I work at a design agency and we don’t always have data or do usability testing to validate our design. It all depends on the project scopes and the clients. In many cases, we just design and get the stakeholders to review then we will ship the design.

It’s always my pain point of selling myself. Its also the reason why I am leaving agency world. It really worries me as I will be interviewing with my dream company very soon. Any tips to help me to overcome it? Should I fake it until I make it?

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Hey!

I think you will find a lot of designers feel this way, it’s an unfortunate trend driven by the market.

You can concentrate on your experience re: working with stakeholders. A lot of people don’t have enough experience with that actually. Stake holder interviews are a type of research!

Also, as a designer there must have been KPIs, trends or other types of design principles you used while designing. For example Gestalt theory or information architecture. You can share how resourceful you were when dealing with limited resources and position it as being able to work within a constraint, timeline or budget.


Good luck!

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Thank you so much for your response! It’s such a relief knowing that I am not alone.

As agency designers, we get exposed to different design problems and have to work within a lot of constraints. After all I am still so thankful for having this experience!

i am in the same situation. I work at a small design agency and I have experience where we did the 5 user testing sessions on an app and the stakeholder didn’t like what the users said and literally told us we can ignore what they said cuz he said thats only a small number of ppl 🥲… i was dying inside when designing the app because i knew it would never work.

Working at an agency i feel like im not a designer and i can’t really be an advocate for the users. No matter how hard i try to convince clients with facts they will only like what they like 🤦🏻‍♀️.

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I feel you 🥲 sometimes I feel like I’m a UI designer, but not a real UX designer.

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Following… because I also have an issue with this.

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I just joined a small agency and most of the projects have no access to user or research. 😒

Maybe you can try to conduct stakeholder interviews and talk to the sales team?

A few years ago I had the same challenge. But eventually, I came up with an approach. Focus on your UX strengths. Even if there is limited research done on most of your projects, I’m sure you’ve done some desk research and/or speculative assumptions based on your desk research, or any type of research. You can phrase this as “We received requirements from the business stakeholders. In addition, because we are a small agency we typically faced budget and time constraints. With that, we had to be creative and improvise our UX approach to do great work for our clients. <then tell your story how you managed to make your clients happy and their goals achieved regardless of limited research>. And then be excited and tell them that you want to apply to *your dream company* because you are passionate about a data-driven approach and you will always advocate for users regardless of those constraints.

Show your process on your case study and tell your story that it didn’t hold you back to do right by your clients. And don’t forget on the reflection section to mention what you could or would have done differently!

Rooting for you to get a job at your dream company!

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