The difference between a Junior, Mid, and Senior-level Designer & How to be a senior-level designer?
As a designer, it can be extremely challenging to navigate the different career levels. As there is no standardization across the industry, it’s like the Wild West.
Junior-Level Designer:
As a junior, you will be mostly focused on refining your visual design skills.
You’re very much expected to ask a lot of questions to your more senior designers so don’t be shy. You should understand the basic design process but you probably won’t have executed each part of it and that’s ok.
You’ll mostly told what to work on over finding problems yourself and you’ll likely work on a small part of the full product experience.
#Owns smaller, simpler pieces of a project
#What needs to be designed, which design needs to be deliverable to clients,
Mid-level Designer:
You should be pretty skilled in visual design now and fairly autonomous when executing your work. At this point, you should have executed all parts of the design process and can conduct typical discovery & validation research (competitive benchmarking, A/B testing, etc)
You’ll still mostly be told what to work on over finding problems yourself but you may such out some during your research and testing. You’ll likely work on full product flows with average complexity.
Lastly, you should be able to understand how to measure the impact of your designs.
#Focus on how, are we approaching/solving this problem,
#Core contributor to projects owns bigger pieces and user flows.
Senior-level designer:
At this point, you are very skilled in visual design to the point where you should be able to mentor and provide valuable feedback to your peers and junior designers. You can operate completely autonomously and likely mentor others across a variety of topics. You should be curated depending on the problem you’re trying to solve.
Not only can you do research you can propose and advocate the need for it.
Seniors discover user problems to solve and pitch them for prioritization. They also work across multiple products or products with high complexity.
Seniors are excellent at articulating your design decisions and can help coach others. You should also have the ability to change your presentation style depending on the audience it’s for. (Ie senior-level stakeholders).
Lastly, by way of insights and user advocating, you can influence the direction of the product (ex. we need to add this feature for this reason), You need to have a deeper understanding of UX design
#Why we are doing this, what will be the outcome,
#Sometimes Leads projects, involved from beginning to end, considered a subject matter expert.
Key pieces of knowledge indeed for a senior designer,
If you’re fighting to change your design level like junior to midlevel or mid-level to senior level, You have to grow your pieces of knowledge for the below categories, and you can navigate is one by one,
Before anyone say senior-level designer make sure your navigate this skills: This aren’t provide gradually, You can pick one by one step and research on it make yourself expert on it and prove your self as a senior level designer,
- Shaping the company strategy,
- Making the design road map, (Blog)
- Helping define the design process (Blog) and making the timeline to implement them,
- Working communication clearly, language improvement
- Explain, discuss, and justify the team design, and give effective feedback and direction to the other team members,
- Attend and give feedback in interviews for prospective candidates,
- Ideating, explaining, and communicating the design decision and concept through wireframes, sketches, storyboards, user, process flow (Bolg), site map, persona (Blog), and high fidelity mockups,
- Working with complex design systems, building, maintaining, and improving,
- Conduct user research to gain insight into user behavior and needs,
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