How to Improve as a UX Designer? Improve Your Peripheral Product Vision

Take a step back and evaluate what it takes for a product to be successful.

In the literal sense, look around you. What can you see in your peripheral vision when you’re at work? Who sits in your periphery? What are their stories? What makes their job hard? What could you do to understand their role and how it overlaps with UX? Could you make their job easier?

That’s the first step to improving your peripheral product vision. By doing this, you’re enhancing your vision and clarity as it relates to the roles and individuals around you. Great first step.

The next step involves the figurative sense of product vision. Get to know the systems, business roles, and influences in your periphery that affect UX and the part you play. What departments exist where you work? Who makes the decisions? Do you understand the complexity of the business?

To take the vision analogy one step further, ask yourself if your product vision is blurry. While there are those who have 20/20 vision and seem to understand the peripheral players that make up the business, some of us need corrective vision to get there. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Practice both of these literal and figurative exercises and your peripheral product vision will improve. Your understanding of business acumen will increase. It will lead to better relationships, better communication, and a shared understanding of all the parts we play to build successful products.

You don’t have to be perfect in them, but developing awareness of the outermost and closely bordering influences to your work moves your peripheral product vision on a scale from blurry to tightly focused and clear.

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