactical that will help you move up the value chain and start influencing your team from the get go.
Besides just speaking to relevant people within and beyond the design team in detail, you need to build a base of domain knowledge to help you contextualize your design work.
When I started as the founding designer at JITX I knew nothing about electrical engineering. So I took a Khan Academy course on the subject, took another course from Contextual Electronics, and personally designed and manufactured a circuit board.
This may sound intimidating or super advanced, but the Khan Academy course was basically for high school students and the circuit board I got manufactured was actually very simple: It was just a timer chip connected to an LED with a few resistors and capacitors. The design was provided by the course.
Nevertheless, because I did that I had a much greater ability to understand what users are trying to accomplish, what their workflow looks like, and how we might curate a better experience for them in our tool. It actually didn't take long for me to do that. I was able to do it within my first 30 days.
But it has paid substantial dividends ever since. The magic of design often resides in making subtle decisions that dramatically alter user experience. Finding these experience levers requires a strong mental model of the domain you're working in and the users therein.
I can think of one example where adding a border to certain groups of components in our schematics would have reduced the discoverability of relevant groups by 50%. I could see and communicate that because of the domain and user knowledge I cultivated.
Can't see yourself designing a circuit board to acquire domain knowledge? No problem. You can choose your own difficulty setting and build yourself up over time.
Find a free online course that is relevant to your domain on either Coursera or Youtube and just watch the first lecture to start. If you're working at a fintech company, for example, watch the first lecture of a course on financial markets.
It’ll give you a common vocabulary, crucial user context, and greater strategic insight to make design decisions that resonate with users and build credibility for you and your team.