Week 1

I'm working on a part time freelance design project. This week I realized that things are not quite the same as in school. Which, somewhat calls for a, "duh" but I'll explain what I mean. In school, the process was laid out perfectly. You do your research, you concept, you test, you build, repeat. As a part-time, free lance designer and probably in settings like agencies, there's this little thing called a budget. I'm working with a senior UX Designer as a mentor/PM and a free lance developer. Without doing more than interviewing the client and doing a crash course bit of research, the PM and I met together to flush out functionalities. From there, I built out a basic wireframe, which I then passed over to the developer. The point of this was to put together a general idea of how long the app will take to design and build, so we can approximate the cost of the app to the client. All this work was done without pay. I got a great lecture from my instructor about getting paid what you're worth, with which I wholeheartedly agree. But I realized this week that sometimes, arguably most of the time, you're working for the longer goal. Things are crazy and out of order in the real world. You sometimes gotta design to your best guess and put it out there in order to achieve a long term goal. The real world ain't pretty but it's exciting.