foodporncess

I am not a religious woman, but I wish I could up vote that comment billions of times.

Thanks for doing this AMA. The field is short of good designers. The more people who get educated about the foeld, the better for all of us including dev and product!

The biggest one I see is people who don't understand that your tools are very different than your job.

Here's an example: My department was recently talking about starting to use Sketch instead of Photoshop because Adobe are assholes with pricing now.

One of my designers made a comment about how this would basically make his job irrelevant. I explained to him that Photoshop is just a tool he uses to do his job, not his actual job. His job is to use design to solve problems. His brain is how he does that, his training is how he does that. Photoshop is simply a tool he uses to deliver a guide to development.

Another big one is not working hand-in-hand with development. Your product is nothing without the developers to bring it to life. Get to know them, respect them, and learn to speak their language. And then don't let them push you around! Your job is to advocate for the user, and sometimes that means finding a new way to get dev to see a feature. You can't do that if you don't speak their language. And that's something you should apply to every stakeholder that you work with from the user to product to dev.

Since OP is answering from the agency side, I'll answer from a software side.

In software, the UX designer works in between product management and development; we help figure out who the user is, what types of tasks they're trying to complete with the software, and how to best make that happen by marrying the technical capabilities and limitations with the product requirements and UX best practices. We also have to make decisions on how to get this done given the resources we have (time, money, staff, etc.).

We don't actually build the software though. We might deliver some front-end code (this just depends on your company's model or your contract with your client), but mostly we deliver annotated comps/wires to dev.

I don't think doing both is more valuable in the workplace. When I'm hiring designers, I do not expect them to be able to build. In software, that's it's own thing. What is valuable is understanding the capabilities and limitations of the technology being used by dev so that you can use it as a guide in your design. That's going to depend on the place you're working though. As a designer, I'm more interested in how you apply design thinking to a problem. You'll learn the other stuff by doing.

And being able to talk knowledgeably with dev is SUPER important. Dev is always your BFF!

Also, check out this link: http://www.creativebloq.com/ux/product-portfolios-61412126

These are some examples of the way people show off their work and demonstrate design thinking.