Vicente Latag

I’ve been thinking of ways how can I make a difference and do something I know that matters to people. I worked as Freelance UX Designer for a few years and did several projects for clients from different parts of the world. I target to finish projects as soon as possible, get paid and work with the next client. Doing that, I thought I’m already doing something great but I just realized that I was just chasing money for my survival. I knew that my design services is good enough for my clients but I feel that I am missing something. I feel that I am not part of something important, I feel that no one will notice even if I stopped freelancing and I feel that I’m not creating a dent in the universe.

This is what I learned, good is the enemy of great. I was settled doing good on designing for ventures of other people but not great on pursuing my mission of using design as a solution for real-world problems. I knew I need to do something.

Right now, I am in a perfect situation where I can expand my knowledge while working with people who are way ahead of my skills. So while I’m in the process of improving myself, I decided to build the Design Process Community. I want other people to grow as I grow. I can’t solve real-world problems through design alone, so I am taking other people with me to become better designers.

When I was just starting as a UX Designer, I often want to have everything planned out on every project so that I know everything I need before I even start the project. I was like a fortune-teller, trying to tell people that I will do A to Z without knowing the things that might happen along the way.

But, how would I ever know? How can I give better estimates to the people I’m working with? I don’t have any idea so I just kept on doing that, hoping that everything will work out just fine. Until I learned about agile, which means being able to move quickly. There are different ways to apply agile to everything that you do and one of them is Scrum. It is an agile process framework specifically designed for software development projects. So you start with the end goal or the vision of the project, then you split it up into small project increments called sprints. It helps you to create something viable in just a few weeks, present it to stakeholders or customers and get feedback for iterations. So you are now shaping the end vision of the whole project based on feedback from people who will actually use it. Anyway, I think that’s enough for the agile thing, you can read more about it at Scrum.org.

So, what I mean with stopping the plan, is actually to stop the guesswork or the long term plans. It is also something that pushes me to procrastinate because of being overwhelmed with how big the project is. If you will just start doing small increments of your goals, whether it is for a company, a project, financial plans, family plans or any other life goals, I encourage you to do one small thing at a time. Instead of doing a twelve-week project, you can do twelve one-week projects. Stop planning and start doing the work.